Revisiting “Boserup Revisited”: The International Labor Organization and the Construction of Social Knowledge on Rural Women in the Global South

In 1981, feminist economists Lourdes Benería from Spain and Gita Sen from India, both working in the United States, challenged reigning assumptions about the impact of economic development on rural women. Published in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, “Accumulation, Reproduction, and ‘Women’s Role in Economic Development’: Boserup Revisited” was an appreciation and critique of what in a decade had become a ur text: Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970) by Danish civil servant and UN consultant Ester Boserup. Benería and Sen replaced Boserup’s reliance on determinist modernization theory with a Marxist feminism that interrogated historical structures of accumulation, analyzed class differentials among women, and stressed “the social relations of production and reproduction” in constructing women’s exploitation and subordination. This paper links intellectual and institutional history to explore the production of knowledge about women and development that “Boserup Revisited” represented. Benería drew upon participatory action research that she gathered as coordinator of the International Labor Organization (ILO)’s Programme on Rural Women, a sub-section of the World Employment Program, the ILO’s initiative during the UN’s Second Decade of Development. These studies covered women’s income generating activities, including informal street trading, agriculture, domestic labor, and assembly work. Many appeared in the ILO sponsored Women and Development: The Sexual Division of Labor in Rural Societies edited by Benería and published in 1982 but commissioned during her tenure at the ILO. Also coming out of these efforts was Maria Mies pathbreaking The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market, also from 1982. Grounded in ILO archives and analysis of these studies, I historicize the very terms that scholars continue to deploy by locating them in the political economy and ideological struggles of the Cold War, global feminism, third world liberation, and an emerging neoliberal globalization.