The previous sections have argued for the importance of drawing Asian and African women’s experiences and perspectives into the historiography of development. But retrieving the historical voices and experiences of women engaged in development in Asia and Africa poses a complex set of methodological challenges, which are compounded for research that looks beyond political and economic elites to capture the experiences of non-elite or subaltern women. Historians have long pointed to the archival challenges of women’s and gender history.Footnote 1 These challenges are heightened by the fact that a significant proportion of women’s social and development work took place outside government structures, and documentation of their activities was rarely preserved in formal archives. The absence of official archival records relating to women’s contributions to the development process helps explain the ongoing marginalisation of women in histories of development more widely. Overcoming that marginalisation requires historians to make creative use of informal collections including personal correspondence, photographs, and images, as well as contemporary media and oral history interviews in addition to official archives. This section draws out our experience of working with archival and non-archival sources in the Global South, and the kind of contributions to the literature they have facilitated. Working with non-traditional sources can present significant challenges. Expanding our understanding of development typically requires substantial investments of time and money. However, we suggest that collaborations—such as those demonstrated by this Arena—can be an efficient way to draw on skills, capacities, and insights of historians working across geographies and languages.
The remainder of this article discusses some of the source bases that have underpinned our work on women and development, and provides insights into their opportunities and challenges, including some of those noted above. It builds on research we have already published and work that is under way. It is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather serves to illustrate the kinds of insights that can be gleaned from traditional and non-traditional archives, as well as the limits of these source bases. Through this exploration, we hope to facilitate more nuanced accounts of development in Asia and Africa, and the role of frequently overlooked agents including women.
Finding women in the archives
Feminist historians have long written of the limitations of the formal archive in documenting women’s experience, with Gayatri Spivak adding that ‘If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.’Footnote 2 Kumari Jayawardena has shown that the struggle for women’s emancipation in many late colonial contexts was bound up with anti-colonialism and the fight for national liberation.Footnote 3 And yet, in the archive, voices of the ‘heroines’ of the nation are all too often sidelined by the phalanx of national heroes who seized the means of political production following independence. The post-colonial rupture could prove liberating, but in many cases, the limitations of colonial archives were amplified by post-colonial archiving practices. The post-colonial archive, as Allman observes, ‘is not the easy and direct descendant of the colonial archive’.Footnote 4 Many independent states did not adopt the same rules as colonial states in naming, preserving, or classifying their records. In some formerly colonised nations, historians must also contend with the impact of decades of political instability, military interventions, and underfunded archiving institutions. Some official records have been lost, mislabelled, or simply uncatalogued, and, therefore, are unavailable to researchers. In the case of Ghana, only in recent years has the Public Records and Archives Department begun cataloguing and releasing records of government departments to researchers. Even those collections that have been catalogued, however, are fragmentary. Many official or semi-official records, which some scholars refer to as shadow archives, are still in the possession of private individuals. Historians including Susan Geiger and Jean Allman argue that the androcentric bias of the archive has facilitated the active erasure of African women from colonial and early post-colonial history.Footnote 5 In the same way, the absence of women in the archival record of development encourages the further marginalisation of women.
National ministries of finance and development were slow to recognise the role of women in development. But we have shown that the boundary between ‘development’ and ‘welfare’ was always permeable, and African and Asian women were often most active in this liminal space. The British Colonial Development and Welfare Act adopted an expansive definition of development that explicitly included welfare. In Ghana, the late colonial government tapped the expertise of educated women, who they believed ‘would strive towards using their knowledge, skill, and experience in uplifting their less enlightened countrywomen to embrace the principles of local and imperial citizenship’.Footnote 6 Records from the Colonial Office’s Social Services Department offer a valuable starting point for interrogating the gendered dimensions of social development in the 1940s. Complementing these are the recently catalogued records of the Department of Social Welfare, housed at the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD), which allow historians to trace shifts in social policy during the transition to independence in the 1950s. While fragmentary, these records contain personnel files and quarterly and annual reports that provide insights into the vast network of voluntary organisations involved in the project of Ghanaian women’s advancement. There is a distinct bias in the record towards educated women, specifically mass education officers who were supposed to act as agents of development. Beyond these categories and records, state archives are largely silent on Ghanaian women leaders.
