Book Review Format

Women and Politics in the Third World

Women and Politics in the Third World provides a feminist analytical perspective on the specific forms of resistance, organisation and negotiation by women in Third World states.

Using case studies the book focuses on difference as a theoretical basis for investigating feminine political activism. Arguing that Western analysts have attributed weakness to terms such as motherhood, marriage and domesticity as choices made by non-Western women, they show that such strategies are used by women to pursue particular goals such as seeking resources, welfare or freedom from oppression for their children. These strategies, the book suggests, should not be classified as unimportant or temporary; they can be highly effective even within such discourses as Islamic fundamentalism.

The contributors to this volume have embarked on an innovative path which highlights differing political approaches in regions as diverse as Latin America, South East Asia, China and the Middle East. It will provide a real insight for students wishing to understand the diversities and complexities of women’s political participation in these areas.

Haleh Afshar teaches Politics and Women’s Studies at the University of York and Islamic Law at the Faculté Internationale de Droit Compare at Strasbourg. She was born and raised in Iran where she worked as a journalist and a civil servant before the revolution. She remains active in feminist Iranian politics and has written extensively on the subject.

Women and Politics Edited by Haleh Afshar and Mary Maynard

University of York, UK Series advisers:

Kum-Kum Bhavnani, University of California, Santa Barbara Haideh Moghissi, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

Afsaneh Najmabadi, Harvard University Pippa Norris, Harvard University

This new series will present exciting and accessible books covering both the formal public domain of politics and the informal and practical strategies and organisations that women throughout the world use to obtain rights, to meet their needs and to improve their situation in life. The series will combine theoretical and empirical work, revealing how and why the political experience of women has been neglected, and contributing to the ongoing reconceptualisation of the political.

Also in this series:

No More Heroines? Russia, Women and the Market Sue Bridger, Rebecca Kay and Kathryn Pinnick

Women and Politics in the Third World

Edited by Haleh Afshar

London and New York

First published 1996 by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge

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Selection and editorial matter © 1996 Haleh Afshar; individual chapters, the contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,

or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or

retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of

Congress

ISBN 0-203-99240-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-13853-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-13861-2 (pbk)

Contents

Notes on contributors vii

Series preface x

Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1

1 Analysing women in the politics of the Third World Georgina Waylen

8

2 Women and the state in the Third World Shirin Rai

26

3 Feminist perspectives on democratisation in the South: engendering or adding women in? Donna Pankhurst and Jenny Pearce

41

4 The role of women in the resistance to political authoritarianism in Latin America and South Asia Rohini Hensman

50

5 Nicaraguan women, resistance, and the politics of aid Jasbir K.Puar

76

6 Chinese women: media concerns and the politics of reform Delia Davin

96

7 Social policies and rural women’s fertility behaviour in the People’s Republic of China, 1979–90 Aiping Mu

109

8 Women and the politics of fundamentalism in Iran Haleh Afshar

124

9 Women and politics in post-Khomeini Iran: divorce, veiling and emerging feminist voices Ziba Mir-Hosseini

145

10 The women’s movement, feminism and the national struggle in Palestine: unresolved contradictions

174

Kathy Glavanis-Grantham

11 Palestinian women and the Intifada: an exploration of images and realities Maria Holt

189

Index 207

vi

Notes on contributors

Haleh Afshar teaches Politics and Women’s Studies at the University of York and Islamic Law at the Faculté Internationale de Droit Compare at Strasbourg. She was born and raised in Iran where she worked as a journalist and a civil servant before the revolution. She is the joint convenor of the Development Studies Association’s Women and Development Study Group and has edited several books produced by this group; the most recent include Women in the Middle East (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); and, jointly edited with Mary Maynard, The Dynamics of Race and Gender (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994). Haleh Afshar is also the convenor of the Political Studies Association’s Women’s group. She remains active in feminist Iranian politics and has written extensively on the subject.

Delia Davin teaches Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. She lived in China for several years and is still a frequent visitor to the country. She has written extensively on women, gender issues and population policy in China. Her books include Woman-work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), China’s One-Child Family Policy, edited with Elizabeth Croll and Penny Kane (London: Macmillan, 1985) and Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, edited with W.J.F.Jenner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989).

Kathy Glavanis-Grantham teaches Sociology at University College Cork in Ireland. She previously taught in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Birzeit University, Palestine, from 1982 to 1991. During this time she participated in several development and research projects in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, a number of which involved working with Palestinian women’s groups. She has also carried out research on the small peasant household in Egypt. Her research interests focus on issues of agrarian change and gender- related topics, in particular women’s role in national liberation movements, with special reference to the Middle East. Her publications include a co-edited volume The Rural Middle East (London: Zed, 1990).

Rohini Hensman is a researcher and writer who has been active in the women’s movement and trade union movement. Although now settled in Bombay, she is originally from Sri Lanka, where she spent her childhood. She has

written several articles, especially on women and work, and co-authored two books, My Life is One Long Struggle: Women, Work, Organisation and Struggle (Belgaum, India: Prathishabd, 1982) and Beyond Multinationalism: Management Policy and Bargaining Relationships in International Companies (New Delhi: Sage, 1990). Her most recent publications are To do Something Beautiful (London: Sheba, 1990) and Journey Without a Destination: Is There a Solution to the Problem of Sri Lankan Refugees? (London: Refugee Council, 1993).

Maria Holt has a BA in Political Science and Middle East and Islamic Studies from the University of Toronto, and an MA in Middle East Politics from the University of Exeter. Her main areas of interest are in Islam, the Palestinian- Israeli conflict, Middle Eastern women and the situation in Lebanon. She has written many articles and book reviews for a variety of periodicals specialising in the Middle East. She has been working for the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding since 1991.

Ziba Mir-Hosseini obtained her first degree in Sociology from Tehran University and her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, where she is a research associate. She also works as a freelance consultant on gender and development. She has done extensive fieldwork in rural and urban Iran as well as in urban Morocco, and is the author of Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (London: Tauris, 1993) and a forthcoming monograph on the Ahl-e Haqq sect of Kurdistan.

