How development modernised patriarchy

[noamnety]

Found through www.insurgentamerican.net/2006/12/20/58/. From 2005, but still a good read.

How development modernised patriarchy

By Sharmila Joshi

50% of the world’s food for direct consumption is produced by women and women do two-thirds of the world’s work. Yet global development projects from the 1940s onwards viewed women as little more than mothers feeding babies. As a result, the socio-economic status of women actually declined, thanks to development programmes.

In 1948, the UN Declaration of Human Rights affirmed the equal rights of men and women. But global development projects initially made women invisible. Most early development models were heavily male-biased: development planners assumed men are the most productive workers Women’s productive role, because it was often not directly linked to the market or the formal economy, was ignored. Instead, their role as reproductive individuals was made ultra visible.

(snip)

Until the 1970s then, women appeared in the global development apparatus almost solely asmothers feeding babies, procuring water for cooking and cleaning, dealing with children’s diseases or growing food in their tidy home gardens to supplement the family diet. Only men, in most development literature, considered to be engaged in productive activities, were the targets in target-bound programmes intended, for example, to improve agricultural production.

(snip)

For example, Margaret Snyder, co-founder of the African Centre for Women and a former Unifem director, and Mary Tadesse, feminist scholar, write about women in parts of West Africa who historically had greater economic and social rights until colonisation . In Nigeria , for example, women's courts determined social disputes and women fixed market prices. With colonisation, agricultural patterns changed and so did the role of women. Men migrated to the mines, village economies deteriorated. The status of women changed: technology was introduced to men; title deeds were made out in their names. After the independence movements of the 1950s and ’60s, Snyder and Tadesse argue, it’s been an uphill battle for women to re-establish their rights. Their attempt is not to glorify a ‘traditional’ past but to focus on the interlinking of historical structural processes and development interventions in the present.

http://www.infochangeindia.org/devp_dictionary_07.jsp

[MaryBear]

1. Not quite true for European based cultures.

Property became the key to wealth and control of women and children in order to control their properly went hand in hand for the landed classes. Poor women and childen have always worked but property for them was not an issue because they had none and so their work was not counted as theirs.

[BlueIris]

2. Kick. nt