The education and development of the Javanese people can never adequately advance if women are excluded, if they are not given a role to play in this. Develop the hearts and minds of Javanese women and one will have a powerful collaborator in that beautiful and gigantic task: the enlightenment of a people which numbers millions!Footnote 1
The dawn of freedom has given us an unprecedented opportunity to re-orientate our values and rebuild our economic structure. A great field of human endeavour lies before us, both in the way of setting up new standards of progress and in helping to give effect to them … The women of Ceylon can, and must contribute their share in re-vitalising the decaying solidarity of rural life …Footnote 2
A legitimate demand is made for … the advancement of the welfare of women, the improvement of the legal, political, social and economic status of all African women. New opportunities bring new duties. Mother Africa is calling on her potential leaders for re-dedication and stern determination to stamp out whatever degrades a woman, the jewel of any nation.Footnote 3
Published between 1903 and 1959, and spanning colonial and post-colonial periods, these three quotations provide insights into the ideas and initiatives of women from Asia and Africa on development in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Ghana. The statements by Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879–1904) on the importance of education in colonial Indonesia, by Lorraine Seneratne (also known as Loranee Seneratne, 1917–2004) on the role of women in economic development and nation-building in Sri Lanka, and by Evelyn Amarteifio (1916–97) on the struggle for women’s rights and the improvement of women’s status at the All-Africa People’s Conference in Accra in 1958, raise important questions about the usual periodisation of development and the assumed role of women within it.Footnote 4 In engaging with these questions, our collaboration has revealed a crucial set of insights about the long colonial-era roots of development, the nature of continuities and ruptures over time, and the complexities involved with periodising the global history of development.
Historians have largely focused on the post-Second World War period as the critical juncture when development emerged as a significant factor in international politics.Footnote 5 Corinna Unger has suggested two key reasons for this process: first, the attempts of European imperial powers to hold on to their colonies, and, second, the ambitions of the new superpower, the United States, to reshape global relations.Footnote 6 With the United Nations’ (UN) declaration of the 1960s as the ‘First Development Decade’, development expanded to explore how social orders and the human condition could be transformed through political action and policy intervention, eclipsing the more limited notion of ‘economic development’.Footnote 7 Women’s histories of development are assigned an even later starting point within this late twentieth-century framing. Going by extant studies, the role of women in development appears only to have begun to attract formal academic and policy interest in the 1970s.Footnote 8 Conventionally, this perceived turning point is credited to the influential critique forwarded by Danish economist Ester Boserup in Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970).Footnote 9 Subsequently, the narrative goes, the ‘Second UN Development Decade’ (1971–80) marked a pivotal shift, with women and men in ‘less developed’ nations, along with feminist theorists and other gender equality advocates, spearheading a transformation that integrated critical perspectives on race, class, and gender into international development initiatives.Footnote 10
In response to these persistent narratives, we argue for an alternative chronological framing based on three key insights. First, we emphasise that, in many contexts, the kinds of activities framed as ‘development’ in the post-war period had earlier been undertaken under the banner of ‘welfare’ or ‘social work’, with women playing a significant role both in planning and implementation.Footnote 11 This observation complicates the conventional temporal framing within which women and development became mainstream in the 1970s and brings out the vast histories of more marginalised women’s development work that preceded it. Second, our work offers new narratives of continuity and disjuncture across perceived ruptures. Continuities are evident in terms of personnel, organisation, and areas of work, yet they manifested under shifting conditions including post-colonial developmentalism and international development initiatives. We advocate for greater precision in identifying and analysing the significance of these continuities/shifts, which complicate existing narratives. Our third insight concerns the validity and benefits of periodisation in global histories and how it relates to development. As even a cursory survey of decolonisation in Asia and Africa reveals, histories of anti-colonialism and independence are chronologically distinct according to territory, a principle that equally applies to histories of women’s movements. While we recognise that ‘we cannot write history without periodising it’, we reject a single, all-encompassing periodisation that applies across our broad spatial field.Footnote 12 Rather, in working collaboratively to integrate diverse geographies and perspectives into a single frame, we observe a plurality of development chronologies across space and we appeal to scholars to incorporate this nuance into their work. The subsequent subsection present examples from our research that build the case for a new periodisation of women and development based on our observations relating to the long history of women and development, the interplay of continuity/rupture, and the essential chronological messiness of the phenomenon when explored in a global perspective.
