Expertise in the Age of Development
Gender, Race, and French Social Programs in Newly Independent Francophone West Africa
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Abstract
This article examines small-scale development programs targeting women in Niger and Senegal between 1962 and 1975. Development's attention to large-scale public works and programs targeting men as productive laborers obscures UNESCO's promise to provide men and women in developing countries equal access to and an equal role in the transformation of their nations. Studying women's animation, a grassroots approach to modernizing rural African villages, allows us to better understand the gendered and raced dimensions of development and explore tensions among and between development planners. This article asks how white women experts, who sought to emphasize women's needs and to valorize their contributions, fit into development. It examines women practitioners’ efforts to counter gendered assumptions about the agents of change in Africa. It shows that women experts adhered to development's universalist worldview, yet simultaneously encountered and critiqued failures to uphold the development ethos. It demonstrates that development's modernization programs perpetuated ideas about women's labor, relegating it to the domestic and reproductive spheres.
Contributor Notes
Amelia Lyons is associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of several articles and The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization (Stanford, 2013). Her current research examines France's outsized role, including nongovernmental institutions and experts, in women's services and educational programing during long decolonization. She traces programs created at the end of the bloody war in Algeria (1950s) and those established in newly independent Francophone West African nations (1960s–1970s) to better understand the continuities and ruptures between the so-called civilizing mission and the age of development. She also leads student-centered, public-facing research projects, including UCF's Veterans Legacy Program (https://vlp.cah.ucf.edu/) and Florida France Soldier Stories (https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/fl-francesoldierstories/). Email: amelia.lyons@ucf.edu.