In 1975, five years into the UN’s Second Development Decade, the UN-sponsored World Conference of Women in Mexico City made the historic assertion that women’s rights were both a prerequisite for and a particular goal of development.Footnote 1 The proceedings built on the gender-sensitive strand of development thought associated with the Danish economist Ester Boserup and responded to the insights of Global South-based scholars such as the Indian economist Devaki Jain. Channelling wider critiques of neocolonialism and Third World dependency, participants at the official conference also connected women’s development to the New International Economic Order resolution adopted by the General Assembly the previous year. Simultaneously, women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America laid out their own perspectives on the subject at a parallel non-governmental organisation (NGO) tribune, often in direct challenge to the leadership claims of Americans and Europeans within the international women’s movement.Footnote 2 ‘Women in Development’, a paradigm that challenged default male bias, had arrived.
In development scholarship, the 1970s is viewed as a breakthrough decade when ‘alternative’ (gender-sensitive, sometimes Global South-centred) development thinking gained traction in an international context.Footnote 3 However, a near-universal acceptance of the landmark significance of this shift obscures a longer, richer history that has yet to be captured in the historiography. This Arenas issue presents the case for incorporating these overlooked strands into the history of development. Our approach draws on research on eight territories in decolonising Asia and Africa and foregrounds the roles of women as development actors during the period 1930 to 1980. One important implication of this is to expand the conventional periodisation of women’s development to incorporate colonial-era histories. Furthermore, our examination of some of the hidden dimensions of development history provides insights into the workings of development, recasting its spatial dimensions and destabilising standard understandings of power hierarchies. We make no claim to global comprehensiveness (our case studies are necessarily limited by our research specialisms, not least in terms of geography). However, in offering a blueprint for a global history of development that is alert to otherwise neglected perspectives, we believe our reflections hold significance beyond the limits of our own ‘area studies’ expertise.
For most of the twentieth century, women in and from Asia and Africa played prominent roles in the unfolding global history of development both as objects of policy and as actors involved in design and implementation. Yet, in keeping with the standard periodisation of development as a post–Second World War phenomenon, histories of women and development are primarily focused on the later part of the century.Footnote 4 This is accompanied by a prevailing historiographical focus on the dominant (Western) structures of development, an approach that is vital for illuminating geopolitical and economic asymmetries but tends to privilege planners and political elites situated in North America and Europe.Footnote 5 In recent years, separate strands of scholarship have widened the frame of development history both temporally and geographically to include European colonial-era and Soviet bloc development programmes focused on what became known as the Third World.Footnote 6 Yet a persistent emphasis on so-called donors produces a strong sense that those who interacted with development in colonial and post-colonial settings were simply passive recipients of flows of ideas, expertise, and assistance originating elsewhere.
Paying attention to the role of Asian, African, and other Global South actors is crucial in the global history of development. As early as 1997, Frederick Cooper argued that the impetus for development in colonial Africa came as a response to the collective action of labour and national liberation movements in the colonies.Footnote 7 Since then, histories of post-colonial states have begun to explore the ways nation-building elites in Asia and Africa authored distinct approaches to development as a means of better securing the promises of independence.Footnote 8 These perspectives are increasingly incorporated into international and global historical narratives, with Su Lin Lewis and Nana Osei-Opare’s recent edited volume breaking new ground in radically recentring the Global South as part of the ‘origin story’ of development.Footnote 9 We welcome this shift but note that, despite a few standout exceptions, women’s roles and experiences still remain largely neglected in historical accounts.
The exclusion of women from Africa and Asia from the historiography of development can be attributed to a number of factors, including the all-too-common trait of gender-blindness in historical research. In large part, however, it results from women’s development activities not being recognised as such.Footnote 10 This tendency is widespread, even within women’s history. It is striking, for example, that histories of the 1975 Mexico City Conference privilege its relevance as a landmark, not in development history, but in the history of global feminism, despite deep engagement with the question of Third World development at the event itself.Footnote 11 As we explain below, we adopt a capacious definition of development that includes social as well as economic projects, a move that suggests a need, not just to carry out new research on women’s roles but to incorporate existing histories of women’s rights and global feminism into the history of development. The present forum is both a response to this challenge and a provocation to encourage future research.