From empire to nation: A long durée view of development
Previous research has emphasised continuities and changes in the norms, practices, and epistemes of development experiments from the colonial to the post-colonial period.Footnote 13 It demonstrates that independence often brought a new level of commitment to the development of the nation, as well as new pathways for international aid, but that there were also significant continuities from the colonial period in terms of actors and assumptions. However, this expanded chronology of development is rarely applied to the history of women and gender, although there is no shortage of research on the topic. We are referring here to the substantial body of scholarship examining the role of African and Asian women in social, political, and economic reform movements beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including work on missionary history; educational, medical, and social interventions; colonial labour politics and control; imperial feminism; and (transnational) suffrage movement.Footnote 14 These strands are rarely integrated into the history of development—a term which, when referring to the nineteenth or first half of the twentieth century, is indeed anachronistic—and are instead treated separately as histories of women’s movements.Footnote 15 Yet reforming efforts targeted at and carried out by Asian and African women before independence, closely align to the type of activity later referred to as ‘development’, as explained in the Introduction to this ‘Arenas’ issue. Following on from this, we advocate for integrating these neglected strands into the history of development and appeal to historians, not just to conduct new research, but to apply a fresh perspective to existing historiographies. Such approaches, that offer a long-durée perspective on the history of women and development provide valuable access points for exploring questions of continuity and change across the political rupture of independence.
In many Asian and African colonies, education and development policies went hand in hand, one fuelling the other to train ‘useful producers’ and ‘necessary intermediaries’. European women, in their roles as missionaries, educators, and voluntary leaders, played a pivotal role in this regard by promoting gendered roles that would allow progress (as they saw it) in colonial territories. Their initiatives to ‘uplift’ Asian and African women and provide them with the ‘right kind’ of domesticity had multiple, albeit often unintended, effects.Footnote 16 For some (usually elite) colonised women, education emerged as a prominent means of ‘making citizens’ (as the quotations at the start of this essay demonstrate), leading to demands for political and social emancipation, and to independent forms of organising social work and development initiatives.Footnote 17 Asian and African women’s leadership of social reform often took on a nationalist bent as both implied a criticism of the colonial state’s civilising claims and an assertion of self-representation.Footnote 18 We consider these endeavours as essential elements in the long history of development.
Education in colonial societies enabled Asian and African women to pursue careers and develop expertise. Educated, elite women such as Pandita Ramabai, Muthulakshmi Reddy, Fatimah Jinnah, Raden Ajeng Kartini, Maria Ulfah Santoso, Rahma El Yunusiah, Evelyn Amarteifio, and Annie Jiagge, among others, pursued careers as journalists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and social activists. Their prominence as elite professional women gave them a platform to become spokespersons for women’s social and political development projects and to defend women’s rights. This was reflected in the rise of women’s civil society organisations such as the All-India Women’s Conference, the National Federation of Gold Coast Women, and the Kongres Wanita Indonesia, which intervened in a range of issues relating to the status of women. The expertise of such women was variously sought, adapted, and rejected by colonial administrators, male Asian and African reformers, and anti-colonial nationalists.Footnote 19 Exploring their histories and their afterlives in post-colonial contexts offers a means of better understanding shifting development agendas that straddled the transition from colonial rule to independence.