Aiping Mu is a researcher in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Glamorgan. Her previous education includes a Bachelor degree in Medicine (Third Army Medical University of China), a Diploma in Chinese (Beijing Open University) and a Master’s degree in Population Policies and Programmes (Sir David Owen Population Centre, University of Cardiff). Born and raised in Beijing, she worked as an agricultural worker, Peking opera singer, medical orderly and later as an obstetrician and gynaecologist in China. From 1984 to 1988, she was a national Co-ordinator of Family Planning Education Programme for the State Family Planning Commission in Beijing. Her recent research has involved women’s fertility behaviour in the context of social policies in China.

Donna Pankhurst is a lecturer in the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University. She has researched in Southern and Eastern Africa on issues of gender, the politics of land and the transition to democracy.

Jenny Pearce is a lecturer in the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford. She is the author of Under the Eagle: US Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (London: Latin America Bureau, 1982), Promised Land, Peasant Rebellion in Chalatenango., El Salvador (London: Latin America Bureau, 1990) and various other co-authored books on issues of politics, development and social change in Latin America.

Jasbir K.Puar completed her MA in Women’s Studies at the University of York in 1993 and is working on her doctorate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her publications appear in diatribes and Socialist

viii

Reviews and include ‘Resituating Discourses of “Whiteness” and “Asianness” in Northern England: Second Generation Sikh Women and Construction of Identity’ (Socialist Review, Winter 1995) and ‘“Writing my Way Home”: Travelling South Asian Bodies and Journey Stories’ (Socialist Review, Summer 1995).

Shirin Rai is a lecturer in Politics at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Resistance and Reaction: University Politics in Post-Mao China (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991) and the co-editor of Women in the Face of Change: Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China (London: Routledge, 1992) and Stirring It: Challenges for Feminism (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994) and several articles on issues of gender in China and India. She is currently working on a project on ‘Women, Public Power and the State’ funded by the Nuffield Foundation.

Georgina Waylen is a lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield. Prior to this, she was lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford and lecturer in Politics at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia. Her main areas of interest are gender and Third World politics, particularly Latin America. She has conducted research on women and structural adjustment and democratisation, particularly in Chile. She has also published articles on women’s political participation, women’s movements in Latin America and she is the author of Gender in Third World Politics (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1986).

ix

Series preface

Difference, equality, identity, politics, nationhood, sexuality and the state. As I write this preface, in the aftermath of the Conferences on Women held in and near Beijing, it is evident that it is these terms that set the boundaries of many of the enthusiastic and spirited debates. And it is also evident that it is precisely these terms that provide the frames for contemporary debates within academic Women’s Studies. As new Women’s Studies courses and writings continue to appear, placing these issues at their core, it is fast becoming apparent that there is still, however, a lack of books that address issues of women and politics specifically. It is that gap that this new series, Women and Politics, edited by Haleh Afshar and Mary Maynard, seeks to redress.

The Women and Politics series focuses on activities and struggles that fuel the dynamic of change in the formal/public domains, as well as in the informal/ personal domains. Thus, politics for this series is persuasively defined within a feminist context—to include the range of public and personal activities that women across the world engage with in order to obtain their public and domestic rights.

Women’s relationship to formal, organised politics has often been one that highlights the tensions and contradictions in the workings of those politics. So, the lack of women in formal political structures demonstrates not only the institutional sexism generated by such politics, but also forces us to examine, and to decide when, and wether, those political structures are worth fighting, indeed dying, for. In a similar vein, women’s involvement in domestic and community- based politics shows us that women’s activities are often institutionally devalued. Or, if not devalued, then used to keep ‘women in their place’, as in the case of women’s fertility and motherhood. Women’s resistances, whether expressed as formal politics or as struggles within communities, have often not been seen for what they are—that is, as challenges to the state, or to nationhood, or to patriarchal formations, or, indeed, as challenges to all three. It is as challenges to all three— through formal politics, through political theory and through the informal and practical strategies built and used by women—that women’s resistances are explored in this series.

Women’s resistances in the Third World—to authoritarianism, to the hegemonic authority of First World writings and practices, plus their/our involvement in political struggles at both macro and micro levels—are sometimes not seen. However, in this stimulating and timely volume, these involvements and resistances are explicitly placed at centre stage. The analysts who have contributed their chapters to this collection represent a broad range of geographical locations, historical periods and methodologies. The emphasis in the book is to bring into focus the activities that women involve themselves with—in both the formal and informal spheres—in the Third World. The common thread running through all of the chapters is that presently accepted notions of key issues —such as the state, war, fertility, motherhood and religious practices—must all be revised in the light of this woman-centred approach. At the same time, this collection argues that women are not a universal category; but that it is necessary, as Haleh Afshar says in her Introduction, ‘to disaggregate women’s activities’. In other words, it is necessary to realise that not only do national boundaries create difference, but so also is difference manifest within nation-states, whether along the lines of gender, religion, class community or relationship to the state. This edited collection thus provides a map for current discussions on what could, and does, constitute women’s political activities.

This collection of clearly argued chapters, all written specially for the book, thus creates an essential volume for all those graduate and undergraduate students, teachers and researchers whose interests lie within the field of women and politics —be it through Women’s Studies courses, Political Theory and Political Science courses, Sociology and History courses, or indeed, through Third World and Development Studies.

All of the volumes in this series engage with theoretical debates and empirical analyses that impinge upon the study of women and politics. In so doing, they demonstrate that women’s contributions cannot simply be added in to politics, rather, that politics is forced to transform itself through the contributions of women.

Kum-Kum Bhavnani Santa Barbara, California

September 1995

xi

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Development Studies’ Association (DSA) for funding and supporting the Women and Development Study Group and the Political Studies’ Association (PSA) for funding and supporting the Women’s Group. I would also like to thank members of these groups for participating in the meeting held at York in May 1994 where earlier drafts of these chapters were discussed. Thanks are similarly due to the University of York’s Centre for Women’s Studies and its members for hosting the PSA and DSA’s women’s groups’ annual meeting and offering kind hospitality to many of the participants.

In particular I would like to thank the contributors to this volume who have given much of their time generously to this book; they have come to meetings to present their papers, to discuss the drafts of the chapters and to comment on and contribute to one another’s work. For me it has been a most enriching experience and I thank them all for so cheerfully putting up with the exacting editorial demands showered on them. Those who met their dead-lines patiently waited for the stragglers; the pervasive good humour and supportive and sisterly responses were invaluable.

