~

Women in Development: Liberalism,

Marxism and Marxist-Feminism

Asoka Bandarage

There is now an avalanche of writings on women in the Third World.

Before reaching for such facile slogans as ‘integrate women into
development’ or ‘sisterhood is global’, we must examine the various
feminist ideologies that are buried in those writings. Only then can
we reach a fuller understanding of the issues involved and can we talk
of appropriate strategies for change. In this article I shall discuss
liberal feminism and its Marxist critique on economicmodernization
and Third World women. I shall also present some arguments and
suggestions toward a Marxistlsocialist feminist synthesis. ’
LIBERAL FEMINISM

Liberalism believes in the inherent viability and goodness of the

dominant politico-economic and ideological structures, namely, the
capitalist system. While i t recognizes the social inequalities and
injustices within the status quo, it sees them as mere aberrations that
can gradually be rectified through legal procedures and attitudinal
changes.
Within this philosophic and political tradition, liberal feminism
sees the subordination of women in capitalist society as a deviation
from the general norms of equality and justice for all individuals (cf.
Mill 1970; Friedan 1963). It believes that sexual inequality can
largely be corrected if women, now confined to the domestic sphere,
are integrated into the public sphere as the equals of men.*Hence,
the emphasis of liberal feminism on legal measures such as the vote,
the Equal Rights Amendment in the USA, affirmative action and
attitudinal change strategies, such as assertiveness training and
achievement motivation .3
Liberal feminism, which arose in the West, has its counterparts in

My thanks are due to the Wenner-Gren Anthropological Foundation for a research

grant for fieldwork associated with this paper.

Development and Change (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills and New Delhi), Vol. 15
(1984), 495-515
496 Asoka Bandarage

the Third World, particularly among professional middle-class

women. In this paper, however, we are concerned only with the
Women in Development school (WID), which is a new field of
academic enquiry and policy planning pertaining to poor women in
the Third World.4 This school is situated firmly within the Western
liberal tradition. As a distinct blend of Modernization theory and
liberal feminism, it assumes that all women can be liberated within
the capitalist world system.

THE WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL

The publication of Ester Boserup’s pioneering study, Woman’sRole

in Economic Development in 1970, and the inauguration of the
United Nations Decade for Women in 1975, were high points in the
evolution of the Women in Development school. Various UN
agencies, the World Bank, the US Agency for International
Development (AID), private voluntary agencies, women academics
and even multinational corporations seeking female labour in the
Third World, are now identified with this field. Their ideas and
strategies are being exported to the Third World in order to
incorporate women into the public sphere, specifically the
expanding market economy.
The traditional male approaches to economic modernization and
social welfare in the West and in the Third World have long neglected
the specific contributions and concerns of women. Others have
justified, and continue to justify, women’s subordination on the
basis of various psycho-biological arguments.
But feminists of varying ideological persuasion are now
identifying women’s ‘invisible’ labour and other contributions and
concerns in societies throughout the world. By taking into account
women’s domestic labour and unpaid labour in the public sector,
they are expanding the definition and meaning of ‘work’. The
‘Wages for Housework’ slogan in itself has done much to increase
consciousness about women’s work.’
The Women in Development school, in particular, describes
women’s distinctive roles in Third World economies and criticizes
established male perspectives, either for ignoring the sexual
dimensions of social change in the Third World or for simply
asserting that economic modernization and westernization will
liberate women (cf. Tiano 1982).
Women in Development 497

Within just over a decade, Boserup and her followers in the WID
field have produced a substantial body of information on women’s
economic contributions and conditions in the Third World. It is from
their studies that we now know that women form the majority of the
world’s food producers. Women constitute 60 to 80 per cent of the
agricultural workers in Africa and Asia and more than 40 per cent in
Latin America.‘ Increasing numbers of households in the world,
especially the one-third or so that are headed by women, are
dependent on the productive roles of women for their very ~ u r v i v a l . ~
The growing number of empirical studies on women’s work
produced by WID writers makes it impossible to deny the centrality
of women in Third World economies. But, as these writers hasten to
show, women’s work in the Third World, as in the West and the
socialist countries, is confined to the most undervalued and
underpaid sectors of production. In the third World, women are
heavily concentrated in the household and the so-called informal
sectors. Hence, much of their work is either undercounted or
completely omitted from calculations of national income and
productivity such as the Gross National Product (cf. Buvinic et al.
1983 and Bandarage 1983a). The results are the supposed invisibility
of women’s work, the continued belief in a universal male
breadwinner role and, more seriously, the greater poverty and
hunger of women (Leghorn & Roodkowsky 1978; Oxfam 1978).
Liberal feminists in the West, most notably Betty Friedan, have
argued that the separation of the domestic and public spheres and the
confinement of women within the home, are the roots of their
economic marginalization and social subordination.8 Likewise,
WID writers beginning with Ester Boserup, have persuasively
demonstrated that the processes of economic modernization in the
Third World are marginalizing women, both economically and
socially.
Meanwhile, the liberal Modernization perspective continues to
believe that underdevelopment in the Third World is caused by
traditional values and social structures; that the basis for
development lies in the diffusion of values, capital, technology and
political institutions from the West; and that all societies can and will
traverse the same path of development as the West (cf. Bandarage
1983b). WID thinkers fully subscribe to this view. Their difference
with their male counterparts lies merely in the argument that the
benefits of the Western development model have accrued only to
men.
498 Asoka Bandarage

