Feminism
I've always been a little puzzled when, from time to time, I hear a woman begin a sentence with "I'm not a feminist or anything....". I wouldn't expect, for example, to hear a Jewish person say "Now its not that I'm against anti-semitism or anything ....".
It says something about political debate (and, perhaps, who shapes it and who it serves) that "feminism" or "feminist" have by now acquired the status of swearwords. This belongs to the same broader phenomenon that smears moves against racism and other forms of discrimination as "political correctness". Perhaps its also "political correctness" to note the following facts about the fate of the world's women in a report in today's Independent:
"Figures compiled by the British government, development agencies and human rights groups resemble a roll call of shame:
* Two-thirds of the world's 800 million illiterate adults are women as girls are not seen as worth the investment, or are busy collecting water or firewood or doing other domestic chores.
* Two million girls aged from five to 15 join the commercial sex market every year.
* Domestic violence kills and injures more people in the developing world than war, cancer or traffic accidents.
* Seventy per cent of the world's poorest people are women.
* Violence against women causes more deaths and disabilities among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war.
* Women produce half the world's food, but own less than two per cent of the land.
* Of the more than one billion people living in extreme poverty, 70 per cent are women.
* Almost a third of the world's women are homeless or live in inadequate housing.
* Half of all murdered women are killed by their current or former husbands or partners.
* Every minute a woman dies as a result of pregnancy complications.
* Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, yet earn only a tenth of its income.
* One woman in three will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.
* 43 million girls are not able to go to school.
* Last year, one million HIV-positive women died of AIDS-related illnesses because they could not get the drugs they needed.
* Human Rights Watch, in reports on 15 countries including Afghanistan, Brazil, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Togo and South Africa, has identified violence against schoolgirls, child domestic workers and those in conflict with the law as on the rise.
* Women across the developing world are the victims of systematic abuse."
Read the rest of the report here. And see also Sue Himmelweit on Feminist Economics over at UK Watch.
Labels: Feminism
8 Comments:
Interesting interview of Laura Kipnis here in which she talks about the "seriously conflicted inner terrain" of women in the "post-feminist" industrialized world...
(MP3 direct link here)
Western feminism was always an upper middle class movement, and wasted little time on such lower class concerns as equal pay.
It was about upper middle class baby boomer women having an equal right to get their noses in the trough as their male counterparts.
Third World women have always distanced themselves from it and stayed in solidarity with Third World men most of whom suffer from equal exploitation. The family unit is the only social unit which keeps peoples' heads above water when people are starving to death.
johnf
ps I find your blog very difficult to post on.
Hi John - sorry you're having trouble posting. Two potential reasons I can think of: either the quality of connection you were using or maybe because they were doing maintenance on blogger at the time.
The Sue Himmelweit article I linked to, and my own post, were concerned precisely with the fate of women in developing countries.
Feminism doesn't ask women in the third world (or anywhere else) to relinquish their solidarity with men who are also suffering from economic deprivation. Nor does it have anything to do with undermining people's families.
I can't speak for every feminist, or for the entire school of feminism. But it seems to me that feminism is basically two things: firstly, a recognition of the particular status and experience of women in the world, and secondly a concern with alleviating or mitigating those aspects of that experience that impact negatively on women. That doesn't have anything to do with "western" values as such - just human values.
"Human values" have been wheeled in for all kinds of less than honorable purposes as Mahmood Mamadani recently pointed out:
The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised--sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa.
Interestingly, there appears to be greater awareness of how feminism has been instrumentalized, esp. in the Middle East:
http://tinyurl.com/2zy6uf
http://tinyurl.com/2r7a9y
thanks Sk - not sure what your point is though.
Feminism, democracy and human rights have all been dishonestly instrumentalised as rhetorical masks for the pursuit of power and the subjugation of various peoples. Does that mean that we should reject feminism, democracy, human rights and human values, or that we should reject the pursuit of power and the subjugation of various peoples?
I would suggest the latter...but maybe I've misunderstood what you're driving at
Just that one should develop street smarts ("intellectual self defence" as Noam Chomsky calls it) to avoid being manipulated by cynical ideologues whose specialty is to keep our mental sympathies "one half...kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow" for their own (or their paymasters') self aggrandisement and enrichment.
But, when it comes to women's--and consequent human--liberation, there's much to celebrate as well in recent history.
Thanks for your response, David, and I really admire your blog and even more, read it.
I still disagree on feminism, however. Perhaps I'm older than you, so am more cynical. I've watched public-school educated women use it, quite cold-bloodedly, for their own advancement. If you look at the present Blair government its filled with 68 ex-Trots and Communists, who used to denounce their fathers as reactionary fascists, and now do things and adopt rightwing policies which would deeply and genuinely shock their fathers.
In the same way that generation of feminists - while containing many genuine people - contained extremely single-minded careerists who used it quite cold-bloodedly for their own advancement. Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman, Germaine Greer, Melanie Phillips, Janet Daly, Beatrice Campbell, many of "Blair's babes."
I'd suggest that that is why "feminism" is such a dirty word today. People see them as shrill-voiced individuals who feathered their own nests, got themselves into positions of power, forgot such obligations to their working sisters as equal pay, and, in the manner of so many upper-middle class English women in the past, took to lecturing the world's poor and darker women on exactly what is wrong with them and how they should improve their lot.
We live in a democracy. The opinions and desires and beliefs of all peoples and all classes - not just one particular one - should go into deciding our fate.
johnf
JohnF - thanks for your comments. Glad you're enjoying the blog.
Can't agree with you here, I'm afraid. What should define the merits of the cause of women's liberation do you suppose? The behaviour of Melanie Philips? Or the fact that 70 per cent of the one billion people living in extreme poverty are women?
A little perspective's called for here, wouldn't you say?
These statistics also show why your final point about democracy is so misconceived. You seem to be saying that feminism is about giving women preferential treatment. This pretty much completely ignores the particular and distinct fate of women in the world that the stats illustrate. If it made no difference whether one was born a man or a woman then you'd have a point. But that's clearly not remotely the case. Given the stats that I quoted, I'm disappointed that this point even needs to be made.
Post a Comment
<< Home