Continuities from the late colonial to early post-colonial decades are evident in the intellectual influences and work programmes pursued by elite women and their organisations (see below for an example from Ghana). Women in India and Sri Lanka, and after 1947 in Pakistan, for instance, demonstrated an ongoing commitment to the domains of education, health, and livelihood development, with a particular focus on women, children, and other marginalised groups.Footnote 20 In the first half of the twentieth century, South Asian women social activists also turned their attention to the issue of rural development, as Maria Framke’s research demonstrates.Footnote 21 The Lanka Mahila Samiti (originally known as the Central Board of Women’s Institutes) was established in 1930 and became one of the largest women’s organisations in post-colonial Sri Lanka, growing from 10 local branches in 1933/34 to 158 branches with 7,500 members in 1948. After its steady expansion under colonial rule, the Lanka Mahila Samiti experienced more rapid growth in the first decade of the country’s independence, with 1,200 branches and around 100,000 members in 1958. The trajectory of the Lanka Mahila Samiti suggests both continuity and rupture: after independence it built on colonial-era foundations but acquired a newly important status due to the development priorities of the post-colonial state.Footnote 22 It functioned through village-level mahila samitis (women’s groups) and pursued a variety of activities that foreshadowed work later labelled ‘development’, including small-scale projects aimed at preventing malaria, training midwives, and increasing food production through home gardens and cooperative farms. The latter became particularly important after food became a more pressing issue during the Second World War. The organisation also focused on the education of rural children and worked to enhance the income of rural households through cottage industry projects. Finally, the expansion of work during the Second World War prompted the Lanka Mahila Samiti to organise training courses for women rural workers. This initiative was followed by the establishment of a permanent training centre in Kaduwela in 1948, offering courses for paid (grama sevika) and voluntary (sweccha sevika) rural workers. In the beginning, the organisation collaborated with various governmental departments of the colonial state, including the Agricultural, Medical, Health, and Industries Departments. This practice continued in the early years of post-colonial Sri Lanka but stopped in the late 1950s.Footnote 23
This brief introduction to the work of the Lanka Mahila Samiti provides several entry points for thinking about periodisation and chronology. According to this women-centred narrative, strong threads of continuity can be traced across the perceived rupture of 1948. Both in the late colonial period and during the years following decolonisation, organisers emphasised women’s voluntary work as a form of national service, representing an important contribution to the nation’s development.Footnote 24 In addition, there was considerable continuity in personnel as women’s career trajectories transcended the moment of independence. However, the continuous work of the Lanka Mahila Samiti from the 1930s to the 1970s requires further research to draw out changes and continuities not only between colonial and post-colonial systems, but also between subsequent post-colonial governments and international development regimes. We argue that a focus on grassroots initiatives and local programmes, as Iris Schröder stressed in her workshop contribution, is particularly important for future research, as it allows for a rethinking of gendered development chronologies that takes account of agency, participation, and practices, but also highlights issues of power, class, caste, age, religion, and so on.Footnote 25
Post-Second World War development: Nation-building and international networking
If a focus on the Lanka Mahila Samiti suggests a long history of development that is often overlooked, our research on women’s activities in the second half of the twentieth century disrupts prevailing chronological understandings in a different way. The emergence of gender-sensitive development is conventionally traced to the 1970s. However, our research has emphasised the importance of the preceding decades in woman-centred development initiatives. In exploring this history, our discussions have revealed the need to balance global trends with the specific trajectories of diverse territories. Decolonisation during the post-Second World War decades precipitated significant transformations across Africa and Asia, but these transformations were by no means uniform. Whereas South Asia and Indonesia achieved formal independence in the immediate post-war years, meaning that post-war development projects were spearheaded by national governments, colonial rule in Africa persisted into the 1950s and beyond. Here, in what is known as the second colonial occupation, government officials attempted to reform colonial rule and ‘modernise’ Africans, often by force.Footnote 26 In formerly British Africa, the Decade of Development overlapped with the so-called ‘winds of change’ and vast political and social shifts took place as imperial rule collapsed.
Whilst we are alert to the specificities of development trajectories across this vast tableau, we identify trends and linkages in the ways colonial and post-colonial governments across Asia and Africa tapped into women’s human capital to promote their development agendas in the 1950s and 1960s. Asian and African women were involved in these processes of nation-building and development, either as volunteers or as members of state administrations. However, the role of women’s expertise was ambiguous, as their development work was at once crucial to and constrained by the state. Women’s knowledge and experience of social work placed them in a variety of government and administrative positions responsible for families, education, social services, etc., but in colonised and post-colonial territories alike these were usually ‘marginalised’ sectors with shoestring budgets. In a similar way, women’s voluntary work allowed both colonial and post-colonial states to outsource certain government services, such as health, family planning, education, and children and youth services, to women’s organisations and activists and therefore placed them beyond the reach of, if adjacent to, central development planning.Footnote 27
In these roles, women became responsible for solving certain social problems and assigned to specific types of development work. In Pakistan and India, for instance, women organised relief initiatives for partition refugees and assumed leadership of long-term rehabilitation programmes, with a special focus on women and children.Footnote 28 In post-war colonial Ghana, the government became concerned about perceived social problems such as juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and vagrancy, which arose in the context of rapid urbanisation and modernisation. As Adwoa K. Opong’s work shows, these issues, which were derived from colonial economic development strategies, buttressed the emergence of women’s organisations such as the Federation of Gold Coast Women (later known as the Federation of Ghana Women). Typically led by upper-middle-class women who had received a mission-oriented education, these groups focused on raising the moral standards of ‘wayward women’ and ‘problem children’.Footnote 29
