REVIEW ARTICLE 99 programmes for women. Ahmed and Miller deal with an assessment of interventionist strategies to save daughters in 'son preference cultures'. They argue that the solutions lie in not awaiting a change in social attitudes, but in giving a girl-oriented direction to policies. The midwife therefore assumes an important role in the socio-cultural context, perhaps more significant than the health centre. At the level of discussion, demographic goals sometimes make women invisible and one does not know how far statistics can be turned into reality without interweaving several strands together. For example, endemic anemia and problems of repeated pregnancy and lactation do not feature in many programmes which do not segment the different health problems faced by Asian women in their life-cycle. This was overlaid by culturally imposed deficiencies. Policy concentrates on Family Planning almost exclusively where again the full burden is on women. The ctouble burden of poverty and culture has weighed down women where policies have operated unthinkingly, and in an unreal context. Since 1974 the growth in information and data and the role of women studies and NGOs has made horror stories regarding women's health and nutrition status almost commonplace, but policies remain impervious to the changes new information demands. That development and health programmes do not reach every family or every member of the household is today a well documented fact. Therefore, Chanana argues that gender and household, along with class and poverty, must be taken into account as important variables for policy formulation. We must consider the way of life (which determines behaviour and expectations from women) and the social values of the individual as an expression of power relations where women function as an inexhaustible resource for the males within the household. Chanana questions the very concept of development which denies women the right to life, and sees Family Planning as an expression of the poor focus of development policies. She advocates the use of social and economic indicators to study growth as a corrective measure. To pressurise policy makers, therefore, Chanana advocates an improved and systematic data base, R & D focus on women's health and a theoretical framework within which gender and health should be studied. There is also a suggestion that NGOs organise women through information and education to demand programmes that solve their problems. Both volumes stress that gender and the household are complex issues that go beyond the medical, economic and developmental approaches. They appeal for a reversal of the'concept of the household as the smallest unit of analysis, since it is not necessarily the seat of harmonious relations between the sexes. The household must instead be viewed as the location of individuals who have unequal power—men, women and children.