Literature Review: A Development Perspective Of Feminism In Modern History

Literature Review: A Development Perspective Of Feminism In Modern History

INTRODUCTION

To contextualise development approaches towards women’s empowerment, this chapter will construct a definition of empowerment based on the notion of ‘power’ and how the different ways of understanding this concept have influenced each shift in feminist development discourse. The work of Michael Foucault regarding the different modes of power can be deemed the intrinsic link between feminist theoretical concepts. According to Foucault (1982), where there is power there is resistance, which provides the foundations for feminist approaches to resist the patriarchal development process.

The first dominant understanding of power within the social sciences is power as ‘power over’, that is, where a subject – whether singularly or collectively – has power over another. ‘Power over’ can be exerted overtly through physical coercion, or covertly through psychological manipulation. The latter can be exercised with subtlety; for example, psychological processes can influence in such a way as to restrict the options perceived or can lead someone to perceive the desired option as being their own desire. ‘Power over’ can often result in internalised oppression, as such in a dominant society where groups of people are systematically denied power and influence, they will internalise the messages they receive about their supposed roles and come to believe such messages to be true (Rowlands, 1998). Rowlands (1998) further identifies that when this ‘internalised oppression’ becomes embedded into society, the effects are mistaken for reality. To add context, a woman who becomes the subject of violence when expressing her own opinions may start to withhold her opinions and eventually come to believe she has no opinions of her own. This covert escalation of ‘power over’ then removes the need to overtly exert power.

WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT

Power as ‘power over’ is relevant to the first liberal feminist critique to the development process. ‘Women in Development’ (WID) emerged in the 1970s to oppose the current thinking that women were particularly recessive to the development process (Boserup, 1970). During this time, development was primarily based on economic growth with little attention paid to broader concepts, and the modernisation theory dominated development thinking. In turn, women were ignored as agents of social change. Modernisation was based upon the ideology that once economies have grown, the demand for equality would become more pronounced and families could embrace an egalitarian structure. Essentially, the status of women would catch up to that of men, as the Global South would catch up to the Global North (Greig, Hulme & Turner, 2007). From this view, achieving modernity coincided with feminist subordination by creating a power struggle between the product of modernisation and feminine traditionalism.

To resist the perception that women are recessive to the development process, WID theorists advocated that women are an untapped economic resource for development. Major institutions such as United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Nations (UN), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Bank came under scrutiny for their male-biased aid programmes and pressure was placed on US policy makers with the aim to increase women’s participation into the existing patriarchal structure. As a result, the 1973 Percy Amendment to the US Foreign Assistance Act required USAID’s development programmes to ‘integrate women into the national economies of foreign countries’ fuelling the “axiomatic assumption that women’s lives would improve once they had been integrated into the development process” (Koczerberski, 1998:396).

Despite WID advocates successfully influencing political strategy, in reality the approach became a tool for high-ranking misogynists in the development sector to address emerging concerns in their favour. Influenced by the capitalist nature of modernisation, particularly in the US, hegemonic development actors decided on a narrative that described poverty alleviation and basic needs as the main focus areas for women’s development, paying no attention to unequal access to resources (Kabeer, 1995). Despite the attempt by WID advocates to empower women financially, the approach failed to change the ‘power over’ narrative, and women continued to be internally oppressed through stereotypical and customary expectations being held over them by men, with little focus on realigning gendered power relations (Connell, 1987; Razavi & Miller, 1995).

WID gained global recognition for its attempt to challenge the central tenets of modernisation. This led to an emergence of