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Dorienne Rowan-Campbell
I would like to feel that when history counts the votes as to which of the isms has had the most impact on twentieth century lives, feminism will be judged as the most important human movement. By feminism I mean that womens movement which speaks to the most profound yet basic of changes in the roles, the rights, and the relations which govern connections, commerce, and intimacy between women and men. This movement, which espouses a change in the texture and weave of male-female relationships, offers a vision of equality in society, equity in partnership, and freedom from gender stereotyping - freeing each person to pursue the roles best suited to their needs and talents. The movement has been dynamic because the struggle for change takes place not on the worlds battlefields but in the most intimate spaces of the home and the human heart. It thus has had the potential to touch every man, woman, and child as the basic tenets remain relevant whatever the conditions under which people live, regardless of the dictates of totalitarianism, globalism, communism, or capitalism, or whether they suffer racism, ageism, or sexism.
In the middle of this century the womens movement, largely quiescent in public consciousness since the Suffragettes, staged a comeback. In true twentieth-century style, feminism - North American and European feminism - became a media event. While coverage tended to emphasise radicalism, women as libbers, perhaps alienating many women and men, there was an exposure of issues and concerns and a level of public debate that had never before taken place in recorded history. That debate moved issues of womens equality beyond domestic boundaries to take on global dimensions; again at a level which had never happened before, and inspired the First World Conference for Women held in Mexico 1974. After four UN World Conferences and one year devoted to women, the world seems to agree that women should have equality and equity and that gender issues are of some importance.
Why, then, are these changes that the world appears to agree are necessary so slow in coming? Why all around the globe are women still working longer hours and earning less than men? Why havent laws which allow discrimination against women been changed and implemented? Why are so many women still illiterate? Why are so many women still chattels of their spouse and his family? Why is violence against women and children, particularly young girls, so prevalent? The third millennium approaches yet practitioners still grapple with the struggle to bring to development work a consciousness of gender issues that will change lives and hearts and bring about a world where women and men share in the direction of the enhancement of their own lives and that of their communities and societies.
Sadly, history is likely to judge that although feminism had the potential for tremendous reach, its scope was never fully realised in the twentieth century. Perhaps in part we are still too close to judge accurately either our shortcomings or our successes. This essay reflects on the segregation and isolation which confront those who seek to breach the ramparts of male hegemony and bring down the walls of gender inequality. It examines the strategies of the womens movement as applied to development work with women, primarily gender training and mainstreaming, and assesses the barriers to change which have been erected to counterbalance its challenge to patriarchy. It also looks forward to some of the areas of positive change, and to the urgent need to anchor these early in the next millennium.
Male hegemony corrupts development initiatives that are designed to make positive differences in womens lives and, by extension, the lives of their men and their families. It is especially visible in the way development has been directed to and through women, particularly with the concept of income generation, in the way violence against women and domestic violence has been handled, and in the whole question of participatory approaches for sustainable development. Particularly disheartening is the manner in which men tend to avoid participation in, discussion of, or attendance to issues if they relate primarily to the concerns of women. Development with women has, therefore, largely been development for women by women with women; and therein lies some of the seeds of its under-achievement.
The Adinka symbol Sankosa, a stylised bird moving forward yet ever looking backward, reminds us that it is impossible to understand the present without having an understanding and awareness of the past. To understand the present situation we first need to glance over our shoulders to the end of the seventeenth century in Europe when the structures of male dominance begin to be institutionalised and gender discrimination codified. We then need to consider the emergence of the international development enterprise itself and, lastly, the role and impact of global corporations.
Sankosa
Nature, wrote Dr Samuel Johnson, has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little. His aphorism might be said to sum up the thinking of his age.
[D]uring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries western society began to find solutions to the problems of organisation brought by the changes that occurred in technology, agriculture, industry, commerce.... Discrimination against women as opposed to prejudice against women and injustice dealt women by particular legal practices became part of the new structures that emerged, and as these new structures emerged and as they affected the lives of more and more people in more an more ways, so discrimination against women became more and more widespread, more and more accepted and more and more difficult to combat& The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century see the construction of a particular culture through western society, and this results in new and particularly damaging levels of discrimination against women. (Griffiths 1976: 99)
Gender discrimination thus became codified and justified. Women slowly became minors too incompetent to manage their own finances and they lost their medieval rights to work as femmes soles (Clark 1968). This happened at a point in history which was to have a dramatic impact on the countries now called 'developing'.
