2024 marked the 30th publication anniversary of Naila Kabeer‘s groundbreaking book, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought, which exposed deeply ingrained gender biases in development theory and policy. In this essay, she reflects on how the book’s discussions on the gendered division of unpaid labour, fertility rates and the struggle for reproductive rights resonates today.

Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. Naila Kabeer. Verso Books. 1994.

Missing perspectives in development

We celebrated the 30^th anniversary of Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought last year in Mexico City, in Geneva and here at LSE. It was written at a time when the idea of gender equality as a development goal was beginning to take hold. The first UN conference on Women and Development in 1975 signalled this, but ideas of gender equality were dominated at the time by liberal feminists from wealthy countries. It was only as voices from the Global South joined the discussion that questions began to be raised about what “gender equality” might mean in a world characterised by uneven development.  

I had graduated from the London School of Economics to take up my first job at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. Reversed Realities (RR) was my attempt to bring together the two traditions that had played an important role in my academic trajectory. As a feminist, I wanted to uncover the male, biased and truncated view of the economy, particularly the focus on markets as the ultimate arbiter of value, that dominated development economics. As an academic in development studies, I wanted to challenge the tendency of feminists from the Global North to use their own experiences to generalise about women in the rest of the world.  

The book discussed the various forms that patriarchal relations took across the world and how differences of class and social identity ruled out simple generalisations about how they worked

Re-evaluating metrics of progress

The book pointed to critical omissions in the market-defined measures of Gross Domestic Product that continues to be used to assess progress across world. These included natural resources as well as women’s unpaid labour in caring for their families, labour frequently treated as just another natural resource. The book discussed the various forms that patriarchal relations took across the world and how differences of class and social identity ruled out simple generalisations about how they worked and what could be done about them. It questioned the money-metric methodologies used to conceptualise the costs and benefits of development interventions. And it highlighted the different ways in which feminists sought to influence mainstream policies: training initiatives to disseminate feminist ideas, grassroots movements to empower women and political mobilisations to promote women’s rights.  

Despite these critiques, RR was written at a time of optimism. Declarations passed at successive UN conferences in the 1990s testified to the concrete gains that women were making on the ground. As a result, many of those early critiques no longer hold. Others do remain relevant but have to be rethought in the light of current realities.

The devaluing of breastfeeding and care work

One of these relates to the taken-for-granted nature of women’s unpaid care work. I explored this in RR by challenging advocacy being put forward at the time by some nutritional experts seeking to persuade women to adopt breastfeeding over formula milk. They argued, quite rightly, that not only was breast milk better for infants, but that formula milk was being imported by poor countries often short of foreign exchange and sold to working mothers often short of income. Savings could be made at national and household levels if women would forego the bottle in favour of the breast because, as one advocate put it, “breastmilk is a natural resource of almost unequalled importance…It is almost the only food available to rich and poor alike”.

Women’s unpaid labour continues to be taken for granted, even as policy makers try to persuade them to increase their labour market participation in the interests of economic growth

My objection was to this latter claim, its assumption that breast-feeding was a costless activity. WHO research told us that breastfeeding made considerable demands on women’s time and energy. Lactating women required a supplement of several hundred extra calories daily to maintain their energy levels. When the nutritional demands on women’s energy reserves were considered in the light of the levels of overwork and malnutrition documented among poor women in many parts of the world, claims about their equal availability to rich and poor alike rang hollow. For women who were malnourished during pregnancy, lactation involved the depletion of their own tissue, so they could only breastfeed their infants at the expense of their own nutritional requirements.  

Women’s unpaid labour continues to be taken for granted, even as policy makers try to persuade them to increase their labour market participation in the interests of economic growth. The same policy makers have done remarkably little to provide women with support for their unpaid care responsibilities or to persuade men to take up a fairer share of this work. The gender division of unpaid labour at home has barely changed in most countries since I wrote my book.

