Female Well-Being: Toward a Global Theory of Social Change
448
Female Well-Being: Toward a Global Theory of Social Change
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Overview
Global knowledge and feminism dovetailed in the 20th century, fed by international air travel, telecommunications, the internet, and a growing awareness that solving female oppression would improve the lot of all humankind. The authors therefore adopt a strong international, comparative, cross-cultural, and feminist framework that uncovers the fundamental processes that promote, sustain, or degrade the female condition.
At the heart of Female Well-Being are case studies written by country teams of scholars, educators, and policy analysts, in Canada, The United States, Colombia, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Croatia, Japan, Bangladesh, Thailand, South Africa, and Sudan. Female well-being is measured by analysing trends in infant mortality, maternal mortality, literacy, life expectancy, education, work, income, family structure, and political power. These trends are contextualised in the light of the century's major events, legislative initiatives, social policies, and leadership, to illustrate the processes that enhance, sustain, or detract from the female condition. This book will be a critical resource for academics, development experts and policy analysts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136670 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban is professor of anthropology and women's studies at Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island.
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban is professor of anthropology and women's studies at Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island.
Read an Excerpt
Female Well-Being
Toward a Global Theory of Social Change
By Janet Mancini Billson, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2005 Janet Mancini Billson and Carolyn Fluehr-LobbanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-667-0
CHAPTER 1
The twentieth century as a transformative time for women
JANET MANCINI BILLSON AND CAROLYN FLUEHR-LOBBAN
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters. African proverb
The fate of female well-being
The twentieth century was a transformative one for females and for gender relations. Virtually everywhere in the world, women struggled towards new freedoms and new identities. The century witnessed a surge of consciousness, a proliferation of women's organizations and global conferences, the flourishing of sophisticated feminist scholarship, and the movement of literally millions of women into the public sphere. The momentous positive transformations in women's lives – and the ways in which female well-being declined or remained static – deserve to be fully documented and interpreted. Female Well-being analyses this natural social experiment through the retrospective lens and wisdom of elapsed time.
As we embarked upon the daunting task of looking back over the 1900s, we also fortuitously found ourselves in the early 2000s with the technological capacity to take a virtual 'data photograph' of women and girls across the globe. Never before in history have humans been able to examine the fate of females in countries in every region of the world and for an entire era. We tackled the complexities of social change by examining statistical and historical data from several extremely diverse countries: Canada, Colombia and the United States (the Americas); Croatia, Iceland and the United Kingdom (Europe); Bangladesh, Japan and Thailand (Asia); and South Africa and Sudan (Africa). With the help of modern technology – computers, the Internet, telephone, fax and flight – we assembled teams of experts who could write about female well-being in these countries. The cases help illustrate the most critical challenges that women faced during the last century and which are likely to shape this century as well.
In this volume, we address the fate of female well-being in terms of four basic indicators – life expectancy, maternal mortality, infant mortality and literacy – but we also examine female political and labour force participation, marital status, fertility, income, contraception, abortion and many other factors. Our exploration of female well-being goes beyond amassing statistics on a single issue to a more holistic approach. Our teams discuss the effects of chronic war on women and children; domestic violence and abuse; religious beliefs; and any other issues they felt were important for women in their country.
Globalization shapes our standpoint in Female Well-being. Globalization can be thought of as multi-dimensional interactions in all spheres that move towards a 'crystallization of the entire world as a single place' (Croucher 2004: 10) and involves international movement of people (including labour), capital and goods. Usually defined in terms of economics and trade, globalization also implies technological, cultural and political interconnectedness which may or may not support female well-being. In keeping with the spirit of global sisterhood, we take a strong international, comparative and feminist perspective designed to uncover the fundamental processes that promote, sustain or degrade the female condition. This helps us address the paucity of theory regarding the impacts of social change on women (and vice versa). Ultimately, we seek to move beyond feminism to a global humanism informed by feminist thought, and to contribute to the growing awareness that solving the problems that arise from female oppression will go a long way towards improving the lot of the whole of humankind.
The uneven patterns of social change
Although the century witnessed an extraordinary convergence of feminism and achievement, the process of change was neither uniform nor universal. The ideology of female emancipation spawned during the nineteenth century was put into practice in the twentieth century with differential and complex results. From the medical establishment to organized religion, women have made some inroads in challenging the male-dominated status quo and reintegrating female perspectives into daily life (Aburdene and Naisbitt 1992; Chant and McIlwaine 1998), but dramatic progress was matched by equally dramatic reversion to past oppressions. Women made tremendous strides in education but lost hard-won advances or failed to gain ground in important economic and political arenas.
By looking back across the century, we can begin to answer the question as to how progressive (or not) those changes were. Virtually every country can point to significant improvements that occurred during the 1900s in the status of women, shifting the balance towards liberation and equity. Generational differences that emerge during a period of rapid change can wipe out centuries of tradition. Just as easily, though, the balance can revert towards subordination. A flurry of forces that keep women 'in their place' can very quickly rebuff a step forward.