The seventeenth and eighteenth century began the transformation of Europe from agrarian to industrialised societies and in so doing changed the nature of work. Work became a separate activity moved out of the home and into a defined workplace. As this occurred, the familial relationships which had hitherto existed between apprentice, journeyman, and master or mistress and servant, began to erode. A distinction began to be drawn between domestic and economic functions (Griffiths 1976). More and more it was the male who shouldered the economic functions, with the female remaining to deal with the domestic. Most important was the transfer of these values, attitudes, and institutions through the colonisation process; a process which was to last into the twentieth century. All colonial powers took with them and applied to their colonial holdings that western model of organisation which overtly discriminated against women.
Examples abound of the collision and collusion between the existing gender prejudices and discrimination and that imposed by the colonial powers. Barbara Rogers (1980) has noted how the colonial structures deprived women in Africa of their usufructural rights; in much the same way as the Enclosure Acts in Europe deprived the peasantry of access to village commons. This separated women from access to and control over their means of production.
A more basic separation also occurred: the isolation of groups of women from that greater community of women. Colonial structures used class and race to separate women from each other. Through strictures about association across race and class lines, colonial rule enforced distances between mistress and servant, between merchants wife and soldiers wife, between the locals and the expatriates. Women, who shared a common condition and experience, could not join together to explore the possibility of fighting for change. Further, under the guise of being protected by men, women in fact became a means of maintaining male hegemony. And maintain it they did: not only by failure to challenge or through their supportive reproductive role in sustaining male privilege, but by making colonialism economically viable. Catherine Hall documents the vast sums of money invested in colonial ventures to which access was gained through the marriages of the middle class as, upon marriage, property became the property of the husband to do with as he wished (Hall 1996)
Developing countries internalised colonial norms of sex discrimination and for the most part situated them as the proper order of things as they became independent of the coloniser. Layered above this remained whatever local traditional forms of prejudice had already existed. Traditional expressions of female power and authority had already virtually vanished.
The next wave of support for the domination of the male came in the form of the missionaries. Both the religious and the development missionaries carried with them clear ideas about the role and situation of women and, consciously or not, applied these tenets in their work. International development emerged as a discipline and industry of its own and many caring, well-meaning, and committed workers nonetheless conveyed their version of what it was appropriate for women to do, and a vision of what these developed women should be like, without any reference to the women themselves and their local situation.
Development directions are branded as much by personalities and prejudices as by concepts and ideals. Interestingly USAID, analysing their staff complement over time, discovered that the early aid workers were overwhelmingly from the southern US states. It emerged that development work, although not that highly paid, was attractive to southerners who earned less than their counterparts in the north. Analysis also revealed that the majority of these southerners were male, white, and had less education and experience than those recruited from the northern states.(1) One might question their impact on how development was delivered. Given that they had been brought up in a society that openly articulated disparaging views on the relationship between race, sex, and intellectual capacity, how effectively were they able to interact with people from the 'developing' world? What were their expectations of the potential of non-white races and of women to benefit from development opportunities? It is clear that the 'who' of development - the people and personalities involved, is as important as the 'what' - the actions, and just as critical as the 'why' - the principles.
Both women and men, even those who volunteered to work in far-off countries in order to share their fortune of birth and education, still carried with them embedded prejudices about the role and place of women. In the early days of voluntarism through CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas), VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas, part of the British government's volunteer programme), and the US Peace Corps, there is no indication that even in preliminary briefing and orientation was the issue of non-discriminatory development with women discussed. Volunteers carried the meaning if not the overt message of discrimination; and most failed to challenge existing bias and stereotypes.
Although many attempts at change are being introduced, most development organisations, even in the NGO world, are still rather patriarchal structures. The scale of hierarchical intensity increases from NGO through bilateral to multilateral agencies, rising to an apex in the World Bank and the IMF. Correspondence from the World Banks External Gender consultative group reveals the slow rate of response to issues raised by them; the IMF appears to be entirely silent on gender issues:
Men are aware, although they may not think about this consciously, that everything lies in appearance, and so will fight for appearances and forget or ignore realities. &This situation is endemic in all patriarchal institutions. (French 1985: 305)
Development organisations have become adept at dealing with women in development and gender issues. In this Reader, Sara Longwe shares with us the insights gained from her repeated visits to Snowdida and enlarges on the blocking strategies which are employed to prevent gender policies or actions which might facilitate womens empowerment coming to fruition. The current set of strategies is borrowed from the management ethos of global corporations. True to a concern for appearance, these involve maximising political correctness, making the right motions, the right pronouncements, and then returning to 'business as usual' in the certainty that little will dislocate corporate reality.