The genesis of this Arenas issue is the workshop ‘Voluntariness, Women and Development in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Societies’, which was organised at the University of Erfurt by Maria Framke and Rosalind Parr with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Research Group ‘Voluntariness’ in July 2024.Footnote 12 The workshop brought together papers on the history of development from the perspective of Ghanaian, Indonesian, and South Asian women from the 1930s to the 1980s, an exercise that revealed a multi-sited global history connected by a number of themes.Footnote 13 This brought into view a series of activities that are otherwise overlooked in the historiography of development, including histories of social reform, welfare, and voluntary work. The panels ranged widely, identifying continuities and ruptures stretching from colonial times to the neoliberal era and traversing multiple scales from the global to the local grassroots level. Most strikingly, our discussions raised important conceptual questions concerning definitions, periodisation, and scale, and inspired valuable methodological reflections on source material, research strategies, and ethics. This prompted a second workshop held online in February 2025 to further explore these themes. The proceedings of these two workshops form the basis of the three co-written articles—‘Chronologies’, ‘Scales’, and ‘Sources’—that make up this Arena.Footnote 14
In reflecting on the implications of situating women in and from Africa and Asia at the centre of the global history of development, this Arenas issue makes four primary interventions. Our first is to disrupt standard definitions of development by emphasising the importance of social welfare activities. This strand of development often goes undetected, and is in fact relatively difficult to detect, because it typically took place below or adjacent to the state through voluntary associations, campaigning organisations, and NGOs.Footnote 15 Yet our research demonstrates that social welfare was intrinsic to the broader notions of ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’ that drove economic development. In the context of imperial ‘civilising’ claims, this imbued development with political implications (including after the formal end of imperialism) in ways that shaped both imperialistic and anti-colonial projects. Our second intervention is to disturb the standard periodisation of development as a post-war phenomenon by exploring the ways our expanded definition of development opens up new narratives of continuity and rupture, while at the same time cautioning against rigid global chronologies. As our time frame (1930s to 1980s) suggests, our research offers a rebuttal of the dominant understanding of development as a specifically post–Second World War phenomenon. Undoubtedly, the vast international development complex that emerged in the era of the Cold War and Asian and African decolonisation determined development as it is commonly understood today. However, African and Asian women’s histories of development include aspirations and projects that played out over different, non-uniform timescales, as our ‘Chronologies’ article explains. Third, by drawing out the rich contributions of women from Asia and Africa, we nuance conventional understandings of development as a top-down process. We do this through a sustained engagement with scale that examines multidirectional flows, the complex workings of power and agency, and the importance of situated place. In exploring these themes in our ‘Scales’ article, we do not seek to obscure the self-serving designs of the powerful but rather aim to set them in the context of forces ‘from below’ that shaped development and have the capacity still to serve as alternative ‘possible futures’. Finally (fourthly), we critically reflect on the limits of established archives of development and call for an expanded source base that more fully captures the participation and influence of actors across multiple scales of development, particularly in Asia and Africa. As our ‘Sources’ article emphasises, uncovering women’s histories usually requires scholars to venture beyond traditional development history repositories, a process that encourages innovation in the conceptualisation and practice of global history. Our experiences of researching and writing histories of development expose some of the structural challenges that characterise our discipline, while also suggesting inclusive modes of doing global history that will be helpful for future research.
