Too much work, and for what?

This morning, I had reason to reflect on how many factors conspire to keep women from professional success. A health crisis in the family has kept a colleague from the office for a few days now with no end in sight within the week. She is conscientious and no doubt this is adding to her stress.

All women work, whether at home for no pay or outside for pay, and that their workload never diminishes is even a saying ("A woman's work is never done"). But when women go out to work for money (because why else would she want to, right?), nothing shifts at home. She retains primary responsibility for the household, for care duties and for the family's social and ritual obligations. When I was young, I used to despair about women who took leave for 'nombu' or for someone's naming ceremony. I don't so it still irritates me when it comes up but now I realise that this is part of that double burden.

In the absence of the joint family, with families being scattered and more women remaining single, care duties are not shared. In an  crisis, there may be absolutely no one else that a caregiver can call on even to sit with a patient while she pays the bill or gets medicine. If she is a midcareer or senior person, it would take an extraordinary organisation to adjust its priorities to her emergency and even then, they may not always have a choice. The expectation is that women would perform their duties excellently at home and outside.

What a huge burden and source of stress for the woman! Already raised in a society where she is taught to be her last priority, in a crisis, she is alone. Having taken leave for the crisis, she may not have the choice of taking leave to take care of herself.

Why then would women take on work in the public sphere? Why would they volunteer? Why would they do political work? Why would they contest elections?

When men make those choices, they are lauded for their public spirit, and the waves (of family members and their expectations) part to make room for the social activist or political leader. By and large, while men in political life serve society, an army of domestic supporters serve them. But who takes over care duties from women? This is one reason that those who advocate the greater inclusion of women in politics are also advocates for care work support, either through allowing budgetary allocations for it or setting up social support systems.

In India, the government and NGOs set up Self-Help Groups (SHGs) everywhere and we have high expectations of women in these groups, especially those with leadership potential or those who get elected to leadership roles. But these are women who often live in localities where there is no infrastructure so getting water or getting to use a shared toilet take time and energy (not to mention planning). They go to work after that. They run their homes, trying to make sure that their children go to school, eat well, do their homework and stay out of trouble. On top of all this, which is already too much responsibility, they are expected to attend SHG meetings on time, carry out the activities and deliver results. We do this in the name of empowerment but really, how unrealistic and inconsiderate. There have to be kinder roads to empowerment. We must find them.

Since the morning, what I have really been thinking about is the way in which we think about work. At work and in politics, our traditional way of assessing work, achievement and success is predicated on patriarchal household arrangements. A man goes out to work, focuses on the work, gets stuff done, and returns to a domestic sphere where one or many women have taken care of maintenance and care work, and everything is set up to support his work outside. Of course, this is in return for his outside earnings that pay for household expenses. The point here is that it is this arrangement that determines how we expect people to work and deliver.

Unless women get the same level of support at home, this is completely unrealistic. And cruel.

Today, many HR firms specialise in helping women find work, even after a long break, and in mentoring their start-ups. But even here, I hear leaders speak about how women must (not as in do, but should) balance home and work responsibilities. A management school leader proudly told me that he plainly advises young women MBA students that they must prepare to balance both responsibilities. Others talk about how family support is important--but in the sense of permission and not shared household work. Women are ridiculously grateful to men for any little support they get and a good man is still one who does or who will 'allow' his wife to work outside or to study.

When will this change? Really, when? Until it does, women are going to carry an unfairly large burden--for themselves, for their families and for society.

Controversy over appointment of women to senior posts

Cross-posting from The PSW Weblog: Maldives controversy: Women appointed to senior posts, September 2, 2010. 

High Office, High Status?

In the sixtieth year of the Indian Republic (which it is not), the nomination of Pratibha Patil is being greeted as a mark of Indian respect for women (which it is not).

