gender and development

For several hundred years, Westerners have been concerned to ‘improve’ gender relations in non-Western societies. What are some of the problems with this project?

Gender and development
Abstract

For hundreds of years, the West has been trying to improve gender relations within non-Western societies through helping Third World countries develop. However this development process is firmly rested within the dualistic modernization framework which produces binary oppositions that limit both thought and practice. Feminist theories that work within this modernization discourse are thus inevitably positioned opposite to each other as demonstrated by the ‘Western’ liberal WID approach versus the Marxist/structuralist GAD ideology. Hence this essay argues that the very core ideas of modernity and development should be reconsidered and. Nevertheless, to avoid the theoretical black hole of post-modern deconstruction, this essay employs a less radical method of rereading the modernization theory. Through the practice of rereading, it is clear that modernization theories as well as practices taken by the World Bank are intertwined with muscular understandings of development and as a result often has a detrimental effect on women socially and economically.

For hundreds of years, the West has been trying to improve gender relations within non-Western societies. This task was subsumed under the master project of development, where the assumption was made that through helping non-western societies develop, i.e. to be more like the West, gender inequality would in turn disappear. This is known as the modernization process in which traditional societies are seen as male-dominated and authoritarian and modern societies as democratic and egalitarian.1

This essay focuses on the problems of using modernization theory as the dominant discourse of development in improving gender relations since the end of the Second World War. Through the critical lenses of liberal feminists, Marxist/structuralist feminists and post-colonial/postmodern feminists, four major problems of the Western modernization project becomes prominent. The first issue, identified by anthropologist and liberal feminist Ester Boserup, is that development does not automatically benefit women, unlike the predictions made by early modernization theorists. The second criticism came from Marxist/structuralist scholars such as Gita Sen and Lourdes Beneria who objected to the unitary category ‘women’ and the failure of modernization and liberal feminist theories to take into account the role of women within the family. The third problem was raised by post-colonial/postmodern feminists like Aihwa Ong and Chandra Mohanty. They accused Western scholars of creating a colonial/neo-colonial discourse that represented women in non-Western societies as the undifferentiated ‘other’, oppressed both by their gender and Third World underdevelopment and only able to be liberated by the West.2 Lastly, because the distinct feminist understandings of women and development were all directed at the modernization discourse of development and so far, none of the critiques was able to come up with an alternative understanding of modernity. Therefore, I chose to follow the steps of Di Stefano and Catherine V. Scott who called for a reassessment of theories of modernization to understand their major themes, how they create hegemonic consensus and how they are put in practice by the World Bank. Through the act of rereading, I seek to redefine gender, modernity and development.

This essay understands modernization theory to be the paradigm of the development discourse since neo-liberalism, the current ruling ideology in developmental studies and practices, could be seen as a ‘reformulation of modernization theory’ despite the major difference in their understanding of the role of the state.3 Terms such as ‘non-Western’, ‘Third World’ and ‘South’ are used interchangeably in this essay as shorthand, rather than implying a monolithic world outside European and American (Western) societies.4

Modernization theorists view development as a linear, cumulative process in which value differences (traditional versus modern) are central.5 During the 1950s and 1960s, modernization theorists paid very little attention to women’s role in development. Those who did offered blindly optimistic outlooks. The modernization process itself and the administration of development policies and projects were perceived as gender-neutral or particularly beneficial to women, who were believed to be more harmed than men by traditional values circumscribing their roles.6 Advanced technology was seen to release women from the drudgery of housework; birth control was said to give women freedom from involuntary reproduction; and modern values and ideas were expected to increase women 's freedom of action.7 These views remained unchallenged until 1970 when Ester Boserup published her groundbreaking book—Woman’s Role in Economic Development.

