'Women': privileged targets for the early 21th century social programs - reflections from a critical gender perspective

Abstract

Since the late '90s, social programs to ameliorate the poverty conditions provoked by the neoliberal model have been applied in Argentina and in Latin America. These processes particularly affect women, as they are the privileged 'target' of those measures. This essay explores the ways in which the New Economics of the Family (NEF), in 90's social programs, promotes the naturalization of women's responsibility as homemakers, and defines them as functional to the objectives of palliative social policies. Such a vision profits from supposed natural 'motherly virtues', and far from promoting more egalitarian relations between women and men, reproduces gender and class discrimination by reinforcing the supposedly natural sexual division of labor

Social Programs; Woman as Target; Human Capital; New Economics of the Family