The New York Times, September 10, 1995
Week in Review, pp. 1, 3.
The Second Sex in the Third World
[Photo] Among the workers digging a system of canals in
India are women whose job is to carry off the last bits
of earth.
By Barbara Crossette
Down a dusty back lane on the ragged edge of the old
Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, some women met a few years
ago to plan a feminist revolutlon. It involved lipsticks
and bras -- but not to jettison the former or burn the
latter. On the contrary. The women hoped to stock cosmetics
and lingerie to be sold door to door in conservative
Islamic neighborhoods where only the men could be out to
shop, and their wives and daughters could not choose even
their most intimate attire. The marketing plan promised two
freedoms: some independent income for poor women, and a
little choice in life for others.
Fruit Stalls
In Asia, Africa and Latin America, such small initiatives
in economic development -- a milk-producing goat for a
village woman in Bangladesh, a wooden stall for a fruit
grower in South India, farm tools for an African, a sewing
machine in Trinidad -- have become hallmarks of a new
women's movement that differs markedly in scale, style and
substance from the traditional feminism of the industrial
West.
While women in the richer nations now known as "the North,"
bicker over history and theory and the question of whether
it is demeaning even to talk about women's rights separate
from human rights, women of "the South," in what was once
called the third world, are organizing in phenomenal
numbers for pragmatic goals: access to capital, the right
of inheritance, basic education for girls, a voice in the
political establishment and medical systems that let them
make choices, especially in reproductive health.
The proliferation of homegrown projects in developing
countries has moved both the focus and momentum of the
women's movement worldwide away from the developed world,
where Western-style feminists have become increasingly
irrelevant, and toward the developing world. Now feminists
from rich nations are more likely to be supporters of the
global women's movement, not its leaders. Indeed, the women
who flocked to the Fourth World Conference on Women in
Beijing from the developing world dismissed as nonsense the
criticisms of those who say that the agenda of the meeting
was created by and for Western feminists.
As women around the world prepared for the conference, for
instance, many agreed that the preparatory meetings over
the last year in Africa were the liveliest and most
intense. When computers crashed at the final round of
meetings in Dakar, Senegal, African women, always good
storytellers, recreated their agenda in their heads
overnight and hand-wrote their document. "When the energy
goes, we provide our own," said Gertrude Mongella, a
Tanzanian who is Secretary-General of the Beijing women's
conference.
Rounaq Jahan, a Bangladeshi political scientist and the
author of "The Elusive Agenda: Mainstreaming Women in
Development," said Asian women agree that much of the
exhilaration left in feminism is in the developing world.
"While the feminist movement seems to have peaked in the
North by the 1970's," she said, "in many countries of the
South it is still young and vibrant."
Perhaps this is because in the developing world, the
women's movement is much more a matter of life and death.
Outside a small clinic on the fringe of a slum in Dhaka,
the capital of Bangladesh, mothers and children huddling
for hours in an open-air waiting room demonstrated the
drawing power and the importance of small women's
organizations. At this clinic, run by the Independent
Bangladesh Women ' s Health Coalition, a bone-thin,
seriously anemic woman was slouched on the edge of an
examining table waiting for contraceptives. A sympathetic
female doctor told her that delaying the birth of another
child was not enough, if she did not accept diet
supplements and look after her health, mental and physical,
she would die.
In such small institutions, it is not only women's bodies
that matter. Their vocations, habits, needs and desires are
treated as important. And the women are encouraged to think
beyond their homes. The Dhaka clinic that was mobbed with
women and children one day was almost empty on another
because both staff and patients had volunteered as
neighborhood election observers.
In several cities in India, women's organizations are
focused on the issue of pervasive, often fatal domestic
violence. This summer, for instance, a well known
politician was accused of murdering his wife and having her
body stuffed into a restaurant's tandoor oven, prompting
demonstrations of outraged women. And their involvement
doesn't stop with protest. Women often find themselves
wading into police and court procedures, civil rights law
and media work. Knowing that for many women there is no
economic alternative but to remain in abusive homes,
women's groups are also trying to promote self-help
vocational projects and low-cost housing for the victims of
domestic violence.
In the last few years, a bold new idea has caught on --
that women are the key to development. As a result, the
women's movements in developing countries have picked up
powerful allies from independent women's groups in Europe
and the United States, from government aid agencies and
from the World Bank. The thinking now is that the poorest
nations will never grow out of poverty unless women become
a more active part of civil society. Without this, a
country can forget population control, the eradication of
epidemic diseases and even the conservation of its natural
resources.
"No country can develop if half its human resources are
devalued or repressed," Madeleine K. Albright, the chief
American representative at the United Nations told an
audience in Beijing.
The World Bank, the primary lender to poor nations and an
organization that has had plenty of opportunities to see
why traditional aid does not always work, is busily
planning new loans for women. Bank officials say that in
the last decade, the percentage of the institution's
portfolio devoted to what they call "gender concerns" has
risen from 10 percent to more than a third. Of the $3.5
billion set aside for improving the status of women, the
Bank says, $200 million is going into a new micro-credit
program to provide tiny loans to women without collateral.
Poor women are surprisingly good investments everywhere,
says Nancy Barry, the president of Women's World Banking,
a 16-year-old nonprofit institution with affiliates in 40
developing countries. Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, now the
model for small-scale credit, lent women S400 million in
1994 -- including some loans as small as $1 -- and 97
percent of them were paid back.
"Women don't need charity, they need access," Ms. Barry
said. And once they have it, they willingly trade
information across national lines. Women in one country
find out through personal networks and electronic
communication which econpmic projects work in another
country, and then they copy them. "What works in Uganqa
will influence the Dominican Republic," Ms. Barry said.
No Grandiose Schemes
All around the world, women are practical and realistic in
their requests, rarely proposing grandiose schemes. In the
southern Indian state of Karnataka, a leading politician
said: "If you ask the village people what they want, they
wan't ask for a medical college. They want bee hives or
market stalls or a pump."
"Women of Africa know what they want," Mrs. Mongella said
in interview. "We don't need a prescription. We just need
support to implement what we want to do." In African
families, she said, there is a feeling that the policies
dictated by international institutions have not so much
trickled down as fallen on their heads. Something that
looks good as a national policy can be devastating for a
village.
An unexpected reversal has now begun. The vitality and
immediacy of the women's movement in the southern half of
the world is now catching on in the northern half.
Americans working in inner-city organizations and rural
self-help projects in poor regions of the United States are
beginning to see how much work can be done with very little
money. They are studying successful immunization programs
and self-help projects jump-started by small loans for
would-be businesswomen.
American women are also learning how much farther the women
in poor nations still have to go, said Barbara Arnwine, the
executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil
Rights Under Law. "American women do not realize that our
sisters throughout the world do not have the kinds of
enforceable rights that we have, that they do not have the
ability to go to court and to say, 'I have been denied-a
job,' " Ms. Arnwine said. "They do not have the right to
say, 'I have been denied housing because I have children.'
We hear stories of women being driven out of business in
India, in Africa. Many women In the world, even in family
courts, don't have the rights of men in custody cases."
What women of the developing world do share with women in
developed nations, though, is a revulsion against violence,
said Ms. Mongella. Civil wars in Africa, Asia and also in
the Balkans have made millions of women refugees or victims
of genocide and rape. "What benefit does the gun hold for
the women," asked Ms. Mongella. No woman needs a gun. But
give her a hoe or a water pump "and she will make a
change."
[End]
