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Women, work, and ideology in the third world
578
Book Reviews
contribution towards a feminist analysis of sexuality and its role in the oppression of women by men. There have been. and will be criticism enough from those who find this particular historical interpretation and its political implications unpalatable. It is a provocative book. but in the best sense of that word. in that it challenges some of the most basic assumptions of male supremacy; and that also makes it. above all. a courageous book. MARGARET JACKSON
WOMEN. WORK, AND IDEOLOGY IN THE THIRD WORLD by
Haleh Afshar, 257 pages. Tavistock Methuen. New York. 1986. Price $15.95.
publications,
This collection is a good example of cooperation among social scientists studying women and development issues in different parts of the world. After having done original field work, the contributors have come together as the Women and Development Study Group of the Development Studies Association for four years. The geographic areas covered in the book include Ghana, Tanzania. Sudan. Morocco, Iran, Bangladesh, India. Malaysia, Java and Brazil. Although the book is divided into three parts respectively on women in rural areas, the proletarianization of women. and women, resource. wage and industrial employment. the papers might be regrouped into two. The papers in the first half of the book give accounts of the ongoing processes of interactions between the traditional structures and new developments brought on by the penetration of the capitalist market system. What makes some of these accounts fascinating is that not only do they not conform to simple generalizations but when they do, it’s always with a twist. As a result. the reader is encouraged to reevaluate the concepts of traditional and modem while considering the impact of development on rural women. Maila Stiven’s article on the famous matrilineal state of Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia shows that women have retained or even increased their ownership of land. She then proceeds to argue that this process was not a result of a continuation of matrilineal tradition but of the collapse of the peasant economy and the migration of men to work in the industrial jobs. Even the matrilineal tradition as is known currently in the region seems to be at least partly a creation of the British Administration. Lynne Brydon argues that the tradition of mandatory nubility rites for Avatime women in Ghana is a confirmation of women’s statuses as equal adult members rather than an evidence of women’s subordination within the context of Avatime ideology. As such, even after women start to work as migrant workers, they use the nubility ritual forms entrenched in, and drawn from Avatime culture/ideology to legitimize and justify their roles and statuses as independent adults. Finally, Haleh Afshar demonstrates how the introduction of ‘socially productive work’ can lead to further enslavement of women. Hers is a more familiar story in the women and development literature where the introduction of carpet weaving in an Iranian village takes the form of women starting to weave from the age of six while men market the carpets and pocket the proceeds. The twist is that in the case of the traditional craft of
spinning. the yam used to belong to the women who sold it to nearby tribal women and controlled the small income. Men took over their earnings when women became the major contributors to the family income. The articles in the second half of the book focus on the proletarianization of women and their confinement to lowwage jobs. The concept of family wage which is discussed in Deborah Bryceson’s article is used by the other four contributors as a major ideological factor legitimizing higher wages for men who support their families and lower wages for women who ‘work for lipstick’. While the family wage is an important analytical tool in dealing with genderbased wage differentials, Bryceson seems to take a theoretical shortcut by claiming that the historical processes leading to the establishment of a family wage for male workers in Western European capitalist societies have been duplicated in Tanzania. An application of the family wage argument to African labor markets has to explicitly deal with the large literature on how male worker’s wages were kept down in the urban areas because their wages did not include the social reproduction cost of their families living in the rural areas. Both Suzan Joekes on the Moroccan clothing industry and John Humphrey on the Brazilian factories develop a feminist critique of the two well-known theories of the capitalist labor markets. Their basic point is that gender relations permeate all social institutions and that labor markets also work through and within gendered structures. Joekes takes Braverman’s ‘deskilling’ argument to task by pointing out that women’s concentration in low-wage unskilled jobs cannot be simply explained away by the fact that the development of capitalism leads to the creation of mainly unskilled jobs. In Morocco. selectivity of female employment in only certain low-paying sectors, use