Over the last two development decades, there has been much evidence to show that the situation of women in developing countries has deteriorated. As we enter the third development decade, there are several questions to be raised regarding the nature of development, and the role of women in such development. To understand why women have been left out of the development process, a brief historical review of development is essential.
Development has meant different things to different people, based on what influences their thinking. It is helpful to look at the work of Karl Mannheim who defines two basic modes of thinking based on one's class interest - ideological and Utopian - that shape one's perception of reality. SheldonCellar applies these two modes to the thinking that influences development theory and models.
Ideological thinking asserts the worldviews of ruling groups, supports the status quo, and sees change taking place largely within currently established structures. Most mainstream development models and work are based on the ideological mode of thinking. Models based on such thinking view development as an administrative problem, the solution to which lies in the transfer of vast amounts of capital and technological resources from the rich to the poor nations. Utopian thinking reflects the opinions of certain oppressed groups, believes in the transformation of the existing structures by overthrowing the status quo, and sees change through destruction of structures responsible for exploitation and oppression of the masses. Models based on the Utopian modes are generally marxist or nationalist in orientation, rejecting the existing power relationships between the "haves" and the "have-nots"and call for basic change in the system. In these models, underdevelopment is not defined as a problem of lack of resources or technology, but one of exploitation and poverty caused by capitalistic expropriation.
Cellar also cites a third model of development, based on moralist-idealist thought. The moralist-idealists are those who believe in the "good society" defined in terms of justice, freedom and liberation, rather than the GNP, industrialization, or public ownership of the means of production. They remain Utopian in nature in that they identify with the poorest of the poor and call upon the dominant classes to cast aside their affluence. However, much of their effort is spent working with the very institutions which the Utopians claim have created the suffering of the masses.
1960-1980:from then to now
During the first development decade (1960-1970), the world's gross international product increased by one trillion dollars. Of this, 80 percent went to the industrialized nations (average annual increase: 1000 dollars) and 6 percent to poor nations (incomes less than 200 dollars). At the end of the first development decade, an annual growth rate of 5 percent had been achieved by most developing countries. Also increasing were rates of unemployment, population growth and the disparity in people's incomes. By this time it had become clear that in spite of rising GNP, the essential needs of people were not being met.
At the same time, developing nations were being depleted of their natural resources at an alarming rate - either in the form of direct imports to developed nations, or as raw material for production of potentially exportable commodities. The development strategy in the 1960s had concerned itself with increased food production to meet increasing population growth. With technological revolutions such as the Green Revolution, this had been achieved, yet food shortages were acute. Massive population control programs were promoted, yet the real reasons why people had children were never fully understood by the population experts.
With the increasing militancy of the developing nations, a more palatable form of development had to be devised. So new concepts were developed by the experts. With the use of terms such as "basic human needs," "new directions," "meeting the needs of the poorest of the poor," and more recently "growth with equity," a whole new development jargon emerged. The developing world retaliated with the New International Economic Order (NIEO), demanding a fairer share of the world's resources, fairer trading patterns, and more input into international decision making. Currently, the two sides maintain these positions with the developing countries pushing for the NIEO, seeing BHN (Basic Human Needs) as a ploy to avoid dealing with structural issues. The developed countries continue to talk of human rights, land reform, technology transfer without admitting the need for real change in their own economic practices.
During these two decades, women working on development issues were suffering the same fate as women in general. They were considered marginal to the process of the highly intellectual development debate, and were treated as such. In the early 1970s several European and North American women began advancing the concept of "integrating women into development." Their work pointed out that development had actually harmed women, that many women in developing countries were worse off than before. More studies were conducted by social scientists, political scientists and other academicians, confirming these findings.
In 1975 the International Women's Year conference declared a decade that would concentrate on women the world over. Since then, at national and international forums, women's role in the economic process has been a major component, and the race for "women in development" was on. Education, vocational/technical training were seen as essential prerequisites for women to move into the development process. Having women in decision-making positions, allocating funding for women's projects and initiating legislation on the prerequisites would further hasten this integration process. The theory was that, as women's work was not recognized as part of the national economy, sufficient opportunities should be made available to women to move into the market economy. This would ensure income generation for them and a sense of self-confidence to participate in the development process.
