Program In Comparative International Development Department of Sociology Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA Working Paper #3 BROADENING THE SCOPE: GENDER AND THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT M. Patricia Fern ndez Kelly Institute for Policy Studies and Department of Sociology The Johns Hopkins University Essay prepared for a Special Issue of Sociological Forum, Douglas Kincaid and Alejandro Portes, editors. Please do not cite or quote without written permission of the author. "(They) dealt in destinies, in the plural. Individuals' lives transposed into data units, threaded into systems, made to yield equations... a pairing not back or down but surgically inward, to the individual's very essence --the statistic self. That such a self existed nowhere but in demographic charts did not render it any less real." (Joyce Carol Oates, American Appetites) Introduction.- Compressing empirical reality into abstract categories is the task of social scientists. In the best of circumstances, this is not an idle exercise. Instead, the construction of analytical terms entails a process of successive approximations that expand our range of understanding of social phenomena. The paradox often is that concepts with the largest potential for augmenting knowledge are slow in gaining the acceptance of particular fields. This has been the case of gender in the study of socio-economic development. The central claim of this essay is that gender is a key term for refining theories of development insofar as it unfolds the 'statistic self,' revealing fundamental aspects in the organization of production and labor. This assertion is based upon practical and intellectual considerations. Mounting evidence has shown that development strategies throughout the world have had a differential impact upon men and women, with the latter often experiencing the most deleterious effects. This finding alone has helped to qualify facile generalizations. It has also increased awareness about the need for programs aimed at upgrading the deteriorating condition of women resulting from misguided development policies. However, the analytical scope of gender goes far beyond pragmatic considerations of policy design and implementation. Gender is primarily a process embedded in the economic and political fabric of society. Thus, it bridges the productive and reproductive realms of collective existence, and it affects the social distribution of power. With class and ethnicity, gender forms the conceptual tripod upon which comprehensive social and economic analysis must rest. Why then has "gender and economic development" grown as a separate field in the social sciences? The answer to that question is twofold. The highly abstract character of studies of economic development has obscured subtle differentiations whose importance has become apparent only as a result of tireless field research. Moreover, the scholarship on gender has placed an overarching emphasis upon women's oppression claiming that their experiences are not reducible to those of men. This has met with resistance in those academic circles where feminist protestations are greeted with suspicion, and where definitions of objectivity and intellectual distance are still the norm. The challenge then is to redress this political/ideological fissure by exploring those aspects in the theorization of gender that will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of economic development. In this essay, I adhere to this prescription by providing, in the first and second sections, a cursory review of some influential approaches to the study of development over the last thirty years and their relationship to the parallel theorization of gender. In the third section, I compare two instances illustrating recent modalities of industrial restructuring. The first case focuses on the expansion of export processing plants (maquiladoras) along the U.S.-Mexico border; the second one examines the survival strategies of electronics firms in Southern California. The theoretical significance of that comparison lies in the specification of gender as a contradictory process that allows for the maintenance of a substratum of, predominantly female, labor outside of market exchanges. That labor is recurrently tapped by employers seeking to maintain a competitive edge in domestic and international economies. The same mechanism enables the replication of patterns of unequal exchange resulting from the articulation of two distinct but interdependent modes of production-- one domestic and one market-oriented--by which capitalist accumulation is fulfilled. The final, concluding, section summarizes the central points of the argument. A Review of Perspectives in Economic Development.- Despite differences in explanatory emphasis and conceptual repertory, theories of development shared, from their inception, four main characteristics. First, they adopted highly abstract vantage points based on aggregate statistical analysis, often to the neglect of specific differences of a national or regional character. Second, they gradually moved from an emphasis upon culture and national character, as variables explaining underdevelopment, to a focus on structural factors resulting from particular relationships among industrialized and poor countries over time. Third, they slowly shifted from an exclusive focus on poor countries to consideration of parallel processes taking place in advanced industrial centers. Fourth, and most important for the purposes of this essay, most studies of development originally underplayed the impact of development policies upon segments of the population divided by class, gender, and ethnicity. Approaches to economic development have varied in consonance with two major paradigms: The first, orthodox discourse, derives from classical and neoclassical economics and from sociological interpretations that assign priority to social action and institutional analysis. The second, critical discourse, has evolved from Marxism and thus emphasizes class antagonisms and structural arrangements in production. During the 1940s and 1950s, orthodox economics and mainstream sociology were transmogrified into a theory of "modernization" which set the terms for future debate in the study of development. Its proponents emphasized the need for transferring economic, political, and cultural guidelines from industrialized to poor countries, expecting that transposition to lead the latter to levels of economic growth commensurate to those found in the former. Modernization theories strongly influenced international development organizations and policy- makers in the Third World (Inkeles and Smith, 1974). Similar perspectives may be found today, among the advocates of monetarism and export-oriented industrialization (Balassa, 1981). During the same period, and side by side with Anglo-Saxon interpretations, several currents of thought grew in Latin America. Some fused with modernization in their emphasis upon psychological, cultural, and philosophical explanations for Third World 'backwardness'. Some stressed the effects of colonialism and imperialism while, at the same time, celebrating the potential of free market economies for raising standards of living in poor countries. The most influential view of that period was formulated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, which pointed to the unique 'structures' which distinguish third-world from advanced industrial countries, and proposed models of import-substitution industrialization as a solution to underdevelopment (Prebisch, 1950). The 1960s witnessed the first systematic attacks against concepts of modernization as well as the demise of import-substitution industrialization. More important, the rise of national liberation movements throughout the Third World and the effervescence that followed the Cuban Revolution provided a new and compelling political setting. Within it, modernization was denounced as an ideology obscuring links of exploitation and subordination between industrialized and less-developed countries. The most articulate critics were the proponents of "Dependency" theory, who followed in the Marxist tradition by characterizing underdevelopment as the effect of long standing "unequal exchanges" between advanced and less-developed nations (Frank, 1967; Cardoso and Faletto, 1969). One of the lasting contributions of this radical critique was an understanding of the 'world economy' as the appropriate unit of analysis for investigating development processes (O'Brien, 1975). Dependency theory changed forever the way we think about economic development. However, the 1970s saw the dismantling of many of its underpinnings. Critics underscored two main limitations. First, 'dependence' is an equivocal term that cannot explain differences in economic growth and varying standards of living among third-world countries. Second, proponents of dependency theory tended to portray less-developed nations as homogeneous entities ineluctably at the mercy of equally monolithic imperialist countries. Internal class inequalities were thus obscured by overly deterministic frameworks. The 1970s also saw the blossoming of an alternative interpretation represented by the "World System" perspective (Wallerstein, 1974). This eclectic approach combined elements from Marxism with Exchange Systems Analysis, and typologies first coined by ECLA. Its originality rested on two factors: a continuation of the appeal to make the 'world system' the appropriate unit of analysis in sociological research, and an emphasis on historical analysis to explain the position of countries within the global mosaic. Both contributions have inspired much useful research in the last decade (Thomas et al., 1987). Nevertheless, the World System Perspective has also been criticized for its arbitrary taxonomic division of the world into 'core', 'periphery' and 'semi- periphery' and for its functionalist bent which, rarely moves away from the realm of pure historical description. The late 1970s and particularly the 1980s have witnessed a series of theoretical sparks as well as confusion, partly resulting from changing political conditions throughout the world. The limitations of centrally planned economies, the ambiguous success of workers' mobilization efforts all over the planet, and the easing of tensions between East and West are among the factors that have altered the tone and substance of intellectual exchange (Chase-Dunn, 1989). Two opposing views have flourished against that background: one stresses the emergence of 'post- industrial society', the other one focuses on the rise of a 'new international division of labor.' The former proclaims the demise of Marxism as a valid tool for sociological analysis, the latter assumes precisely the opposite. Writings on post-industrialism assign major relevance to computer technology as the cause of a quantum leap in socio-economic development. Advanced technology is said to have rendered class struggle obsolete by issuing forth an information-based society whose essence is interpersonal communication and service rather than exploitation and the production of material goods (Bell, 1976). This allows less- developed countries to specialize in manufactures for the world market while other, more advanced nations, focus on scientific research and technological innovation. From this vantage point, post- industrialism is a variation of 'comparative advantage' approaches that flourished since the 1880s and were resurrected in the twentieth century in the guise of 'production-sharing', 'international partnership', and 'modernization'. Such optimistic views of development have been challenged for their narrowly utopian focus on advanced technology, their neglect of persistent class inequalities in the computer age, and their inability to provide a plausible view of the links between advanced and less-developed countries. However, post- industrialism has retained popularity as a catchphrase offering the advantage of apparent neutrality to those fearful of theoretical extremes. A markedly different picture emerges from writings that have attempted to explain the growth of a new international division of labor since the mid- 1960s (Frobel, Heinrichs, and Kreye, 1981; Nash and Fern ndez Kelly, 1983; Sanderson, 1985). According to this view, the consolidation of multinational corporations after the end of World War II was followed by increased capital concentration, the explosion of computer technology, and the strengthening of a new industrial power, Japan. Acute competition led investors to seek lower production costs through the relocation of assembly work to less- developed countries and, as a result, a tightly integrated global economy took shape. Several factors mark the beginning of this new stage in capitalist development. The most salient are: a) the unprecedented mobility of capital investments on a world scale, allied with the availability of advanced technology; b) the centralization in advanced industrial countries of decision-making processes affecting production, combined with the dispersal of manufacturing to third-world locations; and c) the resulting extension of proletarianization in less- developed countries, in association with an increasing reliance on women as providers of cheap labor. This interpretation provides innovative guidelines for the study of linkages among countries affected by the globalization of the economy. It also offers a plausible portrayal of technology as part and parcel of socio-economic development; it stresses the importance of the spatial reorganization of production and, for the first time, assigns priority to gender as a key variable in industrial restructuring. Nevertheless, students of the new international division of labor have also advanced some crude oversimplifications. For example, they overstate the significance of 'cheap' labor as the cause for the movement of capital. Thus, they anticipate a mechanical and continued migration of corporations to less-developed areas, which has not been born out by recent trends. The ineluctable tendency towards proletarianization is also put in doubt when one observes that export-oriented industrialization in third-world countries has incorporated a relatively small percentage of the labor force (ILO, 1988). Export-oriented industrialization continues to flourish side by side with bloated service sectors and underground economic activities. Together with agriculture, these last two categories absorb most of the workers in the world (Portes and Walton, 1981). In addition, writings on the new international division of labor do not provide conceptual tools for understanding the movement of manufacturing operations to countries where labor is relatively costly by international standards--as in the case of Japanese investments in the United States. The same writings do not offer a satisfactory explanation for dissimilar patterns of competition among companies belonging to different industrial powers, or for the role of individual state policies in the process. Finally, the movement of assembly to third world locations is not leading to the total erosion of manufacturing in advanced industrial countries. The limitations embodied by 'the new international division of labor' have been broached directly in recent years. Current studies of economic development give attention to variations within countries and to the role of the state in developmental outcomes. They also investigate changes in advanced industrial nations as part of their legitimate field for analysis (see, for example Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, 1985). The study of socio- economic development has thus ceased to be the exclusive realm of Latin Americanists and Africanists in order to become a larger field focusing on changes caused by the international economy on advanced and less-developed countries. In the next section I discuss theories of gender and development that build upon Marxism and orthodox economics, but which also hinge on complex currents of feminist thought. Gender and Development: An Appraisal of Alternative Views.