Outside, Looking In

Born amid the upheaval of war-time London, Caroline Moser went on to become a ground-breaking feminist anthropologist. In this memoir she explores the beginnings of her outsider roots through her grandmothers, a fearless Boer War nurse, and a caring Quaker. She charts her journey, from childhood under apartheid in 1950s Cape Town to documenting political oppression in 1960s South America, making TV films about Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro. Living with her two young sons in a bamboo house in an Ecuadorian slum alongside local women, consolidated her feminist identity. Working in academia and as a trainer, was when she invented gender planning, a feminist framework still used by development practitioners today. Moser’s swan song came in Washington DC in the 1990s at the World Bank where she challenged conventional orthodoxy on the impact of their economic policies on poverty and gender inequalities.

Caroline Moser always felt an outsider, looking in, as she fought the challenges confronting women determined to forge professional careers and independent lives. In this memoir she explores how her outsider identity has empowered her to wade in, defy injustices, oppose gender inequalities and develop alternative solutions. This is not a misery memoir; rather it explores a powerful personal, professional and political journey through childhood, marriage, divorce and single motherhood alongside an unorthodox career in international development.