Defining development
Our ambition to incorporate women’s histories into the wider field rests on our engagement with what has been recently described as the ‘constructive ambiguity’ of development.Footnote 16 The meaning of development has shifted over time, and varied across place, only acquiring its current, globalised meaning during the so-called Development Decade of the 1960s. Even since then, the term has proven flexible enough to refer to capitalist notions of economic growth and to socialist industrialisation; to input-intensive agriculture and low-tech farming co-operatives; to educational initiatives, improvements in sanitation, healthcare, and nutrition based on science; and campaigns against prostitution, vagrancy, and youth delinquency rooted in moral claims. It was often used as a synonym for ‘modernisation’ but could also take distinctly anti-modernist forms in the guise of ‘community development’. Its claims frequently took on the semblance of technocratic ‘anti-politics’, but development was deeply enmeshed in national and international politics.Footnote 17 There is further slippage in the nexus between development and humanitarianism, which is most evident in scholarship on NGOs and volunteering agencies, and the relationship of both these categories to human rights and international law.Footnote 18 Yet, despite this conceptual looseness—or perhaps, precisely because of its elasticity—‘development’ was uniquely powerful as a discourse in the twentieth century.Footnote 19
Scholars have tried to put some scaffolding around development by breaking the concept up into ‘big D’ and ‘little d’ development. Geographer Gillian Hart defined Big-D Development as the conscious effort to create economic growth and associated social change by governments and development agencies in the post-war period, whereas little-d development captured immanent patterns of social change under capitalism.Footnote 20 Histories of development have largely focused on Hart’s Big-D development while acknowledging its little-d context. However, some historians have diverged from her definition by highlighting continuities between colonial and post-colonial regimes and so challenging the idea of a post–Second World War rupture (see the ‘Chronologies’ article in this issue) and by contesting the claim that development was wholly a matter of Global North intervention by drawing out the role of elites in post-colonial nations.Footnote 21 At the same time, historians have developed their own D/d dichotomy, which differs from social scientists’ usage. In the historian’s terrain, Big-D Development captures the high-modernist, top-down, statist planning depicted by James C. Scott as Seeing Like a State, whereas little-d development captures the bottom-up, humanist, co-operative, and often low-tech forms of community organisation and small-scale marketisation that Daniel Immerwahr calls Thinking Small.Footnote 22
Although this typology helps us better understand development as pursued by states and institutions from the Global North, and the United States above all, it does not quite capture the meaning of development as a pillar of decolonisation and post-colonial nation-building in Asia and Africa. Here, development was referred to by vernacular terms, which could change over time, and these too can be unfolded to reveal great complexity. Ariel Heryanto has demonstrated the complex meanings underpinning varying usages of the Indonesian terms kemajuan, pembangunan, and perkembangan to denote ‘development’ across the Sukarno and Suharto eras.Footnote 23 Development was referred to by other region-specific terms including budiriro in Zimbabwe, ‘humanism’ in Zambia, and Ujamaa in Tanzania.Footnote 24 These were joined by further capacious words, including progress, modernization, nation-building, ‘moving forward’, or even ‘dreams’.Footnote 25 The political trajectories of post-colonial states were varied and yet each leant on the talisman of development for legitimacy; at its extremes, usage was flexible enough to capture authoritarian schemes and Amartya Sen’s definition of development ‘as freedom’.Footnote 26
Our work on women’s role in development does not seek to reduce this complexity. Rather, we further expand this already bulky conceptual framework by arguing for the incorporation of activities often referred to as social welfare or conceived as women’s rights within the definition of ‘D/development’. Social welfare activities including social work; training in home economics; the creation of small-scale handicrafts and cottage industries; and education on hygiene, health, and care for children formed a significant proportion of development projects targeting women (and also employing women) before the 1980s. This work was partly funded by international organisations and overlapped with population control measures including family planning programmes. But social welfare activities were also foundational to post-colonial nation-building, especially from the perspective of Asian and African women reformers. Histories of international development have assumed that women were largely absent from the field until Ester Boserup’s 1970 book Woman’s role in Economic Development gave rise to the Women in Development approach.Footnote 27 We contend that women—and especially women from nationalist elites—had long been involved in development activities, but often under the category of ‘social welfare’ rather than ‘development’.
‘Women’, gender, and development
We recognise that ‘women’ is an unstable category and remain alert to the ways gendered assumptions about the ‘proper’ role of women were implicit both in the drive for development and in nation-building projects.Footnote 28 In societies subjected to the civilisational logic of European colonialism, the emancipation of women had long been considered a marker of progress, which was, in turn, linked to notions of political legitimacy.Footnote 29 Anti-colonial nationalist engagements with ‘the woman question’ often countered colonial claims through a social reform agenda that produced new ideals of modern ‘womanhood’, usually within the realms of domesticity.Footnote 30 One outcome of this was the emergence of educated women who performed crucial symbolic roles as nationalist mothers and, in public life, took up female-coded ‘nurturing’ activities in the fields of health and education, particularly as they related to women.Footnote 31 These gendered nation-building considerations continued to shape development in post-colonial contexts, assigning women particular gendered responsibilities. They were also significant in shaping distinct paths for feminism in Asian and African contexts.Footnote 32 We emphasise, therefore, that women’s development history in the form of social welfare was very much linked to histories of women’s rights, as reflected in the example of the Mexico conference that opens this introduction. Another important aspect of the gendering of development is the extent to which women operated in voluntary, non-state, or intermediary roles, frequently functioning through women’s organisations and NGOs. In this way, women’s activities often occupy an ambiguous territory that is distinct from institutional histories of development, while being very much connected to them.
