Gender Politics

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Gender Politics
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• Women do two-thirds of the worlds work
• but receive only 10 of the worlds income
• and own less than 1 of land.
• Women in developing countries on average carry 20
  litres of water per day over 6 km
• Women in many cases are the primary care givers,
• and balancing the challenges of work and family
  is complex.
• Globally there is still a gender pay gap,
• a lack of women parliamentarians,
• and women's health overall around the world is
  worse than that of men..
• http//www.internationalwomensday.com/

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• The Global Gender Gap Report, World Economic
  Forum
• https//members.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitive
  ness_Reports/Reports/gender_gap.pdf
• 2010 rankings http//www.csmonitor.com/World/Glob
  al-News/2010/1012/Global-Gender-Gap-Index-Iceland-
  tops-France-drops-and-US-breaks-into-top-20

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• Gender politics is an approach to the study of
  politics which focuses on
• the social construction of gender - masculinity
  and femininity
• the role of gender in political and social life

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• Biological differences between human beings, such
  as sex and race, have traditionally been used as
  grounds for social and political inequality,
  discrimination, subjugation, and oppression
• The division of social roles between men and
  women in the family is historically the earliest
  form of division of labour
• It is also the earliest class division, which
  arises hand-in-hand with the establishment of the
  institution of private property
• Patriarchy (literally, rule by the father, now
  understood as the dominant role of men in
  society) is the oldest form of social inequality
• Perception of patriarchy as a natural order.
  How natural?

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• US President Nixon (1969-74) once said, in a
  conversation with aides "Im not for women in
  any job. I dont want any of them around. Thank
  God we dont have any in the cabinet ... I dont
  think a woman should be in any government job
  whatever. I mean, I really dont. The reason why
  I do is mainly because they are erratic. And
  emotional. Men are erratic and emotional, too,
  but the point is a woman is more likely to be.

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• Women dominate Swiss politics
• http//www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11387996

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• Until recent times, womens issues, interests and
  concerns had been excluded from the political
  arena, for two basic reasons
• 1. The division between private and public
  spheres
• 2. The patriarchal assumptions of the language
  and practice of politics
• Womens struggle for equality of rights has been
  one of the key components of the global struggle
  for democracy

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Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), founder of
modern feminism
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• From Mary Wollstonecrafts book A Vindication of
  the Rights of Woman (1792)
• If women be educated for dependence that is, to
  act according to the will of another fallible
  being, and submit, right or wrong, to power,
  where are we to stop?
• The divine right of husbands, like the divine
  right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this
  enlightened age, be contested without danger.
• I do not wish (women) to have power over men,
  but over themselves.

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• Historian Henry Noel Brailsford, in Shelley,
  Godwin, and Their Circle (1913), considered the
  Rights of Woman
• "perhaps the most original book of its century."
• "What was absolutely new in the world's history
  was that for the first time a woman dared to sit
  down to write a book which was not an echo of
  men's thinking, nor an attempt to do rather well
  what some man had done a little better, but a
  first exploration of the problems of society and
  morals from a standpoint which recognized
  humanity without ignoring sex."

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Elizabeth Stanton (1815-1902), a founder of the
womens suffrage movement in the US
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• Elizabeth Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments,
  1848
• "The history of mankind is a history of repeated
  injuries and usurpations on the part of man
  toward woman, having in direct object the
  establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To
  prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid
  world.

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• Married women were legally dead in the eyes of
  the law
• Women were not allowed to vote
• Women had to submit to laws when they had no
  voice in their formation
• Married women had no property rights
• Husbands had legal power over and responsibility
  for their wives to the extent that they could
  imprison or beat them with impunity
• Divorce and child custody laws favored men,
  giving no rights to women
• Women had to pay property taxes although they had
  no representation in the levying of these taxes

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• Most occupations were closed to women and when
  women did work they were paid only a fraction of
  what men earned
• Women were not allowed to enter professions such
  as medicine or law
• Women had no means to gain an education since no
  college or university would accept women students
  
• With only a few exceptions, women were not
  allowed to participate in the affairs of the
  church
• Women were robbed of their self-confidence and
  self-respect, and were made totally dependent on
  men

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• 3 waves of the womens liberation movement
• 1. 19th early 20th century
• Main goal political equality (right to vote)
• 2. 1960s 1980s
• Main goal social and cultural equality
• 3. 1990s
• Continuing struggle for social equality

