- Email: [email protected]
Women and recession
552
Book Reviews
and agencies which systematically, if unconsciously, exclude women. The seven contributors present a picture of women struggling to raise their children in the most makeshift surroundings. They often have to carry water, fetch firewood, rearrange bedding, and furniture twice a day, patch leaking roofs, or live on a building site while their home is gradually constructed around them. Such conditions add enormously to the daily burdens of cooking, cleaning, laundry, and childcare, and put tremendous strains on family relationships. Low-income housing projects have had little or no awareness of poor women’s housing needs. Many men spend little time at home and are unwilling to pay for improvements. Even wives who share in house building do not necessarily gain more control over their housing facilities. Typically women clear the plot, carry water, pass tools to their husbands or hired labourers, provide food and refreshment, and clear up the mess. This is essential and arduous, but not thought of as building work by the men, or by many of the women. Rather it is seen as domestic activity, where women “help out.” In the one project in the book where women and men all did skilled building work (bricklaying, carpentry, etc.) in Nicaragua, there were tremendous tensions around whether building work is suitable for women, and whether they did their share. Women heads of households face other barriers to control over their housing situation, despite the fact that in urban areas, especially in Latin America and parts of Africa, woman-headed households exceed 50% of all households. Housing projects invariably assume that women live with men and may simply exclude those who do not. Eligibility criteria based on a regular income, a lump-sum down payment, or a rigid repayment schedule also exclude women, who, if they are in paid work, earn very low wages on an irregular basis. In addition, it may be impossible for women to provide the required documentation, and difficult to negotiate cumbersome and time-consuming bureaucratic procedures. If they are eligible, say, for a self-help housing scheme, they must work regularly on site, irrespective of their need to earn a living, or responsibilities for childcare. This book emphasizes women’s double or triple burden in Third World countries, as reproducers, producers, and community managers, a perspective which has been absent from much of the development literature until fairly recently. Despite the numerous difficulties facing women in housing projects, the editors point out that this involvement has also been empowering for women. Some learned building skills, and a few were able to get paid work on construction sites as a result. Many learned political skills which allowed them to campaign for better facilities in the surrounding neighbourhood. Given the gravity of the world’s housing situation, however, the editors conclude that the case studies cited may well prove to be exceptions to the rule. Their prognosis for the future is bleak. Global economic recession and the debt crisis mean that many Third World governments are making even less pretence than before to finance housing improvements for the poor. This book has a wealth of detailed information for students and teachers in a variety of fields: Women’s Studies, Women and Development, Women and Public Policy, Urban Geography, Urban Economics, Urban Planning, Development Planning and so on. Though it
focusses on a range of factors which constrain women’s access to housing in Third World countries, those same factors also operate in industrialized countries. We may have low level flush toilets, waste disposal systems, and two-car garages, but we also pay a very high price for housing, and have little control over it. GWEN KIRK CAMBRIDGE, MA, U.S.A.
WOMEN AND RECESSION, by Jill Rubery, 294 pages. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, and distributed in the U.S. by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, New York, 1988. US$49.95 cloth and US$19.95 paper.
This excellent book is made up of two separate major parts, each interesting and informative enough that it could have made a book by itself. In the first part the authors take up an international comparison of the different experience of women in the labor markets of U.S.A., Italy, Britain, and France, specifically dealing with issues of employment and earnings in the most recent years. In the second part they evaluate the effects of public policies on the overall economic situation of women, including the effects of public expenditure, family related policies, etc. We easily perceive women as the weaker portion of the labor force; but it is not easy to understand the empirical effects of this weakness. What is the consequence of economic recessions of women employment and earnings? Three basic answers to this question have been put forward: the “buffer” hypothesis, the job segregation hypothesis, and the substitution hypothesis. According to the “buffer” hypothesis, women are a flexible reserve, to be drawn into the labor market during economic expansions and expelled during slumps. Women’s employment therefore moves procyclically, that is, up and down together with production and income. According to the job segregation hypothesis, there is strict sex-typing of jobs: there are male-employing sectors and there are female-employing sectors; the effect of recession depends on the relative effect of the fall in the demand for goods produced in each sector. We can make predictions in which the probability of unemployment does not depend on sex of the employed but on disaggregate prediction of production in different sectors. According to the substitution hypothesis, during a slump the employer, when its profits are squeezed by the fall in demand, seeks to cut costs by substituting cheaper female labor for expensive male labor. This induces a countercyclical movement in female employment. There is not a single correct answer. As the authors of this book demonstrate, the experience of women in the labor market is historically specific and country specific, and, to some extent, the sharp difference in the three hypothesis from the analytical point of view becomes blurred in reality because elements of each may coexist and combine. For instance, in the U.S.A., increasing cyclical stability of female employment and breaking of rigid sex typing marked the most recent recession of 1982 in comparison with former downturns. Rigid sex-typing, by contrast, continues to exist in Italy, as well as 1 nrotected emolovment of women. as in the 1 .
