Analysing Women's Movements

Despite the appearance of an extensive literature on women’s movements and the steady growth since the mid-1970s in works which offer a critical, feminist engagement with political theory,1 discussion of the broader implications of women’s politics remains a relatively unexamined aspect of the literature on development. There have been some recent attempts to redress this absence,2 yet it is as if the debates within feminist political theory and the field of development studies have pursued parallel paths with little real engagement with each other. This is all the more remarkable given the impact of women’s movements on policy-making and politics in the developing world.