- Studies of the status of women were not uncommon during the first half of the twentieth century. However, the inception of a distinct area of interest on that subject is generally associated with the publication of Ester Boserup's landmark volume, Woman's Role in Economic Development (1970), which represented the first comprehensive attempt to examine the specific effects of modernization policies upon women in the Third World. Boserup's work energized and briefly anticipated an outpouring of writings making women visible as part of societies all over the world. The embodiment of this type of scholarship was Rayna Reiter's influential anthology, Towards an Anthropology of Women (1975), which comprised discrete case studies illustrating the impact of economic development upon women in rural and urban settings. In the following years, the study of gender and development grew to encompass: a) major historical publications questioning the assumptions of conventional interpretations about the growth of industrial capitalism (for example Minge-Kalman, 1978; Minge-Klevana, 1980; Tilly and Scott, 1978); b) demographic writings pointing to distortions and omissions in orthodox views of fertility and population growth (Wood, 1987); c) ethnographic accounts documenting the differential impact of development upon men and women in the Third World (for example, Leacock and Safa, 1986; Nash and Safa, 1980), and d) economic studies focusing on labor market segregation, wage differentials between men and women, and the relationship between domestic and wage labor (Bener¡a, 1982; Bener¡a and Stimpson, 1987; Kessler- Harris, 1975). Towards the end of the 1980s, the field further expanded to include international comparative studies of women and development and research on the changing character of women's consciousness, mobilization, and resistance to developmentalist pressures (Mies, 1988; Nash and Fern ndez Kelly, 1983; Safa, 1980; Ward, 1987). Throughout its comparatively short history, gender and development has incorporated contributions from other related fields. First, it branched out to embrace studies which had been conducted as part of the general field of economic development but which, in the process of conveying an accurate portrayal of reality, had found it unavoidable to include women's experiences. Such was the case of research on the informal economy, urbanization, and rural-urban migration (Deere and Le¢n de Leal, 1981; Jel¡n, 1977; Mintz, 1971; Moser, 1978; Sassen, 1988). One by one these accounts accumulated to become a reservoir of valuable information from which a systematic theorization of gender would later emerge. Second, and more decisively, authors looked towards several currents of feminist thought in an attempt to address intellectual enigmas that neither Marxism nor orthodox economics (and by consequence, broader studies of economic development) could answer convincingly. What are the factors explaining women's widespread social inequality? How does the sexual division of labor relate to labor market segregation of men and women, and to wage differentials between them? What is the relationships between wage labor and non-remunerated domestic work? These were key problems that students of gender and development sought to clarify. In addition to their inherent heuristic value, those questions were also important as part of a historical juncture marked by the legacy of the civil rights and women's movements. Feminist thought was to the conceptualization of gender what the Cuban Revolution, and national liberation struggles had been to the broader area of economic development. In both cases, the political context filled with a sense of urgency what otherwise would have been purely academic inquiries. Scholars acknowledged the significance of the questions being asked. However, they disagreed about the merit of different explanatory frameworks used in answering them. For example, Boserup's pioneering contribution, and the research it inspired, viewed gender inequality as the effect of women's displacement from productive work caused by imperfections in the modernization process. According to Boserup, colonialism first, and then industrialization, had exacerbated women's subordination and distorted preexistent patterns of reciprocity between men and women. The solution to the displacement of women from productive labor lied in the implementation of measures bearing striking resemblance to those supported by earlier advocates of modernization. Birth control programs, the incorporation of women into the paid labor force and, most singularly, an improvement of educational levels were expected to narrow social inequalities between the sexes. Almost three decades earlier, modernization theory had explained third world backwardness as an effect of shared cultural and psychological inadequacies. It had also made a plea for cultural change through the assimilation of behaviors and world views stemming from advanced industrial countries. In the 1970s students of gender and development invoked similar explanations for women's subordination and saw the path to upgrade their social condition in liberal notions of self-autonomy, and equal opportunity in the labor market. Liberal approaches to gender inequality were greeted with some suspicion in many third world countries, but they raised awareness about the unique problems faced by women and influenced the policies of international organizations and national governments throughout the world (Nash, 1975). As a result, there was, in the following years, a limited but constructive emphasis on housing, employment, credit, education, and reproductive choices for women. However, sexual inequality persisted in less-developed countries. In addition, demographic and historical research showed that neither women's participation in the labor force, nor higher levels of education had eliminated many of the differences in status or income differentials between men and women in advanced industrial nations. As a result, Bosrup's view of modernization was challenged. It does not provide a critique of structural arrangements in production, which may ultimately clarify persistent gender disparities. Instead, it views sexual inequality as the temporary consequence of anomalies that can be corrected by enhancing women's human capital stock and by making appropriate technologies, such as birth control, available to them (Bener¡a and Sen, 1986). However, the continuance of ingrained structural imbalances in the economic system inevitably distorts the potential advantages of those technologies as well as those of education and participation in paid employment. In addition, that perspective does not analyze the effects of capitalist investments on women of different classes, nor does it examine processes of capital accumulation and the consequences of these processes on technical change and women's work (Bener¡a and Sen, 1986; Nash, 1975). Finally, Boserup's approach does not assess the impact of ideologies of personal independence and fulfillment through paid employment. These notions may actually exacerbate women's vulnerability by charging them with new economic responsibilities that are difficult to fulfill with the wages they receive. An alternative view to gender inequality was spearheaded by writings that examined the "culture/nature" dichotomy. Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974) examined pre-industrial societies where women were seen as part of the natural world, as a result of their reproductive capacity, and where men were portrayed as the makers of culture. In those societies, nature is both feared and repulsed; therefore, it must be controlled. Women fell into subservient positions as a consequence of men's attempts to subdue the natural environment. Thus, gender asymmetry may ultimately reflect fundamental perceptions upon which social and economic interactions are later developed. Critics of this framework noted its biological deterministic underpinnings and its reliance on Freudian notions identifying men with civilization and women with nature. They argued that the culture/nature dichotomy is not universal; it is rooted in Western tradition and, therefore, cannot be easily transposed to other cultural environments where varying forms of gender inequality also exist. Moreover, explanations relying on inbred psychological predispositions act as ideological constructions diverting attention from, and sometimes legitimating, flaws in the distribution of power and access to resources. In spite of these critiques, cultural/psychological frameworks showed surprising resilience. Their importance for the study of gender and development diminished but they became part of a current of thought joining 'post-modernist' literature with probes into the origins of symbolic articulations of gender inequality (Chodorow, 1982: Martin, 1987). In the late 1970s, liberal and cultural/psychological interpretations clashed with Marxist feminism giving rise to a vigorous debate over a shared concern: the origins and functions of patriarchy. In a path-breaking article, Heidi Hartmann (1976) characterized patriarchy as an independent system of domination anteceding capitalism and rooted in the sexual division of labor. According to this perspective--which blended elements from Marxist and liberal feminism--women's gradual confinement in the home was consummated through a historical coalition between working-class and capitalist men at the expense of women. Men's appropriation of women's labor, partly achieved through subterfuges such as the enactment of protective legislation and the family wage, removed women from the sphere of remunerated work and, consequently, from effective access to political power and economic resources. The implications of this view were straightforward: the improvement of women's social and economic condition would depend on the elimination of the sexual division of labor and women's full incorporation into paid employment. Hartmann's stark interpretation underscored the peculiarities of gender inequality in capitalist societies. Nonetheless, her overarching emphasis on patriarchy confounded several issues. For example, it did not clarify the changing content of 'the sexual division of labor' in the course of history, nor did it examine variations in the nature and degree of women's subordination. It also underestimated the extent to which women have participated in social phenomena that seem detrimental to them from the vantage point of late twentieth-century feminists. A case in point was precisely women's passionate involvement in the struggle for the family wage and protective legislation. Finally, the emphasis on patriarchy assumes that men of different class and ethnic backgrounds have a similar and vested interest in the appropriation of women's sexuality and labor. This is, at best, a narrow interpretation. The patriarchal family, the sexual division of labor, and the home may be seen as mechanisms to suppress women's socio-economic progress. However, they can also be seen as tools for controlling men, particularly working-class men, by transforming them into 'providers' with primary responsibility for the support of women and children. Without the benefit of class analysis, patriarchy became an ahistorical explanation for women's subservience. Ironically, this was tantamount to denying women's active participation in the shaping of history and society by portraying them as the ever- passive victims of men's machinations. The perspective spearheaded by Hartmann bears some similarities with dependency theory. In the same way that the 'development of under-development was characterized as the unavoidable effect of political and economic hegemony of advanced capitalist countries, women's socio-economic subordination was defined as the ineluctable effect of patriarchy. In both cases, variations of experience were obscured by overly mechanistic models. Other, more nuanced explanations for gender inequality stemmed from the dialogue between feminism and Marxism. However, the epistemological affinity between the two strands of thought was questioned in the late 1970s (Hartmann and Markusen, 1980; Sacks, 1983). Critics argued that Marxism shares with classical and neoclassical economics an androcentric bias that subsumes women's experiences into those of men (Molyneux, 1977). By contrast, all brands of feminism aim at gaining an in-depth understanding of the specificity of women's condition, particularly as it relates to their economic and political subservience (Edholm, 1977). Nevertheless, feminism shares with Marxism the belief that political practice should intertwine logically and intimately with an inquiry into the nature of various forms of social and economic inequality. On the whole, feminist scholars challenged, and then reformulated, some fundamental Marxist concepts. In particular, they focused on the relationship between productive and reproductive labor. They also explored the historical transition from domestic to wage forms of labor appropriation, and the role of class hierarchies and the state in defining women's and men's social positions. This offered an opportunity to conceptualize gender as part of the productive system, and as a process that meshed economic, political, and ideological aspects. Historical analysis could then be used to uncover the content of gender relations under various conditions of production and in different eras (Scott, 1986). The logical point of departure for this task was The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884, 1972), Frederick Engels' account of Marx's ideas on the subject. The argument developed in this seminal volume rests on three succinct propositions. First, monogamous marriage was a mechanism evolved over time to ensure men's control over the labor power of women, children and, in some cases, servants and slaves. Second, the nuclear family was used to safeguard the transmission of private property through the severe restriction of female sexuality. Third, both functions were enforced by the state in class-divided societies and particularly