Empowerment Through Self-Subordination?

Abstract Development ethicists increasingly define women’s empowerment as the expansion of women’s agency. This chapter argues that this definition ignores the fact that women can increase their ability to achieve welfare by internalizing and discharging subordinate roles. This means that anti-poverty interventions may not only fail to reduce women’s acceptance of their subordination; they may increase it. Interventions that attach new material rewards to self-subordination can generate new incentives to engage in self-subordinating behavior. The chapter illustrates this by calling for a critical interrogation of Naila Kabeer’s assessment of microcredit in Bangladesh. Microcredit has, in some cases, offered women new reasons to form adaptive preferences toward the norms surrounding purdah (seclusion) and dowry.