The 1900s saw remarkable shifts in gender regimes (power relations between males and females) in some countries and virtually no change in others. Gender regimes are 'in transition under globalization and democratization, but the direction of change is neither unilinear nor inherently progressive' (Bayes et al. 2001: 2). Because gender emanates from a process of social construction, it is in constant flux and is never unitary, even within a specific time and place. The social inequality and well-being indices referenced in this book reveal this unevenness. Nevertheless, we believe that gender regimes vary enough across times and places to capture major patterns of both positive and negative change.
Assessment of female well-being as of 2000
Despite the fact that during the last two decades of the twentieth century national and international institutions intensified their focus on eradicating women's poverty and marginalization (Sweetman 2000), the work of redressing gender inequality has just begun. Women are still the poorest of the poor. In politics, women's voices are muted or silent. A woman in sub-Saharan Africa, where high fertility and high maternal mortality risks prevail, faces a one-in-thirteen chance of dying in childbirth over her lifetime; the rate is one in 160 in Latin America and the Caribbean; one in 280 in East Asia; and one in 4,100 in industrialized countries (Vandemoortele 2002: 8). The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one in five women globally is physically or sexually abused at some time in her life. Women's numbers as a percentage of the world's doctors, engineers and heads of state increased markedly in the twentieth century. Women – slightly more than half of the world's population – still perform two-thirds of the world's work hours, however, earn less than one-tenth of its income, and own less than 1 per cent of the property. Full participation in the labour force characterized some societies – discrimination and narrowly defined roles characterized others.
The invisibility of women Much research and policy analysis fails to acknowledge the informal and unpaid contributions of women to their country's economic base, so we asked our authors to examine this factor as well. In the twentieth century, women created multiple niches in the informal economies (where lack of security, pensions or benefits renders women fiscally vulnerable) at a greater rate than they advanced in the formal sectors (where greater security, benefits and predictability prevail). Women in less developed countries produce 60 per cent of all food and run 70 per cent of small businesses, in addition to caring for families. Official data often ignore these contributions.
Not surprisingly, poverty wears a feminine and often invisible face: of the estimated 1.3 billion people living in poverty, over 70 per cent are female. When nations produce poverty figures for the entire population, without separating the figures by gender, female poverty is masked. As Jan Vandemoortele says, 'The failure to disaggregate for gender ... easily leads to the fallacy of "misplaced concreteness". Average household income is very much an abstraction for women who have little or no control over how it is spent; it may exist in the minds of economists but it does not necessarily correspond with the reality faced by millions of poor women' (2002: 1). In Cuba, for example, poverty has officially been 'eliminated', but women still bear the burden of unequal resources disproportionately.
Women own less than one hundredth of the world's property, but even as they win the right to vote, work outside the home or own property, they usually remain ensnared in the domestic sphere, too. Women who participate in the formal labour force (even in more developed countries) tend to carry the 'double day' burden – serving as wage earners by day and housekeepers/care-givers by night. Strong expectations that women should play their traditional role inside the home persist, buttressed by culture, patriarchy and custom. Moreover, when women gain access to public-sphere activities, they often find themselves victims of a male backlash in the form of stereotyping, ridicule, sexual harassment, pay inequities, glass ceilings, blocked opportunities, role conflict and battering (Faludi 1992).
Global issues Amnesty International (2000) offered an end-of-century reflection on the status and condition of females worldwide, which throws into relief some of the century's contradictions:
• Migrant workers: Because of crushing poverty, hundreds of thousands of women and girls seek work outside their country (or far from home in their own country) as field workers or domestic helpers, usually without government protection against abusive employers or basic human rights violations.
• Domestic violence: Violence against women continues unabated and remains underreported across the globe. Government agencies, including the police and courts, often fail to protect victims or adequately penalize or restrict the movement of perpetrators.
• Refugees and internally displaced women: Women and girls make up 80 per cent of all displaced people and refugees (Mohanty 2003: 234–5). During armed conflicts, women and girls suffer from rape, sexual abuse and the burden of caring for children, the sick and the elderly in hostile circumstances. Malnutrition, illness and sometimes starvation follow refugees from camp to camp. Domestic violence rates escalate during war and chronic conflict.
• Torture: Even at the end of the century, women were being raped and subjected to multiple forms of abuse and sexual violence by the authorities that are supposed to protect them, both inside and outside prisons.
• Human rights defenders: Women who struggle for the rights of others often find themselves at risk for human rights abuses and violations.
• Discriminatory laws, practices and traditions: 'Profoundly discriminatory laws and practices – often in the name of religion, tradition or culture' continue to underscore the notion of male superiority and rights (Charlesworth 1997: 385). Controversial issues such as abortion rights and mandatory veiling persist, and millions of women and girls are subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM).
• Political voice: Freedom of expression and the right to live in safety are by no means universal: worldwide, the average level of women's representation in parliaments is only about 10 per cent.