Gender and diversity training and the management of change have become a growth industry with consultants invited to perform in many major companies as well as in development agencies. The failure of diversify training to affect, for example, the racist and sexist reward structure exposed in a legal suit brought by employees of Texaco Corporation in the USA, despite its apparently open and affirmative recruitment and promotion policies, raises questions as to whether such training was really ever intended to change attitudes.
An examination of the way gender training is applied in development organisations would raise many of the same questions. There are always some staff who are committed, who are interested and want to see change. Many attend because they are obliged to. Cognisance of gender issues is said to be a required work skill to be employed routinely. Development agencies and the UN have made a large investment in training. Most organisations, however - and there are exceptions - fail to follow up the training by developing structures which require accountability on gender issues. There are few penalties for failing to undertake a gender impact assessment, for failing to identify gender issues in log-frame analysis, or for failing, during the planning process, to include indicators through which action on relevant gender issues might be evaluated. In this regard, the attitude of the development sector differs little from that of major corporations.
A 1990 poll of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) from Fortune 1000 companies revealed that '80 per cent acknowledged that sex discrimination impedes female employees progress but less than 1 per cent regarded remedying sex discrimination as a goal their personnel department should pursue' (Faludi 1991: xiii). Many of these companies are multinationals which export these same attitudes and the values which underpin them in influencing business, government, and the labour force in the developing countries where they operate. Many multinationals operate in free trade or protected zones where work billed as opportunities for women, who represent the majority of their employees, oppresses them in conditions as much to be deplored as those in the early days of Europe's industrial revolution. The women have little option but to take the work offered on the terms offered. With the economic downturn in Asia, young women and job-seeking immigrants face a different challenge, a labour market fast degenerating into a sea of lawlessness and corruption. Inhumane sweatshops, people-smuggling scams, forced prostitution and indentured servitude are fast becoming the new emblems of Asias hard times' (Newsweek 1998).
There have recently been exposés in the USA of large multinational garment producers who exploit the US immigrant population in factories which equal the appalling work conditions hitherto prevalent in developing countries. These large corporations thus continue their exploitation of unskilled and semi-skilled female labour. They do so without a concern for developing promotion and career opportunities for those women who are capable of holding such positions, all the while maintaining a veneer of solicitude for those affected by sex and gender discrimination. The values espoused by these global corporations set a standard, a minimum standard, for attention to gender concerns by appearing to act on the management of change as if gender issues mattered, while in fact doing little to affect the status quo. Their political correctness seems to have inspired many followers in the development world - corporate imaging is becoming more important than corporate reality.
Effects in the field
Participatory methods
Male resistance and maintenance of male hegemony affects the way that practitioners who work with women can implement development options. A body of learning and literature on participatory methods has evolved from the experience of working with womens groups, rotating leadership responsibilities, sharing of skills, information and knowledge, and cooperative activities.
Female work and management styles are often characterised as being highly participatory, complementary, and cooperative; styles until quite recently discounted in the management literature. In fact, men are not encouraged to adopt participatory approaches to work, management, or relationships. What patriarchal institutions tolerate, expect, and reward is different forms of obedience - conformity and uniformity being but two such forms - all inspired and maintained by fear (French 1985:308-315). It should not be surprising, then, that while the notion of participatory development is widely accepted as a concept, in reality it exists only minimally in development practice either in fieldwork or in the institutional arrangements of development agencies. A few organisations such as Proshika in Bangladesh strive to make their programmes highly participatory and gender-balanced but for most, participation seems to be viewed as the soft side of development which takes too much time to initiate relative to the outcomes. When agencies do take this path there are often problems. All too often the methodology silences spontaneous demands and elicits, at least, a re-packaging within the vocabulary of participation (Jackson, in Eade 1997).