of males as pacemakers for the females. and the redefinitions of jobs as unskilled because women do them lead her to assert that employers in fact manipulate gender roles to control the labor force and keep wages down. The labor market is structured to take full advantage of the existing gender roles through systematic attempts to prevent comparability of female and male jobs and wages. Both studies note that male and female workers are rarely found in the same departments with the same job titles. Humphrey. in his critique of the segmented labor market theories. accepts that the labor market is made up of job hierarchies but he does not identify the determining factor as technology. He develops the theoretical position that there is no close association between the technologically determined work content of jobs (productivity) and the skill classifications, mobility chains and pay rates of the jobs. In Moroccan clothing firms. the operation of specialized sewing machines are considered skilled jobs for which wages are about fifty per cent higher than for simple line machining. In Brazil, by contrast, the operators of these machines are paid no more than line machinists. In Morocco, these jobs are filled by men but in Brazil by women. The final chapter by Hilary Standing, in contrast to Joekes and Humphrey, focuses on the structure of the family rather than of the labour market. Standing’s analysis of several case studies in Calcutta suggests that entry of women into employment often sets up a dynamic for change-sometimes for better and sometimes for worse-in terms of women’s relations and access to family resources. She makes the reader aware that the issue of
Book Reviews women and development is a much more open-ended one than we may tend to believe. On the whole, there are only two major problems in the collection. One is the use of the quantitative date. Numbers do serve a useful purpose as indicators of larger issues when used properly, which is not always the case in this book. The figures given in the texts are not clearly identified and analysed, and the few tables that are offered have little to do with the texts. Secondly. the contributors could have tried to develop a comparative studies framework given that they had the opportunity to work together. In order to save the women and development studies from being another random collection of detailed area studies, once the major issues are identified, more effort should be spent on a comparative study of these issues across different social structures. FATMA ISIKDAG
A PASSION FOR FRIENDS: TOWARD A PHILOSOPHYOF FEMALE FRIENDSHIPby Janice Raymond. 275 pages. Beacon Press. Boston. 1986. Price hardback $22.95. Women have always been one another’s friends. Upon this truth Janice Raymond builds a powerful new philosophy of female fnendship in A Passion for Friends. In this tendentious work. she demonstrates the prevalence of these friendships across time and culture and revisions feminist friendships as ‘a basis of feminist purpose. passion and politics’ (p. 9). Since the early seventies. feminists have written with passion and insight about the atrocities that have been and continue to be committed against women. Susan Brownmiller and Diana Russell have written about rape. Andrea Dworkin about pornography. and Kathleen Barr! about sexual slavery. Fernmists have described the institutionalization of misopyn! -Phylhs Chesler in Women and Madness, Adrienne Rich in Of Women Born. and Louise Armstrong in Kiss Daddy Goodnight-and traced the universal patterns of woman-hatmg-Mary Daly in GyniEcolog~ and Andrea Dworkin in Woman Hating. In addition. feminists-Alice Walker. Audre Lorde. Tillie Olsen-have analysed the complex ways race. class and sexual preference are used by a maledefined world to further our oppression. And rightly so. The atrocities perpetrated against women must be in our foreground reality until we live in a world free of these crimes. Raymond’s first book. 7he Transsexual Empire, is a forceful indictment of the medical establishment and over the past ten years she has published numerous articles about the abuses in the new reproductive technology. At the same time, in A Passion for Friends she identities and addresses a lacuna in feminist theory. While our energies have been absorbed by the fight against patriarchy and our determination to make the world better for women, we
579