Boserup and others have shown that from the very onset of
European colonialism, the new private property rights, wage labour,
technology, credit and education have been handed to men
(Boserup 1979; Rogers 1979; Tinker & Bramsen 1976). Thus, men
have access to the more lucrative and prestigious jobs in the formal
sectors of the economy, and women are relegated to the least
productive and least paid activities. Lacking property, skills, capital
or education, women are forced to accept whatever jobs they can
find as fieldhands, street vendors, maids or prostitutes.
The objective of the WID school is to spread the benefits of
modernization, the Western development model in particular, to
women. This they hope to accomplish by the fuller integration of
women into the formal sectors of Third World economies. Similar to
liberal feminists in the West, WID thinkers seek this integration
through legal measures and changes in attitudes. To this end the
many international and national conferences, declarations and
legislation including the UN Decade for Women, the Percy
Amendment’ (which stipulated that US development aid should pay
special attention to women’s needs), the Women’s Bureaus, the
WID offices on college campuses, all seeking to influence male
development planners and income-generation projects for the poor
Third World women themselves.

THE LIMITS OF WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT

Liberal feminism has performed a pioneering task in bringing to light

the sexual inequities that are engendered by the processes of
economic modernization. We are enormously indebted to liberal
feminism and Betty Friedan in the West, to the WID school and to
Ester Boserup.
Nevertheless, it is essential that the limits of the WID analysis be
recognized for either comprehending the causes of women’s
marginalization in the Third World or for seeking solutions to it. The
limitations of the WID school reflect the material interests and the
ideological boundaries of its progenitors - Modernization theory
and liberal feminism.
The basic postulate of the WID school is that women are
insufficiently integrated into the processes of economic
modernization and that their liberation lies in better integration into
those processes. Hence, the slogan of the WID school: ‘integrate
Women in Development 499

women into development'.

Indeed, women are marginalized in the least productive and least
remunerated sectors of economic production, but this does not mean
that they are not integrated."' As the WID studies themselves have
repeatedly shown, women are central to Third World economies and
to the very survival of most poor families. In other words, they are
already well-integrated into existing economic structures
everywhere, albeit at the lowest levels.
The question is, then, can women be integrated into more self-
fulfilling forms of employment within the hierarchical politico-
economic and ideological structures of the capitalist world system?
Like liberal feminists in the West, the WID thinkers consider that
this can be done.
The optimism of the WID school derives from its belief that
women's poverty and subordination are simply aberrations within an
otherwise just and equitable social system. Ascribing sexual
inequality largely to traditional values and male ignorance, WID
thinkers believe that this aberration could be corrected through
legislative reforms, attitudinal changes and intervention projects
designed to provide basic needs and income-generating work for
poor Third World women."
Liberal feminist efforts have helped a few women receive higher
education and high level public employment.'2 But many of these
women, especially those in the Third World, would have acquired
such positions through the strength of their social class and family
ties even without explicitly feminist ~trugg1es.l~ As far as the
majority of poor women goes, the record of development aid has
been dismal.
It is predicted that during the Women's Decade, the number of illiterate women will
increase; the number of women in the work force will decrease; the number suffering
from malnutrition will increase and there will be more dependents in most
populations (Reid 1976).14

'Feminization of poverty' is a worsening feature of capitalism in the

Third World.]' In the West, too, its systemic nature is becoming
more apparent. The subsumption of domestic work by capitalism
and the weakening of the nuclear family push more and more women
into the permanent 'under class' (see Stallard 1983). Basic needs
strategies, such as state welfare in the West and food aid for theThird
World, have been liberalism's answer to this situation. Conservative
claims notwithstanding, these strategies are now necessary for the
500 Asoka Bandarage

mere survival of poor women and theirfamilies, but in turn they have
become substitutes for the structural changes required for social
equality and justice, including the liberation of women.
In the meantime, WID strategists are planning end-of-the-decade
celebrations to be held in Nairobi in 1985. Yet another Women in
Development conference, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Percy
Amendment,I6 was held in October 1983, when $75 was charged for
registration and $25 for an opening banquet seat.”
The Women in Development school is rapidly being entrenched
within the Western bureaucracy for the development of the Third
World. Like the rest of the development enterprise, WID has its
quota of Third World professionals, in this case women. WID is
about poor women in the Third World; it is not a force of those
women themselves. What liberal feminism and Betty Friedan have
been for Western middle-class women, the WID school and Ester
Boserup cannot be for poor women in the Third World.

