Maria Mies
Photo by Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen
Professor Maria Mies was a German feminist and activist scholar who lives in Cologne. She was the author of numerous groundbreaking works on women and globalisation. She worked at the Goethe Institute in India, conducted fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh and was the founding director of the Masters in Women and Development at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague in the Netherlands. She was Professor Emerita at the University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule) in Cologne.
She always combined activism and scholarship and was central to establishing the first shelter for battered women in Cologne. Maria Mies was involved in resistance to genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, the fight against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), against the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and on issues of food security, all fundamental components of corporate globalisation. She was known around the world for the concept of ‘housewifisation’ and her writings on ecofeminism.
Other books by Maria Mies: Indian Women and Patriarchy (1980), Feminism in Europe: Liberal and Socialist Strategies 1789–1919 (1981), National Liberation and Women’s Liberation (1982, with Rhoda Reddock), Fighting on Two Fronts. Women’s Struggles and Research (1982), Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986/1999), Women: The Last Colony (1988, with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Claudia von Werlhof), Ecofeminism (1993, with Vandana Shiva), The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy (1999, with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Village and the World: My Life, Our Times, and The Lace Makers of Narsapur.
Maria Mies passed away May 2023.
Rights
A new rights deal where we took over the World rights from Zed Books.