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• In the most basic sense, political (electoral)
  democracies began to appear in the world only
  with the extension of political rights to women
  in the early 20th century
• Labour movements and socialist parties played a
  key role in the struggle for womens rights
• Every Socialist recognizes the dependence of the
  workman on the capitalist, and cannot understand
  that others, and especially the capitalists
  themselves, should fail to recognize it also but
  the same Socialist often does not recognize the
  dependence of women on men because the question
  touches his own dear self more or less nearly.
  August Bebel, Leader of German Social Democratic
  Party, in Woman and Socialism, 1883

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Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), a German
socialist feminist
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Womens suffrage march, New York, May 1913
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• Suffrage (right to vote) in the USA
• 1776 landed (owning real estate) white men over
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• 1920 women
• Women allowed to vote
• UK 1928
• Canada mid-1920s (in all provinces)
• In 20th century revolutions
• Granting women the right to vote is a standard
  feature, reflecting economic needs and womens
  demands

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Petrograd, Russia, February 1917. Women in line
for groceries spark the Russian Revolution
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Russia, March 1917. Womens demonstration
Voting rights are nor universal if women dont
have them
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Larisa Reisner, Russian revolutionary and
feminist leader (1895-1926)
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Civil marriage registration, Russia, 1920s
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Soviet poster, 1920s Down with kitchen slavery!
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Women mastering male professions, Russia, 1920s
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World War II Soviet women medics
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Soviet women in the war pilots
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Children workers assembling weapons
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• The fundamental economic, social, and cultural
  structures of patriarchy remain strong
• Inertia and resistance
• Continuing struggles for equality and justice
• Reproductive rights
• Domestic violence
• Maternity leave
• Equal pay
• Sexual harassment
• Sexual violence

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• The plight of girls in the Global South (Julie
  Mullins, Gender Discrimination Children In Need
  Inc. )
• When a boy is born in most developing countries,
  friends and relatives exclaim congratulations. A
  son means insurance. He will inherit his father's
  property and get a job to help support the
  family.
• When a girl is born, the reaction is very
  different. Some women weep when they find out
  their baby is a girl because, to them, a daughter
  is just another expense. Her place is in the
  home, not in the world of men. In some parts of
  India, it's traditional to greet a family with a
  newborn girl by saying, "The servant of your
  household has been born."

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• In developing countries, the birth of a girl
  causes great upheaval for poor families. When
  there is barely enough food to survive, any child
  puts a strain on a family's resources.
• But the monetary drain of a daughter feels even
  more severe, especially in regions where dowry is
  practised.
• A new bride is at the mercy of her in-laws should
  they decide her dowry is too small. UNICEF
  estimates that around 5,000 Indian women are
  killed in dowry-related incidents each year.

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• The developing world is full of poverty-stricken
  families who see their daughters as an economic
  predicament. That attitude has resulted in the
  widespread neglect of baby girls in Africa, Asia,
  and South America.
• In many communities, it's a regular practice to
  breastfeed girls for a shorter time than boys so
  that women can try to get pregnant again with a
  boy as soon as possible. As a result, girls miss
  out on life-giving nutrition during a crucial
  window of their development, which stunts their
  growth and weakens their resistance to disease.

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• Sex-selective abortions are even more common than
  infanticides in India. They are growing ever more
  frequent as technology makes it simple and cheap
  to determine a fetus' gender. In Jaipur, a
  Western Indian city of 2 million people, 3,500
  sex-determined abortions are carried out every
  year. The gender ratio across India has dropped
  to an unnatural low of 927 females to 1,000 males
  due to infanticide and sex-based abortions.

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• China has its own long legacy of female
  infanticide. In the last two decades, the
  government's infamous one-child policy has
  weakened the country's track record even more. By
  restricting household size to limit the
  population, the policy gives parents just one
  chance to produce a coveted son before being
  forced to pay heavy fines for additional
  children.
• In 1997, the World Health Organization declared,
  "more than 50 million women were estimated to be
  'missing' in China because of the
  institutionalized killing and neglect of girls
  due to Beijing's population control program."

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• Statistics show that the neglect continues as
  they grow up. Young girls receive less food,
  healthcare and fewer vaccinations overall than
  boys.
• Not much changes as they become women. Tradition
  calls for women to eat last, often reduced to
  picking over the leftovers from the men and boys.
  