THE MARXIST PERSPECTIVE

Unlike the liberal perspective, the Marxist perspective argues that

the poverty of the vast majority of women - and men - under
capitalism is not a mere aberration. It is a structural feature of a social
system which puts the profits of a few before the human needs of the
many. Poverty is simply the symptom; exploitation is at its roots. The
solutions needed are not merely technical but political (see
Bandarage 1983a).
The disagreements between the liberals and the Marxists
regarding women’s liberation are not new. They have a long history
in the West. Criticizing what they call ‘bourgeois feminism’, Marxists
beginning with Engels have argued that the roots of female
subordination lie in private property, class hierarchy and the
production of exchange value (Engels 1972,1975).
Contemporary Marxists point out that women’s oppression is
inextricably tied in with class oppression at both the national and
international levels. Accordingly, the liberation of most women -
and men - is not possible within the prevailing capitalist world
system.” Integration into social production within a socialist
economy is a pre-condition for women’s freedom from the
constraints of gender roles.
Following Engels, Eleanor Leacock and several other women
Women in Development 501

Marxist anthropologists have attempted to show that in pre-class

societies sex roles were reciprocal, women were highly autonomous,
and social structures were sexually egalitarian. It was European
colonialism which brought in private property, commodity
production, cash nexus and Western values that laid the foundation
for both class and sexual inequality in such ‘simple’ societies (cf.
Leacock 1975,1981; Leacock & Etienne 1980).
The search for the origins of sexual inequality in class societies by
Marxist anthropologists continues apace.I9 But the more urgent
concern of Marxists studying gender issues in the Third World is with
the exploitative nature of women’s incorporation into global
capitalism today.
Marxists agree with liberal WID thinkers that economic
modernization, or more specifically capitalist development,
generally marginalizes Third World women. The WID school
focuses simply on the outward manifestations of sexual inequality
engendered by this process. In contrast, the Marxists claim to
understand sexual inequality, structurally and dialectically, as it
relates t o social class inequality and to the uneven and unequal
development of capitalism world-wide.”
Empirical studies by Marxists of the effects of agricultural
development on women seek to identify both the commonalities and
diversities of the female experience. They tend to agree with the
WID studies that the benefits of the Green Revolution, for example,
have generally accrued to men.*l The handing of new technologies of
production to men has ‘crowded’ women into a few jobs, narrowing
the range of female tasks and lowering the productivity of women’s
labour in relation to that of men (Sen 1980: 20).
Yet unlike the liberal WID writers, the Marxists are emphatic that
not all men benefit from technical innovations. Nor are all women
similarly affected by technical and other aspects of change. In a study
of rural Java, Ann Stoler suggests that agricultural modernization
has had a more intensifying effect on class exploitation than o n
sexual exploitation. She notes in particular the differential effects of
mechanized rice-hulling, which replaced women’s pounding, on
different classes of women. Women from the poorer households
were compelled to accept whatever alternative income
opportunities they could find. But the women from the wealthier
households, now freed from the task of harvest management, could
invest time and capital in more lucrative trading ventures (Stoler
1977).
502 Asoka Bandarage