A wider range of sources is accessible in the archives of local institutions that partnered with the government to deliver its programmes, or that independently catered to similar concerns. Institutional papers can provide significant insights into women’s roles in national, economic, and social development. Some institutions hold formal archives that are comprehensive, but in many parts of Africa and Asia these tend to be the exception. More common are fragmentary archives, often held in personal collections. The records of the Federation of Ghana Women, for example, were kept at the family home of its founder Evelyn Amarteifio. While the family preserved these records, their inaccessibility to researchers contributed to the marginalisation of Amarteifio and the organisation she led in historical work. In 2009, the family donated the collection to the University of Ghana, opening new scholarship clarifying the relationship between reform work and development in post-colonial Ghana. Adwoa Opong is using this and other collections to rewrite the history of Ghanaian development with women in the frame.Footnote 7
The existence of institutional archives is contingent and often precarious.Footnote 8 Not all organisations possess(ed) the financial and human resources necessary to establish an in-house archive, or for its ongoing management. In Indonesia, archives focused on women are often funded by subsidies and connected to activist communities, rendering them more vulnerable to disrepair and decay. The institutional archive of Kalyanamitra, the Indonesian institute for gender equality, is illustrative. Established in Jakarta in 1985, Kalyanamitra became a thriving centre of knowledge about women and gender in the years after the fall of the Suharto regime, drawing researchers from all over Indonesia, as well as foreigners. Yet, nowadays, Kalyanamitra is barely hanging on: its facilities have been damaged by floods and insects, and records are no longer catalogued but rather haphazardly stacked in plastic boxes. The funding has dried up and its ongoing existence is far from secure. This, among other factors, has motivated long-time feminist activist Ita Fatia Nadia, who was involved in the establishment of Kalyanamitra, to start her own women’s archive, RUAS (Ruang Sejarah Perempuan, Women’s History Room) in her Yogyakarta home. She and the volunteers who run this rich archive of books, magazines, and digital materials, however, are concerned that they may not be able to continue their work in Indonesia’s shifting political context.
Beyond the archive
Published media represents the most accessible source base for women’s role in development, especially in the (still relatively rare) cases where publications have been digitised. Media sources can provide important insights into development aspirations, and reveal the discursive framing of development. Kirsten Kamphuis has used women’s magazines to understand how Indonesian women from diverse social and religious backgrounds engaged with ideas of progress and development in the colonial and post-colonial context.Footnote 9 Raden Adjeng Kartini’s injunction for wider education was eagerly adopted by nationalist-minded Javanese women in late-colonial Indonesia. The editors of Pahésan (1937–41), a girls’ magazine published by a group of educated, elite women in Solo, posited Kartini as a role model and called on (equally elite) readers to go out and educate women in villages and poor urban areas.Footnote 10 Muslim women’s organisations did not look to Kartini in the same way; she was never mentioned in Soeara Aisjijah and Asjraqh, published by Muslim women’s organisations in West Sumatra. However, the women writing in these magazines also emphasised the importance of education.Footnote 11 This was likewise the case in the publications of the Protestant women’s organisation PIKAT.Footnote 12 Magazines and print sources, therefore, reveal that education was central to Indonesian thinking about women’s development across the ideological spectrum in the colonial period.
Women’s magazines in the post-colonial period became more overtly political. Indonesian women gained the right to vote after Independence, and many more became active in international women’s organisations.Footnote 13 Suara Perwari, which supported the Sukarno government, connected women’s roles more directly to nation building, political rights, and development initiatives. By contrast, the Communist-affiliated Gerwani group’s publication Api Kartini encouraged women to become active in communist mass organisations and the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia, Indonesian Communist Party).Footnote 14 The name of this magazine, which translates to Kartini’s Fire, is an indication of the extent to which Kartini remained an icon of women’s emancipation even as the meanings of development changed. Reading Indonesian women’s press, therefore, is useful in pointing out significant continuities between colonial and post-colonial development, as well as slippage between terms (as outlined in the Introduction to this Arena).
Elite and bourgeois women were significant actors in post-colonial nations’ development pathways. Like their counterparts the world over, educated women in India, Indonesia, Ghana, and elsewhere were eager correspondents and their correspondence provides crucial insights into not only the work but also the mentalities of women working in development. Accessing this material can, however, present significant challenges. While many families have carefully preserved historical documents, negotiating access to private sources held by families requires a great deal of thought, sensitivity, and time—assuming it is possible to locate those family members in the first place. Private correspondence is mostly fragmentary and often only from one side (those who wrote on carbon paper bequeathed an all too rare gift to posterity). But it can provide a more intimate, unmediated voice than published sources or official records.
