What do you think?
Rate this book
Women, Development, and the UN: A Sixty-Year Quest for Equality and Justice
Covers the history of United Nations' programs that have benefited women in developing nations, describing the impact on rights, equality, and social justice.
Hardcover
First published September 1, 2005
22 people want to read
About the author
Devaki Jain
22 books24 followersDevaki Jain is an economist, feminist writer, and former director of the Institute of Social Studies Trust in New Delhi.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Want to read
April 15, 2025Introduction to the book
The book ‘Women, Development and the UN’ by the renowned Indian economist Devaki Jain is an account of the parallel evolution of women’s movement, ideas of development and the role of the United Nations therein as the harbour for these developments over six decades from its birth. The contributions and struggles of women, be it the frontline leaders in the Commission on the Status of Women or the lesser-known activists who channelized between them and the public, in the pursuit of equality for women and various aspects of development and human rights, have been expatiated on with sophistication.
The author and the book-
The author is an economist, activist and researcher. She has had a background of working in numerous studies and has been a Fellow at various institutions like Scandinavian Institute for Asian Studies Copenhagen, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and her alma mater itself, St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
At UN, she has gathered plenty information on the dynamics of development and gender in diverse countries as Chair of the Advisory Committee on Gender for the United Nations Centre in Asia-Pacific. All this time spent with the United Nations under various posts, driving crucial missions and studies, has certainly instilled a deep, first-hand understanding of the themes that she attempts to write about in her books, especially this one that particularly focuses on the reforming and creative works of the United Nations. Devaki Jain is often referred to as a feminist economist, that is to imply that she is an economist with special emphasis on the aspects concerning the interests, welfare and contributions of women. The preceding sentence seems to carry the same contradiction that she discusses in her book regarding feminism, the dilemma of giving ‘special’ treatment to women for the civil, political and social drawbacks they have suffered at the hands of male-dominated policy-making since time immemorial, or to treat them with no more attention then men by virtue of the ‘equal’ treatment they themselves demand. The first chapter of the book ‘Setting the stage for equality’ mentions the opposing views among the women leaders of UN in its initial years, that was best depicted in contrasting stances of contemporaries Eleanor Roosevelt and Bodil Begtrup, who each insisted on two sides of the above dilemma, but Begtrup’s argument was supported by many women leaders from developing countries unlike Roosevelt who perhaps hadn’t got to see the way things were different in these nations from her own country, the United States of America . Owing to Begtrup, the voices of women got ‘a space of their own’ in the hustling UN, in the form of a separate autonomous Commission.
Overview of the contents of the book
The sixty years of the United Nations from 1945 to 2005 and the contents of the book have been divided in to five parts.
The first chapter ‘Setting the stage for equality (1945-65)’ puts forth all aspects of ‘setting the stage’ for a quest that initially seemed to concern only half the population of the world but later churned out ideas and methodologies so effective, democratic and noble that they seeped into the essence of human rights, development and world peace. It traces the journey of women from being a total of four in number as signatories of the Charter of United Nations, to building networks of women that worked together, from countries developed and developing, to bring about solutions and justice to even the stakeholders most distant from its operations. The author discusses also the firsts that these women accomplished, including the first ever use of gender-unspecific language in the Charter and preamble by an international organisation like UN and the various organisational reforms that created space for women’s affairs as she also accounts for the ‘offstage’ struggles of forming correct ideologies that were to underlie the decisions of the UN.
The author’s academic research and advocacy was influenced largely by Gandhian philosophy and her focus on issues of equity, democratic decentralization, people-centered development, and women’s rights, is evident in the other books that she has authored and the endeavours she has engaged in. How the aspirations, demands and ideas of the women for their place in the world were to be officially, materialistically assured, is what has been described in the second chapter ‘Inscribing the developments into Rights (1966-75)’. The first developmental decade of UN saw action on the ‘stage’ that had been set over a longtime. Women were still in meagre numbers at the UN, yet leaders like Helvi Sipilä managed to bring the necessary perspective in solving issues like population burst which, like other cases, often forgot to consider women as not only a part of the issue but also as a potent solution that could be worked upon. The chapter shows instances to assert deeply the way women had been sidelined from the gist of the most crucial issues, and how women leaderships emerged often with effective solutions by simply paying heed to these factors that were previously missed.
