Introduction

This bibliography focuses on women’s education in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East. It contains annotations for about 1200 published works in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German. Originally we had planned to cover dissertations, unpublished reports and conference papers, but we came to realize as we began this project in 1986 that the research on women and their schooling, once almost non-existent in academic journals and scholarly books, had flourished. In 1980 when we compiled a bibliography for the International Bureau of Education on the topic, we could find but 355 studies, including government reports. ¹ Today, we found it hard to limit the bibliography to 1200 items. We decided early on, given the explosion of literature on the topic, to direct our efforts to locating the extensive journal, monograph and book literature, including many individual chapters hidden in books which did not have women or education as their central concern. This bibliography represents a guide only to the published research literature on women’s education in the third world. It is limited to research published in five languages; we are clear that a literature on the topic exists in Arabic, in Chinese, and in languages other than the five in which we worked.