ABSTRACT
Scholars virtually ignored the study of women's education in the Third World nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. They did so despite the vast proliferation of research on these countries throughout the 1960s, which sought to trace the relation between school expansion; economic, social, and political development; and social justice and welfare. Research on the education of women in the Third World first challenged the assumption that the determinants, patterns, and outcomes of female education could be studied in the same manner as men's. Few scholars asked whether variations both within and among Third World nations existed; instead, they focused on establishing differences between males and females and assumed the differential outcomes of education were not likely to be modified. Traditional research begins with the proposition that women's lives naturally center on domestic, private life to the exclusion of public life. The research also presumes that schools are neutral in situations divorced from gender systems.
