A War on Global Poverty by Joanne Meyerowitz;

Author:Joanne Meyerowitz;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

WID, WAD, GAD

The history of the OEF shows that development NGOs that focused on women could accommodate to, survive, and even flourish in the neoliberal, business-oriented culture of the Reagan years. In the US government, the conservative policies of the decade narrowed some routes to addressing women’s poverty and widened others. Elsewhere, though, the WID movement took on different forms. As social scientists and development experts relate the history, the WID movement actually stepped to the left, not the right, in the 1980s. It moved, some argue, from “women in development” to “women and development” to “gender and development”: from WID to WAD to GAD. The different strands—which the WID–WAD–GAD chronology poses as change over time—were all there from the start and all there at the end of the 1980s. The changing terms mark a gradual shift in emphasis, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, toward a more critical engagement with both development and gender. At its simplest, WID, seen in Ester Boserup’s foundational work and the Percy amendment, proposed to integrate women into existing development programs. WAD, which reflected the impact of the NIEO, called for women’s equality along with new forms of development that challenged the economic structures that subordinated the global South. GAD asked also for deeper changes in the gendered labor within the household, including childcare shared with men, and for greater attention to class differences among women. The advocates of GAD often posed it as a socialist-feminist critique of liberal feminist WID, an extension of the more radical redistributionist proposals of the 1970s, and an out-and-out rejection of the free-market policies that came to dominate in the US government, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).82

The criticism of the early WID model emerged early on in academic circles through debates at conferences and articles in scholarly journals.83 It reflected theoretical disputes as much as a disillusionment with on-the-ground WID projects. In 1982, Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen, both economists, published a widely cited article that captured the growing critique. They offered a Marxist-feminist vision of political economy. Women, they said, had been “superficially added to ongoing economic development programs” without addressing the hierarchies of class and gender. It was not enough, they said, to add women to modernization programs. Women’s responsibility for unpaid reproductive labor—child rearing, household production, and other domestic work—doubled the workload of poor women who also worked for income, patriarchal families kept them dependent on men, and the capitalist division of labor subordinated them in exploitative jobs. Benería and Sen presented their analysis at a conference at Barnard College in 1980 and then published it in the US journal Feminist Studies in 1982.84 At the time, Benería, who earned her PhD at Columbia, worked at the ILO, and Sen, with a PhD from Stanford, was an associate fellow at the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram), India. Their critical vision elaborated on earlier left-feminist arguments, and over the course of the 1980s, it reached into more development agencies and organizations.

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