Engulfed by the family: women in the Colombian Development State between 1966 and 1990

Abstract

This article analyzes the evolution of social policy in Colombia in relation with macroeconomic development policies and family since 1966. Understanding that many legal reforms have been unable to redistribute resources across gender lines because of their inability to foreground economic development models and its consequences in macro policy framework, the main objective of this article is to make explicit the limitations imposed to women by them. Accordingly, development plans and other policy documents are taken seriously in order to show through a close reading of them that they limit the possibilities of reforms aimed at redistributing resources towards women because of their understanding of the family as a unit that would follow the luck of its male head and as the essential site of traditional, cultural and biological reproduction. Thus, women, understood as the responsible for human reproduction, and not as workers or citizens, were subordinated to the reproduction of patriarchal families, structurally affecting women’s access to resources.