The UN family appeared to place a high value on NGO collaboration and participation in issues and conferences of the 1990s. Yet recently, the very NGOs who had contributed so effectively at UNCED in Rio, Cairo, Copenhagen, and Beijing and had created such a partnership with the UN agencies, found themselves exiled from any real participation at the recent Follow-Up to the International Conference on Population and Development ('Cairo Plus Five') at the General Assembly. Further, a number of countries - including the Vatican (The Holy See) - sought to re-negotiate the break-through gender-aware language and empowering statements on reproductive rights that were agreed in Cairo. With Copenhagen and the Beijing Plus Five assessment meetings scheduled for the year 2000, NGOs are noticeably concerned at this volte face.(2)
If participation is associated with female ways of operating, is it perhaps this element of the feminine that agencies find so difficult to accommodate? True participation, after all, involves the development agent voluntarily giving up power over design, direction, and priorities and sharing accountability for project outcomes or, in the case of the UN, for conference outcomes and directions.
A further impediment to the wider introduction of participatory development approaches lies in the current operational structures of multi- and bilateral development agencies. More and more agencies are hiring consultants to do the work of development thinking and implementation for them. Agency staff now function as development managers; costing, accountability, and results being the bottom line. Although they espouse the language of participation, these managers often find participatory development very difficult to deal with. The executing agencies and the consultants link directly with the field, the agency managers operate from a distance; their development experience mediated by the consultants. If a project is truly participatory, the agency manager who is responsible for it loses even more control because decisions and activities are now legitimately field-driven and the outcomes, management structures, and timing that had been conceived of for the project might all be overturned by a people-based plan.
Income generation
While development strategies have sought to bolster womens economic opportunities they have long addressed the question in a unique way. The answer, it appeared, lay in income generation. Income generation is the diminutive of employment and is feminised by that diminutive in much the same way as occupations are named to diminish the role women play when they perform them: shepherds and shepherdesses, stewards and stewardesses, men are chefs, women are cooks.
The thinking behind income generation indicates that project planners situate women in their domestic setting and identify earnings as being allied to this role. While this might have been an appropriate entry strategy to counteract male resistance to womens self-actualisation through earnings, women never seem to graduate from these programmes. Still on offer from the 1950s to the end of the century are kitchen gardens, sewing, embroidery, chicken rearing ... it is rather like developing an educational programme which for ever traps adults in kindergarten. Even where new areas for earning are identified, such as the owning and running of restaurants in Bangladesh (see Mahmuda Rahman Khan's essay in this Reader), the close association with womens traditional, accepted household roles feeds the stereotype of what women can and should do, and as such may be limiting. These projects need to be as much about finding sustainable solutions to employment as they are about womens empowerment, and also about changing social expectations and acceptance of a narrow set of roles for women. As they now exist, they may restrict women by giving them very limited access to economic opportunities, few possibilities for growth, and little choice. It is perhaps not unexpected that there are many reports, repeated across cultures, of instances when if income generation does become real economic activity, it gets hijacked by men. The money and ideas are stolen and the women left to limp along as before.
Violence
One of the concerns that unites women globally is violence. Women have lived with male violence against them for centuries and turned it in on themselves, blaming themselves for its occurrence, wounded and ashamed. Raising the issue in public debate was seen as so politically charged that the first two World Conferences for Women dealt with the issue under 'Peace' - peace in the home. This allowed for rhetoric but not for real change, Over the years the accumulation of research, the testimony of ever-growing support groups, crisis centres, and shelters has made the personal public, the shameful open. What it does not appear to have done is to cause the problem to diminish. Whether the new openness allows for violent crimes against women to be reported, or whether there is an actual increase, the extent of the violence is numbing. Early strategies that suggested that womens autonomy would lead to a decrease in violence against women are called into question. Policies of zero tolerance, which do exist in some countries, have supported women, and have jailed men, but have not yet brought about a change in society's tolerance of this abuse.
Violence against women is a critical tool in the maintenance of male hegemony; it is the means by which the patriarchal requirements of conformity and obedience are extended to women and enforced. In hierarchies, men may obey through fear of losing jobs, status, or power; while women are made to fear violence. As violence is inextricably linked with male hegemony, only the dismantling of that hegemony is going to reduce violence and persuade citizens that it is an issue for societal concern rather than an isolated private problem. It is also crucial to reduce womens complicity in the violence against them, reject the socialisation which allows women to pretend that to be beaten is to be cared about, and the asymmetrical relations of power which require the bartering of self for money and protection. Most important, change will never be effected without the partnership of men.