In a study comparing the uneven development of capitalist

relations of production in three Andean regions, Magdalena Leon
de Leal and Carmen Diana Deere conclude that ‘capitalism uses the
subordination of women to its own advantage, as a justification for
the sex segregation of work and unequal wage scales’.22But they also
note that while the sexual division of labour is rigid in the ‘non-
capitalist’ region, it tends to break down in the ‘advanced’ capitalist
region due to the effects of rural poverty and proletarianization. The
sexual division of labour in reproduction and domestic work,
however, continues to be rigid and uniform across the regions
(Deere & de Leal 1980: 25); the home seems to be the province of
women everywhere!
These and other Marxist studies show that the changing roles of
women in economic production are determined by the confluence of
a number of historical factors: the sexual division of labour in
reproduction, local class structure, the articulation of specific
regions and sectors of production within national economies and the
international economy. The result is a great diversity and complexity
in the integration of women into the processes of capitalist
development.
This complexity, however, is rarely captured by the liberal WID
studies. These isolate sexual inequality from other socio-economic
inequalities with which it is -inextricably interlinked. The
shortcomings and indeed the possible detriments of such an isolated
and narrow approach to the Third World women whom the WID
school seeks t o help, is highlighted in a recent study by Marxist
sociologist, Maria Mies.
In a case study of a substantial household industry in Narsapur, in
Andhra Pradesh, India, Mies shows how capital engages women’s
labour in the home for the production of commodities for export, in
this case lace. By continuing to label the women lace producers
‘housewives’ and their activities ‘domestic production’, capitalists
(employers, local traders and exporters) have avoided providingfair
wages and other basic labour rights to these women. The extension
of the ‘housewife’ ideology from the West to the Third World, from
the richer to the poorer classes, has helped the isolation and
atomization of the women workers and the mystification of the
processes of labour control (Mies 1982).
As Mies points out, the WID school regularly advocates income-
generation projects for women similar to household lace production
in Narsapur. These projects are concerned solely with integrating
Women in Development 503

women into the cash economy, and tend to ignore the exploitative
class and sexual relations that underlie women’s work. Mies warns
that such projects could intensify rather than alleviate the
exploitation of women (ibidem: 177;cf. also Pinedo-Ofreno 1981).23
Another growing phenomenon pertaining to Third World
women, but more visible than the ‘putting-out system’ discussed
above, is the employment of young women by multinational
corporations located in the export-processing zones. It is the
cheapness of Third World women’s labour and their supposed
docility and natural agility for repetitive and minute tasks that draw
multinational-owned factories to the Third World.24 Labour
docility, however, is not a biological or even cultural condition; it is
created by coercion. In this case, labour control is actually
guaranteed by the Third World government^.^^ Multinationals ‘run
away’ from their home bases to the free trade zones of Asia and Latin
America precisely because of the protection against unionization
and other labour rights, as well as the incredible tax holidays that are
made available to them there.26These are the realities of dependent
capitalist development in the Third World (see Bandarage 1983b:
ch.9).
There are many critical studies, mostly by Marxists, of working
conditions in the garment and electronics factories in the free trade
zones and on the lives of women who work in them (Ehrenreich &
Fuentes 1981; ISIS Guide). These studies recognize that, given the
massive unemployment all around them, the women workers in the
free trade zones consider themselves privileged to hold a job at all.
They seem also to enjoy some aspects of their new social status
associated with their employment in the modern Westernized
sector, especially the relative independence from patriarchal family
controls -the sophistication to wear jeans and use lipstick, and the
freedom to have a boyfriend.
Nevertheless, the studies of women’s work in the free trade zones
make it abundantly clear that these jobs pay so little that most
women have barely enough to live on, let alone to save for the future;
they gain no marketable skillson the job; and, once dismissed (which
happens very early, often due to ill health caused by the job), some
women have nowhere to go (Arrigo 1980).27When familiesrefuse to
accept them and men refuse to marry them because of their
‘independence’, at least a few are forced into prostitution.
Some families tolerate their daughters’ prostitution as long as it
helps them in their own struggle to survive. Prostitution, it must be
504 Asoka Bandarage

noted, is expanding rapidly with tourism, which is yet another

strategy of the Western development model for the Third World. In
tourism, too, the multinationals are dominant .28
In spite of such evidence of the effects of multinationals on their
women employees, the UN, the World Bank and USAID continue
to promote the multinationals’ expansion into free trade zones in the
Third World (Ehrenreich & Fuentes 1981). These organizations, it
must be noted, are closely identified with the objectives of the WID
school. Liberal WID thinkers see free trade and the liberation of
women as mutually compatible. For the Marxists, however, the
integration of Third World women into free trade represents
exploitation, not l i b e r a t i ~ n .The
~ ~ WID school is part of the
problem, not the solution.
Like the multinationals, USAID and other international
population control agencies which claim to help Third World women
in practice often do the opposite. For example, they support,
whether directly or indirectly, the ‘dumping’ of the dangerous
hormonal contraceptive Depo-Provera and the Dalkon Shield IUD
in Third World countries. Both of these have been banned in the
United States due to their harmful effects on women’s health. The
justification given for their export is that the gain that can be
achieved from the use of Depo-Provera and the Dalkon Shield in
countries like Bangladesh, i.e. population control, far outweighs any
costs to women’s health there.30Theracism here is but it is
not uncommon for liberal feminist organizations to support such
population control programmes.
According to Marxists, then, the overall effects of the Western
capitalist development model have been underdevelopmental or
exploitative for the majority of women and men in the Third
World.32But Marxists who are concerned with gender issues stress
the differential effects of capitalism on men and women. They also
argue that while the forms of sexual hierarchy change over the course
of capitalist expansion, the subordination of women remains a
systemic feature of capitalism in the Third World as well as in the
West. Accordingly, women cannot expect to find their liberation
within capitalism.
TOWARDS A MARXIST-FEMINIST SYNTHESIS

