Paper short abstract:

Development policy around the world is increasingly addressing women in their roles as mothers, crowding out policies that target women in roles outside the family. Why is this occurring, and is this trend reconcilable with a “feminist” approach to development?

Paper long abstract:

Over the last few decades, advanced Western democracies have begun to move away from policies encouraging women to be full-time mothers at home, adopting instead policies that facilitate women's equal participation in the workforce. The developing world, on the other hand, has witnessed a little-noticed countervailing trend: that of rising emphasis on women as mothers in social policy and the resultant erasure of women's other social roles from the policy discourse, a trend I identify as "maternalism." Why are we seeing this new wave of maternalist social policy in the developing world and what are its implications for gender inequality? In this project I seek to gain insight into these questions through a close examination of India, which provides a useful case study because it is a developing country in which the rise of maternalist policy is both particularly stark given the otherwise low levels of social spending and especially surprising because it has occurred in absence of the widely accepted causes of maternalism. I use comparative analysis of two of India's major social programs for women to demonstrate that Indian maternalism is a result of (1) the widespread internalization by Indian policymakers of the maternal health norms promoted by the Millennium Development Goals, and (2) the Indian state's propensity to view the issue of women's empowerment through the lens of poverty rather than that of gender justice. The obfuscation of women's non-maternal roles in public policy, I suggest, augurs poorly for bringing feminism back into development policy and practice.