Re-examining approaches to participation, income generation, and reducing violence against women may hold a key to rethinking how to make development with women more productive, inclusive, and effective in the twenty-first century. These issues do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of the mix of approaches practitioners have adopted in the past 50 years and need to be seen in the context of two of the most important strategies employed to enhance development with women: gender mainstreaming and gender training.
Mainstreaming and gender training
Mainstreaming speaks to the systemic application of the gender lens to corporate activities, government and agency policies, and the introduction of routine management procedures to ensure implementation. Mainstreaming arose in response to the isolationist strategies which bound the focal points for women in government and agencies into never-never land, compromising their capacity and reducing their reach. Mainstreaming, however, also poses a challenge to the operation of patriarchy, the intent being that womens perspectives, knowledge, capacity, and difference become part of the mainstream of development options and national life, thus changing both.
Analyses of gender mainstreaming in governments identify a number of barriers. Prime among them is a lack of understanding by policy makers of the strategy itself and of the role of focal points on gender issues. In the Caribbean in the early 1980s, the permanent secretaries responsible for womens focal points admitted that they did not have a very clear idea of their role, mission, capacity, or how they could be managed and supported. In preparation for Beijing 15 years later, the same questions were asked and senior policy makers still did not understand the role of focal points or appreciate the need for mainstreaming. Zero forward motion?
Although mainstreaming is discussed in all development organisations, not enough effort has been made to assure that responsibility and accountability are vested at several levels within them. Best practice suggests that a variety of change agents at different levels and with different roles both inside and outside the organisation are needed to anchor changes. Change agents at the executive level are critical to the introduction of change, but so too are those in the operations sectors who maintain the changes on a daily basis, giving life and expression to policy. Equally important are the outsiders, the consultants who work with the organisation bringing expertise and external validation to corporate efforts. In the case of change strategies such as gender mainstreaming, the media, researchers, writers, and the university community, all keep the issues alive. Without this interaction between internal and external agents, and without a critical mass of change maintainers within the organisation, it is difficult for change to take root (Kantor 1983). Experience also shows that gender mainstreaming easily becomes only an activity and one that is repetitive. An effort to mainstream is made, situations and personalities change, there is a hiatus, and the whole process begins again. Many of the organisations attempting mainstreaming begin with commitment from senior levels. There is a small focal group with responsibility for initiating the mainstreaming. Little structure is put in place. Often the people designated as links to the responsibility nodes are given this task in addition to whatever else they do, most usually, they are women. Then directions change and gender issues become a second or third rank priority, and the responsibility node is exposed as being too weak to challenge this retrenchment in commitments. Because the issues have belonged to a small group of people and mainstreaming efforts have never been entrenched in the system, it has been all too easy to de-rail gender initiatives or to cause them to under-perform. The system also reinforces the minimalist approach to gender mainstreaming by paying most of its gender consultants less than is paid for work in other fields.
Within the UN agencies, a new pattern has been emerging - that of rotating leadership on gender issues. Various agencies have taken a lead, then slipped back only to be succeeded by another. In this way, the system can always point to what is being done somewhere - preferably somewhere else. In the early 1990s, UNICEF took a lead with a strongly articulated policy and clear guidelines for action from its Board. A programme to support this was developed and gained fairly wide acceptance. Within three years, however, priorities shifted as leadership changed and gender issues were no longer on the front burner. UNDP has now taken up the mantle of leadership. It has strong policy mandates, financial allocation strategies to ensure mainstreaming, and additional staff and statements about accountability, and how the initiative should be closely monitored.
One of the flaws of a mainstreaming strategy as it is currently employed is that it focuses almost exclusively on the structures of power and on changing institutions. What is left out is any attempt to influence the ideology of the organisation and challenge in a systemic way the ideology of patriarchy. It is the converse of the feminist movement which challenged mainly at the level of ideology and less at the level of structure. A more synergistic link between mainstreaming and gender training would deliver an emphasis on both structural change and change in attitudes and ideology.
Gender training is the most powerful tool in the storehouse of change activities. It is only through training and sensitisation for both women and men that the personal can be made the political. But, the training often has not gone as far as is required to truly anchor change, and it has not been used as effectively as it might be to address ideology. Too often, it is weighted more to achieving competence than to garnering commitment.