The voices and experiences of non-elite actors can be accessed more directly through oral history. Many of those affected by international development projects in the twentieth century are still alive today. Historians including Kara Moskowitz, Sarah Foss, and Muey Saeturn have used oral histories to document the perspectives of non-elite groups targeted for national and international development projects.Footnote 15 The subjects of Moskowitz, Foss, and Saeturn’s books acknowledged that, as non-elites on the lower rungs of their nation’s socio-economic and racial hierarchies, their power and influence were strictly limited. But this did not mean that they lacked any agency, and historians using their testimonies have demonstrated the complex ways in which grassroots actors renegotiated historical development projects at the point of implementation. Large oral history projects with peoples displaced by international development projects, particularly hydroelectric dams, has further highlighted both the striking power imbalance between states and international development agencies and the people they sought to ‘develop’, and the creativity and resilience of people confronting the adverse impacts of top-down development.Footnote 16
Darshi Thoradeniya has overtly pursued the question of gender in development through carefully conducted oral history interviews that provide invaluable insights into emic interpretations of public health in Sri Lanka.Footnote 17 Her method reveals the importance of building relationships of trust and sensitive interviewing, as well as the value of intersubjective approaches.Footnote 18 Thoradeniya’s work also underlines the tensions presented by the interviewers’ place within extant social, cultural, class, and gender dynamics. The positionality of interviewers is a powerful factor, and the reach and impact of historians who are ‘outsiders’ or ‘insiders’ can vary significantly.Footnote 19 Yet, oral history can also be a significant resource for political groups and social movements, rendering oral history into an unusually powerful form of historical work.Footnote 20
Historians seeking the voices of non-elite women in development contexts no longer available for interview have had to think creatively. Literary works are not the most obvious choice for historians. However, Anna Adima has used creative writing to better understand how non-elites lived through the turbulent decolonisation period in East Africa.Footnote 21 At a time when the state was beginning to clamp down on opposition and public expressions of dissent, literature remained one of the few avenues within the public sphere for political expression, although the Kenyatta and Amin regimes would later stifle this as well.Footnote 22 Women in Kenya and Uganda were active in political and civil society spheres, voicing criticisms of new regimes and the status quo, including through formal organisations such as the Uganda Council for Women or the women’s organisation Maendeleo ya Wanawake in Kenya.Footnote 23 Literature was another means of political protest and women’s assertion of their rights as citizens, and is an important source in understanding histories of development in the region.
Elizabeth is a short story by Kenyan author Grace Ogot, initially published in the East Africa Journal in 1966, before its inclusion in Ogot’s short-story collection Land Without Thunder (EAPH, 1968). It follows the protagonist, Elizabeth, a young secretary recently returned from the USA, who is sexually assaulted by her boss, becomes pregnant, and dies by suicide. Ogot—in addition to being a writer—was also a civil society and women’s rights activist. She considered women’s rights as an essential component of Kenya’s push for development and, like others, held that Kenyan independence saw little improvement to the social position of women to which colonialism had relegated them.Footnote 24 Beyond Elizabeth, Ogot’s works criticised various forms of oppression and inequalities faced not only by women but by non-elite society at large, and the ways in which they hampered Kenya’s post-colonial development.
Ogot had privileges of education and mobility that were rare for East African women at the time. It is testament to her skill as a writer that she was able to act as a proxy for broader communities. Nonetheless, the reality of low literacy rates in some Asian and African nations well into the late twentieth century circumscribed consumption of the written word. Writing fiction, or contributing to newspapers and magazines, was limited to an even more selective group of elite and bourgeois women, meaning that published sources most readily provide access to the voices of a small and select group of women. The perspectives of women from a predominantly oral tradition, or who otherwise did not have access to publishing houses, are rarely illuminated by published sources.
Non-elite groups were, however, the targets of sustained interest by anthropologists, ethnographers, and other social scientists in the twentieth century. In their fieldwork notes and publications, historians have access to social scientists’ view of the territory. The rediscovery of post-war social science data has instigated a ‘social scientific turn’ in several historical subfields.Footnote 25 In the field of development history, historians have examined social scientists’ influence in constructing development as a field of knowledge and power.Footnote 26 Sociology and anthropology were intricately connected to the rise of international development as a distinct field of expertise. Iris Schröder is turning to that work with a particular sensitivity to gender, showing how social scientists were not merely interpreters of gendered dynamics in Ghana, but were also agents who shaped discourses of gender and influenced development priorities.Footnote 27
Others are engaging with social scientists’ raw data and original research materials as a historical source base to understand development as a lived experience. Anthropologists have left reams of fieldnotes, annotated photographs and films, and publications describing both the contexts in which development projects were implemented, and the process of change among targeted populations as they progressed. Some of this material provides rare insights into the lived experience of groups and individuals who did not leave written accounts, and are unavailable for interview. Agnieszka Sobocinska has used the fieldnotes and published work of anthropologists working in 1970s Indonesia to better understand the social and cultural structures of communities targeted by development agencies.Footnote 28 But fieldnotes and publications are far from objective. Historians of social science caution that these are heavily mediated sources that reveal as much about the professional ideologies and personal subjectivities of the social scientists as they do of the lives of people they observed.Footnote 29 Can development anthropology reveal something of the communities targeted for development, and the development process itself? Or are these sources so compromised as to render them useful only for tracing the history of social science, and the vast inequalities inherent to the development enterprise?