Last but not least I’d like to thank Molly and Ali for giving me the time and even giving up their beds to accommodate contributors and Maurice Dodson for holding the fort.

Haleh Afshar

Introduction

Since the early 1960s women’s roles in the processes of development have been increasingly recognised and their contributions documented and analysed. But political scientists, particularly in the West, have been less willing to acknowledge women’s extensive participation in political processes. This volume is a contribution to the growing body of feminist literature which is seeking to redress this imbalance.

Women’s political activities have, for far too long, been seen as marginal or non-existent. This view is reinforced by the relatively small numbers of women in positions of power and leadership, particularly in the West. As a result, the Western-centred academic analysis of politics that has evolved ignores women and places them at the peripheries of the political processes. Third World women activists have been made invisible through a male-dominated discipline of political theory as well as an earlier phase of feminism which had serious misconceptions about femininity, motherhood and the family.1 Western feminisms negated Third World women’s choices of paths of political activism which used the local prevalent ideologies and were often located within religious or maternal discourses.

The contributors to this volume bring Third World women to the centre of the political analysis and highlight the different forms of feminine political activism that has been ignored and undervalued by orthodox academicians. They discard the undertones of weakness and subservience that have generally been attributed to terms such as motherhood, marriage and domesticity and respect the choices made by non-Western women. Their analyses demonstrate clearly that political theories of state, democratisation and activism must be revised to encompass women’s activities, undertaken within such contexts as devotion to religion, even within discourses such as Islamic fundamentalism. Then it will be easy to see that women use concepts like ‘motherhood’, or ‘complementarity’ rather than ‘equality’, to pursue particular goals such as seeking resources, welfare and/or freedom from oppression for their children. Their forms of negotiation with the state must not be equated with weakness nor should their strategies be classified as either temporary or unimportant.

This collection of essays seeks to disaggregate women’s activities in the framework of the political formation of post-colonial states. Though often seen as a single united bureaucratic formation, the contributors to this volume argue that it is essential to recognise that, where the nation-state is concerned, the parts often do not result in a coherent whole. Women are frequently at their most effective when they find a way of utilising the diverging interests of the bureaucracy and the administration or interpolating their demands in the contradictory intentions of different arms of the state and the nation’s stated ideologies.

In Chapter 1 Georgina Waylen maps out a framework with which to study women in Third World politics. She posits three basic premises: first, that women should be put back into the study of formal politics; second, that the fundamentally gendered nature of ostensibly neutral concepts such as nationalism, citizenship and the state be demonstrated; third that a conventional definition of ‘the political’ be widened so that many of the activities undertaken by women be incorporated. Waylen’s chapter seeks to engender the analysis on these bases. The part played by different groups of women in the conventional political arena is examined, focusing for example on the role of women leaders. Women’s political activity outside the conventional arena is also analysed, both oppositional activity and that in favour of the status quo.

Shirin Rai’s chapter focuses on the debates on the state within the feminist literature. It makes a claim for bringing the state back in to the discussion of women’s lives in the Third World. Rai argues that the current debate on the state is entirely West centred, and does not take into account the particular features of the post-colonial states that affect the lives of Third World women. It urges a fresh approach to this question which must have as its starting-point the lived realities of women’s existence, negotiations and struggles.

Donna Pankhurst and Jenny Pearce continue the debate by looking at democratisation. They argue that an analysis of the subject that merely seeks to add women in is both inadequate and inappropriate. A feminist perspective on democratisation must engage in a serious analysis of the nature of political change taking place in many Third World countries. Such an analysis must include an understanding of political marginalisation and democratisation as well as the interactions between class, gender and ethnicity. Feminist analytical perspectives cannot view democratisation as an unproblematic concept and must take into account the variety of ways in which politics in the Third World works through, or in reaction against, the exclusion or marginalisation of socially diverse sections of the population, including, but not limited to, women.

Rohini Hensman’s chapter shows that far from being marginal, particularly in the context of authoritarian governments, women’s activities are amongst the most important components of political processes. Taking a wide perspective across four Latin American and four South Asian countries, Rohini Hensman illustrates the way in which women have organised outside formal political structures to resist authoritarianism. Although the situations are diverse, in each of these cases women have organised autonomously, in defence of what they perceive to be

2 INTRODUCTION

their own interests and concerns, and this activity has brought them into direct conflict with authoritarian regimes or movements. Their goals, as well as their methods of organisation and struggle, have been distinct from that of more orthodox male-dominated movements, and in some cases they have continued to struggle when other forms of political opposition have been drastically weakened or silenced.

The role played by these women is traced to two main sources. First, where they are fighting for their own rights, they are opposing male authoritarianism, which both reinforces and is reinforced by state authoritarianism to varying degrees. Thus to the extent that any functional definition of democracy has to include the equal rights of women to control their own lives and participation in social decisions, their struggle forms an essential component of democracy. Since women in particular are put at a disadvantage by lack of this component, they have a special interest in fighting for it—except in the case of those strata of women whose privileges within an authoritarian system outweigh the disabilities they suffer.

Second, where women have organised themselves and fought to defend the lives and welfare of their children, this has involved a politicisation of the traditionally ‘feminine’ role of motherhood. These women have found themselves pitted against repressive, totalitarian movements and regimes, and have fought back with amazing courage and resourcefulness. Their ability to turn their maternal role (traditionally perceived as a source of weakness by most Western feminists) into a reservoir of immense strength makes it imperative to look more closely at the values being affirmed by these mothers, and to recognise them as universal human values which ought to have a central place in any progressive movement for social change.

A different perspective is provided by Jasbir K.Puar, a non-white US aid worker whose interactions with Nicaraguan women recipients were affected by the complex politics of race and gender. Her chapter outlines her experiences and highlights the interdependence of often helpless, and frequently hapless, young, enthusiastic, but not so well informed, aid workers and the more experienced, but needy, local women. Their opportunities and priorities are often entirely different from those of donors. For these women the politics of aid, like national politics, has had to be negotiated in terms of needs and possible scenarios of successful access to extremely scarce resources. They sought tangible goods rather than good advice.