The analytical and moral superiority of the Marxist perspective is

undeniable. It helps us to understand sexual oppression historically
Women in Development 505

as it interacts with class oppression and imperialism. It shows that

women’s oppression is not simply reducible to male ignorance or t o
the male ego. Women’s liberation needs a radical change in our
values, material interests and social arrangements at the national
and international levels.
But Marxism is not a panacea. As with other forms of radicalism,
there is a vast and obvious gap between the theory and practice of
Marxism (Bandarage 1983a, 1983~).The massive odds against
structural transformation lead many Marxists either to support the
liberal reformist strategies that they deride or to completely
disengage themselves from social activism. The combination of long-
term structural change strategies with short-term solutions for
meeting basic human needs, requires greater and more serious
attention from Marxists.33
On a theoretical level too there are many shortcomings in the
Marxist position on women’s subordination. Marxism pays attention
t o the effects of capitalism on women. The abstract forces of
capitalism - commercialization, proletarianization, etc. - are
posited as the sources of women’s oppression, not the ‘exploitation’
of women by men.34The result is the neglect of such issues as the
oppression of women in pre-capitalist and ‘socialist’ societies
(Bandarage forthcoming), the changing relations between men and
women under capitalism, and the cultural and psychological
dimensions of sexual stratification.
The silence of Marxists on these issues, among other factors, led to
the birth of an explicitly women-centred or feminist perspective in
the late 1960s. This is radical feminism. Radical feminism’s concern
is with the structure of male dominance and women’s subordination,
a structure that it calls ‘patriarchy’. Positing personal relations as
political issues, radical feminism opened u p for debate the entirety of
domestic and intimate social relations previously ignored by both
liberalism and Marxism ( ibidem).
Radical feminists also talk of the universality of patriarchy.
Pointing to such phenomena as rape, wife battery, prostitution,
genital mutilation and dowry murders (in India) as expressions of
patriarchy everywhere, they call for global sisterhood or
international feminism. This is a truly revolutionary development
(Bandarage forthcoming).
But the problem with this position, as with radical feminism in
general, is the lack of sensitivity to the interrelationsbetween sexual
506 Asoka Bandarage

and other forms of social oppression such as class, race and

nationality. This insensitivity is attributable, at least partly, to
radical feminism’s rejection of Marxism (ibidem; see also
Bandarage 1983~).
Analytically, we can separate class oppression from sexual
oppression, capitalism from patriarchy, but in reality they are
inextricably interlinked. As we now know, patriarchy almost
everywhere is shaped by its relationship to the capitalist world
system; capitalism almost everywhere is shaped by its relationship to
the patriarchal system (see Bandarage 1983a).
Patriarchy and capitalism are dialectical relations, and their
dissolution requires a dialectical analysis. This realization has led
some feminists in the West to conceptualize a synthesis between
Marxism and radical feminism.35
Many of the Marxists who write on Third World women, including
those I have discussed in this paper, subscribe to a Marxist/socialist-
feminist perspective. As I have shown, their research is still
concentrated largely on the effects of the expanding capitalist mode
of production on women. But such writers as Carmen Diana Deere,
Magdalena Leon de Leal, Maria Mies and others, are also
attempting to combine analyses of changing household structures,
familial relations and patriarchal ideologies with their analyses of the
effects of capitalism on ~ o m e n . ~ ~ T hisstill
e r e along way to go before
the economic biases of Marxism can be transcended and Marxist-
feminist analyses of women’s sexuality and psychology, the
reproductive role etc. can be developed.
The attempted Marxist-feminist synthesis like its progenitors,
Marxism and radical feminism, are reactions to capitalist
development in the West. They derive their analytical categories and
social change strategies from that experience. But as other critics
also argue (Ehrenreich 1983), many of the analytical categories of
Marxist-feminism such as the patriarchal nuclear family, the
domesticated housewife and the male breadwinner pertain to the
realities of early industrial capitalism. They have less and less
relevance to the changing conditions of advanced capitalism today.37
Indeed, if Marxist-feminism is to be a vital force for women’s
liberation, it must reformulate the old categories and draw new ones
from the realities of female-headed households, ‘feminization of
poverty’, changing sexual mores, emotional strain between and
within the sexes, and the overarching presence of the patriarchal
state and the mass media.38
Women in Development 507