In this book, Boserup employed an anthropological research method and found variations in sex roles across cultures. She argued that since women are always responsible for reproductive work, the differences in their social status across the globe came from the different sexual division of labor and hence gender is a socially constructed concept.8 Focusing on rural production, Bosrup concluded that mechanization of agriculture which was equated with economic development had separated women’s labor from the agricultural sector which undermines their social status. Forced to enter the market economies of the Third World, women were marginalized because they earn less than men as workers and farmers.9

Boserup’s work inspired a number of supporting case studies on the issue of women’s marginalization in development and created a new sub-field of inquiry kwon as Women in Development (WID).10 Rooted in the liberal tradition, WID advocates understood ‘women’ as a category of essentially similar, rational individuals having rights equal to those of men.11 This led WID theorists to demand for women’s integration into the development process rather than to question the sources of women’s subordination and oppression.12 WID focused exclusively on the production aspect of women, recommending agricultural extension and technological training for women to increase their productive capacity. The state is expected to be the major actor in implementing this new agenda and should provide employment opportunities in industry and better access to markets. The WID ideology is dominant to this day in mainstream developmental programs initiated by agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations.13 Nevertheless, it has been criticized for its unitary category ‘women’ and neglect of women’s role within the family.

In their classic commentary on Boserup’s book, Laurdes Beneria and Gita Sen, dismissed Boserup’s instrumentalist view of the unitary category ‘women’ and the notion that the development process could be easily modified to include all women.14 They also accused Boserup and WID for ignoring reproduction and women’s particular subordination within the home.15 Women’s subordination is not merely due to technical change as argued by Boserup, instead, according to Beneria and Sen, it was embedded in a global and historical economic order, capital accumulation under colonialism, which benefited some groups and exploited others.16 Moreover, these groups included both women and men. For Beneria and Sen, the task of improving gender relations through development as modernization advocated by modernization theorists and WID failed to take one’s structural location in the interstices of country, class and gender into account.17

Beneria and Sen’s critiques represented a growing number of concerns from the perspectives of Marxist/structuralist feminists, now known as Gender and Development (GAD). GAD is an analytical framework that focused not on women but gender, in particular the social construction of gender roles and relations.18 For GAD theorists, gender is constructed by individuals who ‘become the social categories of men and women through the acquisition of locally defined attributes of masculinity and femininity.’19 Since the gendered division of labour is revealed as a constructed rather than natural part of life, the possibility of transforming gender roles is thus established. GAD proponents acknowledged women’s concerns for economic independence and give weight to political activism advocating strategies such as community organizing, transformative action, public education and coalition building.20 GAD also expected the state to assume a critical role in providing programs to support the work of social reproduction, namely the care and nurturance of children.21 Although overlooked by mainstream donor agencies, the GAD perspective has been adapted by many organizations at the grass-roots level in analyzing gender relations in the farms, households and communities.22 This approach however is questioned for its tendency to victimize and essentialize women, in particularly, Third World women.

With common roots in the Enlightenment, both Liberal and Marxist feminists were criticized by postmodern/post-colonial feminists for their Western, hierarchical and dualistic nature of thought and their reinforcement of the Western/non-Western divide on women as well as men.23 According to Chandra Mohanty, the discourse of WID ideology is ‘one of the best examples of universalization on the basis of economic reductionism’.24 For Mohanty, instead of analytically demonstrating how the social category of ‘women’ is constituted in specific contexts, the female subject of WID is reduced merely to a gendered identity.25 For anthropologist Aihwa Ong, GAD theorists Beneria and Sen differentiated non-Western women only in terms of their status as wives and workers in reproduction (i.e. the production of use values in the household and the production of commodities).26 Hence their claim to ‘a richly textured understanding’ may possibly describe their understanding of capitalism in relation to its varied effects on ‘domestic work’, reproduction and production, population and birth control but not their representation of women in the Third World.27