Let me address why I do not think this is a mark of respect for women. The post of President in the Indian Republic is a symbolic and ceremonial one. If it seems important today, that is a function of the character and calibre of the incumbent. It has not always seemed like such a significant office, and while there was always some politicking that preceded it, the fuss this time is a first. It is because President Kalam brought his energy and enthusiasm that the office has begun to seem like it might matter. In sum, if the next President has a different temperament and energy, the Indian Presidency will be back to ceremony, symbolism and etiquette. And it really won’t matter except in a crisis who occupies Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Am I saying the Indian presidency doesn’t matter? Of course, not; of course, it does. But less in the ways that are suggested when someone says that a woman becoming President is a mark of respect for women. It has been hugely important to have a President whose integrity is unchallenged, whose imagination and openness to ideas were inspiring to many and whose energy and attention to detail made a difference in many places starting with the running of the presidential palace itself. The President, we have seen, can really be a role model—a youth icon, to use the language of MTV. But the Indian president wields very little power, and that is the acid test here.

Moreover, there is a difference of value between direct and indirect election. While the latter is sometimes more convenient, in a democracy, it never has the value of a direct endorsement by those who cared enough to vote. The Indian President is not directly elected (nor is the American, theoretically) and therefore, never has the independent mandate or power base that the American or French or Sri Lankan Presidents have.

The second reason why I don’t think this nomination is a mark of women’s progress is clear if you contrast the fact that Sonia Gandhi, who is undoubtedly one of the most powerful people in India, is never described as the woman president of the Indian National Congress. Ditto Jayalalithaa. When you qualify any office by gender or any other identity marker, it becomes clear that symbolism and tokenism are at play. If in fact, women had significant access to power at all levels, their ascension to high office would be routine. There would neither be a glass ceiling of the sort Hillary Clinton is trying so hard to shatter nor would there be a ‘coup by affirmative action,’ which is a nasty thing to say, I know, but quite likely an accurate description of the thinking that preceded Ms. Patil’s nomination.

The third and most important reason that President Pratibha Patil will not signify the progress of women is to be found in the homes and workplaces and streets of India. When women are safe in their homes from the men who claim in public to respect and worship them; when they can step down from those pedestals and altars long enough to earn a living and build a good life for themselves and those they care about; and, when they can consider careers in politics in the way that they do in engineering and medicine so that parties don’t have to make a conscious choice to nominate and appoint them, then women will have progressed in India.

Moreover, and this is my final reason for not over-reading this as a landmark for women, women in high office, or any office, do not necessarily make a difference in areas that concern women. It is an essentialist myth that a woman in power will address the needs and concerns of women. She might, or she might not. She might not care; she might care but lack clout; she might have other matters that seem more important to her. And then she might address these questions (like violence against women; access to livelihoods, credit and property rights; reproductive health issues) but do so in ways that are retrogressive. After all, all women are not feminists. And the rise to power makes its own demands. The track record of women in power working to empower is not as good as one would hope.

Having said all this, it still feels good to think of a woman occupying Rashtrapati Bhavan and one who has worked hard through her political career. I grew up with Madam Prime Minister and as I am fond of saying, did not know that you could associate male pronouns and adjectives with this office till I was in Junior College. I want small girls beginning to read newspapers today to feel the same way: that all symbolic and real offices of power are usually occupied by women and that therefore it is a perfectly natural and sensible thing to aspire to them. Careers in public service should have the appeal that careers in showbusiness do (after all, they are not that different in some ways!). I want young girls to see Sonia Gandhi and Pratibha Patil, the way they do Shabana Azmi and Jayalalithaa, Sunita Williams and Sania Mirza, and say, “When I grow up, I am going to be President of India.”

I delight in the fact that our wonderful handloom fabrics and textiles can be shown off by our Head of State, who may no longer be a dull male elder in grey or black bandh-gala or cream shervani (or a bright male elder dully dressed). I want the world to see, in the splendor of the Mughal gardens, the richness of Kanchi pattu in jewel colours and Banarasis in twilight pastels and Muga silks that reflect the light. Or the hardy vividness of the Puneri cotton saree, the delicate brightness of the Kota, the sombre white and gold of Kerala cottons and the thoughtful lightness of the Bengal. Ikat blouses, Khadi sarees, Himachal and Bandhni shawls and coats with Kashmiri embroidery.