under capitalism. There were several lasting contributions in this scheme. For one, it furthered an understanding of the family as a normative concept linked to the pooling of and control of labor in actual households (Rapp, 1982). It also clarified patriarchy as a changing phenomenon tied to the perpetuation of class-divided systems of production. Finally, it illuminated the role of the state and state ideology in cementing the whole scheme (Zaretsky, 1982). However, this model also led to some egregious stumbling blocks. It assumed that the sexual division of labor was rooted in immutable biological constraints and, as a result, it adopted a contradictory stance with respect to the incorporation of women into paid employment (Sacks, 1975; Hartmann and Markusen, 1980). In some cases, this was seen as a pre-requisite to achieving the historical goals of the subordinate classes. In others, it was deplored as a violation of the natural order. In addition, Engels did not fully explain why the appropriation of women's sexuality, said to be in the interest of the ruling elites, was also found among the groups they oppressed. In other words, this paradigm failed to distinguish among various forms of domestic labor arrangements, normative concepts of the family, and how these two aspects related to class hierarchies. These limitations were further complicated by a specious debate on productive and non-productive labor which, in turn, rested upon the Marxian theory of value. As defined in Volume 1 of Capital, use value was produced by individuals in the course of fulfilling subsistence needs. Historically, it corresponded to domestic forms of labor organization in foraging and horticultural societies. The extension of class-divided modes of production and, eventually, the advent of capitalism brought about the growth of complex markets and commodities endowed with exchange value. Industrialization led to the expansion of market relations, and to the further circumscription of use value to the domestic sphere. Productive labor was irrevocably equated with paid employment. Considerable energy was squandered during the 1970s debating whether women's domestic labor was productive or not. This semantic argument threatened to divert attention from a more fundamental issue, that is, that the domestic sphere is a veiled but real domain of economic activity that subsidizes the reproduction of the work force in two related ways: Non-remunerated domestic labor secures the physical maintenance of individuals, and the replication of structures of thought and styles of life necessary to promote the accumulation of capital, the generation of profits and, in the last analysis, the perpetuation of the system of production. Moreover, it is within families and households that class, gender, and ethnicity mesh creating different modes of incorporation into wage employment, different forms of consciousness, and different alternatives for economic and political expression outside the home. Denying that domestic labor is "real work" obviates the need to acknowledge the contribution to economic growth of numerous women whose labor is rendered invisible (Bener¡a, 1982). In turn, this spares the capitalist classes a need to confront the costs that the reproduction of the labor force would entail if women did not assume that responsibility without compensation. Thus, the relevant issue is not whether domestic labor is productive or not. Instead, the question is: What are the factors that explain the separation between two dimensions of economic activity, one characterized by unpaid domestic labor, and one typified by the presence of wage employment? This is an historical, not a theoretical, question. The answer is that, in the West, the separation between 'home and workplace' emerged gradually and was solidified under industrial capitalism (Minge-Kalman, 1978; Tilly and Scott, 1978). The split between wage and domestic labor that followed early attempts to rationalize capitalist production in Europe and in the U.S. also corresponded to redefinitions of the roles of men and women. Increasingly, women were exclusively charged with child care and the regeneration of human energy. The advent of the factory, while allowing increases in output and a more efficient organization of labor, also made it difficult for women to coordinate wage and domestic responsibilities. As mechanization advanced, remunerated employment became the prerogative of men even in those areas of production that had originally been a female domain. Women and children became dependent on men for access to resources in an increasingly monetarized marketplace. A complex body of legislation sanctioned these new arrangements. The particulars of this process have varied according to historical period and geographical area. However, the effects have been strikingly similar. Throughout the Third World, industrialization and the mechanization of agriculture have had a profound impact upon women. Those belonging to privileged classes have benefited to some extent. They have gained access to paid employment in industry, government or education, while leaving domestic work to servants. Rural women have found their conditions of life debased by the same transformations. Capital investments in commodity crops have consistently displaced women from agricultural employment (Bener¡a, 1982, Deere, 1981), and their artisanal goods have competed at great disadvantage with mass commodity production (Young, 1982). As servants and assembly workers, women have faced new dilemmas: The need to support families has led them to become wage earners. However, caring for families often prevents them from holding jobs. That tension, which reflects an inbred systemic requirement to maintain a devalued reproductive sphere outside the realm of paid employment, has been tenuously resolved in three complementary ways: First, women have clustered in a few niches of the occupational structure where jobs are seen as an extension of their domestic responsibilities. Second, those jobs have been assigned low productivity and wages (Kessler-Harris, 1975). Finally, the two phenomena are captured in ideological constructions which define women's paid employment as a supplement to that of men. Wage differentials between men and women may be interpreted as an effect of the belief that the former should have higher earnings because they have families to support, while the latter merely add to the gains of their husbands or fathers. That belief partly explains why, universally, women earn less than men when employed in jobs requiring similar levels of education, training and responsibility. Gender acts as an independent variable affecting alternatives in the labor market. Women earn lower wages than men simply because they are female. The preceding discussion may be condensed into the following points: Gender is a fundamental process linking complementary dimensions of the economy. It ensures the existence of a sphere where labor power is reproduced, disciplined and placed into circulation. It also it determines the alternatives of individuals in the realm of paid employment. The specificity of women's socio-economic experience is grounded in the contradiction resulting from that split. Moreover, gender has a decisive influence in the overall configuration of the relations of production. To paraphrase historian Joan Scott (1986), 'man' and 'woman' are, simultaneously, empty and overflowing receptacles whose content depends on the articulation of production at particular moments in time. All societies assign roles to individuals on the basis of perceived sexual characteristics. However, those roles vary significantly over time. Finally, gender interacts with but cannot be equated with class and ethnicity. The three are irreducible categories which designate highly specific relations of economic, political, and ideological domination. Merging these concepts can obfuscate critical phenomena, for example, the part played by domestic labor in the formation of class hierarchies (see Wright, 1985) or the effect of gender ideologies on differential modes of adaptation of ethnic groups into broader social configurations (Fern ndez Kelly and Garc¡a, forthcoming). In the next section I examine two cases of industrial restructuring in an increasingly internationalized economy. One of the purposes of this comparison is to illuminate the processes outlined above. An equally important objective is to sharpen key concepts already present in writings on the World Economic System. Global Development, Industrial Restructuring and Gender.