In the chapters that follow, the strategies used by women to obtain what welfare, health care and opportunities they can from more or less powerful states is examined. Using specific case studies from post-revolutionary or embattled states, the authors discuss the problems faced by women who have been active in resistance movements or have had to come to terms with the contradictory demands made of them by ideological and practical needs. Women in China, Nicaragua, Iran and Palestine have sought to endorse much of the revolutionary ardour that led to the emergence of the state, or the resistance movement and its

INTRODUCTION 3

politics, while seeking to extract policies that would enable them to meet their own economic and strategic needs.2 These chapters consider the use made of the media and local literature; the prevalent discourses of femininity, motherhood, domesticity, and the demands made by women. Using the conservative prevalent political language, these women often pursue goals that bear remarkable similarities to feminist demands in the West.

The political participation of women both at the formal and informal levels and the articulation of the prevalent ideologies with policies that have often proved detrimental to women is discussed. These chapters illustrate the varied and complex ways that different women in different countries have engaged both with the content and the context of the laws that affect their lives. They have made effective use of creeds and stated government principles to curb, alter or reverse some political trends. All too often women are caught at the centre of the state’s contradictory economic and political programmes. Chinese women are required to have only one child, while the economic changes make children valuable resources for peasant families; the state and the family make diametrically opposed demands on women. In Iran the stated policy of separation of the public and private spheres and the ideological wish to restrain women within the household clash with the economic needs of families to have at least two full-time breadwinners. Nevertheless, far from being helpless victims, women can and do negotiate a variety of more or less effective solutions to carve out a space for themselves in the political domain.

Delia Davin and Aiping Mu analyse some of the issues discussed by Rohini Hensman in terms of their articulation with state policy in China. Davin looks at the wider political questions and the way that they have been reflected in the Chinese literature on women’s issues since 1980. She highlights the problems that have gained importance and the policies that have been pursued; demands for equality and the efforts to establish it, concerns about employment and education and attempts at integrating women into the formal political process, as well as writings concerned with population policy. Davin argues that both the recent economic reforms and the long-running population policy had some adverse effect for women. These in turn have encouraged more serious efforts, both academic and official, to investigate and analyse the position of women in China. The slightly greater freedom to write and publish has also promoted greater variety in writing about women. However, women’s issues and population policy remain very sensitive topics in China, not least because of the potential impact on China’s international prestige, very much in evidence with the UN Conference for Women held in Beijing in September 1995.

Aiping Mu’s chapter concentrates on the implementation of social policies that have had controversial impacts on fertility behaviour among rural women in China. The government’s requirement that each family should have only one child has entailed measures such as delaying marriage and practising contraception. At the same time the implementation of rural economic reform policies has resulted in more demand for family labour; the introduction

4 INTRODUCTION

of a market economy created more employment opportunities and more mobility for rural women.

Mu argues that the rural industrialisation that followed the economic reforms transformed the occupational pattern of rural women from agriculture to non- agricultural. This in turn facilitated the implementation of the one-child policy which was more vigorously enforced in the collective economy based rural industrial units. Although the fertility rates declined, there was a gap between individual preferences and the goals of the national population policy. Rural families have found it difficult to accept the concept of a one-child policy. Thus conflict over fertility between rural couples and the state authorities is likely to continue for a long time.

The chapters on Iran include an analysis of the use of the Persian media and women’s journals by Iranian elite women to highlight the tensions that exist between women and the state on the delineation of an appropriate place for women in the public domain as well as the implementation of appropriate population planning. Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s chapter continues this theme by concentrating on similarities and differences of the ‘modernist’ and the ‘Islamist’ feminist discourses in Iran. Mir-Hosseini argues that a remarkable and unexpected result of the Islamic revolution has been to raise the nation’s gender consciousness and place women at the centre stage of politics in Iran. Haleh Afshar’s chapter analyses the use made by Iranian women of the Islamic discourse to demand practical solutions for child care, employment opportunities and political participation. In the bargain that they have struck, elite Iranian women have accepted the veil as the non-negotiable emblem of Islamification in the country.3 Like some Latin American women, they have placed motherhood at the centre of political negotiations.4 Using the Islamic terminology and defending their rights as mothers and providers of domestic havens, they have demanded that the state fulfils its obligations towards them. It must enable them to become good mothers, by providing them with easy admission to education; help them to become good citizens, by providing effective child care for working mothers. Iranian women have accepted a divided labour market, which denies them access to certain jobs. In return they have demanded more flexible working hours and specific periods set aside to enable them to fulfil their ‘mothering duties’.

The chapters on Palestine by Maria Holt and Kathy Glavanis-Grantham demonstrate the problems faced by women involved in the resistance movement and caught in the rising tide of Islamism. Palestinian women, like their Iranian counterparts, have had to formulate demands that are compatible with the formal Islamic dictum. At the same time they have sought to alleviate the more draconian chauvinist measures and inject their interpretations into the political arena.

Holt’s chapter explores the contradictions between Western perceptions of Palestinian women and the rather more complex reality of their lives. Holt reviews recent Palestinian history, including events such as the ‘catastrophe’ of 1948 when the majority of Palestinians were forcibly uprooted from their land,

INTRODUCTION 5

the 1967 war which resulted in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Intifada and, most recently, the September 1993 Declaration of Principles which brought limited self-rule to parts of the occupied territories. Throughout, Palestinian women have remained active and have developed their involvement—both practical and political—in the national struggle. They have created a multiplicity of organisations and have participated in the conflicting currents of nationalism, Islamism and feminism in their society.

The contributors to this volume demonstrate that if the experiences of women the world over is to be understood and included in the study of politics, then the mainstream must be broadened to take on the range of political activities of women. It is not possible to add gender on to the orthodox political theories and expect them to make sense. Women are not an additional extra in the discipline of politics; they play an integral part in the processes that shape the destinies of nations. Women’s demands and priorities are often different from those of male politicians who set the agendas. What is interesting is the different and effective ways that women living in different countries, and under different political systems, succeed in negotiating a way forwards towards their strategic goals. Political science would indeed be much the poorer if it did not develop to encompass the complex and significant role played by women in the political arenas.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am most grateful to all the contributors of this volume for assisting in the writing of this introduction. In particular I would like to thank Delia Davin, Rohini Hensman, Aiping Mu and especially Donna Pankhurst for their extensive and meticulous comments on an earlier draft of this introduction.