Marxist-feminist theory is now at a theoretical impasse. If it is to

move forward, it must take into account changing social realities
both in the West and the Third World in the capitalist and ‘socialist’
societies. Categories drawn from the Western capitalist experience,
often the white middle-class experience at that, continue to be
applied globally by liberals, Marxists, feminists and Marxist-
feminists alike. We need to draw our theoretical assumptions from
wider experiences - from women, yes; but not only from white
middle-class women, but also from poor Third World women; not
only from advanced capitalism, but also from dependent capitalism
in the Third World.
The vast literature on economic modernization and Third World
women, the main trends of which are summarized in this paper,
provides a wealth of empirical data for reformulating old categories
and for drawing new and more relevant ones. But this literature has
hardly been touched upon by those who are working towards a
Marxist-feminist theory in the West. ‘Women in Development’ or
the study of poor Third World women, continues to be an esoteric
and peripheral sub-field within feminist discourse. It should be
central to feminist theory, if indeed feminism is to transcend its
middle-class bias and its Eurocentricism and begin to make sense to
most women.

0 NOTES

1. In a separate article I have explored radical feminist theories pertaining to

Third World women (Bandarage forthcoming). For representative writings from
liberal, Marxist, radical and Marxist-feminist positions, see Jaggar & Rothenberg-
Struhl (eds) (1979).
2. As a result of the ‘double burden’ experienced by middle-class women thus
integrated into the public sphere, the weakening of the nuclear family and the New
Right’s backlash against the women’s movement, liberal feminists in the USA have
recently begun to pay more attention to domestic relations between men and women.
See Friedan (1981a and 1981b). See also Bandarage (forthcoming).
3. A distinct current within feminism asserts that women incorporated into the
public sphere will ‘feminize’ or ‘humanize’ it rather than be ‘masculinized in the
process. This argument was used by some American suffragists in allaying the fears of
men who opposed the vote for women and their participation in public life. For a
discussion see Kraditor (1965, esp. chapter 3). See also the work of Carol Gilligan
(1982) and the so-called ‘cultural feminists’ referred to in Bandarage (forthcoming).
4. In an earlier review I discussed the liberal and Marxist-feminist perspectives on
Third World women as two competing ideologies within the Women in Development
508 Asoka Bandarage

field (Bandarage 1983a). It should be noted that while liberal feminists popularly use
the WID nomenclature, Marxist-feminists tend to deride it because of its connotation
that the processes of social change in the Third World are positive or developmental.
But in the absence of a more appropriate term, some Marxist-feminists also use it,
albeit reluctantly. See ISIS (1983: 3).
5 . However, if met, the demand of wages for housework would only help
perpetuate the sexual division of labour and the confinement of women in the home.
The Wages for Housework Campaign arose out of the domestic labour debate in
socialist feminist circles in the West. See Dall Costa & James (1973).
6. Of Conjuring and Caring (n.d.). See also UN (1979); New Internationalist,
special report on Women and World Development (two parts), esp. Part 2, p. 11;
Newsletters from The Women and Food Information Network (University of
Arizona); ‘Women, Land and Food Production’, ISIS Inremationul Bulletin 11
(Spring 1979); Zeidenstein (ed.) (1979). UN Agencies and USAID’s WID Office
have produced a wide array of studies on women’s economic activities in the Third
World. See, for example, Ahmad & Loutfi (1981); and USAID (1981).
7. Estimates of households headed by women range from 33 per cent to 40 per
cent. SeeNash (1983). SeealsoBuvinic&Youssef (1978).
8. See Friedan (1963). Lacking an historical perspective, liberal feminism (and
radical feminism too) tends to attribute universality to the dependent housewife role,
which isspecific tothe Westernmiddleclassesin earlier stagesof industrialcapitalism.
For critique see Bandarage (1983c and forthcoming).
9. Section 113 of the US Foreign Assistance Act presented by Senator Charles
Percy states that US aid shall be administered to give particular attention to those
programmes which tend to integrate women into the national economies of
developing countries, ‘thus improving their status and assisting the total development
effort’.
10. This is forcefully argued in ISIS (1983: 3). See also Beneria 4c Sen (1981).
11. See articles in Buvinic et al. (1983) and my critique in Bandarage (1983a). Nici
Nelson has identified three main approaches to policy planning in the WID school:
pragmatic approach, justice for women approach, and women and welfare approach
in Nelson (1979). See also Mayra Buvinic’s discussion of the different approaches in
WID in Buvinic et al. (1983).
12. This has resulted in ‘tokenism’. Baran and Sweezey’s analysis of racial
tokenism and its functions for advanced capitalism can well be extended to gender
tokenism as well. See Baran & Sweezey (1966, chapter 9).
13. In India and some Middle East countries, women, that is upper-class women,
received greater access to the public sphere through social reform and nationalist
movements. These movements were led by men who handed some rights to women.
See Renjen Bald (1983) and Mernissi (1975).
14. Consider also the figures released by the UN at mid-decade in 1980: women
account for half the world’s population; two-thirds of the world’s work hours; one-
tenth of the world’s income and less than one-hundredth of the world’s property. Less
than one-third of women are literate and in many Asian and African countries only
one in ten femaleseven enters school (UN 1979). Note, too, that in India the disparity
between the sexes with regard to both employment and chances for physical survival
have steadily increased with the socio-economic changes of the recent decades (Mies
1980).
15. There is insufficient evidence on the socialist record on women’s liberation.
Womenin Development 509