The persistence of patriarchy At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is still in many respects 'a man's world'. The tenacity of patriarchy is evident, although great strides in recognizing women's rights have been made in many countries. Despite the dramatic growth of female-headed households and some international gains for women in decision-making and positions of power, the twentieth century did not significantly undermine normative patriarchy. The slow advance of female well-being can be attributed in some instances to the existence of more rhetoric than material assistance or political will. The issues facing women and girls have been ignored for so long that solutions will take decades to make a real difference in female lives.
Furthermore, even when men reject the exercise of power over women, they benefit from the existence of male-biased structures and institutionalized sexism that favours males (Sweetman 2000: 9). Those who make public commitments to achieving gender equality are sometimes reluctant to renounce male privilege and the 'patriarchal dividend' they enjoy (Connell 1995). Just as whites in historically racist societies must give up some of their privilege in order to foster racial equality, so men will need to examine self-critically the consequences of centuries of male privilege.
A comparative case study approach
From the very inception of Female Well-being, we have worked from a comparative, cross-cultural and feminist framework. We approach the question of female well-being systematically and comparatively from the perspective of eleven countries. Because it is hard to construct a cross-national model for such a complex phenomenon as female well-being, there is a tendency to reify statistical analyses. Several scholars have attempted to construct a 'status of women index', but indicators vary in their power of cross-cultural comparability. This both reflects and results in biases. In Female Well-being, we try to minimize such biases through a solid, data-driven picture of the fate of women and girls that is broadly comparative in its reach but carefully focused through detailed and interpretive case studies. By using data from both wealthy and poor countries, we can pinpoint common sources and implications of female inequality. Issues relating to growth and development were written large across the twentieth century and will dominate this century. Therefore, we compare country profiles with global data on women. On the other hand, treating the status of women 'in general' as a unitary analytic category is misleading and unproductive, so we prefer to focus on female well-being within the context of national realities as females have shifted from traditional to contemporary lifestyles, rural to urban lifestyles, and domestic to public-sphere involvement. We hope to raise the level of feminist scholarship beyond single-country case studies, two-country comparative studies or international handbooks that present data without significant theoretical analysis. Data from across the decades of this turbulent period form the foundation for a comprehensive theory of social change that encompasses the core institutions of society. Grounding our theory-building in empirical data helps avoid the pitfalls of armchair philosophizing about how things work in the real world.
The country case studies In selecting the countries, we considered criteria such as political existence throughout the century, quality of historical data, and availability of scholars who could participate. India, China, Nigeria or Indonesia would have been informative cases, but finding a competent team willing and able to tackle their large size, heterogeneity and historical/political complexities proved to be an elusive task. Turmoil in the Middle East rendered data-gathering and locating teams problematic. Data in former Soviet bloc countries is notoriously inaccurate after decades of suppression and 'misinformation'. Communist countries, overt dictatorships and closed monarchies tended not to collect or make public data on many crucial indicators, therefore eliminating some countries from consideration.
In the end, we chose countries from which we could learn something uniquely important about gender and social change. The cases come from every region of the world except Australia and the Middle East, and reflect many religious, racial, educational, income and occupational groups, varying degrees of urbanization, and different types of government. We include poor countries and rich countries, homogeneous and heterogeneous countries. All existed in 1900 (in some identifiable form), even if they were colonies and their boundaries later changed, and all existed until 2000 (Figure 1.1).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsPreface
Part I: Introduction
1. The Twentieth Century as a Transformation Time for Women - Janet Mancini Billson and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban
2. The Complexities of Defining Female Well-Being - Janet Mancini Billson
3. A Critique of Social Change Theories - Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and Janet Mancini Billson
Part II: Case Studies
4. Women in Bangladesh: A Journey in Stages
5. Women in Canada: A Century of Struggle - Tess Hooks, Patrice Leclerc and Roderic Beaujoy
6. Women in Colombia: 'You Forge Your Path As You Walk' - Elena Garces de Eder with Adriana Marulanda Herran
7. Women in Croatia: Continuity and Change - Vesna Barilar, Zeljka Jelavic and Sandra Prlenda
8. Women in Iceland: Strong Women, Myths and Contradictions - Thorgerdur Einarsdottir
9. Women in Japan: Change and Resistance to Chance - Masako Aiuchi, Makoto Ichimori, Masako Inoue, Keiko Kondo and Fusako Seki
10. Women in South Africa: Crossing the Great Divides of Race and Gender - A. M. (ria) Van Niekerk and Jopie Van Rooyen
11. Women in Sudan: Resistance and Survival - Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban
12. Women in Thailand: Changing the Paradigm of Female Well-Being - Farung Mee-Udon and Ranee Itarat
13. Women in the United Kingdom: The Impacts of Immigration, 1900-2000 - Erica Halvorsen and Heather Eggins
14. Women in the United States of America: The Struggle for Economic Citizenship - Laura Khoury
Part III: New theory for a new century
15. Common Challenges: Factors that Enhance or Detract from Female Well-Being
16. Towards a Gendered Theory of Social Change
17. Towards Global Female Well-Being
Editors and Contributors
Index