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The United Nations Decade for Women (1975-85) overlapped with a brief window during the Cold War, when newly decolonized nations seemed in the ascendant, having gained control of the UN General Assembly and several UN agencies, and ushered in UN endorsement of the New International Economic Order. This article briefly considers two networks launched by campaigning women intellectuals based in the Global South, which emerged at either end of the UN Decade. The Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), established in 1977, demonstrated that it was possible to radically reorient development schemes towards wellbeing and sustainability, rather than productivity and growth. The association Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), founded in 1984, included many of the same objectives, and even some of the same members as AAWORD, but it reflected the altered Cold War context which redirected development towards neoliberal solutions.