While it is clear that women continue to be the ‘second sex’, some socialist states like
Cuba have alleviated mass poverty and prostitution and provided literacy and
employment for women. See King (1977); also the work of Margaret Randall
including Cuban Women Now (1974); also Elizabeth Croll’s comparative work on
women in socialist countries (1981).
16. The Percy Amendment, like the human rights stipulations to foreign aid, has
hardly been implemented. The overwhelming proportion of US aid is military and
both military and economic aid are sent predominantly to client states. See Moore
Lappe, Collins & Kinley (1980).
17. For breakdowns of fees by membership status and registration dates, see
brochures of the Women in Development: A Decade of Experience Conference
organized by the Association for Women in Development, 1 S 1 5 October 1983. The
Association for the Advancement of Policy, Research and Development also had a
Conference on International Development and Women in the ’80s in Washington DC
in November 1983. The registration fees ranged from $100 for a non-organizational
affiliate to $10 for a student.
18. Humanist and ‘critical’ theorists within the Marxist tradition (like Sartre and
Marcuse) argue that even those aligned with capitalist interests cannot find their full
human freedom within the constraints of capitalism. Marx also suggested this in his
early writings.
19. Marxists often ignore sexual stratification in precolonial feudal societies. I have
explored the debate between radical and Marxist-feminists on the origins of sexual
inequality in my forthcoming article, ‘From Universal Sexual Subordination’.
20. See, for example, the ISIS Guide to Women in Development, Nash (1977),
Beneria & Sen (1982); many of the writings in the Signs special issues on Women in
Development also take aMarxist perspective: Signs,Vol. 3, No. 2(Autumn 1977)and
Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 1981); Saffioti(1978).
21. The Green Revolution is the technical revolution in agriculture which was
pushed by capitalist interests as a deterrent to the feared Red Revolution in the Third
World. High yielding seed varieties as well as fertilizer, tube wells, tractors, etc. are
the central ingredients of the Green Revolution. While they have expanded aggregate
production, the monopolistic tendencies of the capitalist Green Revolution have
exacerbated social class as well as sexual inequalities.
22. Deere and de Leal differentiate the three regions by the character of the social
relations of production - specifically, the development of wage labour. They note
that even the non-capitalist region is incorporated into capitalist exchange relations
through labour migrations and so on. Deere & de Leal (1981). See also de Leal &
Deere (1980) and Kate Young’s interesting article (1978). For theneo-Marxist debate
on the social relations of production in agriculture in the Third World, see Bandarage
(1983b: chapters 8 and 9).
23. The ‘puttmg out’ system and its abuses are not peculiar to the Third World.
There is a legislative battle in the USA now between labour unions seeking to extend
labour regulations to home production and the employers and, alas, the women
workers in the home-based sector who oppose legislative intrusions. Given the job
losses here, labour unionsin the USA are also attempting to regulate the expansion of
manufacturing companies into the Third World and the import of goods to the US.
24. Thereisagrowingliteratureon thissubject. SeeforexampleSafa(1981),Elson
& Pearson (1981), Fuentes & Ehrenreich (1983); Newsletters of the Nationwide
Women’s Progradwomen and Global Corporations Network, American Friends
510 Asoka Bandarage

Service Committee; Chapkis & Enloe (eds) (1983).