Book Reviews
recent recession. It is associated with relative equal pay in the unionized sectors, but with lower wage and worst work conditions in the rest of the economy. In all the articles each contributor (Bettio for Italy, BouillaguetBernard and Gauven for France, Humphries for the U.S., Rubery and Tarling for Britain) produce a thorough and econometrically sound analysis which produces original research results. The contributions in the second part (same contributors, except Power for the U.S.A.) are exhaustive; their pieces are in character of surveys rather than of original research. There is a particularly clear overview of the often perverse effects of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s two-pronged attack: cuts in state support systems which induced increased domestic labor and removal of wage floors protecting income of the working women. There is also a detailed analysis of the contradiction of the French policies toward the family, which give incentives at the same time to women participating in the labor force and to women staying in the home to raise more children. A conclusion by Jill Rubery summarizes the results of a research which is advanced enough in the methodology and wide enough in scope to become a benchmark of research for labor economists interested in women. The book may constitute an excellent reference when teaching on the issue. ELISABETTAADDIS UNIVERSITY OF ABRUZZI ROMA, ITALY
POWERFUL IMAGES: A WOMAN’S GUIDE TO AUDIOVISUAL RESOURCES, edited by Isis International, 210 pages. Isis
International, cover.
Rome
and
Santiago,
1986. US$12
soft
Isis International, the worldwide network of women and women’s organisations, say that this directory is only one part of a wider project of theirs. The directory consists of an inspiring mix of practical information on making tape-slide shows, pieces by groups of women from al1 around the world who have found audiovisuals a useful tool in sharing experience and spreading information, listings of videos, films, and tape-slide shows available in every corner of the earth on every topic to do with women’s lives and struggles, and a similarly global list of organizations that create and distribute such resources. Isis International have set up a computer database of information on feminist audiovisual presentations, which they are keen for people to use (a small fee is charged for this) and update. The address for the Audiovisual Project is: via Santa Maria dell’Anima 30, 00186 Rome, Italy. Reading the catalogue section is a heartening experience-it is great to know of all these films being made a11 over the world. The films, with no distinction attempted between fiction and documentary, are divided first into subject area (e.g., Reclaiming our History, Empowering Women for Development, The Craft of Culture, Lesbian/Gay Liberation, Reproductive Rights, Ourselves and Our Bodies) and then into geographical region (e.g., Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, Europe). It gives a clear feeling of the fact that we have issues in common throughout the
553
world-as well as of the differences in experience. For practical purposes, people based in Latin America and Asia who want to run a programme of films or slideshows will find the catalogue serves them better than those from the rest of the world. Isis had practical problems gathering information about radical African films, though they include films made by international agencies that could be critically examined. The listings for industrialized countries are representative rather than exhaustive; addresses are given of distributors whose latest catalogues could be consulted. But I think the listings would be useful to everyone in giving an idea of what one could raise through making or presenting audiovisuals. Aid agencies will find the directory invaluable. The most absorbing section of the directory is “Experiences,” in which women from a wonderful variety of situations write about how they have used audiovisual shows to spread their ideas. The Zamani Soweto Sisters Council talk about the painful, challenging but useful experience of showing their film to Die Kaapse Vrouwe Klub. Women from Cusco in Peru speak of the slide show recording their lives as something constantly being changed, a process more than a product. Women for Women in Bangladesh point out the value of video in communicating with women who have had limited access to education. Akhila Ghosh, of the Centre for Development of Instructional Technology in India, writes a theoretically thoughtful piece. She shows the reasons for the failure of some government-made information films-their centralized production (they are dubbed into over a dozen languages) and the isolation of their message (on birth control) from the social context in which they are shown makes them irrelevant to the people they are intended for. By contrast, women using video about and within their social situation can communicate valuable ideas to others in similar circumstances. This section recounts the experiences of radical audiovisual work both of groups of women in extreme poverty and of women in privileged professions with access to filmmaking resources who have then shared their expertise with such groups. It does not make any comment to point out a distinction-and perhaps it is misleading to think there is one. Those with access to resources must be aware of those without, and work to make them available to them; those with untold stories must be aware of how useful audiovisuals can be. Political activism is something that happens at all levels, not something that one group does to another. The existence of the database alleviates my main worry about the directory, which is to do with the inevitable incompleteness of an international directory concerned with grassroots activism. The relevant women’s film organisations, by their nature (i.e., underfunded), will change greatly over relatively short periods of time. But even if the contacts listed need some following up, this directory will provide a valuable starting point for anyone who picks it up, anywhere in the world, and thinks “we could do something like that. ” RACHEL WARD UNIVERSITY OF YORK ENGLAND
Book Reviews