Further, although the lessons on best practice exist, practitioners still have difficulty in ensuring that in each society, community, and situation, gender training is tailored to current realities. Every society has gender issues which are immediate and important. The task is to identify them and to incorporate them into the syllabus design. The inability to apply lessons learned as broadly as might be wished relates to who controls the organisations and the resources. Patriarchy is not likely to invest extensively in a medium directed at its own demise. Hence, much of the really creative and effective gender training is funded by small organisations which are less concerned about maintaining male hegemony. Many of them are in fact womens development organisations.
Even more important, gender training must move beyond sensitisation and awareness not only into competence and skills development in recognising and dealing with gender issues in the workplace, but to take them to the personal level into the heart. The heart has been difficult to reach. Let me give an example. A high-level seminar on gender roles of males in the family was going smoothly with little disagreement. In a segment which dealt with television and its impact on children and on gender socialisation, there was an exercise. All participants watched a music video. The men were asked to come back with their gut reactions to the video. The women were asked to predict what the men would feel and say about it. When these were compared there was anger. The men felt that the women demeaned them by making assumptions about what men think and what men react to; the women felt the men were saying what they felt would be acceptable and were not being honest about their reactions. The session ran an hour and a half over time but became a vehicle for expressing concerns, attitudes, and assumptions which had not been aired either by males or females in the other sessions, and so moved the seminar a little way beyond political correctness.
The challenge for practitioners is to find creative and effective ways to raise the concerns that show up attitudes held by both women and men and to create a safe arena for both expressing and beginning to deal with them. Most gender training in development organisations is actively discouraged from venturing into this field, the argument being that staff will be uncomfortable and that they really need skills and knowledge, not basic attitudinal change. If attitudes are to change, however, organisations need to open their doors to challenging and perhaps uncomfortable forms of gender training and sensitisation.
While making people aware of how gender affects their lives, their programmes, the outcomes of their activities, is indeed important, the message and the medium often become confused. Too many programmes designated as gender training are almost entirely women-focused and do not reach male participants. A training colleague once confided that she had had a difficult time in Western Samoa where she was undertaking a gender training programme. When asked how she had proceeded, she explained that she looked at the situation of women and their inequality and this was not well received by the men present. Western Samoa at that time had an extremely high incidence of young male suicide largely attributed to changes in society in which young men no longer won their spurs through deeds of valour and found no satisfying alternative for self-realisation. By contrast, women had clear social roles which were less affected by changing lifestyles. In addition, women in the village had the responsibility for a clean environment, for pure water, and thus attracted the attention of the development agencies and became involved in small projects. An opportunity was missed. If the issue of male suicide had been part of the training programme, perhaps the males might have paid more attention.
Gender training and mainstreaming need to be linked in a more holistic way so that gender training is seen as capacity building in its widest sense. It is not merely a short mandatory course but indeed becomes the primary tool for achieving mainstreaming; mainstreaming in this instance meaning an organisations capacity to understand, analyse, and implement conditions that create a gender-friendly workplace - in itself a dismantling of male hegemony. Gender analysis and gender training should be addressing basic organisational and personal change. Gender training needs to become more process- and experientially-oriented without losing the skill-based elements so necessary for project development and management. Mainstreaming should lead to a total change in workplace values - where decisions are more widely shared, childcare and leave are important, families and relationships count, and where respect for a diversity of voices and views is enshrined.
Subversive strategies
Perhaps the millennium is the moment to begin actively to subvert some of the strategies used against womens empowerment and to turn these in on themselves.
In the 1970s and beyond, many development agencies had an avoidance strategy for women and development issues. They hid behind the rubric of development deals with people not with men or women, we only look at people. It is unlikely that there has been a gender training programme held where someone did not suggest what about development for men? These concerns need to be creatively acted upon.
Gender analysis has allowed us to examine the gendered realities of the people. However, we need to revisit those statements and to make certain that we are indeed looking at the human dimension of the people, the men and women behind the gender issues. Gender analysis lets us separate men and women in order to understand the issues but we need to do more re-integrating in order to act positively on what we have understood. Despite the many men who now work on gender issues and the many mixed training teams, all too often the issues which affect women most specifically get picked out and dealt with; but mens roles, the asymmetry in power relations, the patriarchy trap for men, are little attended to. If this orientation is not changed, gender training will continue to argue the case for women and not engage the men as partners, as change agents, and as converts. In practice, development with women will remain development without men and will be less effective because of it. A conundrum: as it is male hegemony which unpicks the gains made by women and challenges incursions into male privilege.