integrating women into development; a pseudo-feminist myth
The definition of integration is " to form into a whole"; to incorporate into a larger unit," "to end segregation of and bring into common and equal membership in society or an organization" (Webster). In the case of "integrating women into development," if the "whole" is development then we can assume that bringing women into development would end an essentially sexist process of progress. However, when the literature and theories about women in development were being propagated, the nature of development, as it existed, was never questioned. The proponents of such thinking were in basic agreement with mainstream development thought. The only quarrel with it was that women had been left out. Even to this day, the most ardent proponents of integrating women into development have not realized that neither mainstream nor marxist models have room for women ,as neither group has addressed the problem of patriarchy. Society's acceptance of male-domination has pervaded development work. Though much lip service has been paid to the equal participation of women in the male-dominated development circles, this has remained by and large "integration" without much thought or attempt towards genuine power sharing with women.
income generation: no questions asked
For mainstream development models, development has meant the "integration" of developing countries into the international market system, whereby the notion of "growth"was to be manifested in increased economic production. Towards this end, education and employment were considered a means for income generation. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that common indicators used to determine women's involvement in development have been employment and education. When most women live in rural areas and in a non-market economy (70 to 80 percent are involved in subsistence work), these indicators have little validity. As women make up 60 to 90 percent of the agricultural labor force and produce 44 percent of all food, why is it crucial to talk of income generating projects? Rather, would it not be better to recognize women's current productivity? Most developing economies have moved or are moving from agrarian-based to industrial-based economies, in spite of what their governments may claim. During this process, the structure of agriculture has suffered. With growing emphasis on cash cropping and non-food crops, subsistence farming has suffered a major setback.
This has had serious repercussions on women and the rural communities. Through subsistence farming, most of a rural family's and community's needs were met. Excess edibles were sold or bartered in local markets for commodities such as soap and clothes. With increasing numbers of women having to shift to cash cropping, and with meager economic returns,- the family's needs are not being met. Nutritionally this has taken a heavy toll on the health and well-being of rura lcommunities. Former food-producing communities are now growing cash crops or non-food crops for export to urban, national and international markets. Whereas once they were somewhat self-sufficient, they now mostly rely on government handouts or foreign aid. Income generating projects may be a godsend to women, with few opportunities for subsistence farming and few or no skills for alternative work in a limited job market, who have been forced into non-farmwork. However, it further exacerbates the problem of vanishing subsistence farming and food dependence on foreignmarkets.
Enlisting women in new jobs, largely for manufacturing export items, often requires their migration to urban areas. Skills that women are taught are "female-prone" - a term used to describe skills which women are supposedly best at, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and which are low-skilled, low-paid and easily replaceable. Local and multinationalindustries such as textiles, electronics and agribusiness have capitalized on this shift and preferentially hire women. Paying low wages for long hours in unhealthy and hazardous working conditions, these industries claim they are liberating women. Multinationals have been keen advocates of this transfer of women's work from self-sufficient to market-oriented types. The industries well realize the gold mine they have struck with women who are usually the most willing to work, the easiest to fire and the least likely to unionize. Income generation advocates little realized the complexity of issues when they suggested this. With little or no protection for wages, benefits and work, women are the most abused section of the formal labor force.
education: literacy or critical consciousness?
Education, along with income generation capacity, has been perceived as the key to the golden door of success and equal participation of women in the development process. It is true that women need education to be able to participate in society, but the nature of this education has not been sufficiently questioned.
In industrialized societies or urban areas of developing countries, education can be a stepping stone to economic self-sufficiency. However, the educational systems in most developing countries are relics of their colonial past, and irrelevant to the needs of most people, especially women. The education is either highly specialized (in which case women have to compete in a narrow job market) or too general (in which case women have access only to the lowest paid jobs). Economically, even such education is beyond the means of most people. If a child has to be educated, preference is given to the male child, who is a better asset in terms of financial returns. For the affluent, educating women is an exercise that will increase their price in the marriage market.
If education is to have any value for women, it must be a means to raise their consciousness about the oppressive structures that keep them in positions of powerlessness. Most educational systems do not provide a climate for such thinking skills to develop. In developing societies, most educated women — the leaders, academicians, professionals in establishment organizations - perpetuate the status quo. The reasoning behind this is that if the patriarchal system has worked for them, it should work for all women. Demands for traditional education from third world women and others come from a lack of perspective of what this limited privilege can be used for.
When a woman is relatively powerless and has little control over what is happening in her environment, education for literacy is meaningless. What she craves is knowledge of why she must bear so many children, work endless hours without respite, be beaten and raped, have an alcoholic husband, and go hungry. Existing educational systems have not provided women with the tools to understand and analyze the true nature of social, political and economic systems that govern their lives and oppress them, and this is why they have failed. If women are to be change agents in their societies, the education offered them must be a tool for consciousness raising and action. This end result cannot be brought about by learning the three Rs or being drilled in nutrition and family planning.
appropriate technology: appropriate for whom?