25. Cynthia Enloe has persuasively demonstrated how the multinationals’ use of
cheap labour in the Third World and the necessity of state coercion to do so, in turn
contributes to the militarization of Third World societies (Enloe 1982).
26. Note also that many of the ‘sweat shops’ producing garments in the United
States employ largely Third World females, mostly the so-called ‘illegal aliens’
(Flannery 1978).
27. Some of these observations are based on my talks with women workers in the
free trade zone of Sri Lanka.
28. See chapter on Migration and Tourism in the ISIS Guide; ISIS Bulletin,
‘Tourism and Prostitution’, No. 13, November 1979; Samarasuriya (1981). See also
my discussion of prostitution in Bandarage (forthcoming).
29. There has never been ‘free trade’ under capitalism. ‘Comparative advantage’
of the imperialist economies, for instance, washsguaranteed by thecapitalist state. As
I have argued elsewhere (1982), in many colonial situations, the capitalist mode of
production was not simply protected but established and consolidated by the colonial
state.
30. There is a growing literature on corporate dumping in the Third World; see,
for example, Dowie (1979), Ehrenreich, Dowie & Minkin (1979), Weir, with
Schapiro & Jacobs (1979). A list of countries where Depo-Provera is marketed can
be obtained from the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which has
generally supported its use. See also The Women, Health and Development Kit
produced by the JUNICDJGO Sub-Group on Women and Development, Joint
United Nations Information Committee’s Working Group on Development
Education. See also the chapter on international development in the latest edition
of the Boston Women’sHealthBookCollective(forthcoming). TheBoston Women’s
Health Book Collective and ISIS feminist information and communication centre
in Geneva have a wealth of information specific to women’s health and development.
See in particular their joint product International Women and Health Resource Guide
(1980).
31. See Mass (1976). Within the USA, too, population control programmes have
historically been racist. A disproportionate number of those sterilized are women of
colour. Often they areinvoluntarily sterilized. It isestimated that 25 percent of Native
American women and 30 to 35 per cent of Puerto Rican women (in the island) of child-
bearing age are sterilized. See Allen & Pueblo-Sioux (1983), Giacomo (1980) and
Ainsworth (1979). Angela Davis has pointed out that during the early decades of the
twentieth century some feminists searching for allies in their campaign for birth
control took positions supporting the reduction of ‘undesirable’ elements in the
population, such as blacks, foreigners (immigrants) and the lower classes. Such
positions, notably that of Margaret Sanger, fed into the eugenics movement and the
racial hysteria of the time (Davis 1981, chapter 12). Consider also the pro-Depo-
Provera position of the International Planned Parenthood Association.
32. The so-called ‘dependency’ theorists call the effects of the Western capitalist
strategy on the Third World ‘underdevelopment’. Other neo-Marxists have used the
terms ‘dependent’, ‘colonial’, ‘uneven and unequal capitalist development’. For
discussion see Bandarage (1983b, chapters 1 and 9).
33. For example, it is necessary to differentiate the various types of development
programmes for women. There are at least a few programmes which attempt to move
beyond income generation to organizing women and empowering them. The Self-
Women in Development 511

Employed Women’s Association based in Ahmedabad and Working Women’s

Forum based in Madras, India are two such organizations. They give women greater
control over production and distribution through access to credit, producer co-
operatives and policy changes at the national and international levels. But these
programmes still have a longway to go before attackingthe sexual division of labour in
the home and the workplace or in providing adequate health and educational facilities
for women workers. While giving protection, the unionization of women in the low-
skilled, low-paid informal sector jobs and household production could nevertheless
rigidify the sexual division of labour and sexual stratification. I have discussed these
issues in a field report (Bandarage 1984).
34. For Marxists, exploitation has a precise meaning. It is the extraction of surplus
value by capital from wage labour.
35. Perhaps the most ground-breaking effort was Rubin (1975). For other
representative writings see Eisensteini(ed.) (1979), Sargent (1981), Rowbotham
(1980), New American Movement (1975). Although informed by socialist-feminism,
many of the writings of the socialist-feminists on the Third World have remained
largely empirical. Young et al. (1981) and Nash & Fernandez-Kelly (eds) (1982) are
more theoretically inclined works.
36. References to their work and the work of Sen, Beneria, Nash, Fernandez-
Kelly, Enloe, Young et al. have been made throughout this paper. See also Bourque
& Warren(1981).
37. The domestic labour debate and the Wages for Housework Campaign, still
popular among some Marxist-feminist circles, are examples. See articles on socialist-
feminist discussions ofwomen’s work in Jaggar & Rothenberg-Struhl (eds) (1979) and
Costa & James (1973).
38. See Zillah Eisenstein’s current work on the state in advanced capitalist
societies, ‘The Relative Autonomy of the (Capitalist) Patriarchal State’, chapter from
her forthcoming book; Easton (1978), Mattelart (1978/79).

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Asoka Bandarage is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brandeis

University, USA. She is the author of Colonialism in SriLanka: The
Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands, 1833- 1886.She is
on the editorial boards of Hypafia, The Bulletin of ConcernedAsian
Scholars and is also a consultant to Feminist Studies.