Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 118-119

Almost at the same time as this new international division of labour was being worked out and put into practice, the world was made aware of the necessity of 'integrating women into development.' Already in 1970, Esther Boserup had found out that women had not benefited from whatever development had taken place in Third World countries. Here findings were corroborated by the many reports on the status of women prepared by governments for the UN World Conference on Women, held in Mexico in 1975. It was found out that women's status had deteriorated in most Third, and even First World countries in all spheres: in politics, employment, education, health, law. As a consequence, the World Plan of Action presented by this conference demanded that the governments make substantial efforts to remedy the situation and to integrate women into development. After this, the UN organizations, the World Bank, the NGOs, all began to talk of women, and to include a chapter on women and development in their programmes. Can we consider this as a genuine change of heart on the part of the male development planners? Were they now really interested in women's liberation after they had forgotten about them throughout all the previous years? And what did they, what do they, mean by 'integrating women into development'?

To begin with, let us not forget one thing: women were also integrated into the old strategy of development. Their unpaid or low paid labour as farm workers, as factory workers, as housewives had also been the base of what has been called modernization in developing countries. But this labour had remained invisible; it provided a lot of the subsistence basis on which male wage-labour could emerge. It subsidized the male wage. But now something else was meant. 'Integrating women into development' means, in most cases, getting women to work in some so-called income-generating activities, that is, to enter market-oriented production. It does not mean that women should expand their subsistence production, that they should try to get more control over land and produce more for their own consumption, more food, more clothes, etc., for themselves. Income in this strategy means money income. And money income can be generated only if women produce something which can be sold in the market. As purchasing power among poor Third World women is low, they have to produce something for people who have this purchasing power. And such people live in the cities in their own countries, or they live in the Western countries. This means that the strategy of integrating women's work into development also amounts to export- or market-oriented production. Poor Third World women produce not what they need, but what others can buy.

Another characteristic of this strategy is that it defines Third World women not as workers, but as housewives. What they do is not defined as work, but as an 'activity'. By universalizing the housewife ideology and the model of the nuclear family as signs of progress, it is also possible to define all the work women do--whether in the formal or informal sectors--as supplementary work, her income as supplementary income to that of the so-called main 'breadwinner', the husband. The economic logic of this housewifization is a tremendous reduction of labour costs. This is one of the reasons why international capital and its spokesmen are now interested in women.