Coordinated by Neuma Aguiar for the Latin American chapter of the Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) network, this 1990 volume examines the impacts of the 1980s debt crisis on women. Combining macroeconomic analysis with studies of household-level experiences, the collection explores how state-led structural adjustment policies affected women, who often absorbed the social and economic consequences of the crisis through increased unpaid domestic labour and participation in precarious labour markets.

Through regional case studies, the authors analyse the effects of state retrenchment on social reproduction and document the intensification of women’s double burden within the informal economy. The research also examines how the crisis reshaped family dynamics and accelerated women’s incorporation into the workforce. Despite severe economic constraints, the volume highlights how everyday survival strategies—including communal kitchens and grassroots initiatives—politicised the domestic sphere and fostered new feminist social movements. The book ultimately critiques mainstream development models by highlighting their dependence on women’s unpaid care work and documenting the need for alternative economic policies and feminist collective organising.