NOTES

1 See for example M.Barrett and M.McIntosh (1982) The Anti-Social Family, London: Verso and S.de Beauvoir (1959) Memories of a Dutiful Daughter, Harmondsworth: Penguin. For the reassessment see K.Grieve ‘Rethinking Feminist Attitudes towards Motherhood’, Feminist Review 25(March): 38–45.

2 For detailed discussions see M.Molyneux (1985) ‘Mobilization without Emancipation? Women’s Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua’, Feminist Studies 11(2) and S.A.Radcliffe and S.Westwood (eds) (1993) ‘Viva’: Women and Popular Protest in Latin America (London: Routledge).

3 For detailed discussion see D.Kandiyoti (1988) ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’, Gender and Society 2(3): 271–90.

4 See Rohini Hensman, Chapter 4 in this volume, and S.Westwood and S.A. Radcliffe, ‘Gender Racism and the Politics of Identities’ and J.Schirmer, ‘The Seeking of Truth and the Gendering of Consciousness: The Co Madres of El Salvador and the CONAVIGUA Widows of Guatemala’, both in S.A.Radcliffe and

6 INTRODUCTION

S.Westwood (eds) (1993) ‘Viva’: Women and Popular Protest in Latin America, London: Routledge.

INTRODUCTION 7

Chapter 1 Analysing women in the politics of the Third

World Georgina Waylen

This chapter aims to outline some of the issues involved in the analysis of women in Third World politics. It would be impossible for a piece of this type to be comprehensive in its coverage or to outline a definitive approach to the study of women in Third World politics but it does aim to provide some guidelines. Some of the themes covered will be specific to the study of women and politics in the Third World, while others will also be relevant to the study of women and politics more generally. This is based on three important assumptions. First, ‘polities’ does not have the same impact on women as it does on men as is often assumed and therefore this needs to be investigated. Second, the political process often alters gender relations, i.e. relations between men and women, and this needs to be explored. Third, women often participate as political subjects in political activity in different ways from men, which raises questions about the distinctiveness of ‘women’s political activity’—should it be classified and analysed as a separate entity? Addressing these questions has important implications for the study of politics as it has been conventionally constructed.1

When looking for guidance in this endeavour, problems emerge with the conventional literature. Compared to some other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology and the humanities such as literary studies and history, orthodox political science has been slow to incorporate a gendered perspective into its approach (Silverberg 1990). The discipline of politics finds this hard to do. The traditional subject matter of the discipline—‘high polities’—treaties, wars, power politics as it is played out in the top echelons of the public sphere, not to mention the institutional politics of parties, executives and legislatures, is typically male dominated.

In any discussion of gender relations and politics, the public/private split is a crucial notion which has both informed orthodox accounts and inspired feminist critiques. While much of this literature has been written in a Western context, and despite its often universal tone, about the First World, the influence that many of the ideas and concepts have had on political activity and its analysis in the Third World means that it is important to consider them here. Stretching back to contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond, most of the political theory which underlies Western liberal democracy

and liberal democratic theory has at its roots the separation of the public and the private. Beginning with Locke, the private domestic sphere was seen as lying outside of the proper realms of investigation and interference by the state or others. The public sphere was seen as the arena where everyone was incorporated as an individual citizen in the political world. Few links were made between the two spheres and theoretical attention was focused on the public arena, as domestic life and the private sphere was assumed to be irrelevant to social and political theory. Of huge significance to the study of gender relations were the assumptions underlying this—implicitly individual citizens active in the public sphere were assumed to be male heads of household, and women were relegated analytically to the private sphere, subsumed within the household headed by the individual male. This ignores both the links between the two spheres, and varying role played by the state in constructing the boundary between them. While appearing gender neutral, maintaining a division between private and political life as central to liberal democracy is maintaining a division between men and women, where only men can be abstract individuals (Pateman 1983; 1989). The political is therefore defined as masculine in a very profound sense which makes it hard to incorporate women on the same terms as men and excludes many of those activities that women are involved in as not political. This is combined with an approach which sets up frameworks and theories which, while appearing gender neutral, work to exclude women. It is not enough then just to get a better understanding of the role of women in formal politics: a wider analysis, using broader definitions of the political, is needed.

Developments in feminist analyses in the 1980s have provided new theoretical insights relevant to this endeavour. Before this the notion of ‘woman’ as a unitary and a historical category had often been taken for granted. Some feminists had treated women as one homogeneous group, making the assumption that it was both possible and unproblematic to generalise about all women and their interests. This often meant that the experience of white, middle-class and Western women was generalised to black, working-class and Third World women. As part of a sea- change in theoretical debates, the different ways in which the category ‘woman’ has been constructed historically have been explored (Riley 1988). The notion of a ‘women’s interest’ shared by all women regardless of race, class and sexuality has become highly contested.

Three major elements have contributed to the breakdown of this kind of universal theorising (Barrett and Phillips 1992). First, black women have provided a powerful challenge to much of the work of white feminists, arguing that their analyses were imbued with racist and ethnocentric assumptions, again generalising the experience of white feminists to black women (b hooks 1984; Moraga and Anzaldua 1983). Second, the re-emergence of the ‘equality versus difference’ debate broke down the confident distinctions between sex and gender, and in some quarters sexual difference came to be celebrated rather than denied (Scott 1988). Debates moved on to ask how to deal with embodiment, arguing that it is not difference that is the problem, but how it is constructed and dealt with (Bock

ANALYSING WOMEN IN THIRD WORLD POLITICS 9

and James 1992). Third, the feminist challenge to mainstream theorising has been paralleled by the post-structuralist and post-modern critiques of the universal grand frameworks which characterised enlightenment thought and has heralded the end of the meta-narrative (Nicholson 1990). There has been a shift from ‘things’, i.e. an emphasis on structures so favoured by a social science approach, to ‘words’, an emphasis on language and discourse derived from literary and critical theory (Barrett 1992). Form and representation become important as language is no longer seen as transparently and directly reflecting ‘reality’. This has been accompanied by the fracturing of the ‘cartesian’ unitary human subject and the self so beloved of rationalist enlightenment thought to be replaced by notions of difference, plurality and multiplicity.

