Diane Elson's Nineteenth-Century Feminist Analysis

Since the beginning of the post-war period, thinking on how best developing or ‘Global South’ countries can advance to the level of the United States or Western Europe has been notably altered. From its origins as a colonial discourse on direct intervention to a system based on financial aid and development projects, development theories encompass a wide range of ideas from plumbing like Water Aid to exported democracy and renewable energy. Diane Elson was among several 20th-century feminist critics to argue that contemporary development thought recreated older divisions, particularly notable in the exclusion of women’s perspectives within development theories, arguing that: “It facilitates the view that ‘women’, as general category, can be …show more content…
It is held that by imitating Western nations, a developing country will experience successful economic growth that can benefit all citizens and eventually push the country to a Western level of prosperity. While modernisation theories faced criticism on their one-size-fits-all economic approach, little comment was made on women’s involvement until the critiques of Elson and others from within the UN. The intellectual response to modernisation theory’s shortfall, Women in Development or WID reinterprets modernisation theory, turning women into an ‘economic resource’. Women are portrayed as independent and in possession of unique administrative skills that can allow for them to further the process of development as administrators and entrepreneurs. The flexibility of modernisation theory in adapting to a focus on gender and creating a theoretical entry point for women suggest that it was not overturned at all when feminist critiques of it were …show more content…
Both pushed for development policies that specifically included and focused upon the needs of women such as childcare, illustrating how feminist theorists changed modernisation theory (Peet and Hartwick, 1999, p.285). Calkin (2015) discusses how these early approaches essentially ‘co-optated’ feminism into development discourses, by promoting inclusion as a ‘win-win’ scenario: “WID advocates suggested that the integration of women into development policy frameworks would benefit women and promote more efficiency in the development process; here, we see the first incarnation of the ‘win–win’ narrative that characterizes so much of the policy discourse today.” As a result, the inclusion of women does not overturn the development model of modernisation theory – instead, they are absorbed into the theory and silenced in order to maintain the theory’s pre-eminence, and this continued exclusion is excused by the gains women are implied to make in the