Sources are the building blocks of the historical narrative. The search for source materials and their critical cross-examination are integral parts of the historian's task. Yet these efforts usually are hidden from view: historians favor presenting the completed narrative rather than discussing the important steps in research. In some fields of history, the question of appropriate sources is exceedingly critical. Women's history is one such field, quite simply because the secondary literature has tended to neglect women's lives and the more common primary archival sources similarly are mute. Societal prejudices that kept women out of our documented history also have limited their appearance in the original sources. For example, Saxon officials in the textile villages of the Oberlausitz drew up detailed lists of wage-earning weavers around the mid-nineteenth century. These lists are remarkable for the absence of women, who were very active in home weaving, due to an administrative decision to limit the survey to those with the franchise.1 In the history of lower-class women are found the same complications that social historians experience in tracking the lives of people who left sketchy and incomplete records. And much of the published material that exists on working-class women challenges the historian for its class as well as gender and ideological biases.
The article traces the impact of feminist activists and development experts from around the world who, from the 1960s to the 1990s, pushed for greater attention to women's life situations in the emerging and increasingly contentious international debates about economic growth. Increasingly well-positioned within UN commissions, bureaus, and development agencies, these women used the statistical facts about policy impacts to redefine economic development agendas along feminist lines. This information 'from below' produced a 'knowledge revolution' that circulated widely within the UN system with far-reaching consequences for feminist advocacy. The new knowledge deepened understandings of rights claims even as its meanings, over time, led to competing responses among feminists to the continuing challenges of global inequality. The article is based on extensive published primary sources and relevant secondary interdisciplinary literature.
KeywordsCommission on the Status of Women, DAWN, economic development, gender and development, transnational feminism, women-in-developmentThe UN Decade for Women (1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985) brought diverse groups of women from around the globe together at women's world conferences to identify, and seek policy solutions to, the perceived disadvantages of women with respect to men's life opportunities. The
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