The third chapter, ‘Questioning Development Paradigms (1976-85)’, shows how, during the Decade of Women as declared by UN, the women’s movement garnered relatively more efforts and results despite being overshadowed, at times, by other humanitarian issues prevalent at the time. It was this time when all-new information and researches on the states, social and economic conditions and roles of women, were carried out to pour in the real and practical insights into the lives of women. These would later guide for more efficient policy-making in Conferences and better discussions on development ideas in seminars, that were to follow.
‘Development as if women mattered (1986-95)’, is the title that chapter four goes by. The decade under review revealed many of the dilemmas and disjunctions of women’s history with the United Nations, including both the disjunction between the increasing strength of women’s voice and the decline in the condition of women at the ground and the increasing spaces for women’s advocacy at the world body and doubts about the value of those spaces. The events of this period have been so described as to suggest that they foreshadowed the dramatic changes that were about to emerge, both in global governance and in people’s responses to those changes.
In the fifth and the final chapter, ‘Lessons learnt from the UN’s sixth decade (1995-2005)’, the author marks again the advancements made by the women’s movement during this decade and also discusses and analyses more theoretically the work of the UN, the women’s movement, their synergy and numerous other forces that penetrate the fabric of global policy-making, standard-setting and administration. It is here that she implies that the struggle is not over yet and that women’s movement and UN’s duties are far from being over. True reform will not happen until the political will is created and activated to fully bring women into the mainstream with equal privileges, access to resources, and decision-making roles, until women’s intellectual contributions are received as the luminous ideas for which the world body was once well known. Jain concludes the chapter and, thereby the book, by concluding the collaboration of the United Nations with the women’s movement as meaningful and unparalleled in all social, political, economic and personal frames of the globe.
Salient features of the book
This work by Devaki Jain provides an account of the promised themes in a very organised and well-researched manner. The layout of the book into chapters is itself simple as it should be, being based on consecutive decades following the birth of the United Nations organisation. The chapters have been subdivided into witty sub-themes, that seem to follow a flow-chart, and are consistent and correspondent in idea over the chapters.
The contents of the book have been overviewed in the previous section and through the same, the characteristics of it being well-researched is evident. The theme that the book covers is broad and multi-dimensional, there can always be more perspectives to take into account, yet, the discussions in the book are relevant and well-chosen from a sea of indiscriminate information, they are true to the path that the book tries to traverse. The data presented in the book are placed in the right amount at the right places. The text rarely has any statistical numbers to pause and wrap your head around, but it does have tables in between that puts forth full-blown data that is, at places, crucial to supplement the points made in the text, but wouldn’t hinder the understanding of a non-scholar reader.
The writing is quite balanced with both factual information, historical timelines, short introductions to personalities that the world doesn’t know much about and parts that read more like a discussion forum, where ideas are expatiated on.
An enrichment to literature? ..Or not?
While introducing the theme of the book, author Devaki Jain elaborates on various subtleties of the issue, and amidst these discussions she attempts to evaluate the value of the book itself, in the vastness of all of the literature. Numerous books on Development lie in the literary world, the works on the evolution of the United Nations as an organisation are not few in numbers either and women’s movement has been accumulating literature in its name for more than a century now. This book adds value to the endless sea of literary works by virtue of dealing with the interconnections and interplay of these three, their intertwined history of growing and their potential for the future. The niche that this book fits, according to the author herself, is, specifically, the political ground of this interplay, an assertion well maintained in the book. Besides, the involvement of the author in the field, in the proceedings of the United Nations, in all endeavours concerning the theme of the book and her own unique stances on issues that are directly and indirectly expressed in the words of the book, must contribute something that is out of the capability of another author, and that makes the book worth a read.
