Overview

A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernisation programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor. When the United States joined the war on global poverty, economists, policymakers, and activists asked how to change a world in which millions lived in need. Moved to the left by socialists, social democrats, and religious humanists, they rejected the notion that economic growth would trickle down to the poor, and they proposed programs to redress inequities between and within nations. In an emerging 'women in development' movement, they positioned women as economic actors who could help lift families and nations out of destitution. In the more conservative 1980s, the war on global poverty turned decisively toward market-based projects in the private sector. Development experts and anti-poverty advocates recast women as entrepreneurs and imagined microcredit - with its tiny loans - as a grassroots solution. Meyerowitz shows that at the very moment when the overextension of credit left poorer nations bankrupt, loans to impoverished women came to replace more ambitious proposals that aimed at redistribution. Based on a wealth of sources, A War on Global Poverty looks at a critical transformation in antipoverty efforts in the late twentieth century and points to its legacies today.

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Reviews

Winner of the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations A history of antipoverty efforts, with an emphasis on the shift toward 'enterprise' in the 1980s, with the microcredit treatment being mostly pre-Yunus. ---Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

Winner of the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Meyerowitz's narrative puts into dialogue the usually separate histories of development doctrine, post-1960s leftism, global feminism, and the economics of microcredit. . . . A War on Global Poverty fills an important gap in the literature. ---Nils Gilman, Journal of American History Joanne Meyerowitz's A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit makes clear that the US welfare state has always had an international dimension. We can't understand how the social safety net eroded without examining its reach abroad. ---Maia Silber, Chicago Review Meyerowitz rightly foregrounds the significance of gendered notions of uplift and empowerment in remaking international aid. * Boston Review *

Author Information

Joanne Meyerowitz is the Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Her books include Women Adrift and How Sex Changed.

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