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• Women in every society are vulnerable to abuse.
  But the threat is more severe for girls and women
  who live in societies where women's rights mean
  practically nothing. Mothers who lack their own
  rights have little protection to offer their
  daughters, much less themselves, from male
  relatives and other authority figures. The
  frequency of rape and violent attacks against
  women in the developing world is alarming.
  Forty-five percent of Ethiopian women say that
  they have been assaulted in their lifetimes. In
  1998, 48 percent of Palestinian women admitted to
  being abused by an intimate partner within the
  past year.

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• In some cultures, the physical and psychological
  trauma of rape is compounded by an additional
  stigma. In cultures that maintain strict sexual
  codes for women, if a woman steps out of bounds
  by choosing her own husband, flirting in public,
  or seeking divorce from an abusive partnershe
  has brought dishonor to her family and must be
  disciplined. Often, discipline means execution.
  Families commit "honor killings" to salvage their
  reputation tainted by disobedient women.

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• For the young girls who escape these pitfalls and
  grow up relatively safely, daily life is still
  incredibly hard. School might be an option for a
  few years, but most girls are pulled out at age 9
  or 10 when they're useful enough to work all day
  at home. Nine million more girls than boys miss
  out on school every year, according to UNICEF.
  While their brothers continue to go to classes or
  pursue their hobbies and play, they join the
  women to do the bulk of the housework.

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• Housework in developing countries consists of
  continuous, difficult physical labor.
• A girl is likely to work from before daybreak
  until the light drains away. She walks barefoot
  long distances several times a day carrying heavy
  buckets of water, most likely polluted, just to
  keep her family alive. She cleans, grinds corn,
  gathers fuel, tends to the fields, bathes her
  younger siblings, and prepares meals until she
  sits down to her own after all the men in the
  family have eaten.
• Most families can't afford modern appliances, so
  her tasks must be done by handcrushing corn into
  meal with heavy rocks, scrubbing laundry against
  rough stones, kneading bread and cooking gruel
  over a blistering open fire.
• There is no time left in the day to learn to read
  and write or to play with friends. She collapses
  exhausted each night, ready to wake up the next
  morning to start another long workday.

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Feminist Theory

• A summary by Professor Sandra Whitworth, York
  University

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• Even though the word feminism implies a single
  monolithic approach, in fact feminists argue and
  disagree with one another quite strongly about
  the main sources of oppression and what to do
  about them

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• Liberal feminists concerned with representation
  (and primarily, the under-representation) of
  women within the public spheres of modern life
• Why are women under-represented? How do we make
  that representation more equal?

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• Radical feminists locate relations of inequality
  in patriarchy
• Women and men are essentially different from one
  another
• They would agree with liberals that women need to
  be more represented in the public sphere, but not
  on equality rights grounds, but rather on the
  ground that women bring a different voice to
  politics
• They would also expand the sites of politics
  not simply the public sphere, but also the
  private sphere, the bedroom, the family, the body

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• Postmodern feminists agree that politics exist
  everywhere, but resist the radical feminist
  impulse to define women and men
• More interested in deconstructing the assumed
  naturalness of various political categories,
  including the category woman

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• Critical feminists agree with postmodernists that
  the prevailing discourses about femininity and
  masculinity are essential to understand how both
  women and men are oppressed,
• but argue for greater attention to the material
  conditions of peoples lives i.e. their real
  lived condition, which will be affected by class,
  race, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and so on

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• Islamic feminism
• aims for the full equality of all Muslims,
  regardless of gender, in public and private life.
  
• advocates womens rights, gender equality, and
  social justice grounded in an Islamic framework.
• Rooted in Islam, the movement's pioneers have
  also utilized secular and Western feminist
  discourses and recognize the role of Islamic
  feminism as part of an integrated global feminist
  movement.
• Advocates of the movement seek to highlight the
  deeply rooted teachings of equality in the Quran
  and encourage a questioning of the patriarchal
  interpretation of Islamic teaching through the
  Quran, hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad), and
  sharia (Islamic law) towards the creation of a
  more equal and just society.

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The Better Half Helping Women Help the World, by
Isobel Coleman, Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb
2010 http//www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65728
/isobel-coleman/the-better-half