- We hire women for several reasons. Women are generally more responsible than men; they are raised to be gentle and obedient, and so they are easier to deal with. They are also more nimble and meticulous and they don't get tired of doing the same operation nine- hundred times a day. So we pay them fair wages but, you know, low wages aren't why we hire them. We hire them because we know we'll have fewer problems. (Plant Manager, Ciudad Ju rez, Chihuahua) It's not just the fact that they are women, it's also the culture. Mexican women, especially the foreign-born, will do anything for their families. They're brought up to be that way. They work hard and they don't ask for much, they don't give you any hassles. So, men could do the same job but men are more ambitious and what we have is handiwork; that's women's work. (Plant manager, Los Angeles, California) Elsewhere (Fern ndez Kelly, 1983), I have described the circumstances surrounding the employment of women in Mexican assembly-plants (maquiladoras), and those that characterize the incorporation of hispanic women, many of them foreign-born, into Southern California electronics firms (Fern ndez Kelly, 1988). In both cases, women have been part of a broader trend of industrial reorganization in companies aiming to improve their competitive edge in domestic and international markets. This process has had major implications for socio-economic development in third-world countries. It has also exposed a contradiction in the productive system between the need to maintain a substratum of labor outside market exchanges and the need to lower production costs by targeting women as providers of unskilled and semiskilled labor. For almost three decades, the electronics industry has been at the forefront of major trends in the world economy. Since the late 1950s, semiconductor technology made possible the relocation of manufacturing from advanced to less-developed nations. Computers and new management strategies enabled employers to control operations more efficiently in home countries while, at the same time, coordinating productive facilities in distant geographical areas. In addition, the movement of operations to less- developed countries permitted investors to sidestep comparatively high wages and unionization rates in advanced nations and to harvest benefits derived from low-cost labor in the Third World. Since the 1960s host governments in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean provided incentive programs that led to the proliferation of export-processing zones where millions of workers, most of them women, assemble products for the world market. A striking example of export-processing industrialization is found in Mexico's border where a booming assembly-plant (maquiladora) program has existed since the mid-1960s. Although maquiladoras were first conceived as an emergency measure to create jobs, they soon became a centerpiece of Mexico's development strategy. In 1968, there were fewer than 15 plants employing approximately 2,000 people. At present, there are more than 1000 maquiladoras--60 percent of which manufacture electronics products-- hiring nearly 400,000 workers, that is, 10 percent of the Mexican labor force. Seventy-five percent of those workers are women, whose median ages range from 18 to 25 years. In recent years, the maquiladora program has grown to become the largest export-processing experiment in the world. By 1985, that program had surpassed tourism and trailed only oil production as a source of revenue for the Mexican government. Maquiladoras have been the fastest growing sector of the Mexican economy for more than a decade (Fern ndez Kelly, 1987). Despite their success, maquiladoras have caused major concerns. Critics have raised questions about the plants' impact on standards of living, wages, and the increase of unemployment and underemployment during the same period that the program has existed. These problems have been related to demographic and external economic changes--for example, comparatively high fertility rates and major currency devaluations--but they have also been associated with specific employment policies. From the beginning, managers targeted women without significantly expanding opportunities for men. Therefore, maquiladoras expanded the potential pool of available labor by recruiting 'formerly unemployable' women--wives and daughters--who had been part of the 'economically inactive' population. The statements quoted at the beginning of this section show that, in formulating hiring policies, managers rely on a reservoir of definitions about the proper roles and 'natural' predispositions of the sexes. These formulations typically invoke notions of domesticity, manual ability, obedience, and gentleness to explain the incorporation of women into low-skill, low-wage occupations. As in the case of similar constructions regarding racial and ethnic groups, those definitions reinforce the unequal treatment of individuals as members of a particular group while, at the same time, sanctioning their recruitment into specific segments of the occupational structure. In the case of women, this requires a delicate balancing act because the benefits derived from their employment depend, in large measure, on reaffirming their primary roles as mothers and wives whose proper place is in the home. Ideologies about the appropriate roles of men and women are not held by managers alone. They are shared by women who aspire to have families of their own, and male companions who act as providers for them and their children. However, many women cannot afford to be exclusively housewives and mothers. Along the U.S.- Mexican border, women seek jobs in order to support households and children. Almost half of the people living in Ciudad Ju rez are fourteen years of age or younger. The need to provide for children is exacerbated by the scarcity of jobs for men. Seventy- five percent of males (fathers, husbands, brothers, etc.) sharing households with maquiladora workers in Ciudad Ju rez are either unemployed or underemployed. Many resort to intermittent illegal work in the United States or eke out a living as laborers and petty vendors. Thus, along the U.S.