and agencies which systematically, if unconsciously, exclude women. The seven contributors present a picture of women struggling to raise their children in the most makeshift surroundings. They often have to carry water, fetch firewood, rearrange bedding, and furniture twice a day, patch leaking roofs, or live on a building site while their home is gradually constructed around them. Such conditions add enormously to the daily burdens of cooking, cleaning, laundry, and childcare, and put tremendous strains on family relationships. Low-income housing projects have had little or no awareness of poor women’s housing needs. Many men spend little time at home and are unwilling to pay for improvements. Even wives who share in house building do not necessarily gain more control over their housing facilities. Typically women clear the plot, carry water, pass tools to their husbands or hired labourers, provide food and refreshment, and clear up the mess. This is essential and arduous, but not thought of as building work by the men, or by many of the women. Rather it is seen as domestic activity, where women “help out.” In the one project in the book where women and men all did skilled building work (bricklaying, carpentry, etc.) in Nicaragua, there were tremendous tensions around whether building work is suitable for women, and whether they did their share. Women heads of households face other barriers to control over their housing situation, despite the fact that in urban areas, especially in Latin America and parts of Africa, woman-headed households exceed 50% of all households. Housing projects invariably assume that women live with men and may simply exclude those who do not. Eligibility criteria based on a regular income, a lump-sum down payment, or a rigid repayment schedule also exclude women, who, if they are in paid work, earn very low wages on an irregular basis. In addition, it may be impossible for women to provide the required documentation, and difficult to negotiate cumbersome and time-consuming bureaucratic procedures. If they are eligible, say, for a self-help housing scheme, they must work regularly on site, irrespective of their need to earn a living, or responsibilities for childcare. This book emphasizes women’s double or triple burden in Third World countries, as reproducers, producers, and community managers, a perspective which has been absent from much of the development literature until fairly recently. Despite the numerous difficulties facing women in housing projects, the editors point out that this involvement has also been empowering for women. Some learned building skills, and a few were able to get paid work on construction sites as a result. Many learned political skills which allowed them to campaign for better facilities in the surrounding neighbourhood. Given the gravity of the world’s housing situation, however, the editors conclude that the case studies cited may well prove to be exceptions to the rule. Their prognosis for the future is bleak. Global economic recession and the debt crisis mean that many Third World governments are making even less pretence than before to finance housing improvements for the poor. This book has a wealth of detailed information for students and teachers in a variety of fields: Women’s Studies, Women and Development, Women and Public Policy, Urban Geography, Urban Economics, Urban Planning, Development Planning and so on. Though it
focusses on a range of factors which constrain women’s access to housing in Third World countries, those same factors also operate in industrialized countries. We may have low level flush toilets, waste disposal systems, and two-car garages, but we also pay a very high price for housing, and have little control over it. GWEN KIRK CAMBRIDGE, MA, U.S.A.
WOMEN AND RECESSION, by Jill Rubery, 294 pages. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, and distributed in the U.S. by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, New York, 1988. US$49.95 cloth and US$19.95 paper.
This excellent book is made up of two separate major parts, each interesting and informative enough that it could have made a book by itself. In the first part the authors take up an international comparison of the different experience of women in the labor markets of U.S.A., Italy, Britain, and France, specifically dealing with issues of employment and earnings in the most recent years. In the second part they evaluate the effects of public policies on the overall economic situation of women, including the effects of public expenditure, family related policies, etc. We easily perceive women as the weaker portion of the labor force; but it is not easy to understand the empirical effects of this weakness. What is the consequence of economic recessions of women employment and earnings? Three basic answers to this question have been put forward: the “buffer” hypothesis, the job segregation hypothesis, and the substitution hypothesis. According to the “buffer” hypothesis, women are a flexible reserve, to be drawn into the labor market during economic expansions and expelled during slumps. Women’s employment therefore moves procyclically, that is, up and down together with production and income. According to the job segregation hypothesis, there is strict sex-typing of jobs: there are male-employing sectors and there are female-employing sectors; the effect of recession depends on the relative effect of the fall in the demand for goods produced in each sector. We can make predictions in which the probability of unemployment does not depend on sex of the employed but on disaggregate prediction of production in different sectors. According to the substitution hypothesis, during a slump the employer, when its profits are squeezed by the fall in demand, seeks to cut costs by substituting cheaper female labor for expensive male labor. This induces a countercyclical movement in female employment. There is not a single correct answer. As the authors of this book demonstrate, the experience of women in the labor market is historically specific and country specific, and, to some extent, the sharp difference in the three hypothesis from the analytical point of view becomes blurred in reality because elements of each may coexist and combine. For instance, in the U.S.A., increasing cyclical stability of female employment and breaking of rigid sex typing marked the most recent recession of 1982 in comparison with former downturns. Rigid sex-typing, by contrast, continues to exist in Italy, as well as 1 nrotected emolovment of women. as in the 1 .