Transfer of technology has been a major ingredient of mainstream development work. This transfer has filled the coffers of many multinational corporations that manufacture and export heavy equipment, has supported highly specialized and largely intellectual research and development institutions, and has meant large investments for developing countries. It has proved an expensive and futile exercise and developing countries are now demanding technologies that meet the needs of their budgets and projects.
Taking off from the "small is beautiful" ideology, the concept of appropriate technology emerged. Developed countries rushed into developing ones with new designs and innovations that would revolutionize the developing world. Recognizing that women do back-breaking work for long hours, the women in development community sought solutions once again in technology. Instead of examining why women, after hardwork in the fields and markets, have to return home to cook, care for children, gather fuel and water and take care of animals, the development planners seized upon appropriate technology. Smokeless stoves, grinders, seed hullers, weeders, hoes and such like were invented and improved upon to cut the time spent in these tasks. The inherent sexism in permitting men to return from the fields, bathe, eat and go visiting with friends has never been questioned. Job sharing of "women'swork" is unheard of.
Similar questions can can be raised regarding technical innovations that have supposedly eased the burden of women's work in developed societies. Have the vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, blender, ice maker enabled a woman to have a more equal relationship with a man? Equality cannot be achieved as long as women are seen as marginal to the existence of men,society or development.
The new directions in technology suffer from the same malady as development. They are male-dominated, designed mostly in developed societies, and often involve resources alien to the local environment. Even when the appropriate technologies are locally developed, they are often done in research laboratories and academic institutions with little input from the women and men in the field who will be utilizing the technologies.
health
Most of the health care focus around women has been in family planning and nutrition. While it is important for women to have access to information and services to control their fertility, much of the help offered has been misguided and controlled mainly by population specialists and family planning agents, who are usually men. Reproduction information and services made available to women are largely male and establishment-controlled, and unsuited to the lifestyles and bodies of the women receiving them. Additionally, services such as regular checkups and pre and post-natal care are rarely available. Efforts by the overzealous and insensitive population community (with help from the pharmaceutical industry and national governments which work hand in hand with these organizations) have been based on the premise that it is better to have reduced fertility at any cost than over-population. Who makes this decision is quite clear - certainly not the women on the receiving end of these programs. In spite of the known dangers of synthetic contraceptives, the women in development community has further pushed for these programs.
A similar situation exists in the area of nutrition. The popular thinking is that most people in developing countries do not have sufficient know-how to balance their diets and need to be educated. However, it can be said that development has done more to undermine the possibility of achieving a balanced diet than to help it. Development strategies, supported by international food politics, have pushed for the boost in food production of items for export (to earn foreign exchange for sophisticated technology and research), as well as non-food items. Towards this end, land once producing food to meet the needs of the community is being used for cash-cropping and income generation.
To alleviate this problem, solutions are being proposed and implemented such as food substitutes (e.g. soy meal) which are alien to the diet of the local people and, therefore, rejected. Questions relating to the overall structures of agriculture, of land ownership, crop priorities, etc., are hardly ever raised. If they are, it is in the light of reformist measures such as land reform or water reallocation.
If a society were committed to maintaining a fair standard of health for its people, it would devise and implement systems of agriculture and health care that would make the goal possible. As long as foreign exchange earnings and modernization are higher priorities for most developing societies, basic health care will remain an illusion. Research and development emphases will be on diseases which affect mainly the elites (e.g. cardiovascular diseases), with little attention to the politics of malnutrition and reproduction. Development experts, unwilling to question the power and control of medicine and researchers will continue to ignore the role of women in the health and planning process, except as a means to serve the experts' ends.
women in development: a long-distance affair
Since its conception, much of the mainstream women in development work has been like a long distance affair. Largely defined by western women and their elitist counterparts in developing countries, it has fallen prey to the same assumptions that development work has; i.e., development is an overseas problem. All societies are developing societies. While it is true that most people in less developed countries live more precariously than their western counterparts, it is also true that marginalized sections of developed societies have much in common with their counterparts in developing countries. This relationship, a critical one if development were viewed as a class issue, has been ignored by the experts. It is easier to deal with something which is not too close to home and which is also more exotic.
At the same time, this long distance strategy excuses governments of developed countries from dealing with issues of deprivation at home. With increasing internationalization of capital and human resources as well as raw materials over the last decade, it has become detrimental to development work not to establish this link. As a result, the strategies in the past, as well as the ones being proposed for the future, lack validity. Case in point: the marginalization of women in developing societies (so well elucidated in the women in development literature) cannot be overcome without examining the roots of marginalization, which is the patriarchal system, not only in the developing societies but in the developed ones as well.
