Reproduction

This chapter analyzes the ILO’s Programme on Rural Women, which offered an alternative vision of development around the worth of subsistence and reproductive labor. Beginning in the late 1970s, its feminist staff moved beyond the findings of Ester Boserup on the gendered impact of development. They considered relations in the household, the centrality of women’s domestic and non-monetized work, and the significance of both for capitalist accumulation. Eschewing reliance on statistical data, program staff sought to decolonize knowledge by commissioning fieldwork and surveys by women researchers from the very places under investigation. The staff encouraged participatory action research that regarded rural women themselves as experts and empowered poor women collectively. The resulting studies, including ones by Lourdes Benería and Maria Mies, would define the field of women and development. But the program came into conflict with FEMMES, the ILO’s coordinating unit on women’s issues, over institutional domains, issue priorities, and the very meaning of equality. By the mid-1980s whether the conditions of the rural woman in the Global South would foreshadow wider precarity was unclear, but a general belief emerged that family labor created a barrier to full labor force participation.