Developing Power: How Women Transformed International Development

Around the world, women have long occupied the pivotal place in social and economic life on its most basic and meaningful levels. Yet the international development programs that grew in the mid-twentieth century largely ignored or bypassed women’s ideas, women’s rights, women’s work, and the realities of women’s lives. More often than not, these development projects served to reinforce patriarchal structures rather than to support or empower women. In Developing Power, women from around the world tell how they fought to ensure that the unprecedented political and economic changes in the developing world would benefit women as well as men.

In these compelling testimonies, a distinguished group of 27 pioneering women from 12 countries tell their own stories, revealing the moments when they realized that they could challenge the received wisdom of the day, and the struggles involved in turning their ideas into actions. These varied accounts come from women involved in creating the four major UN conferences on women held from 1975 to 1995, women scholars, women in institutions that provide development funds, and women in development agencies. The stories in Developing Power reach beyond their individual contexts to provide a model for progressive social change.

IRENE TINKER has served on the faculties of Howard University, Federal City College, American University, and the University of California/Berkeley. She has conducted research in fifty-four countries and lectured in thirty-six. Tinker was director of the office of International Science at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where Margaret Mead taught her about lobbying the UN, and she co-founded the Wellesley Center for Research on Women and founded the International Center for Research on Women and the Equity Policy Center.

ARVONNE S. FRASER has been Coordinator of the Office of Women in Development at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), U.S. representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and a member of the U.S. delegations to the first two UN World Conferences on Women 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights. She is currently senior fellow emerita of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, where she organized and directed the International Women's Rights Action Watch (IWRAW) and co-founded the Institute's Center on Women and Public Policy.