Why not begin to work with mens groups? Women found that working together as women, at least for a time, strengthened their capacity to understand and articulate their situation. Men need to be able to do the same. Mens groups does not mean the my-mother-failed-me' school of male sensitivity or the construction of the male mystique, but a genuine search at the roots of male gender socialisation and a concern for liberation from patriarchy.
First comes the question of establishing trust. The specific experience of the womens movement throughout the centuries and very specifically the past 30 years, identifies that the time of greatest danger to making gains is not when women have achieved full equality but by the increased possibility that they might do so (Faludi 1991). The last 15 years have demonstrated that men have been very wary of the changes made in womens lives in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and that many of them have been very angry about what they perceived as the usurpation of male privilege. Some gains must also have been made in the world of development with women for there has also been a backlash in this arena. There are fewer funds available for gender issues and development with women; preparation for the Fourth World Conference showed up a struggle to achieve consensus on aspects of the Beijing Platform for Action on language which had already been agreed in Nairobi in 1985, and a pulling back on issues such as reproductive rights and the language agreed in Cairo in 1994. The backlash is in part responsible for what UNICEF calls the gender fade-away, where policy statements and objectives include gender empowerment statements, but project activities contain little to challenge male dominance and facilitate womens empowerment. Women, despite making personal commitments to trust individual men, are also distrustful of males in general, and are particularly concerned that partnership should not mean taking over.
In development practice, the most fertile area for building bridges of understanding between men and women is also the most difficult. Poor women and men share common but different problems as they attempt to claim their entitlements (3) - although the entitlements they have difficulty claiming may be different for males and females. Women, for example, have difficulty claiming even direct entitlements such as control over their own body or gaining prestige and respect. Nonetheless, patriarchy severely disenfranchises poor men. It is only the illusion that male hegemony endows all males with power that successfully prevents many men from acknowledging the truth of their powerlessness. Besides, women are there to be ranked lowest in the pecking order.
The majority of the worlds citizens are trapped in the morass of poverty. But the morass provides fertile ground for change. Robert Chambers (1983) identifies the resistance to change displayed by elites which destroys poverty projects and programmes which aim at empowerment. Replace elites with patriarchy and the analysis fits the reality of both women and poor men. Despite the fact that the poor have so little, they are often unable to take chances on change strategies and/or invest in opportunities which might change their condition. Development interventions need to focus more on facilitating the understanding of common oppression and shaping from this understanding mutually beneficial approaches, activities, and interventions. These will continue to break down gendered prejudices and will eventually form the basis of healthier relationships between women and men. These approaches will have to be highly participatory, concentrating on developing practical examples of the uses of power that focus on using power to, which relates to where you situate yourself relative to other people, to issues, and to solutions; rather than power over, which is about where you situate other people. Building alliances between women and men has added benefits in that elites have hitherto been able to isolate poor women from poor men, and to invalidate empowering activities in this way.
The above is not to suggest that men and women and poor women and men have never worked together. They have and they do. Unfortunately, in most cases the joining of forces has been predicated on the requirement that women have been persuaded to put relational issues, issues of gender inequality, aside until the battle against racism, for independence, for the revolution is won'. When the desired situation is achieved, the men remained the power brokers, womens role in the struggle and gender equality are forgotten. Movements that have been women-led, such as the Chipko movement, have been more inclusive.
Building trust means making space for men to work as partners, and making space is as difficult for women as it is for men. When the feminist movement challenged men to share in domestic chores and childcare, many women who did begin to share those areas of responsibility found that they had to school themselves to relinquish their space. They found it uncomfortable; humans find it difficult to unlearn the habits of centuries. Part of the challenge about letting men in lies in how to find the men who want to hear the message - and then giving up space to them to create a place where the togetherness can happen.
Many nodes of change already exist where there are men and women with an extraordinary commitment to break down gender barriers. In the Caribbean, the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies has been working in partnership with men to help to understand their gendered reality. A particular issue has been the high drop-out rate of young males from the education process and a number of mens groups work with them. In India, Sumedhas, The Academy for the Human Context, runs fellowship programmes directed at human resource practitioners in industry and development. These examine the self within the family, work organisations, and wider society. The group has a strong a commitment to breaking down the areas of silence between women and men and building understanding and friendships between them.