have lost a ‘far-sighted’ vision of our own purpose, Raymond argues. So focussed have we been upon stopping the pain at hand that we have failed to envision its substitute. We have failed to create a philosophy of female friendship, an ethics for living in the world, as we try to change it, with integrity and pleasure. As Raymond cogently states: ‘Feminists have “fought the good fight” against patriarchy, but we may also have let the struggle against women’s oppression define too much of our theoretical agenda. It is time to think more spaciously about the purpose of feminism and its role in bringing women together. The range of feminist theory needs to be expanded beyond women’s subordinate relations to men to include women’s sustaining relations with women’ (P. 22). To begin to fill this gap, Raymond takes a pragmatic approach to female friendship. On the one hand, she writes poignantly of the misunderstandings, the losses and the betrayals. Though our expectations for friendship heightened in the seventies-that euphoric period of awakening feminist consciousness-many of us were sorely disappointed. Some were hurt to the extent that we gave up on female friendship. thinking a betrayal by another women caused too deep a pain to be risked again. We expected sisterhood to miraculously heal the wounds of patriarchy. Yet, as Raymond reminds us, we expected too much. In fact. one of the many strengths of this book is her adamant refusal to dismiss the losses or sentimentalize the possibilities of female friendship. Instead, in precise prose. she moves deftly through the problems. She writes of the origins and varieties of female friendship in history. she names the obstacles and describes a vision. Her effort is worth it. She convinces us that discerning women will find life-sustaining. passionate friendships with other women. She is a realist who imbues her writing with hope. In Three Guineas Virginia Woolf suggested that women need new words to express new ideas. Raymond begins her work with some brilliant neologisms. The ones that have become part of my vocabulary are herero-real@ and Gyniuffecrion. The former defines the dominant world view that sees woman as existing solely for man. It aptly describes the fact that we live in a world ‘where most of women’s personal. social, political. professional. and economic relations are defined by the ideology that woman is for man‘ (p. 11). The term moves beyond heterosexism as a paradigm for women’s oppression because it addresses not only the way our sexuality is defined in terms of male-female relationships but our professional and political lives as well. In addition. it identifies the world view that ‘has consistently perceived women together as women alone’ (p. 3). Herero-relarions-the pervasive male-female interaction in hetero-reality-for example. have seeped into feminist theory by defining feminism as the equality between men and women. As Raymond astutely notes. This definition places feminism at a false starting point. that is. woman in relation to man rather than woman in relation to woman’ (p. 13). For Raymond. feminism means ‘the equality of women with our Selves’ (P. 13). Raymond’s word @n/affection addresses a primary tenet of her book. ‘women have been friends for mihenia’ (p. 4). In fact, female existence is replete with examples of ‘an original and primary attraction of women for women’
Book Reviews
contribution towards a feminist analysis of sexuality and its role in the oppression of women by men. There have been. and will be criticism enough from those who find this particular historical interpretation and its political implications unpalatable. It is a provocative book. but in the best sense of that word. in that it challenges some of the most basic assumptions of male supremacy; and that also makes it. above all. a courageous book. MARGARET JACKSON
WOMEN. WORK, AND IDEOLOGY IN THE THIRD WORLD by
Haleh Afshar, 257 pages. Tavistock Methuen. New York. 1986. Price $15.95.
publications,
This collection is a good example of cooperation among social scientists studying women and development issues in different parts of the world. After having done original field work, the contributors have come together as the Women and Development Study Group of the Development Studies Association for four years. The geographic areas covered in the book include Ghana, Tanzania. Sudan. Morocco, Iran, Bangladesh, India. Malaysia, Java and Brazil. Although the book is divided into three parts respectively on women in rural areas, the proletarianization of women. and women, resource. wage and industrial employment. the papers might be regrouped into two. The papers in the first half of the book give accounts of the ongoing processes of interactions between the traditional structures and new developments brought on by the penetration of the capitalist market system. What makes some of these accounts fascinating is that not only do they not conform to simple generalizations but when they do, it’s always with a twist. As a result. the reader is encouraged to reevaluate the concepts of traditional and modem while considering the impact of development on rural women. Maila Stiven’s article on the famous matrilineal state of Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia shows that women have retained or even increased their ownership of land. She then proceeds to argue that this process was not a result of a continuation of matrilineal tradition but of the collapse of the peasant economy and the migration of men to work in the industrial jobs. Even the matrilineal tradition as is known currently in the region seems to be at least partly a creation of the British Administration. Lynne Brydon argues that the tradition of mandatory nubility rites for Avatime women in Ghana is a confirmation of women’s statuses as equal adult members rather than an evidence of women’s subordination within the context of Avatime ideology. As such, even after women start to work as migrant workers, they use the nubility ritual forms entrenched in, and drawn from Avatime culture/ideology to legitimize and justify their roles and statuses as independent adults. Finally, Haleh Afshar demonstrates how the introduction of ‘socially productive work’ can lead to further enslavement of women. Hers is a more familiar story in the women and development literature where the introduction of carpet weaving in an Iranian village takes the form of women starting to weave from the age of six while men market the carpets and pocket the proceeds. The twist is that in the case of the traditional craft of
