Third World women were long the undervalued and ignored actors in the development process but are now recognized as playing a critical role. This book has been designed as a comprehensive reader presenting the best of the now vast body of literature that has grown up alongside this acknowledgement.
The book is divided into five parts, incorporating readings from the leading experts and authorities in each field. The first part acts as an introduction to the field, examining the key theoretical debates and discourses surrounding women and development from a historical perspective. Distinguished practitioners explore the ideas and concepts fundamental for understanding the area: class, 'race' and ethnicity, religion, reproduction, persistent inequalities, colonialism, modernization, economic exclusion and patriarchy.
Part two goes on to look at the household as a unit of analysis; exploring sexuality, single-parent families, agricultural production, and environmental relationships while the third part locates women within the global economy, addressing issues such as industrialization, multi-national companies, Free Trade Zones , the informal sector and the feminization of labour. Part four views the social transformation of women as a consequence of Structural Adjustment Policies and intrusive state policies into women's health, reproductive rights and sexuality. Next, the volume poses the fundamental questions around women and ideology; do national liberation struggles contradict with feminist movements? What is the impact of religious fundamentalism? Are socialist development processes similar or dissimilar to capitalist processes? How has the transition to capitalism affected women? The final section of the book shows how women from the ground up are organizing themselves for change.
Nalini Visvanathan is an independent researcher living in the Washington, DC area. A native of India, her research and publications cover women's health in the population context, education and the empowerment of adolescent girls, women's movements and community-based participatory research. Her doctorate is in interdisciplinary communication with an emphasis on development studies.
Lynn Duggan, Professor of Labor Studies since 1997 and PhD economist, teaches at Indiana University Bloomington. She has written articles and book chapters on free trade and social policy, feminist comparative economic systems, family policy in East and West Germany, and reproductive rights in the Philippines.
Laurie Nisonoff, Professor of Economics, has taught economics, economic history and women's studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, since 1974. She is an editor of the Review of Radical Political Economics, and served as the co-ordinator of the RRPE 6th Special Issue on Women, 'Women in the International Economy'. She has published alone and with Marilyn Dalsimer on women in China, and on the labour process.
Nan Wiegersma is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Fitchburg State College, Massachusetts. She has published numerous articles on land tenure, gender and development. Her article “Peasant Patriarchy and the Subversion of the Collective in Vietnam” was reprinted in the research anthology Gender and Development: Theoretical, Empirical and Practical Approaches, Volume I, Lourdes Beneria Ed. She is author of Vietnam: Peasant Land, Peasant Revolution and is coauthor (with Joseph Medley) of US Development Policies toward the Pacific Rim. She was the Women and Development Expert for the United Nations on a World Food Programme mission to Vietnam. She was also a coeditor of the first edition of The Women Gender and Development Reader.
Nan was a Fulbright Fellow in Nicaragua, studying women's work in export processing zones. The research from this study was published in Women in the Age of Economic Transformation, Aslanbegui et al. Eds. (1994) and Women in Globalization, Aguilar and Lacsamana Eds. (2004).
Barbara Ehrenreich is the bestselling author of over a dozen books, including
Nickel and Dimed,
Bait and Switch,
Bright-sided,
This Land Is Their Land,
Dancing In The Streets, and
Blood Rites. A frequent contributor to
Harper's,
The Nation,
The New York Times and
Time magazine, she lives in Virginia.
Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of The Time Bind, The Second Shift, and The Managed Heart. She is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Her articles have appeared in Harper's, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today, among others. She lives in San Francisco.
Kalpana Wilson is a Fellow at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics. Her experiences teaching development studies in British universities, as well as her involvement as an activist around issues of racism and imperialism, led her to pursue the themes of this book. She has also written and researched extensively on agriarian transformation in Bihar in India, women's participation in rural labour movements and the relationships between neoliberalism, gender and the concepts of agency.
Diane Elson holds a Chair in Sociology at the University of Essex, UK and is a member of the Essex Human Rights Centre. She has acted as advisor to UNIFEM, UNDP, Oxfam, and other development agencies and is a past vice president of the International Association for Feminist Economics. She has published widely on gender and development. Her academic degrees include a B.A. in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford; and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Manchester.
