Gender in historical and development studies: An agenda for the 1990's?

Abstract

In the history of Western capitalist industrial economies, low income families, dependent on the working class man's inadequate earning power, were eventually assisted by an emphasis on state welfare schemes rather than on rising cash wage levels. Such schemes are, however, largely missing as a basic infrastructure in most of the poorer developing countries. And yet public provision of facilities for water, fuel, sanitation, health, education, low cost housing, etc., is now under attack throughout the world in all types of economies as inflationary. It is suggested, therefore, that the poverty of wage levels, the role of welfare services and their provision, and a more realistic measurement of women's economic contribution, unpaid as well as paid, should form an interrelated agenda for the 1990s.