Feminism in the Third World

As women's movements in the West gained strength, their case for social change began to reach an international audience. In 1967 the United Nations encouraged worldwide efforts to improve women's status by adopting a resolution for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Feminism's official reception in Third World nations, however, was highly ambivalent. Formal measures urging particular attention to women had negligible impact on most national leaders and policy makers in the late 1960s. And with important exceptions, Third World women applied little organized pressure for change.

By the mid-1970s official attitudes had shifted considerably. The U.N. community declared 1975 as the International Women's Year and assembled in Mexico City for an international conference on women's status. There, the "Decade for the Advancement of Women" was adopted for the years 1976 to 1985. The global consequences of this international attention to women's problems and potential proved significant. Many Third World governments established women's bureaus and commissions, taking the first official measures to improve women's lives, or at least to become familiar with their needs. In Latin America, a strong and vocal feminist movement emerged, fostering social change and attention to women's issues in many parts of the region. The government of Bangladesh declared that 10 percent of government jobs would be reserved for female professionals. Other governments took similar measures, and an official consensus emerged that sex discrimination was a problem governments could no longer ignore.

Official concern about women's status came at a time of rising dissatisfaction and debate over national development efforts in the Third World. During the 1960s—the first U.N. "development decade"—policies designed primarily to boost aggregate measures of countries' economic growth often did so at the expense of jobs and livelihoods, particularly among the poorest groups. National incomes might actually rise while conditions of poverty worsened for broad sectors of the population