-Mexico border in general, and in Ciudad Ju rez in particular, women use most of their earnings to help support families. Yet, working as an assembler is often seen by employers as a way to earn pocket money. Maquiladora workers are, therefore, considered supplementary wage earners rather than main providers. As a result, the unusually low wages they are paid are not seen as a problem by government officials, legislators, and union leaders. In addition, the very reasons why women are hired to perform repetitive, manual operations act against their capacity to organize and make demands to employers. The emphasis on women's docility, sense of responsibility, and dexterity reduces the options for collective political expression and becomes a mechanism for control at the workplace. Compelled by need, women seek paid employment in environments characterized by the scarcity of viable economic opportunities. However, maquiladora jobs do not provide channels for occupational mobility, increased earnings over time, or improvements in status. It is not surprising, then, that women see assembly jobs as an expedient way to earn meager wages and not as a source of personal or collective identity. In the end, those women alternate periods of paid employment with periods during which they withdraw into their homes. The ebb and flow of female labor helps firms to maintain their flexibility in highly competitive markets. The dynamics of domestic and paid labor are also critical for appraising new definitions of national development in the Third World. Earlier in the century, Latin American governments attempted to consolidate domestic industry through import- substitution strategies allied to nationalist agendas. The prescriptions put forth by the Economic Commission for Latin America carried an implicit affirmation of men as providers and heads of households. By contrast, current modalities of export-oriented industrialization rely on the opening of countries to foreign investment through the implementation of incentives that rely heavily on comparatively low wages and disciplined workers, many of whom are women. The goal is development through direct competition in the world market on the basis of pliant low-cost labor. Many government officials in developing nations now perceive the erosion of workers' earnings and the curtailment of political demands as requirements for successful economic integration on a world scale. Thus, the concern over the character of women's employment in less-developed countries expresses and should be linked to a broader interest in the long- term impact of export-oriented industrialization on the standards of living and occupational mobility of all workers--male and female--in third world-nations. The transfer of manufacturing operations to less- developed countries is but one of the several facets of international economic restructuring. The same period that witnessed the growth of export-processing zones in Asia and the U.S.-Mexico border also saw a shift from basic industry to services in the U.S. That transition entailed several complementary sub- processes: There was a reduction or redefinition of blue-collar employment in capital- and labor-intensive sectors, with an increase of automation in some types of manufacture, and the growth of subcontracting as a means to decentralize the economic and political risks of production. In the same vein, the rise of services and the decline of manufacturing parallelled growing class and income inequalities and drops in union membership. In many sectors, these phenomena were linked to the employment of international migrants, many of them undocumented. These changes also coincided with the massive incorporation of women into the labor force. Students of the New International Division of Labor have emphasized the role that large wage differentials have played as an incentive leading employers to move assembly operations to less developed areas. However, in the U.S., capital flight has not resulted in the total erosion of the manufacturing base. Instead, firms have resorted to major adjustments that complement foreign operations. Electronics companies aptly illustrate this trend. U.S. electronics manufacturing has experienced a vigorous growth over the last two decades. Firms have adjusted to meet the demands of highly specialized-- often defense-related--markets by providing customized products requiring technological sophistication and, therefore, proximity to research and development centers. In addition, most electronics producers have not eliminated assembly work in this country. Instead, they have relied on various forms of subcontracting, including the intermittent use of industrial homework, to supplement production at times of peak demand. Finally, employers have targeted new pools of unskilled and semiskilled labor. Originally, electronics firms hired local, white women who left their jobs after relatively short periods of employment, either to get married or to devote full attention to their families. Since the 1970s, the number of minority and migrant workers has increased. Approximately 100,000 hispanic women are employed in Southern California electronics firms alone. Choices in type of personnel have also resulted in the spatial reorganization of electronics production. For example, it is commonly believed that Santa Clara County--Silicon Valley--is home to the largest number of electronics firms in the nation. However, it is within the Los Angeles metropolitan area that the largest cluster of electronics companies in the country is located. There are several reasons for this boom: In addition to the proximity to specialized markets and research centers, employers have sought benefits derived from the presence of large, affordable labor pools, comparatively low wages and unionization rates, and access to cheap land and improved transportation. Thus, the same variables that explain the relocation of manufacturing operations to export processing zones in the Third World also clarify the domestic decentralization of manufacturing. This is evidenced in the movement of electronics firms from Northern to Southern California (Sassen, 1988). The spatial restructuring of production has entailed domestic and international subcontracting and, in turn, the tapping complementary labor pools within and outside the U.S. The employment of women, particularly Hispanic women, in Southern California electronics industries must be studied within that context and as part of a broader strategy. The proliferation of small firms, the reliance on customized products catering to specialized markets, and the widespread use of subcontracting, including industrial homework, are all aspects of a larger picture entailing the search for flexibility and competitive potential on a world scale (Sassen, 1988). Almost 40 percent of direct production workers in Southern California electronics firms are foreign-born Hispanics, most of them Mexican. Thus, export- processing manufacturing in the Third World and the proliferation of highly flexible firms in areas like Southern California entail a circuit characterized by two types of international migration. One involves massive transfers of capital from advanced industrial countries to underdeveloped and developing areas where the cost of labor is six to thirteen times lower than in the U.S., and where host governments are willing to constrain labor unrest. Another, related, type of migration is formed by individuals flowing from underdeveloped areas to advanced industrial countries in search of employment. In sharp contrast to post-industrialist expectations, the electronics industry is predominantly an employer of unskilled and semi-skilled workers most of whom are female and many of whom are migrants. Hiring policies in that sector reflect some national trends. Aggregate forecasts predict that the largest number of jobs over the next decade will be created