Interest has increased in the construction of the subject and the notion of identity. Identity is seen as complex and a combination of different elements such as class, race, gender and sexuality, not simply one factor (Butler and Scott 1992). There exists therefore the plurality of identities in the single subject. At the same time, there is also a greater recognition of diversity and difference between women. It therefore becomes impossible to say, in any uncomplicated way, that all women are oppressed by all men. The need to forge commonality across difference through alliances and coalitions becomes a key issue within feminism.

The use of enlightenment categories and grand universal frameworks had particular implications for analyses of Third World women made by First World feminists and academics (Spivak 1987). First, many analyses were informed by notions, paralleling ideas about the common oppression of women, that ‘sisterhood is global’, i.e. that there was more uniting women of different races, classes and sexualities than dividing them. This was often expressed in various cross-cultural analyses of patriarchy. Second, when difference was actually acknowledged it was often done by turning all Third World women into a non- Western ‘other’. The ‘Women in Development’ literature, in particular, is often marked out for displaying these characteristics—treating all Third World women as the same, whether they were, for example, upper-class urban educated professionals or lower-class rural peasant women and advocating general ‘solutions’ to various perceived problems which affected them from the framework of a universal homogenising feminism. This had the effect of removing agency from Third World women, often seeing them as passive victims of barbaric and primitive practices (Lazreg 1988; Mohanty 1988; 1991; Ong 1988).

Where does this leave the study of women in Third World politics? The inadequacy of the conventional politics literature indicates that several things have to be done. First, women have to be put back into the study of formal politics. But as Donna Pankhurst and Jenny Pearce point out in Chapter 3 of this volume in the context of the debates about democratisation, women should not be ‘added in’ to the analysis of political processes at the expense of other forms of social relations such as class and ethnicity. Second, it is necessary to make clear how ostensibly neutral political processes and concepts, such as nationalism, citizenship

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and the state, are fundamentally gendered. Third, it is not enough simply to reintegrate women as actors in the study of conventional politics but those activities women are typically involved in outside the male-dominated institutional sphere must also be included in such analyses. This challenge to the conventional construction of the political is crucially important, as without it much of women’s political activity can be dismissed or marginalised as it does not fit easily into conventional categories and, as a result, the important role it plays in the political process will be ignored. New developments in feminist theorising have meant that if universalistic discourses of patriarchy and women’s oppression can no longer be used uncritically by a white Western and predominantly middle- class feminism as they have been in the past, there is a need to find ways of examining, first, the role played by different groups of women in conventional politics, and the part played by different groups of women in political activity outside of conventional politics, which can accommodate specificity, diversity and heterogeneity. This means an approach which can look at the complexity of women in the Third World from a perspective of the multiplicity of difference rather than ‘otherness’.

CONVENTIONAL POLITICS

While conventional politics is largely seen as synonymous with electoral politics in the First World, this correlation doesn’t hold so clearly in the Third World where authoritarian and military regimes and even the revolutionary overthrow of the state have been more commonplace. It is now well documented that men and women participate differently in all forms of formal politics in both the First and Third Worlds: in both getting issues on the political agendas and in policy making and implementation (Ackelsberg 1992). In the past men’s political behaviour has been seen as the norm by political scientists, and women’s analysed in terms of its deviation from this male norm. As part of this, many myths and stereotypes about women’s political participation have grown up, e.g. that women are passive, apolitical and conservative, which feminist political scientists have endeavoured to puncture (Randall 1987). It has been widely observed, that initially on gaining the vote, women do not vote with the same frequency as men in both the developed and developing world. However, this gap closes rapidly and once voting rates are controlled for age, class, education, etc., these differences disappear. It is clear that women’s tendency to vote less is not inherent but transient and contingent, e.g. it declines with increasing urbanisation. In the Chilean election of 1989 women had a higher propensity to vote than men.

There is, however, a marked tendency for women to participate less than men in formal politics the higher up the echelons of power you look (Peterson and Runyan 1993). At the grassroots level women on the whole make up a smaller percentage of the members of political parties than men. In the late 1960s women made up between only 15 and 20 per cent of party members in Chile and Peru. There was no greater number in the socialist block: in 1980 women formed only

ANALYSING WOMEN IN THIRD WORLD POLITICS 11

19 per cent of ordinary Cuban communist party members. Women have often been marginalised in women’s sections. Many one-party states in the Third World, particularly in Africa, created women’s organisations or co-opted already existing ones which became part of the dominant political party. These have been more vehicles for the state to control women’s participation, mobilising them on its terms and providing the regime with a base, rather than ways for women to gain representation within the system (Staudt 1986: 208). In Zimbabwe, for example, the ZANU women’s organisation was headed by Sally Mugabe, the president’s wife. However, with democratisation in parts of Latin America, many women activists have set up more autonomous women’s sections in parties of the centre and centre left with distinctly feminist agendas (Waylen 1994).

Inevitably, given the low numbers of women members of political parties, the numbers elected to representative bodies are also low. While women tend to participate in greater numbers in local level politics, the average percentage of women in national legislatures globally in 1987 was 10. This hides wide diversity. In 1987 the proportion of women legislators in sub-Saharan Africa was approximately 7.5 per cent; Latin America 7 per cent; South Asia 5 per cent and South East Asia 12 per cent. But the proportions had increased in all regions since 1975 (United Nations 1991: 32). It appears that women fare better in systems with proportional representation. In Chile the return to electoral politics saw fewer women elected than there had been in the early 1970s before the military took power.

There tend to be even fewer women found in the executives of governments whether they are authoritarian, elected, state socialist or revolutionary. Often, a very small number of women are appointed to posts which reflect the role that women so often play in the private sphere, e.g. women are often given responsibility for health, education, welfare and women’s affairs (where this portfolio exists). In 1987–8 an average of only 3.5 per cent of the world’s cabinet ministers were women and ninety-three countries, comprising thirty-one from Africa, twenty-four from Latin America and the Caribbean and thirty from Asia and the Pacific, had no women ministers at all. Women are largely excluded from key areas such as economic policy, defence and political affairs. Even in the ‘social’ areas, women formed only 9 per cent of the ministers in Africa and 6 per cent or less in the rest of the Third World (United Nations 1991: 31).

