Economic Growth, Peasant Marginalization, and the Sexual Division of Labor in Early Twentieth-Century China

In recent decades economic development theory has increasingly focused on the question of women and work. At the same time, development agencies and planners have attempted to integrate programs for improvement of the economic and social position of women into larger strategies aimed at increasing agricultural and industrial growth in the Third World. Two implicit assumptions have formed the basis for many of these programs and the theory from which they arise: first, that processes of economic growth and development associated with market expansion are benevolent; and second, that the primary problem for Third World women has been insufficient participation in these processes. Although these assumptions continue to undergird development planning, they have not gone unchallenged. Indeed, in the two decades since Ester Boserup's (1970) pioneering work first documented that both planned and unplanned market expansion often resulted in more work but no improvement-or even decline-in the condition of rural