Working collaboratively
Finding and accessing sources documenting women’s contribution to development is resource intensive, which underscores existing inequalities. In-country work requires language capacity and interpersonal skills. But some source bases relating to Asia and Africa are better preserved in well-funded Western institutions than in national repositories. The records of Ghana’s Department of Social Welfare held at the British Library and the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex are more comprehensive than those in Accra; some historical Indonesian newspapers, magazines, and other cultural sources can be found only in libraries in the Netherlands. Passport power is important, with some scholars from the Global South facing substantial barriers to research in Europe and North America. Conversely, research in nations including India and Indonesia is becoming increasingly difficult for foreigners as governments withhold research visas for those working on subjects that might be deemed politically or socially sensitive, especially if research encompasses ‘protected’ or ‘restricted’ areas or peoples (many of whom were targets for development projects). The gendered politics of both academic hierarchy and family responsibilities also come to bear when research demands travel. This is to say nothing of the environmental impacts of fieldwork-based research, typically requiring flights and therefore emitting substantial amounts of carbon dioxide.Footnote 30
Although the importance of recovering Asian and African women’s roles in development is evident, this work must be accompanied by an acknowledgement of researchers’ positionality. What are the ethical risks—the risks of misunderstanding or misrepresentation—that arise when scholars in positions of relative privilege write about subaltern women, many of whom have since passed away? How are these risks multiplied by differences in race, class, and culture? And how do these risks balance with the urgent need to correct a historiography that is fast maturing, but lacks a recognition of women’s experience and impact on development both as a nation-building and an international enterprise?
These factors, among others, underscore the potential benefits of collaboration and co-authoring. A carefully assembled team working together to uncover the history of a particular region, group, or development project, can pool linguistic and conceptual capacities. If dispersed geographically, they can spend more time in locally accessible archives or conducting fieldwork while burning less cash and producing less carbon dioxide. And discussion and comparison can help clarify and potentially mitigate risks of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. This co-written piece has clarified the fact that conceptual leaps can come from collective discussion and comparison of projects originally pursued by individuals. But research designed to be collaborative from the outset, pursued by teams assembled across geographies and bringing together varied linguistic capacities and viewpoints, could bring even greater contributions.
This section has illustrated the benefits and challenges involved in retrieving the role of women in Asian and African development. Historians must be prepared to look beyond the archive, to think creatively, and work collaboratively in order to unearth sources illuminating women’s voices, experiences, and agency in the history of development. Doing so, however, is essential if we are to revise the marginalisation of women in histories of development and unearth a more complex story that accounts for women’s full range of participation and agency, and that revises our understanding of development, its chronologies, and scales.
Financial Support
Agnieszka Sobocinska’s research for this article was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), Project number: 101170121; Maria Framke’s research for this article was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Project number: 454046633.
Competing Interests
The authors declare none.
Agnieszka Sobocinska is Professor of Global History and Director of the Australia Studies Institute at King’s College London. She is Primary Investigator of the European Research Council Consolidator project DEVHIST: Twentieth Century International Development in the Global South (2025–2030). Her books include Saving the World? Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (UNSW Press, 2014).
Anna Adima is a writer, researcher, and educator whose work explores the histories, literatures, and creative cultures of East Africa. Currently a Career Development Fellow in History at Durham University, she has previously worked in Uganda as a journalist and in the cultural sector. She holds a PhD in East African history and literature from the University of York.
Maria Framke is a historian of modern South Asia based at the University of Rostock. Maria’s research and publications encompass the history of international organisations, imperial and nationalist politics, humanitarianism, and gender and ideologies in the twentieth century. She is the author of the book Between Empire and Nation: South Asian Humanitarianism in the Late Colonial Period (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her current research project, ‘Hidden Histories: Women’s Role in Rural Development Programmes in India, c.1920–1966’, examines Indian women’s contributions to rural reconstruction schemes in three key areas—namely, health, education, and sustainable livelihood.
Kirsten Kamphuis is a feminist historian of colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. She is currently a LIAS Fellow at Leuphana University, where she is working on leftist women’s internationalism during the Cold War. Her publications include articles in BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review and Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth. Her book manuscript on girls’ education in colonial Indonesia, based on her doctoral thesis, is under contract with Leiden University Press. She is an editorial board member of the annual Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis/Yearbook of Women’s History.
Adwoa K. Opong is an assistant professor of African History at Chapman University. Her research sits at the intersections of histories of decolonisation, development and gender in 20th Century Africa, Ghana to be specific. Her current project, ‘Regulating the Social: Uplifting Womanhood in a Decolonising Ghana’ explores the post-war convergence of social work, decolonisation, and development through an analysis of one of the dominant women’s organisations in Ghana, the Federation of Gold Coast (Ghana) Women. In addition to her primary focus, Adwoa’s broad research interests include African women’s social and political activism and Black internationalism in the twentieth century.
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