Changes in women's lives and voices are both cause and effect of larger economic, social, and political processes. Women today live longer, have fewer children, are more likely to be literate; they are also likely to have some control over fertility, to work outside the home during part of their life, and to have political and legal rights more often than at any previous time in history. These shifts in social, demographic, and political conditions are linked to massive economic changes. The growth in the quality of human capital is a major contribution to economic development. Within constraints on women's ability to invest in land and physical capital, women have rationally invested in the quality of human capital through having fewer children and shaping the quality of their families' lives. Women have a stronger tendency than men to prefer child quality to quantity. Evidence for this position comes from findings on women's fertility preferences and the links between women's education and quality indicators such as child mortality and child education. The hidden role of women in creating the shift from quantity to quality in human capital is a major factor in liberating succeeding generations of women. The hidden women's movements created the conditions for succeeding public women's movements. The well-being of women, families, and nations can be served through supporting women's education and reproductive health care in developing countries and attending to the need for harmony between work and family obligations in developed countries. (KB)