Can Development Create Empowerment and Women’s Liberation?

Empowerment of the oppressed, whether they be peasants, workers, racial minorities or women, has been taken as a goal by social movements since the 1960s. This has been true particularly Westerninfluenced women’s movements and other grassroots movements in countries in Latin America and the South influenced by the theology of liberation, the radical pedagogy of Freire, and/or Marxism and struggles for national liberation. While consciousness-raising practices associated with empowerment as the means to challenge social oppression were initially used in radical ways by these movements, Western women’s movements and race/ethnic rights movements often subsequently developed an identity politics that ignored the real conflicts that intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality and nationality caused between members of these movements. This made these movements liable to cooptation or defeat.