Between 1986 and 1999, the British Government’s development cooperation Ministry published a series of information booklets to publicise its policy in relation to women and development (ODA 1986, 1989, 1992, 1995; DFID 1999).
These were colloquially known in house as “WID [Women in Development] glossies”. They aimed to provide the government’s policy position at the moment of publication. Three years or so later that position had shifted and a new booklet was required (DFID 2000).
The cover of the 1986 publication has a photograph of a group of sullen, immobile sariclad women, one very obviously pregnant and in a rural setting. The cover on the next booklet, in 1989, shows a more modern image of women: technicians in white coats, in a laboratory and on a research station. In 1991, it is a lively young woman teacher in a shalwar kameez, sharing a joke with a group of laughing girl pupils. The fourth booklet, published for the Beijing Conference in 1995, reverts to tradition: a sari-clad woman frowns in concentration as she makes a basket. Finally, in 1999 the title Breaking the Barriers returns to the educational image. A group of school girls and boys, is depicted, thus representing the shift in British aid policy from WID to Gender and Development (GAD).
The choice of these covers was a small, but significant element in a repetitive contest within the Ministry about the pictorial and textual content of each booklet. These contests were an important arena for the making, confirming and disputing of the government’s evolving policy on women. It was a battle between those who wanted each booklet to stop further change by drawing a line in the sand and those seeing it as a pointer towards a more progressive policy.
I write this article as an erstwhile biased protagonist, a social development adviser and gender specialist, involved in the politics of a hierarchical and initially highly patriarchal organisation. Fellow protagonists and I saw ourselves more as guerrillas than missionaries (Miller and Razavi 1998). Thus, I describe dreary, bureaucratic arguments over the choice of words and pictures as “battles” because that is how I felt it to be – battles to illuminate, challenge and change the norms and meaning embedded in government policy (Fraser 1989). Although I cannot represent the UK gender and development lobby, it seemed to me that many women in that group also saw it as a battle, in which the construction of the policy document was a key field of engagement.
In the next section, I describe each booklet’s policy context. I then provide a historical account of the specific policy processes that shaped each booklet and follow this by analysing the stories, that is the myths and fables, that the booklets contain. I conclude by briefly touching on the advantages and perils in deploying such stories as an instrument to policy change.
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This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 35.4 (2004) Battles Over Booklets: Gender Myths in the British Aid Programme
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