There are several explanations for this pattern of participation in conventional politics. Many women are constrained by their roles in the private sphere, which prevent them from participating in the public sphere on the same terms as men and gaining the experience deemed necessary for a career in politics. However, it has been suggested that this affects middle and upper-class women to a lesser extent in much of the Third World, because they can utilise the labour of female servants to free them from their domestic responsibilities (Richter 1990–1: 530). Almost universally middle-class women, because of factors such as economic resources and employment, levels of education and confidence, find it easier to participate than poorer women in the upper echelons of conventional politics.

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However, it is not only the nature of many women’s lives which prevents them from participating, but also the structures of formal politics. This ranges from the timing of meetings, the combative style and machismo (often commented on in left-wing parties), and more widespread discrimination against women, for example in selection procedures, which prevents them from rising in political parties (Caldeira 1986).

One phenomenon, which has been noted particularly in Asia and appears to go against these trends, is the relatively high number of women leaders in the Third World, such as Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Corazon Aquino and Violetta Chamorro (Genovese 1993). There are particular explanations for this which do not contradict the basic pattern. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein (1978) has claimed that in India there is a link between the degree to which politics is institutionalised and the participation of women, as the permeability of institutions allows women to achieve political prominence. Also in the Asian context, Linda Richter (1990–1) has argued that, among the factors which enable women to reach leadership positions are elite status, high levels of female participation in the movements struggling for independence, and crucially important, links to politically prominent male relatives, often accompanied by their martyrdom, e.g. their assassination. Richter also claims that women leaders suffer important disadvantages over their male counterparts: they do not generally have an institutional base, a regional constituency, an administrative track record or a military niche, often being seen as temporary leaders, making them vulnerable to coup attempts. In Latin America, the ‘supermadre’ is seen as important. Elsa Chaney (1979) has argued that women in politics have often played the role of mother of the people. Eva Peron’s social welfare activities, seen as dispensing help to the poor and sick, are often cited as an example of this.

While women are on the whole under-represented in formal politics, this does not mean of course that the policies made and implemented in the political process do not have a huge impact on the lives of different groups of women and on gender relations in general, as Aiping Mu demonstrates in her examination of China’s fertility policy in Chapter 7 in this volume. When examining policy making and its outcomes, the gendered nature of the state becomes an important focus. There are often large numbers of women employed in state bureaucracies, but few are found at the top of the state hierarchies in all types of political system whether electoral, authoritarian or state socialist (Staudt 1989). In the 1980s the highest proportion of female public sector administrative and managerial workers was found in Latin America at 20 per cent, with 13 per cent in Africa and 10 per cent in Asia. While these figures had increased significantly in all areas since 1970, women are found only rarely in positions in central banks, economics ministries or foreign trade (United Nations 1991: 35). The state therefore is a gendered hierarchy, with women having an uneven representation in the bureaucracy (Franzway et al. 1989: 30). Some analysts have gone on to focus, not simply on the lack of women but also on the embedded masculine style and organisation of state bureaucracies, epitomised for example by the Weberian rational model (Ferguson

ANALYSING WOMEN IN THIRD WORLD POLITICS 13

1984). It has been suggested, however, that in some Third World states, middle- class educated women are in a good position to play a strategic role in the bureaucracy. (Charlton et al. 1989: 13). Indeed Alvarez, after examining Brazil, has suggested that state-led development increases employment opportunities for female professionals and technocrats within the state (Alvarez 1990: 261).

When examining links between state action and gender relations, policies and their impact can be divided into three major categories (Charlton et al. 1989). The first set is policies which are aimed particularly at women. These often focus around so-called protective legislation and reproduction, e.g. abortion and laws surrounding childbirth such as the provision of maternity leave. A second subdivision is those policies which deal with relations between men and women, particularly property rights, sexuality, family relations, areas where power relations between men and women and therefore sets of gender relations are often institutionalised. The laws and regulations surrounding these issues frequently become an area of contestation when attempts are made to alter the existing pattern of power relations, as occurred with the enforcement of colonial rule in Africa when marriage, divorce and women’s mobility became highly contested (Barnes 1992; Channock 1982; Manicom 1992).

The third set, general policies, are supposedly sex-neutral but have a different impact on men and women. These can be further subdivided into those policy areas linked to the public sphere and somehow seen as masculine, such as state- defined politics, war, foreign policy, international trade, resources extraction and long-distance communication; and those connected with welfare and reproduction. Women have traditionally been excluded from the so-called masculine areas of policy. The most extreme example of this has been war, where women have, until very recently, participated on a different basis from men. While national liberation struggles and revolutionary mobilisations have incorporated women as fighters, this, too, has often happened in gender-specific ways, i.e. the image of the woman fighter as mother with a rifle in one arm and a baby in the other (Reif 1986). Those policy areas more intimately connected to the private sphere and reproduction, for example, housing, health and education, fall under the general rubric of welfare and the welfare state. In contrast to the ‘masculine’ policies of the public sphere, welfare states have, for some time, been the subject of feminist analyses, particularly in the First World, looking at how they were established assuming particular patterns of gender relations or with the effect of creating or maintaining particular gender roles, and emphasising issues of control and empowerment for women (Wilson 1977).

Even in much of the Third World where welfare states are far less developed and comprehensive, women are, on the whole, a large proportion of providers of state welfare services. The state sector therefore provides employment opportunities for different groups of women. Middle-class professional women are more likely to be employed by the state than the private sector, e.g. as teachers, social workers, nurses in sex-segregated employment (Seager and Olson 1986). Women also form the majority of consumers of welfare services. This is

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because of the role traditionally ascribed to many women in the domestic sphere as mothers and household managers, i.e. it is women within the household who often liaise with welfare services on behalf of other members of the household, e.g. the young and old. It is women who often make up the majority of the poor and are the major recipients of whatever welfare services exist. Any cuts in welfare services have particular implications for many women, both as providers and consumers of state welfare services, as has been seen in the impact of adjustment policies in the Third World (Afshar and Dennis 1992). Welfare states therefore have a differential impact on particular groups of women. Poor women, as the recipients of welfare services whether chosen or imposed, experience the welfare state very differently from the middle-class professional women who are employed to provide these services. This brings us to consider the gendered nature of the state, citizenship and nationalism.

