Joanne Meyerowitz Analyzes Past Anti-Poverty Campaigns

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Joanne Meyerowitz described the historical role of women in anti-poverty campaigns.

At the Sept. 30, 2021 Human Rights Workshop, historian Joanne Meyerowitz spoke about her most recent book, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit. Meyerowitz — the Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and Professor of American Studies at Yale University — discussed how and why anti-poverty efforts increasingly focused on women as the “deserving poor” and the shift’s implications for human rights.

The book is a history of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s, a project that began when Meyerowitz’s curiosity was piqued by the “obscure” 1973 Percy Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act. This amendment, she said, requires U.S. foreign aid agencies include women in development projects overseas. It sparked a research process that led Meyerowitz to engage with three “separate, interlocking histories.”

Meyerowitz first considered how 1970s experts on development sought to address poverty through redistribution. At the time, they investigated how to redistribute wealth both among nations and within them. The approach was a pivot away from past efforts, she explained. “Experts were nudged to the left, moved by the failures of previous development programs that didn’t trickle down,” said Meyerowitz. She suggested that they were also inspired by radical movements by African socialists and religious humanists that sought to address global inequality. This shift in their attention was marked by a repudiation of the “large-scale modernization projects” that were embraced in the 1950s and 1960s, she said, and by a focus on “local programs to address the basic needs of people.”

Meyerowitz described how her book moves from this early ’70s-era transition to a discussion about the integration of women in global development. In the early 1970s, feminists began advocating for the inclusion of women into development projects, Meyerowitz said. The movement arose out of a concern for on-the-ground poverty and informal economies where women predominated. It was founded on the beliefs that “women should have access to the training and jobs routinely offered to men,” and that “women should be integrated into the modern economy as ‘income generators’” with “access to remunerative labor,” According to Meyerowitz.

The advocates for women argued that “existing development programs were harming women,” excluding them and confining them to traditional gender roles. As a result, liberal feminists in the U.S. were inspired to push for the Percy Amendment, and women in development offices and programs were established worldwide. Under President Ronald Reagan, Meyerowitz said, the U.S. women in development movement was not eliminated as Reagan did not oppose “putting poor women to work in income-generating activities.” But his administration “changed the orientation of women in development” toward a “petty capitalist business development model,” she said.

In a “retreat from redistribution,” the women in development movement became increasingly “neoliberal, private, [and] market-oriented” with the provision of “microcredit” to women with low incomes. Microcredit organizations, many of which are now for-profit companies, operate by providing small loans to people in poverty, generally with the idea that they can start their own business and ultimately pay back the loan after they have started generating a regular income. In the 1970s, women were seen as equally deserving of these micro loans, which, Meyerowitz pointed out, were billed as business and not as welfare. In the 1980s, however, women began to be characterized as “better investments than men.” The change represented a “significant shift in the stories told about gender,” Meyerowitz explained. Women of the Global South were considered “the virtuous poor, the deserving poor,” while men were characterized as “untrustworthy.”

Meyerowitz said that the microcredit model could be harmful as well as helpful. Going into debt, she argued, is not the best way to prosperity.

Through the history of development that Meyerowitz traced, human rights were notable mostly for their absence in anti-poverty arguments. Meyerowitz said she repeatedly came across a “right to self-determination” embraced by leaders of the Global South, which sought “equity among nations, but not within them.” This moral and political claim, Meyerowitz noted, was “not in the language of human rights.”

Anti-poverty work was also typically framed in economic terms rather than rights-based terms. Meyerowitz suggested that in some cases, such as during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, the distinction was based on the fact that anti-poverty programs were seen as a complement or corollary to human rights campaigns. In other contexts, advocates “positioned their work as good economic policy” rather than invoking women’s rights, which could provoke anti-feminist opposition.

Not all advocates delicately steered clear of women’s rights language, though. She highlighted the 1978 testimony of Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, at a congressional hearing on international women’s issues. Decades before Hillary Clinton made the phrase famous, Height declared that “women’s rights are human rights,” she said.

Meyerowitz acknowledged that it’s “really easy to criticize” development programs. “I’m not a nihilist and I want us to remember that we should work to redistribute wealth and for gender equality and to end poverty and its material deprivations,” she said. Meyerowitz suggested that revisiting the programs of the past could help illuminate a path toward that future.