Microfinance: The Political Project of Global Finance and Liberal Feminism

ABSTRACT Employing the liberal feminist narrative that women in the Global South are stuck in a static patriarchy, global finance promises to save and emancipate by providing them with access to credit. Academic research has been unable to establish any systematic relationship with access to credit and women's empowerment in the 4 decades since this claim was first made. Mainstream economists and development institutions insist that this is because of patriarchal pressures on Southern women. Their response is to find new ways to push credit led “emancipation,” such as by giving women childcare services loans or by promoting “gender lens investing” while forcing them into precarious work and entrepreneurial ventures. Postcolonialists argue that through this agenda, finance capitalism has made inroads into the lives of poor women (and men) across the Global South, earning high returns for its elite financiers in the North. In this essay, I trace the evolution of microcredit to its current iteration and contend that its success rests crucially on liberal feminist narratives that paint Southern women as passive victims of a brutish patriarchy while glossing over American imperialism's exploitations of them, which occur at the nexus of finance capitalism, global development, and liberal feminism.