If (post-)colonial conditions produced specific ideals of ‘womanhood’, our workshop discussions have underscored the importance of intersectionality and the heterogeneity of ‘women’ according to class, caste, race, or ethnicity, as well as regional or spatial factors (urban/rural; capital/peripheries). While social reform provided a pathway for middle-class women to enact citizenship through gender-appropriate nation-building activities, poorer and other marginalised women were more likely to find themselves on the receiving end of development as targets of social policy or as labour. Often these distinctions were ignored in development planning and are glossed over in histories of Asian and African women.Footnote 33 However, we have also encountered examples of development work by Third World women that was sensitive to difference within the category of women and paid close attention to the particular conditions of women in marginalised communities.Footnote 34 Given the origins of our collaboration (at a workshop on voluntariness) our research tends towards a focus on relatively elite women who engaged with development as thinkers, planners, campaigners, and workers. With this in mind, we have sought to maintain a critical focus on asymmetrical social dynamics and paid attention to how such perspectives impacted and were resisted by subaltern actors. Moreover, in reflecting on these issues, we have developed conceptual and methodological pathways for incorporating voices ‘from below’ which may be helpful for future research on women and development.
Geographic scope and organisation of this issue
This Arenas issue positions women in and from Asian and African colonial and post-colonial societies at the centre of the global history of development. We approach this history by drawing on case studies from select territories in South and South-East Asia and West and East Africa.Footnote 35 In doing so, we note that the category ‘Asian and African’ implies certain commonalities and, from the 1950s, served to rally a collective ‘Afro-Asian’ identity based on the shared experience of colonialism. Yet at the same time we acknowledge that our coverage is far from comprehensive and emphasise that Bandung-era ‘Afro-Asia’ was always heterogeneous and cartographically inexact.Footnote 36 Additionally, although we recognise that for many development actors (and historians) ‘Afro-Asia’ was frequently subsumed within the broader categories of ‘the Third World’ or ‘the Global South’, we make no attempt in this issue to map our geographical focus to these wider framings.Footnote 37 That said, there may be helpful comparisons to be made with other colonial, post-colonial, and ‘Global South’ territories and our findings may spark dialogue with scholars whose research relates to contexts we have neglected.
Our ambition to engage the wider field in dialogue is indicative of our commitment to fostering collaborative approaches to global history. This Arenas issue reflects the ethos of shared endeavour that defined our workshop discussions and our conviction that the sharing of expertise across ‘area studies’ boundaries promotes valuable global historical knowledge. The co-authored articles included in this Arenas issue integrate written contributions submitted by multiple participants to our two workshops and are shaped by our wider discussions. Consequently, they have been produced collectively by several researchers: the named co-authors who contributed specific research, the broader collective who discussed the drafts, and the lead authors who shaped each article into a coherent piece.Footnote 38
The articles that follow explore three interrelated themes. ‘Chronologies’ asks how the periodisation of the historiography of development might be impacted when we privilege women in and from Asia and Africa. ‘Scales’ offers a spatial framework for examining questions of interconnectedness in development history. As our ‘Sources’ article emphasises, uncovering these histories usually requires scholars to venture beyond traditional research pathways. Consequently, ‘Sources’ reflects on the issue of locating and accessing women and development in the archive. Our conclusions are included at the end of each article with the ‘Afterword’ offering an overall summary and suggesting future directions.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the editors of the Journal of Global History and two anonymous reviews for comments on earlier drafts. The authors also thank all participants of the workshop ‘Voluntariness, Women and Development in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Societies’ held at the University of Erfurt July 2024 and a subsequent online workshop in February 2025 for the rich discussions that helped shape this Arenas issue.
Financial support
Maria Framke’s research for this article was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Project number: 454046633. Agnieszka Sobocinska’s research for this article was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under Consolidator Grant 101170121.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
Rosalind Parr is a lecturer in History at Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. Her research is focused on the Indian women’s movements during the period of decolonisation and is published in Itinerario, Journal of Global History, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, amongst others. She is the author of Citizens of Everywhere: Indian Women, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism, 1920–1952 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
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.
Agnieszka Sobocinska is Professor in 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 (2025–30)’. 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).
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