Drawing upon Michel Foucault and Edward Said’s insights on power and knowledge, Mohanty and Ong found three distinctive features in the Western feminist discourse. These are the essentialist constructions of the analytical category of ‘women’; universalist assumption of sexist oppression across cultures; and the political implications of essentialist and universalist supposition that ultimately point to the colonialist intention of Western discourse.28 Through textual analysis, both Mohanty and Ong discovered an ahistorical, decontextualized category of ‘women’ placed in opposition to an equally ahistorical and decontextualized ‘men’. While ‘men’ is identified as the oppressor and ‘women’ the oppressed, the category of ‘women’ is also subdivided into First World and Third World women. Furthermore, women in the First World are identified as modern, liberated and culturally superior while Third World women were assigned to an inferior position. Once this binary is established, a more subtle discursive move becomes apparent when Western women are identified as ‘women’. The new opposition now reads as ‘(real) women’ versus ‘(not yet modernized and liberated) women.’29 The Western/non Western women and modern/traditional binaries in Mohanty and Ong’s view, constructed Third World women as the ‘Other’ that needed to liberated by the First World though economic rationality (modernization practices).30 This postmodern feminist perspective, with its inquiry into the ‘Western’ hegemony and its emphasis on localized, subjugated knowledge/power systems provides a powerful and effective critique of the subjugation of Third World women’s experiences by Western scholars.31

While sharing postmodern feminists’ concerns over essentialism and universalism in the discourse of improving gender relations in the Third World, I also question the practical side of postmodernism in improving gender relations. Although heavily criticized for its liberal roots, WID still sought political change for women. For instance the UN decade for Women was a result of WID lobbying.32 Even Marxist/structuralists theorists managed to put theory into practice, with Oxfam as the leading organization for its gendered focused policies for women.33 In contrast, the textual focus taken by Mohanty and Ong painted women in non-Western societies as the product of our imagination. This disjunction between ‘our’ lives and ‘their’ lives created by textual analysis seemed to make the gender improvement project impractical.34 If ‘difference’ means that there is no connectedness between ‘us’ (the West) and ‘other’ (non-West), how is it possible to form strategic coalitions across class, race and national boundaries?35 Furthermore, does postmodernism require the abandoning of women as a systematic category of analysis?36 Unable to answer these questions, I choose to employ a less conventional but also less radical method of deconstructing the modernization theory through the process of rereading. This allows me to ‘search beyond and beneath’ of what is unnamed, excluded and concealed.37 In addition, I also examine how modernization theory was put into practice by the World Bank since it is the leading agency in directing development policies and underpinned by the modernization paradigm and influenced by the WID school of thought.

Through the process of rereading, three common themes are found in a diverse range of modernization writings.38 First, there is an unconscious and pervasive psychological separation and differentiation of the household. This gap is established through demarcating a list of characteristics as tradition and contrasts them to the features of modernity. For example, in Daniel Lerner’s writings, women and the household are conceived as a part of the past that contains fatalistic worldviews while modernity requires self-propelled men to leave the private sphere, abandon tradition and join the public realm with other rational man.39 This public/private dichotomy is the second distinct character of modernization theories. According to modernization theorists like Samuel Huntington, the public realm is populated by men who have left the private realm of village and ‘tribe’ to become modern. To be modern is to leave the obstacles of family, household, village and ‘tribe’ and move to the city where ‘locus of new economic activities, new social classes, new culture and education.’40 Finally, modernization theory uses evolutionary models, which portrays development as struggle for overcoming tradition and implicitly, over femininity. W.W. Rostow’s depiction of the rural village and ‘tradition’ for instance was something that must be struggled against. Rostow, describes modernization process from ‘takeoff’ to the ‘drive to modernity’ as a shift from a group that ‘weighted too heavily with interests and attitudes from the traditional past’ to a generation of men who ‘were prepared to create an urban-based modern society.’41

Therefore it is evident that the definitions, conceptions and language used to define and describe development by modernization theorists are interwoven with masculine meanings.42 Rereading modernization theory showed how modernity has been envisioned in opposition to a feminized and traditional household and portrayed as power struggle with the feminine on the way to ‘maturity’ and urbanization. Development requires the emergence of rational and industrial man, an individual who believes rewards should be distributed based on universalistic rules.43

Later theorists added another trait to the modernization theory in which modernity is acquired through the public free market in contrast to the traditional ‘non-economic’ sphere of the home. The free market not only allows the talents of entrepreneurial and competitive men to flourish but also creates bonds among men that preclude ties to family and village.44 The state’s role is merely to encourage entrepreneurial talents. A modern society is thus painted by modernization theorists as composed of rational economic men who will accomplish the necessary economic breakthrough for capitalist-style development.45 Close analysis of the World Bank’s 1989 report on Sub-Saharan Africa similarly demonstrates how masculine preoccupations embedded in modernization theory was put in practice by the World Bank, despite its adaptation of feminist critiques.

