The heroines of dignified struggle

When, as part of her research, the feminist academic June Fernandez-Kelly got a job as a worker in a maquiladora (a factory in Mexico producing goods for US multinationals), she discovered how arduous the 'unskilled' job of sewing pockets onto garments actually was. Demanding perfect coordination of hands, eyes and legs, the task required great nimbleness – a trait associated with women, who are drawn in ever-larger numbers into this kind of low-wage production in the global economy. Fernandez-Kelly was expected to sew almost 400 pockets every hour, about 3000 every day, all for around USD 5 a day..The excerpt of Fernandez-Kelly's work in The Women, Gender and Development Reader (WGDR) is insightful and richly detailed, as is much of the rest of the book. Both of the books under review were originally published in London, and have now been republished in Southasia by Zubaan. Included in WGDR are texts by such well-known Southasian social scientists and activists as Gita Sen, Bina Agarwal and Chandra Mohanty, as well as a host of additional, formative feminist essays..Over recent decades, the academic world of gender and development studies has moved through several paradigms and models. The newest, it now appears, is the WCD (Women, Culture and Development) model. The frivolity of acronyms apart, this book demonstrates that, regardless of this paradigm shift, the earlier models are far from obsolete. For example, Danish economist Ester Boserup's sterling contributions to the field during the 1970s still stand out. We continue to draw upon her demonstration of the strong and positive role that African women had historically played, even under patriarchal conditions, as agricultural subsistence producers. Or, her exposé of the ways in which European colonial law and economics marginalised such women..There are also, however, distinct tensions in the field of gender and development. An influential group in this field works for international development agencies funded by wealthy countries of the North, where they also live. The work of such practitioners is limited by the murkiness of the politics of international aid, and the self-serving and exploitative interests of such countries. Equally, academics and activists based in the developing countries find that the women who are their subject are constantly squeezed from three directions: between conservative or fundamentalist interests; a state receding from welfarism; and the increasingly volatile nature of global markets, which now seek to mould women into docile subjects of the 'flexible', service-driven, 'feminised' new global economy. In the new marketplace of emerging service sectors, such as call-centres, women workers are greatly in demand due to several stereotypes: their perceived conversational and 'courteous' skills, willingness to work flexible hours, and tendency to steer clear of aggressive unionisation..A complex narrative often emerges from women's encounters with these multiple forces, one that cannot be accounted for in terms of straight gains and losses. Fernandez-Kelly, for example, documents how her colleagues in the maquiladora were able to bond and exercise personal agency, for instance, in camaraderie amongst themselves, even when unionisation was taboo. The annals of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), formed to organise women in the informal sector in Gujarat, or those of women in Uttaranchal's environmental Chipko movement, belong to another order of agency altogether, and emerge as icons of women's activism in the field of development..Particularly compelling in WGDR is a feminist reassessment of gender in the family and the household – of women's work. Past academic research has demonstrated that the family and household must be seen as sites of what can be described as 'cooperative conflict' – of negotiations and bargaining over resources. On the other hand, there is the dangerously wrongheaded view emphasised by mainstream economics – of the male head of the family as an altruist, who fairly speaks for the whole family and justly distributes familial resources. From the work of feminist economists we have learned that, even today, official statistics do not have an appropriate set of standards for measuring women's work..Structure of feelings.Feminist Futures is a refreshing book. At the intersection of studies of culture, feminism and critical development, it adapts a notion of culture that the Welsh Marxist Raymond Williams described as a "structure of feelings" – which, say the editors, "is meant to denote [a] blend of pattern and agency". There is in this model a simultaneous emphasis on ideology, and on human experience, feeling and agency. This emphasis on women's ability to take control of themselves is particularly important in the context of other schools of epistemology, such as certain brands of post-modernism, that completely write-out women's abilities to think and feel..The book experiments with several genres. "Maria's Stories", for instance, are moving autobiographical narratives told by the Salvadorean activist Maria Ofelia Navarrete. Later, US sociology professor John Foran blends politics and aesthetics to meditate on the centrality of desire, love and dreams – of the how's and might's in revolutionary social change. In a short, spare article, Raka Ray invokes the ways in which Lakshmi, a 40-year-old female domestic worker in Calcutta, conceptualises a just society and developed culture. Other articles look at the popularity of the ancient Indian design philosophy of Vastushastra, the contradictions in recent Indian reproductive and child-health policy, and how 'cyber-connectivity' is giving birth to ways to further gender justice. An important component of Feminist Futures is also its conscious visualisation of issues of sexuality, including homosexuality, in the field of gender and development..Reading these books together, one does not get a sense that earlier writings in the field have been superseded by later ones. Each of these fresh additions is welcome, but what stands out is the excellence of practitioners over the past three decades, who helped to bring younger scholars into what has become the enviably strong position of the gender and development terrain today. The best articles in these volumes testify to the importance of hard empirical observation, and of seeing political economy and culture as both complementary and indispensable in the study of gender and development. The heroines of academic works such as these are extraordinary women, who see dignified struggle as a quiet, non-grandiose, yet essential component of everyday life.