And now a parochial confession: I was born and raised as a Tamilian in Maharashtra and now I am a displaced Maharashtrian in Tamil Nadu. That the outgoing President and the one likely to succeed him are from these two states does give me a cheap thrill. Yeah, yeah, we are all Indians and of course, I am. But in a polity where the people of the Gangetic plain garner all the main speaking parts from epoch to epoch, I am happy to have my own people there, centre-stage albeit in non-speaking parts.

(Post-script: No, the Indian Republic does not turn sixty this year; that will happen on January 26, 2010. This year, the independent Indian state turns sixty on August 15. Between August 15, 1947 and January 26, 1950, India was not a republic but an independent dominion.)

DON'T celebrate Women's Day....

...unless you understand WHAT you are celebrating?

Several years ago, when my Russianist sister would describe the Soviet celebration of International Women's Day with flowers and cards, I laughed in scorn. Then, in the US, I saw the day turn into what Americans call a 'Hallmark Holiday.' Now living in India, the laugh's on me: movies starring leading actresses on TV, fatuous statements about mothers and wives, getting a break from cooking and cleaning... and sales! Now I have nothing against TV, movies, food and shopping, but what happened to the original reason we began to observe--not celebrate--this day?

International Women's Day is a marker in the worldwide struggle for women's rights and equality. It is a day where we remind ourselves of how much remains to be done in our quest to stop this very patronizing and trivializing way that society has of treating us and our struggles.

What have these struggles been? In India, I would say it has been and remains first and foremost, a struggle for survival. Some of the liberal struggles waged elsewhere--suffrage, for instance--have come more easily than the right to life and the right to livelihood.

The struggle for an equal right to life goes back to the campaign against sati, followed by the pioneering efforts of other nineteenth century reformers against child marriage, for widow remarriage (as opposed to sati or a long life in poverty and vulnerability in one of India's pilgrimage centres), and for the education of women. The nationalist movement mobilized women, both in its Gandhian and in its violent, revolutionary streams. From there to the granting of suffrage and equal rights was a small but insufficient step.

Insufficient, because the advent of a consumerist modernity has brought new travails to women's lives. The practice of demanding dowry has now spread throughout the country, and the killing or other abuse of young brides whose dowry is deemed inadequate is known around the country. This is true of female infanticide and its terrible new technology-enabled version, female foeticide (or sex-selective abortion, which sounds euphemistic to me sometimes). Women and girls face many other kinds of sexual abuse, from incestuous rape to sexual harrassment in the workplace to what we quaintly term 'eve-teasing'. All this, plus the residuary category of domestic violence (meaning the battery and torture of wives)--not much reason to celebrate, is there?

We are still splitting hairs over the right of women to participate in politics and be represented in numbers more closely approximating their presence in society. Scarily, even as we do so, the child sex ratio drops, and I wonder where that meeting point will be between equal access and the sex ratio: will the former rise to meet the latter as it is presently, or the latter fall to meet the former as it is presently.

I grew up a feminist because I did not know there was another way for an intelligent, spirited young woman to grow up. As Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender wrote, to me, feminism is the 'radical notion' that women are human. I did not learn feminism in women's studies classes (they did not exist when I was growing up). I learnt it from strong women and men in my family and from my gut response to inequities I witnessed around me. So much has changed in the last few decades, but so little of it for the lives of women--who may now buy washing machines, but not political access or security. So much remains to be done. Yes, I will look at the glass as half-empty because it prevents me from settling in a sanguine fashion into my own comfortable middle class life. It reminds me of how intertwined my fate is with those of other women.

Don't 'celebrate' Women's Day, observe it! If you cannot be part of our struggle with us and support it, ignore or challenge us, but do not reduce this life-and-death battle we wage to a greeting card or a posy or worse, discounts for the very things that shackle us to stereotypes and limits.