The book ‘Women, Development and the UN’ by the renowned Indian economist Devaki Jain is an account of the parallel evolution of women’s movement, ideas of development and the role of the United Nations therein as the harbour for these developments over six decades from its birth. The contributions and struggles of women, be it the frontline leaders in the Commission on the Status of Women or the lesser-known activists who channelized between them and the public, in the pursuit of equality for women and various aspects of development and human rights, have been expatiated on with sophistication.
The author and the book-
The author is an economist, activist and researcher. She has had a background of working in numerous studies and has been a Fellow at various institutions like Scandinavian Institute for Asian Studies Copenhagen, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and her alma mater itself, St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
At UN, she has gathered plenty information on the dynamics of development and gender in diverse countries as Chair of the Advisory Committee on Gender for the United Nations Centre in Asia-Pacific. All this time spent with the United Nations under various posts, driving crucial missions and studies, has certainly instilled a deep, first-hand understanding of the themes that she attempts to write about in her books, especially this one that particularly focuses on the reforming and creative works of the United Nations. Devaki Jain is often referred to as a feminist economist, that is to imply that she is an economist with special emphasis on the aspects concerning the interests, welfare and contributions of women. The preceding sentence seems to carry the same contradiction that she discusses in her book regarding feminism, the dilemma of giving ‘special’ treatment to women for the civil, political and social drawbacks they have suffered at the hands of male-dominated policy-making since time immemorial, or to treat them with no more attention then men by virtue of the ‘equal’ treatment they themselves demand. The first chapter of the book ‘Setting the stage for equality’ mentions the opposing views among the women leaders of UN in its initial years, that was best depicted in contrasting stances of contemporaries Eleanor Roosevelt and Bodil Begtrup, who each insisted on two sides of the above dilemma, but Begtrup’s argument was supported by many women leaders from developing countries unlike Roosevelt who perhaps hadn’t got to see the way things were different in these nations from her own country, the United States of America . Owing to Begtrup, the voices of women got ‘a space of their own’ in the hustling UN, in the form of a separate autonomous Commission.
Overview of the contents of the book
The sixty years of the United Nations from 1945 to 2005 and the contents of the book have been divided in to five parts.
The first chapter ‘Setting the stage for equality (1945-65)’ puts forth all aspects of ‘setting the stage’ for a quest that initially seemed to concern only half the population of the world but later churned out ideas and methodologies so effective, democratic and noble that they seeped into the essence of human rights, development and world peace. It traces the journey of women from being a total of four in number as signatories of the Charter of United Nations, to building networks of women that worked together, from countries developed and developing, to bring about solutions and justice to even the stakeholders most distant from its operations. The author discusses also the firsts that these women accomplished, including the first ever use of gender-unspecific language in the Charter and preamble by an international organisation like UN and the various organisational reforms that created space for women’s affairs as she also accounts for the ‘offstage’ struggles of forming correct ideologies that were to underlie the decisions of the UN.
The author’s academic research and advocacy was influenced largely by Gandhian philosophy and her focus on issues of equity, democratic decentralization, people-centered development, and women’s rights, is evident in the other books that she has authored and the endeavours she has engaged in. How the aspirations, demands and ideas of the women for their place in the world were to be officially, materialistically assured, is what has been described in the second chapter ‘Inscribing the developments into Rights (1966-75)’. The first developmental decade of UN saw action on the ‘stage’ that had been set over a longtime. Women were still in meagre numbers at the UN, yet leaders like Helvi Sipilä managed to bring the necessary perspective in solving issues like population burst which, like other cases, often forgot to consider women as not only a part of the issue but also as a potent solution that could be worked upon. The chapter shows instances to assert deeply the way women had been sidelined from the gist of the most crucial issues, and how women leaderships emerged often with effective solutions by simply paying heed to these factors that were previously missed.