spinning. the yam used to belong to the women who sold it to nearby tribal women and controlled the small income. Men took over their earnings when women became the major contributors to the family income. The articles in the second half of the book focus on the proletarianization of women and their confinement to lowwage jobs. The concept of family wage which is discussed in Deborah Bryceson’s article is used by the other four contributors as a major ideological factor legitimizing higher wages for men who support their families and lower wages for women who ‘work for lipstick’. While the family wage is an important analytical tool in dealing with genderbased wage differentials, Bryceson seems to take a theoretical shortcut by claiming that the historical processes leading to the establishment of a family wage for male workers in Western European capitalist societies have been duplicated in Tanzania. An application of the family wage argument to African labor markets has to explicitly deal with the large literature on how male worker’s wages were kept down in the urban areas because their wages did not include the social reproduction cost of their families living in the rural areas. Both Suzan Joekes on the Moroccan clothing industry and John Humphrey on the Brazilian factories develop a feminist critique of the two well-known theories of the capitalist labor markets. Their basic point is that gender relations permeate all social institutions and that labor markets also work through and within gendered structures. Joekes takes Braverman’s ‘deskilling’ argument to task by pointing out that women’s concentration in low-wage unskilled jobs cannot be simply explained away by the fact that the development of capitalism leads to the creation of mainly unskilled jobs. In Morocco. selectivity of female employment in only certain low-paying sectors, use of males as pacemakers for the females. and the redefinitions of jobs as unskilled because women do them lead her to assert that employers in fact manipulate gender roles to control the labor force and keep wages down. The labor market is structured to take full advantage of the existing gender roles through systematic attempts to prevent comparability of female and male jobs and wages. Both studies note that male and female workers are rarely found in the same departments with the same job titles. Humphrey. in his critique of the segmented labor market theories. accepts that the labor market is made up of job hierarchies but he does not identify the determining factor as technology. He develops the theoretical position that there is no close association between the technologically determined work content of jobs (productivity) and the skill classifications, mobility chains and pay rates of the jobs. In Moroccan clothing firms. the operation of specialized sewing machines are considered skilled jobs for which wages are about fifty per cent higher than for simple line machining. In Brazil, by contrast, the operators of these machines are paid no more than line machinists. In Morocco, these jobs are filled by men but in Brazil by women. The final chapter by Hilary Standing, in contrast to Joekes and Humphrey, focuses on the structure of the family rather than of the labour market. Standing’s analysis of several case studies in Calcutta suggests that entry of women into employment often sets up a dynamic for change-sometimes for better and sometimes for worse-in terms of women’s relations and access to family resources. She makes the reader aware that the issue of
Book Reviews women and development is a much more open-ended one than we may tend to believe. On the whole, there are only two major problems in the collection. One is the use of the quantitative date. Numbers do serve a useful purpose as indicators of larger issues when used properly, which is not always the case in this book. The figures given in the texts are not clearly identified and analysed, and the few tables that are offered have little to do with the texts. Secondly. the contributors could have tried to develop a comparative studies framework given that they had the opportunity to work together. In order to save the women and development studies from being another random collection of detailed area studies, once the major issues are identified, more effort should be spent on a comparative study of these issues across different social structures. FATMA ISIKDAG