Although many women embraced these roles, others resisted and subverted their relegation to social work alone and the gender roles that underpinned it. For example, as Maha Ali has shown, notable South Asian women challenged and redefined existing development paradigms by linking them to the struggle for socio-economic rights.Footnote 30 This made available alternative, caste- and class-sensitive approaches even as development maintained a predominantly elitist character. As early as the 1940s, India’s first Dalit woman elected to the constituent assembly, Dakshayani Velayudhan, advocated for social security and shorter working days for rural and labouring classes.Footnote 31 Simultaneously, Maniben Kara campaigned for workers’ rights as a trade union leader in Bombay.Footnote 32 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay took this idea to the international level through her writings and visits to the United States. She had been vocal about the inequalities within the domestic and global economic order, and utilised Marxist theories to push for workers’ and women’s rights across all classes.Footnote 33 Women’s contributions to the discourse on rural development and workers’ rights found expression in debates taking place in international organisations including the International Labour Organisation and UN committees such as the Economic and Social Council, and the Commission on Human Rights. These perspectives fed into wider debates about development at international events such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Nevertheless, they remained marginalised within the male-dominated UN arena and it was only the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) that emerged as an international political platform for the contestation of rights and development agendas for women in the Global South.Footnote 34 Certainly this constituency gained greater influence in the 1970s with an established cycle of women’s conferences and the landmark achievement of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). But our research demonstrates a fruitful, if less visible, history of Asian and African women shaping debates around political, economic, civil, social, and educational rights in earlier decades.Footnote 35
African and Asian women’s agendas achieved increasing prominence as they assumed positions of leadership at the CSW in early post-independence contexts. In 1966, with input from Annie Jiagge (Ghana), the CSW drafted an eleven-article ‘Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women’ (DEDAW). The declaration passed in 1967 with Helena Benitez (Philippines) as CSW chair. However, under the leadership of Leticia Ramos Shahani (Philippines), the document was later expanded into a thirty-article declaration, which explicitly included rural women’s rights and opportunities for development.Footnote 36 Eventually, these discussions led to the drafting of Article 14(2) of CEDAW, which enshrined the rights of rural women and their right to participate in development planning efforts.Footnote 37
Beyond the UN in the 1950s and 1960s, women’s development initiatives took place in international arenas that are not usually associated with development: feminist and women’s rights networks functioning within and across geopolitical power blocs that linked women’s development not just to social work, but also to political and ideological agendas trained on the realisation of rights, peace, and security. Some of these networks had their roots in the late colonial period, while others developed in the context of decolonisation, the Cold War, and ideas of Asian-African solidarity.Footnote 38 Building on an emerging historiography of twentieth-century transnational feminisms, Widya Fitria Ningsih traces the transnational alliances of Indonesian women’s organisations in the early post-colonial period. Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement), for instance, built relationships with women’s organisations in other nation-states, particularly Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) affiliates in Australia, China, and the Netherlands. By contrast, Perwari (Persatuan Wanita Republik Indonesia, Women Association of the Republic of Indonesia) forged links with Western women’s organisations, including the League of Women Voters, the Pan Pacific Women’s Association and the Nederlandse Vrouwen Committee (NVC), and maintained these ties after the political upheaval of 1965, which led to the banning of many ideological groups, including Gerwani.
The transnational activism of both these Indonesian organisations was directed towards issues concerning women and children. Gerwani members attended the International Conference in Defence of Children in Vienna in 1952, tasked with forming a committee for child defence and celebrating 1 June as International Children’s Day. They also participated in the 1953 World Congress of Women in Copenhagen, where a Declaration of Women’s Rights was produced, demanding equality in social, economic, and political areas. Gerwani adopted this declaration, distributed 5,000 manifestos across the country, and held a congress to promote its outcomes. Perwari’s leading activists were also committed to internationalism, yet with a cautious approach. For example, Nani Soewondo stressed the importance of engaging in global women’s movements to prevent domination by those unfamiliar with colonial experiences, while Hadidjah S. Soekanto argued that women’s issues were a global concern that transcended national borders. They argued that the issue of women’s rights and development could not be resolved internationally without taking into account the voices and experiences of women in the decolonising world.Footnote 39
The examples presented here demonstrate some of the ways in which the study of African and Asian women’s interventions disrupts the conventional periodisation of the post-war era. Rather than view the UN-sponsored International Women’s Year as a turning point, we instead set the events of 1975 and after in the context of a longer time frame. Our research suggests that, while gaining greater prominence during the UN Decade for Women (1975–85), the ‘Women in Development’ paradigm was fundamentally shaped by the earlier internationalist efforts of women from Asia and Africa both at the UN and beyond it in transnational feminist and women’s rights networks. These efforts, which reflected diverse national and ideological perspectives, were instrumental in promoting new ideas and, in particular, linking economic development to social and political rights for women in ways that pre-empted the demands of the UN Women’s Conferences of 1975 and after.