The third chapter, ‘Questioning Development Paradigms (1976-85)’, shows how, during the Decade of Women as declared by UN, the women’s movement garnered relatively more efforts and results despite being overshadowed, at times, by other humanitarian issues prevalent at the time. It was this time when all-new information and researches on the states, social and economic conditions and roles of women, were carried out to pour in the real and practical insights into the lives of women. These would later guide for more efficient policy-making in Conferences and better discussions on development ideas in seminars, that were to follow.
‘Development as if women mattered (1986-95)’, is the title that chapter four goes by. The decade under review revealed many of the dilemmas and disjunctions of women’s history with the United Nations, including both the disjunction between the increasing strength of women’s voice and the decline in the condition of women at the ground and the increasing spaces for women’s advocacy at the world body and doubts about the value of those spaces. The events of this period have been so described as to suggest that they foreshadowed the dramatic changes that were about to emerge, both in global governance and in people’s responses to those changes.
In the fifth and the final chapter, ‘Lessons learnt from the UN’s sixth decade (1995-2005)’, the author marks again the advancements made by the women’s movement during this decade and also discusses and analyses more theoretically the work of the UN, the women’s movement, their synergy and numerous other forces that penetrate the fabric of global policy-making, standard-setting and administration. It is here that she implies that the struggle is not over yet and that women’s movement and UN’s duties are far from being over. True reform will not happen until the political will is created and activated to fully bring women into the mainstream with equal privileges, access to resources, and decision-making roles, until women’s intellectual contributions are received as the luminous ideas for which the world body was once well known. Jain concludes the chapter and, thereby the book, by concluding the collaboration of the United Nations with the women’s movement as meaningful and unparalleled in all social, political, economic and personal frames of the globe.
Salient features of the book
This work by Devaki Jain provides an account of the promised themes in a very organised and well-researched manner. The layout of the book into chapters is itself simple as it should be, being based on consecutive decades following the birth of the United Nations organisation. The chapters have been subdivided into witty sub-themes, that seem to follow a flow-chart, and are consistent and correspondent in idea over the chapters.
The contents of the book have been overviewed in the previous section and through the same, the characteristics of it being well-researched is evident. The theme that the book covers is broad and multi-dimensional, there can always be more perspectives to take into account, yet, the discussions in the book are relevant and well-chosen from a sea of indiscriminate information, they are true to the path that the book tries to traverse. The data presented in the book are placed in the right amount at the right places. The text rarely has any statistical numbers to pause and wrap your head around, but it does have tables in between that puts forth full-blown data that is, at places, crucial to supplement the points made in the text, but wouldn’t hinder the understanding of a non-scholar reader.
The writing is quite balanced with both factual information, historical timelines, short introductions to personalities that the world doesn’t know much about and parts that read more like a discussion forum, where ideas are expatiated on.
An enrichment to literature? ..Or not?
While introducing the theme of the book, author Devaki Jain elaborates on various subtleties of the issue, and amidst these discussions she attempts to evaluate the value of the book itself, in the vastness of all of the literature. Numerous books on Development lie in the literary world, the works on the evolution of the United Nations as an organisation are not few in numbers either and women’s movement has been accumulating literature in its name for more than a century now. This book adds value to the endless sea of literary works by virtue of dealing with the interconnections and interplay of these three, their intertwined history of growing and their potential for the future. The niche that this book fits, according to the author herself, is, specifically, the political ground of this interplay, an assertion well maintained in the book. Besides, the involvement of the author in the field, in the proceedings of the United Nations, in all endeavours concerning the theme of the book and her own unique stances on issues that are directly and indirectly expressed in the words of the book, must contribute something that is out of the capability of another author, and that makes the book worth a read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review