too often, their new burdens. ² Where the traditional extended family has
broken down and the state is unable, or unwilling, to provide the sup-
port services that the families customarily had shouldered, women are
worse off than ever.

The United Nations Decade for Women that ended in 1985 gener-
ated an important body of information and testimony about the true
condition of women worldwide. The three women's conferences during
the Decade amply demonstrated that a revolution of international mag-
nitude is occurring, centered on women's aspirations and accomplish-
ments; they also dramatized to governments the fact that economic and
social development will not be achieved without the active and skilled
participation of women. These are changes that are working toward
women's greater equity in many societies.

At the first UN women's conference, held in Mexico City in 1975, an
attempt was made to present a unified expression of women's needs. Ten
years later, at the final conference in Nairobi, a greater acknowledgment
of the divisions caused by cultural, economic, and political forces was
apparent. The recognition of diversity did not negate the consensus that
women are particularly handicapped by poverty, malnutrition, ill health,
illiteracy, isolation, and lack of access to resources. Most of the world's
women, particularly rural women, have a common catalog of needs:
access to income-producing activities; training and education; health
services for themselves and their families; family planning; improved
legal rights, particularly those related to family law; access to such
resources as credit; participation in community decision-making and the
political process; and, for rural women, improved technology for agri-
culture, food processing, and water and fuel collection. In particular, the
aim of the "Forward-Looking Strategies" that grew out of the Decade for
Women was to propose how governments, private agencies, and women
themselves might respond to those needs.

Prodded by the activism generated by the Decade, many govern-
ments made substantive efforts to upgrade women's status. Previous
development efforts that counted on a "filtering down" of national eco-
nomic development to the poor have generally been repudiated, though
not totally abandoned. As the poor have been more accurately identi-
fied as disproportionately composed of women, development efforts
have been changing course. The question increasingly being posed is
how to reach the village level and find out what women really need.

Programs for women have tended to center on their traditional roles
as mothers and housewives: Home economics rather than income
generation has been the subject. As Mayra Buvinic points out, welfare‐
oriented strategies based on women's customary roles prevail through-
out the developing world. "With the exception of family planning

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