Women and Politics in the Third World
Sample Term Paper
Words 2,300
Introduction
In the early 1970s, scholars of anthropology and development attempted to document the lives of women and emphasize the importance of the woman’s perspective; this practice often resulted in universal explanations of women and their subordination. The assumption that women were a discrete category, who experienced similar constraints and interests regardless of class, race, and age, was applied cross-culturally and universally. This early scholarship was followed by an array of works that sought to produce an image of an “average Third World” woman, “based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘Third World’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, religious, domesticated, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)”; scholars often constructed the Caucasian Western woman as culturally superior, liberated, and modern. (Mohanty, 1988; Marchand, 1995) (more…)