Responding to criticisms from both liberal and Third World feminists, the World Bank outlined the need to protect the most vulnerable members of society from the consequences of structural adjustments and the flexibility of structural adjustments programs to adjust to particular country’s circumstances rather than relying on wholesale adoption of a standardized package.46 However, women were still casted on the informal side that needs to participate and integrated into the system. The World Bank’s idea of helping African women was to create opportunities for women to participate in the economy. According to the report, women should contribute to income generating work while they continuing their sex-specific activities within the household. 47 This recognition of women’s economic role while simultaneously enclosing them into the traditional household boundary exposes the masculine nature of World Bank policies.

Compared to Rostow’s explicit juxtaposition of technology and effeciency against family and clan, the gendered dichotomies of the World Bank report were more subtle but still saw the agents for development as free from the private sphere and household.48 Progress, freedom and development were all underpinned by the image of skilled personnels who are conversant in the application of modern technology and science to nature.49

For instance, the World Bank’s 1989 report argued that the existing urban areas in Africa have not developed in the ‘appropriate’ manner due to low food prices and other government subsidies that caused overcrowdings and inefficiency in all sectors of the economy. The balance should be restored by rural farmers who are willing to harness new technology to improve agricultural growth. Through exporting these crops, famers could earn the requisite foreign exchange to begin an orderly process of industrialization and urbanization.50

The idea that the chief engine of development in Africa was the entrepreneur can be traced back to Rostow’s five stages of development. Following Huntington, the World Bank also praised the virtues of city life claiming that ‘rapidly expanding urban centers are crucibles of acculturation to modernity and to the market economy.’51 The themes of minimal role for the state also remained. Separation from the household, detachment from the land obtaining rationality and acquisitive behavior that came out of the World Bank’s report revealed its attachment to the theories of modernization.

This deconstruction of modernization theory and the World Bank’s reports shows that modernity has been envisioned in opposition to a feminized and traditional household and portrayed as power struggle with the feminine on the way to ‘maturity’ and urbanization.52 This patriarchal version of development and understanding of gender improvement for women as to become like men is thus the biggest obstacle for the West to overcome in its attempt to improve gender relations in non-Western societies. It will be a formidable task to try to rethink and redefine modernity, development and its relation with gender. The new discourse of development should take into consideration of the three main feminist critiques of modernization and development in order to make the world a better, equitable and diverse place. The first step towards this noble goal is to acknowledge that development does not equal modernization, and development for women is not synonymous with becoming men.

Since the end of the Second World War, the West has tired to improve gender relations in non-Western societies through development practices under the modernization discourse. This process has inspired a widespread of criticisms from liberal, Marxist/structuralist and post-colonial/postmodern feminists. With case studies pointing towards the detrimental effect of development on women and the emphasis of using gender instead of the unitary category of ‘women’ are increasingly acknowledged and adopted by mainstream and alternative developmental agencies. Yet, the modernist framework is rarely questioned in both liberal and Marxist/structuralist thoughts. Post-colonial and postmodern scholars however, recognize the need to move beyond the binary structures and patriarchal characters which are deeply imbedded in Western knowledge. Through the practice of rereading, it is clear that modernization theories portrayed development as something achieved by individual men who struggled to overcome the household, the private realm and tradition. The World Bank’s understanding of development in Africa is deeply rooted in the dichotomies of men/women, city/village, modern/tradition which could be traced back to the modernization theory of development. This masculine vision of development excludes the role of women and as a result often has a detrimental effect on their social and economic positions. Overcoming these ideas is not easy and it becomes even more problematic to put them into practice. Nevertheless, a better and more equitable world does require a fundamental rethinking of modernization and the abandonment of the Western women/non-Western women, Modern/Traditional and Men/Women dichotomies.53

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