On 10/24/06, Anthony D'Costa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The Scandinavian cases also provide alternatives to both Iran and "left" view of "feminism." In Scandinavia children are encouraged both socially and as part of state policy. Both parents work: they must because of high taxes (in addition to women's rights issues) but they are supported by the state for child care, maternity leave for both parents, etc.
I agree with you, except that I'd note the limits of gender-neutral social democratic policy's impact on promoting gender equality in child care in particular and gender-equal division of labor in general that I noted in another posting. Comparing Iran to Sweden as "policy alternatives" really doesn't make sense, though. They are on entirely different levels of economic development.
I would agree with Yoshie that there are wide variety of sentiments regarding work. My own significant other did not feel justified commuting to work, which left fewer hours for family and child care. Of course any policy that is state-dictated and if coerced must be opposed but this does not mean that the state policy itself is out of sync with what people want. It's a very "culture-specific" issue.
Moreover, Iran, like many other statist countries, has what I would call "state feminist" organizations (i.e., official women's organizations), and they make inputs into policy initiatives like this. BBC's criticism of offering women the chance to "work part-time but be paid full-time" is revealing. On 10/24/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Iran leader backs larger families By Frances Harrison BBC News, Tehran
<snip>
Although this idea might appeal to some women, the likelihood is that it will damage women's chances of being employed, because it will make it more complicated and expensive to hire a woman.
That's a typical attitude of liberal equal-rights feminists, shared by certain of Iran's own reformists, too. The attitude basically says, recognizing the biological and social differences between men and women (it's biologically women who bear children, and it's women who have been socialized to take care of children) and making policy that eases the burden on women based on that recognition would make things difficult for capitalists and therefore is wrong. It, instead, appeals to the state to make gender-neutral policy, suggesting that women will be on equal footing to men in a gender-neutral environment. But that is not so. The only women who do as well as men in a gender-neutral environment are childless women, for other women are still stuck with care-giving labor almost everywhere, even in socialist and social democratic states. Here, class difference among women matters. Richer, better educated women who have no or few children fare better under the liberal equal-rights feminist regime than the regime that explicitly recognizes gender difference and make maternalist policies based on that, for all rich women need to strive for gender equality is equal opportunity, while working-class women, who tend to bear more children than richer women, are probably more at a disadvantage under the former than the latter. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