Book Reviews
recent recession. It is associated with relative equal pay in the unionized sectors, but with lower wage and worst work conditions in the rest of the economy. In all the articles each contributor (Bettio for Italy, BouillaguetBernard and Gauven for France, Humphries for the U.S., Rubery and Tarling for Britain) produce a thorough and econometrically sound analysis which produces original research results. The contributions in the second part (same contributors, except Power for the U.S.A.) are exhaustive; their pieces are in character of surveys rather than of original research. There is a particularly clear overview of the often perverse effects of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s two-pronged attack: cuts in state support systems which induced increased domestic labor and removal of wage floors protecting income of the working women. There is also a detailed analysis of the contradiction of the French policies toward the family, which give incentives at the same time to women participating in the labor force and to women staying in the home to raise more children. A conclusion by Jill Rubery summarizes the results of a research which is advanced enough in the methodology and wide enough in scope to become a benchmark of research for labor economists interested in women. The book may constitute an excellent reference when teaching on the issue. ELISABETTAADDIS UNIVERSITY OF ABRUZZI ROMA, ITALY
POWERFUL IMAGES: A WOMAN’S GUIDE TO AUDIOVISUAL RESOURCES, edited by Isis International, 210 pages. Isis
International, cover.
Rome
and
Santiago,
1986. US$12
soft
Isis International, the worldwide network of women and women’s organisations, say that this directory is only one part of a wider project of theirs. The directory consists of an inspiring mix of practical information on making tape-slide shows, pieces by groups of women from al1 around the world who have found audiovisuals a useful tool in sharing experience and spreading information, listings of videos, films, and tape-slide shows available in every corner of the earth on every topic to do with women’s lives and struggles, and a similarly global list of organizations that create and distribute such resources. Isis International have set up a computer database of information on feminist audiovisual presentations, which they are keen for people to use (a small fee is charged for this) and update. The address for the Audiovisual Project is: via Santa Maria dell’Anima 30, 00186 Rome, Italy. Reading the catalogue section is a heartening experience-it is great to know of all these films being made a11 over the world. The films, with no distinction attempted between fiction and documentary, are divided first into subject area (e.g., Reclaiming our History, Empowering Women for Development, The Craft of Culture, Lesbian/Gay Liberation, Reproductive Rights, Ourselves and Our Bodies) and then into geographical region (e.g., Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, Europe). It gives a clear feeling of the fact that we have issues in common throughout the
553
world-as well as of the differences in experience. For practical purposes, people based in Latin America and Asia who want to run a programme of films or slideshows will find the catalogue serves them better than those from the rest of the world. Isis had practical problems gathering information about radical African films, though they include films made by international agencies that could be critically examined. The listings for industrialized countries are representative rather than exhaustive; addresses are given of distributors whose latest catalogues could be consulted. But I think the listings would be useful to everyone in giving an idea of what one could raise through making or presenting audiovisuals. Aid agencies will find the directory invaluable. The most absorbing section of the directory is “Experiences,” in which women from a wonderful variety of situations write about how they have used audiovisual shows to spread their ideas. The Zamani Soweto Sisters Council talk about the painful, challenging but useful experience of showing their film to Die Kaapse Vrouwe Klub. Women from Cusco in Peru speak of the slide show recording their lives as something constantly being changed, a process more than a product. Women for Women in Bangladesh point out the value of video in communicating with women who have had limited access to education. Akhila Ghosh, of the Centre for Development of Instructional Technology in India, writes a theoretically thoughtful piece. She shows the reasons for the failure of some government-made information films-their centralized production (they are dubbed into over a dozen languages) and the isolation of their message (on birth control) from the social context in which they are shown makes them irrelevant to the people they are intended for. By contrast, women using video about and within their social situation can communicate valuable ideas to others in similar circumstances. This section recounts the experiences of radical audiovisual work both of groups of women in extreme poverty and of women in privileged professions with access to filmmaking resources who have then shared their expertise with such groups. It does not make any comment to point out a distinction-and perhaps it is misleading to think there is one. Those with access to resources must be aware of those without, and work to make them available to them; those with untold stories must be aware of how useful audiovisuals can be. Political activism is something that happens at all levels, not something that one group does to another. The existence of the database alleviates my main worry about the directory, which is to do with the inevitable incompleteness of an international directory concerned with grassroots activism. The relevant women’s film organisations, by their nature (i.e., underfunded), will change greatly over relatively short periods of time. But even if the contacts listed need some following up, this directory will provide a valuable starting point for anyone who picks it up, anywhere in the world, and thinks “we could do something like that. ” RACHEL WARD UNIVERSITY OF YORK ENGLAND