That some percentage of women in developed societies enjoy a certain level of economic independence must not be equated with the achievement of equality in the power structures that control their societies. This is evident in examining the position of the majority of women in developed societies, who are the poorest, most oppressed, overworked and marginalized sections of their society.
Decisions made in any country regarding women in the garment industry affect women in the USA, Mexico, Britain, Italy, India, Sri Lanka, Korea, Taiwan and many other countries. Flight of capital and the internationalization of trade has brought these women together — either to lose or gain from such investments or to collectively organize against the single-purpose of the multinational corporations: maximization of profit.
Women working in the mainstream development community have largely failed to address these issues — at home or overseas. It is easier to propagate reformist measures such as income generating projects, job skills, nutrition education, welfare and the like than to examine the root causes of overt sexism, agricultural displacement, and the marginaiization of women in any society. If ever the issues of power and powerlessness are brought up at a national/international forum, it is only at the theoretical level with little pragmatic followup.
Women in development can have real meaning when the vital links between the local and global situations are made. For example, women in the USA must look at the struggles of women in their rural communities, women in Appalachia, Native American women, farm worker women, working class women. Many of the problems these women are facing are similar to those being faced by their sisters overseas. As most women in the USA fall into the marginalized categories, the women in development community in the USA has gravely shirked its responsibility in neglecting these issues and failing to relate them to the marginalization of women overseas.
toward a theory of women and development
For women to become a vital force in their societies, change will have to be based on a new theory of development which embraces feminism. Feminism poses some challenges to development theory and praxis that must be addressed if any effective and inclusive work on bringing about a new order is to be done. It questions the artificial barriers between the political, social and economic aspects of society, and how individuals relate to these orders. Feminism asserts that the personal is political and personal change is a prerequisite to societal change ... the internalization and subjectification of being a change agent. It insists that the experience of women be recognized and validated in all work related to change. Examples of how this theory can be developed already exist, in progressive women's movements all over the world that are challenging the power of patriarchy. Women are organizing, speaking out against injustice in the home, workplace and society. These struggles are not restricted to upper and middle class women (as we are often told), but evident in working class and peasant women's groups, who have a long history of struggle against oppression.
At the same time, the struggle against patriarchy and economic oppression cannot be separated from the struggleof those who are poor and powerless. Progressive women's movements can be separate, and part of all those who work to bring about a just, participatory and sustainable society.
strategies for change: reform or radical?
There is no one strategy that will ensure equitable development for all. However, there are several directions that such strategies can go which could enable equitable development. If change were to be categorized in two broad areas - reform and radical - each category would have certain strategies that would enable change to be brought about.
Reformist strategies are those which are devised to alleviate problems (e.g., food stamps for the hungry, unemployment compensation for the unemployed) without much attention to the cause of the problems. Radical strategies are devised by examining the root of the problem, and proposing alternatives to presently existing structures that are responsible for creating the problems.
Whether strategies are reformist or radical in nature, they can go hand in hand, especially in societies where a total transformationof the political, social and economic system is not in sight, but there must be understanding of the means and the end.
The US 1980 Democratic Political Convention illustrated the need for such awareness. Political reforms meant that for the first time, women were half of the delegates to the national convention. However, as a columnist Richard Reeves pointed out, "Women, even when they share floor space at a convention, may never truly share political power of change politics. The game has rules made by men and they have a life and momentum of their own." Such reforms are important, but should not alone be taken as necessarily representing a real shift toward equality in decision making.
Both reformist and radical movements share a common goal for change. The underlying ideologies of the two are different, but reforms rightly integrated can become steps to more long-term change.
helping shape this future
Individuals and institutions interested in building this new just order need first of all to do more intentional thinking about the kind of political, social and economic order that will meet the needs of all people. Towards this end, development must mean the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in the most equitable manner possible,with maximum participation of all people. For those in the developing and developed world it means study, consciousness raising, dialoguing and brainstorming about how people can gain control over their economies, no matter where they are. It means concentrating on the problems locally, state-wide, nationally and internationally.
A feminist approach to this future would require that this process happen before "development" is planned. It would also require the participation of women in every step of the way.
And finally, women — and men who are concerned about development - must learn to stand fast. Too long the theory has prevailed that when other more pressing issues of politics and peace are dealt with, then humankind will be able to turn to the needs of women. The challenging idea of our times is a determination to build a world less divided between rich and poor, the weak and the powerful. In moving to this goal, the old theory can no longer hold. True development, just development, cannot happen when the needs, talents, and potentialities of half of the world's population are seen as secondary and marginal. That is why feminism is not a frivolous concern. It deals with work, with struggle, and above all with the dream of a new day for all peoples.