Gender studies in development

Boserup (1970) provided the first overview of women’s role in the development
process in a comparative analysis of women in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her
thesis was that women were being ignored in the development of the Third World.
Therefore, ‘development’ was genderspecific – specifically beneficial to men. Her
analysis was not critical of the development process itself, for she remained quite
firmly within the neoclassical modernisation paradigm and she did not present a clear-
cut feminist analysis of women’s subordination. Her work did provide, though, a
starting point for the next decades of feminist research in development studies.
A school of thought that was established after this pioneering research was the
liberal, feminist, Women in Development School (WID), which parallels the liberal
modernisation perspective. Their philosophy of development for women lies in the
diffusion of values, capital, technology and political institutions from the West
(Bandarage, 1984: 497). They argue that integration of women into the development
process will facilitate their participation in the formal (public) economy. The
limitations of this perspective stem from a lack of class analysis, combined with the
fact that women are already integrated into the development process but their work is
invisible.
The Marxist perspective differs from the liberal in that it sees the poverty of
women and men as a structural feature of capitalism as a social and economic system
(Bandarage, 1984: 500). Marxists agree with liberal WID thinkers that economic
modernisation (capitalist development) marginalises Third World women, but they
believe that, to understand this inequality, one must look at social class inequality and
the unequal and uneven development of capitalism world-wide. Marxists also
acknowledge, unlike liberal WID advocates, that not all men benefit from
technological innovations, nor are all women similarly affected by technological and
other aspects of change (Bandarage, 1984: 501). Comparing the two approaches to
gender in development, the Marxist is superior in that it comes from a materialist
perspective and is less prone to generalise about men and women as homogeneous
groups. Marxism is deficient, however, because its position on women’s oppression,
like men’s, is based on the abstract forces of capitalism, commercialisation and
proletarianism, thereby ignoring women’s oppression by men (Bandarage, 1984: 505)
The birth of radical feminism challenged this omission by introducing personal
relations as political issues. The focus on the domestic sphere of life and personal
relationships between men and women opened up for debate areas that had been
previously ignored by both liberalism and Marxism (Bandarage, 1984: 505). Radical
feminism, focusing on the ‘universality of patriarchy’, tends to overlook the
interrelations between sexual and other forms of social oppression such as class, race
and nationality (Bandarage, 1984: 506). In attempting to bridge this gap, a theoretical
perspective has been created to synthesise Marxist theory on capitalism and radical
feminist theory on patriarchy. This is socialist feminism or the analysis of gender and
class in the political economy.
Theories of gender in development have provided a body of literature which
illuminates the invisibility of women. Although there are conflicting ideologies within
the general paradigm, the growth of this literature confirms the appropriateness of
making gender central to development studies. The revolutionary nature of the growth
of this field of study is apparent, but its limitations to date are also evident. There is a
lack of systematic research on the consequences of rapid growth and technological
change on women and on gender relationships. Heyzer (1987), focusing specifically
on women in South East Asia, identified two main areas of study which need to be
enhanced: the reactions of women to technological and other kinds of production
changes, and the resulting conflict and contradictions that occur at both macro and
micro levels as a result of these changes. The view of women as agents of change
rather than as merely passive victims of circumstances animates research into how
women themselves interpret and respond to structures of opportunity and constraint. It
also forces recognition of the limited alternatives for action facing women who wish
to resist oppression (Hess & Ferree, 1987: 14)