Geography and gender, hindsight and foresight: A feminist development geographer’s reflections on: “How the Other Half Lives: The Geographical Study of Women”

Abstract

Inspired by, and drawing from, Jacqueline Tivers’ early and foundational paper in Area (1978) on the need for dedicated geographical research on women, in this brief paper I offer selected reflections on the progressive “engendering” of geography from the late 1970s to the present from the perspective of a feminist geographer with enduring interests in gender and development (GAD) in the Global South. I concentrate, first, on “hindsight,” tracing some key steps at the beginning of my personal academic journey as an undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge, and subsequently as a PhD student at University College London, when the “geography of gender,” especially in developing regions, was still very much in its birth pangs. In the latter part of the paper I turn to the “foresight” demonstrated by Tivers in her call to redress the absence of attention to women in geographical study, and particularly to problematise assumptions about women as a proxy for “households” (commonly construed as conforming with nuclear units headed by men), and the frequently limited, if not invisibilised, “female” roles within them. Despite the paucity of data and scholarship on women, let alone gender, and “alternative” family forms, 40 years ago, I comment on the prescience of Tivers’ work in identifying challenges which continue to persist as well as to preoccupy feminist geographers on the eve of the third millennial decade.