Globalisation: Issues in World Change.
Women, Children and Men in the "Developing" World.
Gender relations, and in particular the place of women in the developing world is an issue fraught with analytical problems not least because of the contentious use of the western stereotype of the family. By the use of the term gender rather than sex it should already be clear that what is referred to is not simply biological sex as defined at birth by physical characteristics, but the socially created expectations of roles and behaviours associated with the respective sexes. In simple terms gender means the place each sex occupies in society, attributed by their gender role.
As Margaret Mead's ground breaking study "Male & Female" (1962) clearly illustrated there is little that can be described as natural or inevitable in the dominant relations of men and women in western society. Mead's work has implications for Development Agencies in the third world and their practical operations as well as destroying the epistemological bases of the Structural Functionalist Family paradigm and of Radical Feminism. In particular, many pre-colonial or "primitive" societies, including settled agricultural communities, passed on property or at least the rights to make use of property along the female line. The tradition of matrilineal inheritance still survives in some areas today in peasant based subsistence agriculture. Given that women are the largest component of the workforce in this type of land use this is not surprising.
The division of labour by gender does however have some significance in almost all known societies past and present: this does not infer that a relationship of dominance obtains in all cases. For example in many hunter gatherer communities the gender relations were such that all important matters would be discussed by a gender balanced group. Neither is childcare the exclusive preserve of women in many societies. The organisation of the provision of the means of subsistence will play a determinant role in the organisation of childcare, so that for example such tasks are as likely to be allocated by age as by gender.
As has been the case in virtually every issue we have discussed so far there are tremendous variations in the position and condition of women in the societies and cultures of the South, in particular the influence of cultural factors such as religion will play an important part in the relative position of women in a given society. It should also be self evident that spurious and emotive concepts such as "universal sisterhood" do little to enhance either analysis or action. Again common factors do however present themselves are most apparent in the extreme; that is in the cases where the problems discernible in most Third World economies are "writ large in red letters".
The economic needs of the Imperial system, in particular in terms of the appropriation of land as private property are obvious at variance with the dominant land rights tenure systems that pre-existed pre-colonial times. Land tenured as private property was an alien concept to most societies outside the European land mass before the conquest of the South.
Under Chewa custom land is not a marketable commodity. An individual may use a piece of land for many years, but he [sic] can never own it. Possession of that land transcends his lifetime; it belongs to the dead, the living and the unborn. The individual therefore does not own a piece of land but has rights over it.(Barbara Rogers " The Domestication of Women". Tavistock 1981.)
Such a system of land tenure cannot be compatible with legal-formal imposition of a system of land transfer by purchase: The well known racist jokes surrounding the purchase of Manhattan Island for trinkets does not indicate stupidity on the part of the Native Americans who believed that the formal purchase of land was no more possible then than it is now to "purchase" the Brooklyn Bridge.
Imperialism was universally administered by men for a ruling elite of men. The civilian and military officers and the men below them were just that- men: and the period of greatest expansion of Empire, the nineteenth century, was also a period of the ascendancy of an ideology of male supremacy as well as of white supremacy.
Indeed the imposition of the stereotypical Western Family structures was viewed as being functional in and of itself in the service of the Empire- the allocation of domestic labour to women and only women freed male labour for wage labour in urban centres or in input intensive agriculture- the marginalisation of subsistence cultivation to a subservient social group allowed the formal-legal supported theft of high quality farm land for plantation cropping. As would be expected the attempts to inculcate western family structural imperatives was not universally successful, and many areas of the third world still exhibit practices in agriculture with substantial female control.
The post war period, as we have examined has seen the expansion, of the urban, industrial imperative, however imperfectly, into the Third World and as a consequence the marginalisation of the peasant. If subsistence agriculture itself is to be seen as traditional, backward looking, and especially economically retrograde, then development programmes of all kinds have concentrated on the "modernisation" of the rural landscape. The ideology of male dominance has had, until recently the effect of marginalising the already marginal: women cultivators became "farmer's wives". In practice they were to become invisible. In the most extreme cases of economic collapse, in particular some areas of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa and in particular during the eighties conditions have so worsened that subsistence agriculture is exclusive to women while men migrate to find wage labour in distant towns cities or countries or are absent because of the many civil wars that rage across the rural landscape.
In the many rural development projects carried out under the auspices of the UN as Rogers points out the quantitative methodology used in the initial evaluation research often excluded women for two main reasons. The methodology of the researchers assumes two factors- that land tenure is exclusive, permanent and male and that economic activity means activity in the cash economy- both of these serve to exclude women. The researchers, project valuators and field officers -white males almost to a man- specifically sought the "head" of a household to attribute control of land to: this was adhered to as a practice even when the head was absent or non-existent.
Even health orientated projects (which are still often evaluated on the basis of a cost benefit analysis) tended to excluded women- the river blindness projects in Southern and western tropical Africa for example only accounted for male victims, despite the non-gender specific nature of the condition.
Projects specifically directed at women are often carried out under social welfare rather than economic organisations, many indeed are aimed at "educating" rural women in domestic "science" with the same patronising and missionary like zeal with which the crusaders of the late nineteenth century sought to solve malnutrition in the labouring classes by teaching soup making.
In the field of birth control assumptions are also made about the ability or willingness of Third World Women to limit or control their own fertility- indeed it is asserted that the underlying cause of the growth in population that has occurred is due to the imposition of a twentieth century mortality rate on a medieval birth rate. The data we have already examined in relation to life expectancy would indicate that for many areas in particular, mortality has yet to attain the standards of the dark ages. In any case peasant and nomadic communities had effective population control well before the arrival of the white man. Such methods as post natal exclusion, polygamy, or extended lactation were and in some areas still are commonplace.
They are also, it goes without saying, the first projects to suffer from retrenchment when funding suffers due to recession. When intergovernmental aid is conditional on reciprocal trade the bias is obviously towards capital intensive construction projects-almost without exception these projects will be detrimental to peasant communities.
In the urban Third World many of the same problems reappear in different guises, many women are outside the formal wage economy dependent on trading and services in barter or cash. Since many of these economies will also exhibit gross inequality with small numbers of very rich among a mass of very poor there has grown up a cash commodity market in extremis- the commodification of women themselves- whether as bartered brides to the sad & single of the North or the more straightforwardly economic orientation of prostitution.