Changing positions on fertility

RR was written at a time when population growth in poor countries was seen as a major obstacle to economic growth. A great deal of international aid was devoted to various means, coercive and persuasive, to get women to adopt family planning technology to reduce their fertility. However, by the time of the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo, advocacy by the international women’s movement had succeeded in shifting the aid industry’s preoccupation with population control to greater acknowledgement of women’s reproductive rights. The following decades saw fertility rates come down in most developing countries as access to family planning became more responsive to women’s needs.  

The decline was, of course, welcomed by the population establishment. But something less welcome was happening simultaneously. Fertility rates, already low in the better-off countries of the world, began declining even further, falling below net replacement rates and threatening the capacity of successive generations to reproduce themselves. The reason appeared to be that as women entered labour markets that remained organised around the norm of the male breadwinner, they found that their access to good jobs was blocked by the unchanging gender division of labour at home. Working women everywhere had to work longer hours than working men because they retained disproportionate responsibility for the unpaid care of families. The decision to have fewer or no children, widely dubbed “the birth strike”, was their response to this asymmetry. 

At the 1984 UN population conference […] the Reagan administration adopted what became known as the “Global Gag Rule”, withdrawing US funding from any development agency that offered abortion services.

When I wrote about this phenomenon in 2007, this unwelcome decline in fertility rates was confined to certain countries in southern Europe and East Asia which provided very little support to the working mothers who were making up an increasing percentage of their labour force. Since then, fertility decline had spread further – and for similar reasons. As Jenny Brown wrote in 2019 in relation to the United States: “With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike”. Measures like child support, maternity leave, tax breaks and cash payments were put in place to incentivise women to increase their fertility but met with little success. However, not all efforts focused on incentives.

Gains and losses for reproductive rights

Today’s renewed preoccupation with women’s reproductive behaviour connects to an observation I made in RR about donor policies around aid. I pointed out that the vagaries of politics in donor countries juxtaposed with the asymmetrical nature of political accountability in donor funding was leading to politically driven shifts in official definitions of reproductive choice for Third World women. This was very evident in the case of the US. At the 1984 UN population conference, when most countries in the Global South had accepted that their resources could not support unrestricted population growth, the Reagan administration adopted what became known as the “Global Gag Rule”, withdrawing US funding from any development agency that offered abortion services. Since then, every US administration has had to decide what to do about the rule. It is revoked when Democrats gain power, reinstated under Republican administrations. The women in the poorer countries of the world whose lives are affected by these policies are not a part of the voting public in the US and hence outside the democratic feedback loop that allows voters to influence those they vote into power.

My belief, one that I shared with many, that democracies were safer for human rights, that being part of a democratic feedback loop would allow women to defend their rights, finds itself on increasingly shaky ground

Women within the US were in a stronger position to make and hold on to gains on reproductive rights. But this is changing. Over the past decade, the US electorate has twice voted into office a Republication president who has little regard for these rights. In his first term, President Trump reinstated the Global Gag Rule (it had been rescinded by the Obama administration that came before him and then again by the Biden administration that came after) but extended the withdrawal of US aid to any agency that provided services for HIV-AIDS, nutrition, malaria, water and sanitation, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. In his current term, he has suspended US aid altogether.  

Human rights under threat

Domestically, he describes himself as the “fertilisation president”, determined to reverse the fertility decline, to make America procreate again in order to strengthen its growth rates and its military presence in the world. The federal constitutional right to abortion has been overturned, leaving the decision to individual states, resulting in growing inequality in access to safe abortion across the country. At the same time, he has issued directives to expand access to in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment for childless couples. It is childlessness that Americans are urged to fear, not pregnancy.

My belief, one that I shared with many, that democracies were safer for human rights, that being part of a democratic feedback loop would allow women to defend their rights, finds itself on increasingly shaky ground. Reversals in women’s rights are spearheading a broader right-wing backlash in many countries that do not pretend to be democratic, but they are occurring in the heartland of democracy as well. This was not a possibility that I could ever have imagined when I wrote my book 30 years ago.

Note: This post gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: A Community Advocacy Group worker talks to local women about reproductive health in Makeni, Bombali District, Sierra Leone. Credit: Abbie Trayler-Smith via H6 Partners on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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