Olivia Casey is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Education at Rutgers University, and 2025-2026 Consortium Research Fellow.
In the final decade of the twentieth century, girls’ education campaigns proliferated within international development, with the United Nations declaring the 1990s as the decade of the Girl Child. Development discourses emphasized that investing in girls' education was essential for stimulating economic growth and lowering high fertility rates. Global development actors cited quantitative data to argue that prioritizing the education of poor adolescent girls was the best investment a nation could make in its future, often dubbed the Girls in Development paradigm. However, perplexingly, this rising focus on girls’ education as a tool for managing reproduction arose at a time in which many social scientists were increasingly asserting that population growth was not an urgent problem. This project examines how the Girls in Development paradigm gained ascendance in international development and was understood as legitimized by a scientific consensus—in spite of a climate in which many quantitative social scientists were undermining concerns with population growth.
While scholarship on the Girls in Development paradigm continues to grow, limited research has attended to how this paradigm emerged within a highly complex landscape of late twentieth century quantitative social science. This project focuses on the contrasting evolution of two quantitative social science disciplines—economics and demography—in the late twentieth century. I explore how these two scholarly disciplines differently shaped (and were shaped by) emerging global educational priorities surrounding girls’ education. In spite of perceptions of scientific consensus within international development, this project examines how the Girls in Development paradigm arose in a context in which quantitative social scientists advanced a range of conflicting perspectives on the relationships between girls’ education, population, and economic growth.
Through the generous support of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, I was able to travel to two consortium member institutions for my research: the Rockefeller Archive Center and the National Library of Medicine. These archive visits were very generative for the development of my dissertation research and I am grateful to the Consortium for making these research trips possible.
At the Rockefeller Archive Center, I reviewed a significant number of reports, publications, and memorandum pertaining to two series of conferences which took place at a Rockefeller Foundation estate in Bellagio, Italy throughout the 1970s, respectively focused on the issues of education and population within development. The Rockefeller Foundation was bequeathed the Bellagio estate in 1959 as a philanthropic gift from Ella Walker, an American-born heiress who had married an Italian prince. Upon acquiring this estate, the Rockefeller Foundation transformed the sprawling and picturesque grand villa into a thriving intellectual hub where scholars, policymakers and development leaders gathered to tackle a host of global issues. The Bellagio center served as a meeting point for influential conferences on topics ranging from international monetary policy to public health, agriculture, food security, education, population and more.
Limited scholarship has explored the historical significance of the Bellagio education and population conferences. In my dissertation, I explore how these conferences served as an intimate and unique space of debate among development leaders with a great focus on emerging quantitative social science research, at a time when appeals to quantification were becoming increasingly salient in setting development priorities. With a main conference room that could only fit approximately twenty attendees, the Bellagio conferences were attended by small groups of elite and powerful leaders of development, including heads of agencies such as the World Bank, USAID, UNICEF, UNESCO, UN Development Program, OECD, the Overseas Development Ministry of the UK, Canadian International Development Agency, as well as representatives from donor institutions such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The general format of the conferences was for background discussion papers to be prepared by foundation staff and leading academic specialists, so that the latest social science expertise could be intimately discussed and debated to instruct development priorities. Contrasting the Bellagio population and education conferences, in particular, illuminates the distinct crises that the fields of demography and economics faced and how their respective fields—and development leaders—differently responded to them.
As I learned from reviewing the materials related to the Bellagio conferences, the Bellagio education conferences were among the very first international convenings in which development leaders from around the world were urged to prioritize girls’ education on the basis of emerging economic and demographic quantitative evidence. The earliest Bellagio education conferences took place in the early 1970s, at a time in which economists of education expressed skepticism and disillusionment that the methods utilized with their field were deeply flawed. Reports from the Bellagio conferences illuminate mounting criticism of manpower planning, which was a widespread form of educational planning that had become commonplace throughout the last decade among organizations such as the World Bank, OECD, UNESCO, and the ILO. As manpower forecasting was on the decline due to its extremely unreliable and inaccurate record, economists contributing discussion papers to the Bellagio education conferences placed their hopes in a new form of economic inquiry that was gaining rapid ascendance, namely, educational rate of return studies.
Among the key investment strategies that the Bellagio economists recommended on the basis of rate of return literature was to prioritize the education of girls. Notably, economists contributing to the Bellagio conference, such as Theodore Schultz, argued that there existed a particular social benefit to investments in the education of “females”—primarily stemming from the benefits that educated mothers could pass down to their children, as well as the effects of investing in girls’ education on lowering women’s fertility.
Though the Bellagio population conferences took place contemporaneously with the education conferences throughout the course of the 1970s—they featured a contrasting set of debates and discourses concerning population growth. Just as the Bellagio education conferences illuminated anxieties faced within the economics discipline, the Bellagio population conferences illuminated a different set of difficulties faced within demography. At the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, participants from the global South organized to present harsh critiques of the widespread notion that overpopulation was the cause of many development problems. Instead, they condemned the imperialist and uneven global economic order as the real problem in need of urgent attention. Over the course of the 1970s, in reactions to events such as the World Population Conference, the Bellagio population conferences reflected a growing acknowledgement of the critiques of the population establishment and a rising skepticism towards narrowly focused concerns over population growth. Whereas the Bellagio education conferences took reductions in fertility as an unquestioned goal—facilitated through investments in girls’ education—the Bellagio population conferences reflected the unraveling and questioning of this presumed goal. Examining and contrasting the Bellagio education and population conferences demonstrates how the development of social scientists’ contrasting perspectives were shaped by the disciplinary, institutional, and sociopolitical landscapes in which they were embedded. The collections of the Rockefeller Archive Center were instrumental in this research in providing a large volume of illuminating primary source material surrounding the Bellagio education and population conferences.
At the National Library of Medicine, I reviewed collections pertaining to Florence Mahoney, a healthcare activist who is particularly known for her contributions towards the establishment of the National Institute of Aging. The collections included several reports, pamphlets, and publications concerning population growth from a variety of research, philanthropic, and nonprofit organizations groups such as the Committee on Population within the National Academy of Sciences, the Hugh Moore Fund, the World Population Emergency Campaign, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. These collections were helpful in tracing how various actors differently conceptualized the relationships between girls’ education, fertility and economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s.
As educational priorities increasingly revolve around appeals to quantitative measurement and evidence, this project aims to contribute to the growing critical scholarship surrounding quantification and education. This project adds to our understanding of the Girls in Development paradigm in the late twentieth century, illuminating how the formation of hegemonic knowledge depended on the suppression of divergent perspectives. Certain commonsense ideas about girls’ education, economics, and reproduction became cemented and unquestioned within development imaginaries, despite the presence of alternative perspectives within broader networks of social science expertise and across academic silos. Furthermore, this project holds significance for understanding how racialized fears of population growth and international development policies targeted at limiting women’s fertility in the global South have powerfully persisted through appeals to quantitative expertise.
My dissertation project has benefited greatly from the generous support of the Consortium and its member institutions, which have provided invaluable primary sources for my project. As I continue my work on this research, I am very grateful to the Consortium and its member institutions.