ABSTRACT
Development strategists and practitioners regarded rural women as the most marginal of groups and ultimate frontier of development, hard to ‘reach’ and ‘integrate’. Though development policies were made mostly by and for men, their awareness of the importance of women’s work grew, and women came to be seen – usually in instrumental ways – as one key to improving agricultural production and nutrition. This chapter describes the build-up of institutions and hiring of female staff, the emergence of the concepts “women in development” and “gender and development”, and feminist critiques of them. ‘Development’ aimed at commodifying female work and making it more productive, sometimes even promoting land rights for women, but many projects had a negative, or no positive, outcome for rural women and added to their workload. Their failure thus highlights that of rural development policies aiming at reducing poverty as a whole.
