Abstract
In 1977, speaking at the Asian Regional United Nations Seminar on Participation of Women in Political, Economic, and Social Development, Mrs Arakitti Jatarupamaya from the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Bangkok Office reaffirmed her agency’s commitment to women workers. “The ILO believes that the problems and the interests of women are generally indistinguishable from those of men and they should be dealt with in the same manner and within the same framework of policy,” she announced. But given “changing trends in economic and social development, programmes have been intensified to help women attain better training and equal opportunity and treatment in employment.”1 This hybrid conception of the woman worker — the same as men but targeted for compensatory or additional treatment — reflected a long-standing position of the ILO recalibrated for the UN Decade for Women but also updated for a world where the challenges of global inequality stood at the centre of debates over the meaning of development, in which women and men from newly independent states across the globe demanded action.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
International Labour Office, Declaration of Philadelphia (Montreal: ILO, 1944), online.
D. S. Cobble, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World: U.S. Labor Women’s Reform Internationalism and the Legacies of 1919,” The Journal of American History, 100 (2014), 1052–85.
C. T. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in C. T. Mohanty et al., eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51–80.
Ibid., 72.
G. Rist, A History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed Books, 2001); D. R. Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940–1970 (Basingstoke, UK and Geneva: Palgrave Macmillan and ILO, 2012); “Development of Opportunities for Women in Handicrafts and Cottage Industries,” ILO Draft for the IX Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, 28, ESC 77–78.
Here I am indebted to J. Olcutt, “The Battle within the Home: Development Strategies, Second-Wave Feminism, and the Commodification of Caring Labors at the Mexico City International Women’s Year Conference, 1975,” in L. Fink, ed., Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labour History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 194–214.
Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940–70 (Basingstoke, UK and Geneva: Palgrave Macmillan and ILO, 2012)
For a summary of these differences, N. Kabeler, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought (New York: Verso Press, 1994).
M. J. Alexander and C. Mohanty, “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radica Praxis,” in A. L. Swarr and R. Nagar, eds., Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 24.
G. Rodgers, E. Lee, L. Swepston, and J. Van Daele, The ILO and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009 (Geneva and Ithaca, NY: ILO and Cornell University Press, 2009), 195–204.
ILO, Report to the Governments of Ceylon, India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand on Conditions of Women’s Work in Seven Asian Countries (Geneva: ILO, 1958), 13.
For example, E. Boris, “Desirable Dress: Rosies, Sky Girls, and the Politics of Appearance,” ILWCH, 69, no.1 (Spring, 2006), 123–42.
M. Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (London: Zed Books for the ILO, 1982).
E. Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 247–52.
International Labour Conference, 48th Session, 1964, Sixth Item on the Agenda, Women Workers in a Changing World Report VI (1) (Geneva: ILO, 1963), 1–2, 107. On UN efforts, Arvonne S. Fraser, “Becoming Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly, 21 (1999), 890–91.
ILO, Women Workers in a Changing World Report, VI, no.1 (1963), 107–10.
Ibid.
International Labour Conference, Record of Proceedings, 48th Session, 1964 (Geneva: ILO, 1965), 458, 459.
International Labour Conference, Record of Proceedings, 49th Session, 1965 (Geneva: ILO, 1965), 385.
International Labour Conference, “Appendices: Eighth Item on the Agenda: Equality of Opportunity and Treatment for Women Workers,” Record of Proceedings, 60th Session, Geneva 1975 (Geneva: ILO, 1976), 781.
United Nations, Meeting in Mexico: The Story of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, 19 June–July 1975 (New York: United Nations, 1975), 3.
E. Prügl, The Global Construction of Gender: Home-Based Work in the Political Economy of the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 100–01, 108–13; E. Boris and E. Prügl, eds., Homeworkers in Global Perspective: Invisible No More (New York: Routledge, 1995); ILO, Home Work: Fourth Item on the Agenda, 4 (2A) (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1996).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 International Labour Organization
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Boris, E. (2016). Difference’s Other: The ILO and “Women in Developing Countries”. In: Jensen, J.M., Lichtenstein, N. (eds) The ILO from Geneva to the Pacific Rim. International Labour Organization (ILO) Century Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137570901_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137570901_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57592-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57090-1
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)