Gender and the Paradoxes Of Development

The two chapters in this section present an invaluable opportunity to reflect upon the advances made, and challenges still to be surmounted in the study of gender and development. In the late nineteen-seventies, when the field was expanding, the enthusiasm over innovative research was equaled only by the expectation that the study of gender would soon issue a theoretical corpus of sharp descriptive and explanatory potential, and broad in its capacity for generalization. That goal has not been fully realized, and the reasons, historical as well as ideological, deserve attention.