A PASSION FOR FRIENDS: TOWARD A PHILOSOPHYOF FEMALE FRIENDSHIPby Janice Raymond. 275 pages. Beacon Press. Boston. 1986. Price hardback $22.95. Women have always been one another’s friends. Upon this truth Janice Raymond builds a powerful new philosophy of female fnendship in A Passion for Friends. In this tendentious work. she demonstrates the prevalence of these friendships across time and culture and revisions feminist friendships as ‘a basis of feminist purpose. passion and politics’ (p. 9). Since the early seventies. feminists have written with passion and insight about the atrocities that have been and continue to be committed against women. Susan Brownmiller and Diana Russell have written about rape. Andrea Dworkin about pornography. and Kathleen Barr! about sexual slavery. Fernmists have described the institutionalization of misopyn! -Phylhs Chesler in Women and Madness, Adrienne Rich in Of Women Born. and Louise Armstrong in Kiss Daddy Goodnight-and traced the universal patterns of woman-hatmg-Mary Daly in GyniEcolog~ and Andrea Dworkin in Woman Hating. In addition. feminists-Alice Walker. Audre Lorde. Tillie Olsen-have analysed the complex ways race. class and sexual preference are used by a maledefined world to further our oppression. And rightly so. The atrocities perpetrated against women must be in our foreground reality until we live in a world free of these crimes. Raymond’s first book. 7he Transsexual Empire, is a forceful indictment of the medical establishment and over the past ten years she has published numerous articles about the abuses in the new reproductive technology. At the same time, in A Passion for Friends she identities and addresses a lacuna in feminist theory. While our energies have been absorbed by the fight against patriarchy and our determination to make the world better for women, we
579
have lost a ‘far-sighted’ vision of our own purpose, Raymond argues. So focussed have we been upon stopping the pain at hand that we have failed to envision its substitute. We have failed to create a philosophy of female friendship, an ethics for living in the world, as we try to change it, with integrity and pleasure. As Raymond cogently states: ‘Feminists have “fought the good fight” against patriarchy, but we may also have let the struggle against women’s oppression define too much of our theoretical agenda. It is time to think more spaciously about the purpose of feminism and its role in bringing women together. The range of feminist theory needs to be expanded beyond women’s subordinate relations to men to include women’s sustaining relations with women’ (P. 22). To begin to fill this gap, Raymond takes a pragmatic approach to female friendship. On the one hand, she writes poignantly of the misunderstandings, the losses and the betrayals. Though our expectations for friendship heightened in the seventies-that euphoric period of awakening feminist consciousness-many of us were sorely disappointed. Some were hurt to the extent that we gave up on female friendship. thinking a betrayal by another women caused too deep a pain to be risked again. We expected sisterhood to miraculously heal the wounds of patriarchy. Yet, as Raymond reminds us, we expected too much. In fact. one of the many strengths of this book is her adamant refusal to dismiss the losses or sentimentalize the possibilities of female friendship. Instead, in precise prose. she moves deftly through the problems. She writes of the origins and varieties of female friendship in history. she names the obstacles and describes a vision. Her effort is worth it. She convinces us that discerning women will find life-sustaining. passionate friendships with other women. She is a realist who imbues her writing with hope. In Three Guineas Virginia Woolf suggested that women need new words to express new ideas. Raymond begins her work with some brilliant neologisms. The ones that have become part of my vocabulary are herero-real@ and Gyniuffecrion. The former defines the dominant world view that sees woman as existing solely for man. It aptly describes the fact that we live in a world ‘where most of women’s personal. social, political. professional. and economic relations are defined by the ideology that woman is for man‘ (p. 11). The term moves beyond heterosexism as a paradigm for women’s oppression because it addresses not only the way our sexuality is defined in terms of male-female relationships but our professional and political lives as well. In addition. it identifies the world view that ‘has consistently perceived women together as women alone’ (p. 3). Herero-relarions-the pervasive male-female interaction in hetero-reality-for example. have seeped into feminist theory by defining feminism as the equality between men and women. As Raymond astutely notes. This definition places feminism at a false starting point. that is. woman in relation to man rather than woman in relation to woman’ (p. 13). For Raymond. feminism means ‘the equality of women with our Selves’ (P. 13). Raymond’s word @n/affection addresses a primary tenet of her book. ‘women have been friends for mihenia’ (p. 4). In fact, female existence is replete with examples of ‘an original and primary attraction of women for women’