***********
An off-the-cuff, point of departure list for reading further:
Radha Kumar, The History of Doing, Kali for Women, 1993.
Sakuntala Narasimhan, Sati - Widow Burning in India, Anchor, 1992.
Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, University of California, 1998.
Raka Ray, Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India, Minnesota, 1999.
Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime, OUP, 2002.
Mala Sen, Death by Fire: Sati, Dowry Death, and Female Infanticide in Modern India, Rutgers, 2002.
Flavia Agnes, Law and Gender Inequality: The Politics of Women's Rights in India, OUP, 2001.
Manushi remains, to my mind, an important resource. It may be accessed here and also here.
and if you will excuse a little self-promotion (hey, it's my blog and I'll write what I want to!):
Farah Faizal and Swarna Rajagopalan, Women, Security, South Asia: A Clearing in the Thicket, Sage, 2005.

Base-ic Concerns

This morning, the Indian Express reported the setting up of India’s base at Ayni in Tajikistan: India’s first footprint in strategic Central Asia, the reporter wrote. Bases leave more than one kind of footprint in the communities where they are located.


In her 1989 book, “Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics,” Cynthia Enloe describes the relationship between a military base and the local community. The base depends on the community’s acceptance which serves as camouflage and in turn, the community comes to depend on the base for jobs and a ready market. Writing primarily about American bases around the world, she identified the interaction between soldiers and local women as particularly controversial. During the Second World War, it was social interaction between Black American soldiers and white British women leading to interracial romance and marriage that provoked concern. Elsewhere however, it was a different equation that obtained between armies of occupation and women in occupied countries, most infamously, Japanese soldiers and Korean “comfort women” and after the war, American soldiers in Okinawa and Japanese women.

The relationship between soldiers and sex workers resembles a contractual or consensual arrangement; however, as Enloe shows in this book and again in “Maneuvers” (2000), they are deeply embedded in and enabled by an unequal power relationship. Enloe’s work provides examples from British policy regarding overseas cantonments, and asks whether we only see this in the context of settings where those stationed on the base are from a different race than local community members. AIDS has added an extra dimension to this multilayered issue; for instance, the part played by UN peacekeepers in spreading the infection in parts of Africa and the part played by US soldiers in doing the same in parts of Asia where there are US bases has been documented and protested.

There are all kinds of military bases; armies step outside their original homebase in a variety of contexts. The Indian base in Tajikistan, like US bases in so many parts of the world, will serve as an observer mission of sorts, also providing a rapid deployment facility if needed. There are bases set up by armies of occupation, a contentious term that is used to refer both to invading armies and armies fighting insurgencies over a long-term. The Indian army presence in Kashmir and northeastern India and the US army in Vietnam are examples, as is the advancing and retreating Sri Lankan army in northeastern Sri Lanka. Finally, there are peacekeeping forces, whether their presence is mandated by the UN Security Council or bilateral treaties like the Indian Army in Sri Lanka. Accusations of sexual violence are common to all these contexts, and until recently, it was possible to brush them aside as ‘the spoils of war’ which are to be expected when soldiers are stationed away from families for a long time. In 2001, the Sri Lankan army was even reported to have prescribed the impotence drug, Viagra, to injured soldiers to raise their morale.

In the last decade, feminist mobilization has resulted in the acceptance of the idea that rape is a weapon of war. Apologies have been made by the Japanese government for their wartime excesses in the first part of the twentieth century and Pakistani feminists apologized to Bangladeshi women for the actions of the Pakistani army in 1971.

Feminists, but also any other Indians who care that those who act in our name should act in a righteous fashion, must draw attention to these experiences and beyond challenging the rationale for establishing bases abroad, must advocate the adoption and strict implementation of behavioural codes that prevent soldiers from acting in an exploitative way. Human rights advocacy has done that, especially in Kashmir and northeastern India, but beyond redress, punishment of individual offenders and removal of particular laws, we need to press for a renewed appraisal of

(1) how we understand base-civilian relations;
(2) how the establishment defines, investigates and punishes sexual violence;
(3) the degree of transparency brought to such proceedings, and finally,
(4) our own willingness and ability to monitor base conduct in the interests of the community in which Indian bases are located.

