‘Selective Rights, Collective Wrongs: Women, body-politics and the development agenda’, Index on Censorship, Vol. 4, Special Issue for the Beijing Conference
Official development-speak calculates time in decades. The U Ndeclared the 1960s the ‘First Decade of Development’, by whichreckoning, we are now in the fourth decade of development. Women,however, were not discovered until half-way through the second decade:at International Women’s Year in 1975. Which put ‘Women in Development’ just 20 years behind.The reason the women in development calendar moves at a separate pace from that of the mainstream is the time it took- an extra decade and a half – to persuade policy makers and planners that women’s specific needs and interests have been systematically left out of the development agenda. While this has been gradually rectified over the past
two decades, the incorporation of women’s issues into the development process has been on very selective terms…