in low-paying occupations in services and, to some extent, in direct production of non-durable and durable goods. Electronics manufacture alone will have required fifty times more janitors than engineers by the end of the century. More than 70 percent of all workers in the same industry will have been involved in direct production and assembly. Finally, electronics companies reflect a trend away from unions, and in favor of reduced government intervention in the relationship between capital and labor. In general, internationalization may be seen as both an economic and political process that allows employers to benefit from large wage differentials while, at the same time, evading rising workers demands in advanced countries. The two cases outlined above provide an opportunity for expanding the range of concepts included in theories of economic development. Writings on the 'post-industrial' society and on the World System perspective have not examined gender as an integral part of economic restructuring on a world scale. Given their utopianism, 'post-industrial' approaches cannot help elucidate the differential impact of advanced technology upon men and women or the perpetuation of wage differentials between the sexes in 'information-based societies'. Perhaps more importantly, those perspectives cannot explain why women are sought as bearers of preferred labor at times of economic transition. This is important if only because 'information-based' societies have generated an unprecedented number of jobs for women and transformed the employment alternatives of men. The 'World-System' perspective has steered analysis toward a high level of abstraction where it is difficult to unfold the 'statistic self' and to examine the particulars of actual human interaction (see, for example Smith, Wallerstein and Evers, 1984). Nonetheless, that literature offers a distinct path for integrating the contributions made by studies on gender and development. The world-system perspective posed, since the mid-1970s, that the inception of capitalism, as an hegemonic mode of production, occurred gradually in Europe during the 'long sixteenth century' (1450-1640). Primitive accumulation on the basis of agriculture, raw material extraction, and the elaboration of crafts was succeeded by increasing mechanization, technological innovation and, eventually, the establishment of factories and assembly lines. Maquiladoras and flexible electronics firms in Southern California can be seen as recent outcomes of this process. Capitalism extended wage labor and commodity exchange as predominant features of the economy. However, it also depended, for the realization of profit, on the maintenance of preexisting productive arrangements. Special attention has been given to the endurance of subsistence agriculture, petty commodity production and the underground economy as mechanisms subsidizing the generation of profit and capitalist accumulation (Portes and Walton, 1981). Thus, one of the enduring contributions of the world-system perspective has been its elaboration of the notion of 'articulation' which qualified conceptualizations of capitalism as a system whose expansion had destroyed all pre-existing modalities of labor organization. The modern world-system may be best understood as a composite formed by overlapping modes of production-- some characterized by subsistence activities--and one predominant realm where advanced capitalist exchanges occur. Writings on the world-system have posed the need to examine households as part of the study of development. What is missing in this framework is a specification of domestic units as loci where the articulation of modes of production actually takes place. Households can be conceptualized as flexible entities encompassing not one but several mechanisms for gaining access to resources through subsistence activities and paid employment. This involves the differential allocation of household members to various economic domains. The differential allocation of labor power into interlocking realms of production occurs primarily on the basis of gender. It is impossible to understand the concept of articulation without relating it to definitions of womanhood and manhood and to different roles played by men and women in the broader economy. Finally, the domestic sphere is endowed with a measure of relative autonomy insofar as it constitutes the site where the reproduction of labor power takes place. The salient implication of this analysis is that domestic units provide an economic substratum that enables the replication of unequal economic exchanges in outward-oriented and overlapping circles of production. In some cases, women's non-remunerated labor as wives and mothers sustains the incorporation of individuals into subsistence and underground economic activities; those, in turn, can supply low- cost labor channeled through subcontracting arrangements, that ultimately subsidize the maximization of profits in the formal sector of the economy. In the case of maquiladoras and Southern California electronics industries, domestic units formed by women and immigrants are tapped directly by firms aiming at lowering the cost of production and retaining a competitive margin. In both instances, households, organized on the basis of gender, represent the first layer upon which processes of unequal exchange are founded. Writings on gender and development have explained the strains resulting from this transaction. On the whole, capitalist economies cannot dispense with domestic spheres which largely subsidize the reproduction of the labor force. However, the subordination of domestic units to market exchanges makes women particularly appealing as bearers of unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Under capitalism, women cannot be fully incorporated into the labor force without threatening the political and economic stability of the system as a whole. But, at times of structural transformation, the system is found uneasily chasing its own shadow by enlisting women into wage employment. Conclusions.- Studies of gender and development have some times been perceived by observers as an endless litany of feminist complaints about the perceived or real abuses of men. The preceding discussion makes clear, however, that an analysis of gender entails more than that. In the best of circumstances, it refines our understanding of fundamental economic, political, and ideological processes by identifying aspects of the productive system that other concepts are able to explain only in limited ways. A cursory review of the literature on gender and development shows several breaking points. Pioneer writings on the subject adhered to modernization perspectives and offered liberal economic alternatives to enhance the position of women in third world societies. Marxist critiques gave way to a new set of issues that enhanced the analytical potential of conceptualizations of gender. Most importantly, feminist thought contributed to shift the focus of analysis to basic aspects of the productive system that Marxism as well as other approaches had neglected. The conversation among several currents of thought has entailed an intellectually stimulating exchange of major implications for the understanding of development in both advanced and industrializing countries. Finally, most of the literature on gender and development has primarily focused on the experience of women. This was in response to earlier omissions in general theories of economic development. 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