***

Of related interest, a handful of links:

• Rubina Saigol, Militarisation, Nation and Gender:Women's Bodies as Arenas of Violent Conflict, South Asia Citizens' Web.
• Patricia Mukhim, Women and insurgency, The Telegraph, November 29, 2005.
• Jeanne Ward and Mendy Marsh, Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in War and Its Aftermath: Realities, Responses, and Required Resources, UNFPA, June 2006. See also here.
• A report on Cynthia Enloe's lecture, How Can You Tell If You're Becoming Militarized? Some Feminist Clues, WHRNet.org, March 29, 2006.
• Kalpana Sharma, Kashmir's steel magnolias, Hindu, September 8, 2002.
• UNAIDS, Peacekeepers. And in Laurie Garrett, HIV and National Security: Where Are the Links? Council on Foreign Relations, July 18, 2005.
• Michael Richardson, War Apology Likely to Ease Tension in Asia : Japan Vows to Pursue Conciliatory Course, International Herald Tribune, August 24, 1993.
• Suvendrini Kakuchi, 'Respect Women Before Setting Up Military Bases' IPS News, January 31, 2007.
• Chalmers Johnson, America's Empire of Bases, CommonDreams.org, January 15, 2004.

Women in Politics

Sujata Dutta Sachdeva of the Times of India asked me two questions this week in connection with an article she wrote on women in South Asian politics. First, why is it that women in politics do not devote as much attention to development issues as we expect? Second, why are they judged so harshly for their corruption?

The answer to both questions lies in the expectations we impose on women who enter politics. These expectations are not merely unjustified but also unfair.

The general expectation is that women, as mothers, will have a natural inclination for policy fields relating to nurture (development, health, child welfare and animal welfare) and as homemakers, will excel in hospitality-oriented ministries like tourism. There is nothing wrong with being interested in these spheres and they are undeniably important. But if everyone thinks they are so important, why don't the Arjun Singhs, Laloo Prasads, Dayanidhi Marans and Arun Jaitleys lobby for these appointments?

The gendered division of labour in most homes finds its way to policy-making circles, and the men do the issues that are valorised as serious (defence, foreign affairs, finance, internal security) while women keep the home clean, healthy and hospitable (just women's work, you know!). Just as all women do not have an abiding passion for housework, and there are women who do not feel they must be mothers, so there must be female politicians for whom these ministries are just a place to serve time before they can get a really important government or party post.

And why not?

This is the perfect segue to my answer to Sachdeva's second question. Why should we expect women who enter politics to live and act by a higher morality when the game is by and large dominated and won by those who are conniving and corrupt? Is it because we think women are somehow morally superior? Or is it that we do not expect women to be ambitious and able and willing to take action to further their ambitions?

I think both sets of expectations are traps--and women see variations of them in every professional field. Pedestals are prisons and being idolized is being frozen in stone. Place a woman on a pedestal, telling her she is delicate and angelic, and somewhere you are also telling her: you are too weak, possibly too slow-witted and certainly, I don't expect that you will seriously challenge my right (as a man) to play and win the game. Tell us that women are worshipped as mothers in this civilization, but don't tell us that what that means is that we could not possibly be interested in the intricate detail of defence budgets and tax reform.

If this topic seems like old hat to you, you haven't been paying attention to the tone in which news about Mamata Banerjee or Jayalalithaa gets reported and discussed. Sonia Gandhi is now too powerful to get the same treatment but there are shades of it in the way people respond to Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy.

As the US prepares for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign and South Asians gleefully point out, "Been there, done that!" it is a good time to reflect on the degree to which South Asia's women leaders represent a genuine empowerment of South Asia's women and a good time to pay attention to how we handicap these politicians by telling them how much we expect of them.

Postscript: Am I advocating or condoning corruption and poor governance? No, not at all. I am advocating the woman politician's right to ambition and to an interest in all spheres of policy-making. And I am saying, if you don't like the level of corruption you get, change the game so that bad behaviour is penalized across the board.