CITIZENSHIP, NATIONALISM AND THE STATE

These three categories are linked together. Citizenship is an important way in which the relationship between the individual and the nation-state has been theorised. It is not gender neutral. Men and women have been incorporated into citizenship in Western states in very different ways. Initially citizenship was restricted to men (for long periods excluding working-class men and men of different races such as black slaves in America) and incorporated them as soldiers and wage-earners, i.e. through activities in the public sphere; only later were women incorporated, often as mothers, through their activities in the private sphere. So despite current formal equality as voters, men and women have been differentially incorporated as citizens by the state.

This raises the question of links to the nation and nationalism as citizens are citizens of a nation-state. Clearly in the study of Third World politics, an analysis of nationalism and the processes surrounding the creation of ethnic identities and the nation-state is crucially important. Nationalism also is not constructed in a gender neutral fashion (McClintock 1993; Parker et al. 1992). While recognising the lack of a unitary category woman, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (1989) have located five major ways in which women have tended to participate in ethnic and national processes and state practices on different terms to men. These are:

• as biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities, as ‘mothers of the nation’

• as reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups • as participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and

transmitters of its culture • as signifiers of ethnic/national differences—as a focus and symbol in

ideological discourses used in the construction, reproduction and transformation of ethnic/national categories

ANALYSING WOMEN IN THIRD WORLD POLITICS 15

• as participants in national, economic, political and military struggles (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989: 7).

The control of women and their sexuality is therefore central to these processes. Kandiyoti (1991) has argued that this identification of women as bearers of cultural identity will have a negative effect on their emergence as full-fledged citizens. In the post-colonial context, while many nationalist movements and nationalist projects equated the emancipation of women with ‘modernity’, some successor states have then appeared to reverse reforms when the previous secularist projects appear to break down (Kandiyoti 1991).

It is clear that a gendered analysis of the nation-state is necessary here. There were, for a long time, few feminist analyses which went beyond seeing the state as either somehow essentially good or essentially bad for women in general. These views of the state are too simplistic, because it is not fixed whether the state is essentially good or bad. Indeed, the state has no necessary relationship to gender relations; it is evolving, dialectic and dynamic. It is far better to see the state as a site of struggle, not lying outside of society and social processes, but having, on the one hand, a degree of autonomy from these which varies under particular circumstances, and on the other, being permeated by them. Gender (and racial and class) inequalities are therefore buried within the state, but through part of the same dynamic process, gender relations are also partly constituted through the state (Pringle and Watson 1992). The state therefore partly reflects and partly helps to create particular forms of gender relations and gender inequality. Feminist analyses therefore have advanced from looking at the way the state treats women unequally in relation to men, to examining the ways in which, for example, the project of the welfare state has constituted a ‘state subject’ in a gendered way. Gendered identities are in part constructed by the law and public discourses which emanate from the state (Showstack-Sassoon 1987).

As Shirin Rai argues in a much longer analysis in this volume, because the relationship between the state and gender relations is not fixed and immutable, battles can be fought out in the arena of the state. Consequently, while the state has for the most part acted to reinforce female subordination, the space can exist within the state to act to change gender relations (Alvarez 1989; Charlton et al. 1989). At different times and within different regimes, opportunity spaces can be used to alter the existing pattern of gender relations. Women’s relationship to the state, particularly its welfare element, can also be seen as a site of contestation which provides the context for mobilisation, and the welfare state can function as a locus of resistance. The actions of the state can also become a focus for political activity by groups outside the state, e.g. poor women campaigning for an extension of services. Alvarez, for example, has argued that the extension of the remit of the state into the realm of the private has the effect of politicising the private, e.g. through issues such as abortion, rape and domestic violence. This politicisation then gives women’s movements a handle to campaign around and

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influence the political agenda. Shifting the boundary between the public and the private then becomes an important point of influence (Alvarez 1990).

Different groups of women therefore interact with the state in different ways, and can have some influence over the way in which the state acts. It is important to analyse under what conditions and with what strategies women’s movements can influence the state and policy agendas. Debate has centred around whether women’s movements should attempt to work with the state and political parties. ‘State feminism’ has emerged as an important issue in the context of democratisation with the return to civilian governments in some Latin American countries. Can feminist movements be successfully incorporated into the state and achieve their own agendas or do they simply get co-opted (Waylen 1993)? This brings us to look at ‘women’s political activity’.

WOMEN’S POLITICAL ACTIVITY

Why do women undertake political activity under certain circumstances, what form does this activity take and how can women’s movements be analysed in the Third World context? If identities are complex, comprising multiple intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality, causing individuals to react in different ways at different times, women will act politically, not simply on the basis of gender, but race, class and sexuality as well, in a complex interaction. In the same way as it is difficult to talk of a unitary category ‘woman’ and women’s interests, it is impossible to talk of a women’s movement. There is not one movement, but a diversity of different movements of which feminist movements are one part. Broad generalisations are therefore not possible.

It is important not to fall into the trap of essentialism here. Some scholars, for example, have analysed women’s activities in terms of an ‘ethic of care’ and maternal thinking, arguing, in positive and perhaps rather romantic terms, that women bring to activities in the public sphere supposedly ‘female’ values of caring, mothering and peacefulness (Gilligan 1983; Ruddick 1989). They have been criticised for both essentialism and universalism: looking at gender to the exclusion of other forms of difference such as race and class, and trying to create grand universal frameworks.

Recently attention has also focused on the form that women’s political activities take, including whether women find new ways of ‘doing polities’ (Waylen 1992). Using approaches influenced by post-modernism and post- structuralism, political action is seen, in part, as a struggle over dominant meanings, including dominant ideas of woman, and aiming to change those meanings. Using the ideas of Foucault amongst others, knowledge and the ability to construct knowledge equals power. Much greater emphasis is therefore put on the form of political protests: on their use of the body and symbols and metaphors and how far they subvert dominant discourses of womanhood. One of the most powerful symbolic and subversive acts carried out by women protesting at the disappearance of their relatives has been the takeover of public space not normally