Moving past the 1970s
Much of the historiography of development has focused on the mid-century decades, but women’s active participation in development continued to gain traction in the later decades of the twentieth century. Existing scholarship has drawn attention to the significance of the occurring shifts—for instance, towards microfinance as a distinctly woman-focused development paradigm.Footnote 40 However, our research also indicates the presence of continuities in terms of areas of work and concepts applied. This is exemplified, for instance, by the profound influence women have exercised in the domain of health and family planning throughout a protracted and conflict-ridden paradigm shift from population control to the promotion of women’s reproductive human rights and public health.Footnote 41 The World Health Organisation Global Programme for the Control of Diarrhoeal Diseases (CDD), established in 1978, sought, as Claudia Prinz demonstrates, to address various objectives, among which was the training of women from disadvantaged rural backgrounds in childcare and healthcare. Like earlier health campaigns, the programme defined women predominantly in relation to the social and family context, with specific tropes concerning women as family caregivers persisting. The focus on women as mothers had the capacity to either strengthen or weaken the feminist agenda, as demonstrated by scholars.Footnote 42 Whilst an international coalition of NGOs emphasised women’s rights in relation to pregnancy, birth, and childcare/breastfeeding during the 1980s, USAID programmes introduced behavioural-science aspects in combination with a market-based framework that portrayed women less as citizens than as consumers.Footnote 43 This duality, discernible in development programmes from the 1970s onwards, may be interpreted as a harbinger of subsequent neoliberal policies, as women’s rights emerged as a recurring theme in international development initiatives even as policies such as structural adjustment had a disproportionate adverse impact on women in the Global South.
The challenge for future research will be to explore not only a more diverse global discourse with contested narratives of women’s development, but also the longer continuities and disjunctures of practices, struggles, and negotiations that have shaped the global history of women and development. Women’s roles in development were contested in many ways and for numerous reasons. Focusing on women in development history, therefore, can lay bare the power struggles that shaped a multilayered, complex, and truly global history.
Financial support
Maria Framke’s research for this article was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Project number: 454046633; Maha Ali’s research for this article was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), grant number 852176.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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.
Maha Ali is currently writing her PhD dissertation at Leiden University on South and South-East Asian actors at the UN and their influence on the history of development and international human rights-making, forming part of the team for the ERC-funded project ‘Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of United Nations and the Global South’. Her work has appeared in the Yearbook for the History of Global Development and she is assistant editor of the London Review of International Law.
Widya Fitria Ningsih is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada. Her research and teaching interests include women’s and gender history, the decolonial movement, transnational migration, food sovereignty, and sonic heritage. In addition to teaching, she actively participates in international research projects, including managing the NWO-funded project ‘Restituting, Reconnecting, Reimagining Sound Heritage (Re:Sound) (2025–28)’, which examines colonial history through sound archives.
Adwoa Opong is Assistant Professor of African History at Chapman University. Her research sits at the intersections of histories of decolonisation, development, and gender in twentieth-century Africa, specifically Ghana. Her current project, ‘Regulating the Social: Uplifting Womanhood in a Decolonizing 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.
Claudia Prinz is a historian at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she also earned her PhD. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary international and global health history, the history of international organisations, and medical and digital humanities, with a focus on scholarly communication and scientific publishing in the digital age. She is one of the managing editors of H-Soz-Kult, a prominent scholarly communication network within the European humanities.
Iris Schröder is Professor of Global History and Director of the Centre for Transcultural Studies/Perthes Collection at Erfurt University (Germany). She is currently interested in working on the intersection of histories of social sciences, post-colonialism, and development studies with a special focus on Ghana. Her most recent publications include: Jenseits des Terrazentrismus. Kartographien der Meere und die Herausbildung der globalen Welt (Wallstein, 2022) (edited with Felix Schürmann and Wolfgang Struck); ‘Ulrich Jaspar Seetzen’s Travels to the Middle East: Ways of Knowing and Translation’, in Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge 10 (2025): 125–38.
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