The issue of domestic violence is a real point of entry for working with men. Traumatic events can become cathartic and stimulate action. On 6 December 1989, a man shot and killed 14 women engineering students, because they were 'a bunch of feminists'. This horrific crime galvanised men all over Canada into action against violence. Their continuing commitment to changing society has developed into a wide network bound together by the White Ribbon Campaign. The anniversary of the massacre is Canada's National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Some European and developing countries are developing their own White Ribbon campaigns, and there are also US chapters. White Ribbon seeks to build awareness among men of the issues of violence in the society and the need for men to make conscious commitments to stamp this out. Some groups have been working in support of feminists by trying to overcome male resistance to feminist messages. Several of the groups have developed anti-violence sensitisation programmes, with young men being a particular target. These groups support the work of womens crisis and counselling centres and shelters. In the words of one of them:
All this leads into the very rich territory of supporting men to deal with the pain and power in their lives (the personal and the political.) Our work is to invite men to explore the middle path of the healthy and assertive expression of feelings and the healthy choices that can go along with that. My philosophy on men and accountability works on the belief that all men, myself included, have three choices: 1) be violent, sexist and abuse power and control; 2) remain silent while it happens around us; or 3) speak out, connect with other men and work as allies with women for positive change and social justice.(4)
All over the globe there are men who, witnessing violence against women they care for, become activists for change (the websites of some of these organisations are listed in endnote 4).
One of the problems development fieldworkers have in confronting violence against women is their need to validate their own presence in the community, and the fear that to intervene would compromise the effectiveness of their work. These same workers, however, try to change a number of other practices and attitudes that are equally sensitive. In Bangladesh, for instance, BRAC decided to challenge the practice of dowry. All fieldworkers knew that this was part of their role, they knew the issues and the arguments. Interestingly, few organisations take this approach to wife-beating.
Although organisations may say that the violence against women is an important issue for them, their lack of concrete interventions suggests to the people they serve that in fact they condone it. Development workers need skills to introduce interventions that are necessary, appropriate, and safe; interventions which do not blame but open up issues up for discussion. Training is needed to upgrade negotiation and processing skills, and development workers need examples of how to intervene without demeaning the abuser and making the situation even more difficult for the woman. North-South and South-South linkages with the men who work on this issue would help to build this capacity in the field.
Male hegemony can only be dismantled and eroded by working with men; it has to implode from within. Women can not do it alone. Perhaps the most important act of subversion, the most important aspect of turning the inside out, is the issue of power. Instead of being concerned with the literature which bemoans womens fear of power and competition, women need to reclaim the types of power with which that they are comfortable.
Nature has made women so powerful& what power is this? It is a positive rather than a negative use of power. Power to rather than power over; power to create, power to nurture, to share, to change a world. The power to can undermine power over if enough people are committed to making that change. Mahatma Gandhi enshrined the effectiveness of the use of non-violence. Choosing not to confront, not to abuse, not to fight back is one means of using power to. Sharing this power with enough men will begin to disrupt male hegemony.
What is at issue is not an abstract measure of the words 'equality' or 'equity', but the construction of a climate of mutual respect and value between women and men. Essentially what the feminist movement has been trying to achieve is not a label of equality stamped onto every man and woman, but individual and social acceptance, respect, a deep awareness of the humanity of both sexes, and an equal valuing of men and women, different as they may be. As an ideology, feminism is not exclusive of men as patriarchy is of women. Its values support the creation of a different moral universe, one that is not focused on power and control, or on the accumulation of the material at the expense of human or environmental systems. It allows for sustainability and mutuality and for choices. It offers a vision for the future which should encourage men to want to strike off the shackles of male hegemony (all by) themselves.
One of the unifying threads which informs women's experience is the consciousness that women's movements have existed throughout history. Like Penelope of old, women have used subterfuge to preserve space for themselves within patriarchal systems. In ancient Greek mythology, Penelope achieved this space, and distanced herself from her predatory suitors, by weaving a burial cloth for her husband Ulysses as she awaited his return, and then unpicking at night what she had woven during the day. Like her, the women's movement across the centuries has been kept alive by maintaining and subverting processes, by weaving and unpicking, by changing and undoing, by (outward) compliance and by subterfuge. In the twenty-first century, the lessons of all those ripped seams and broken tapestries need to be pulled together and woven into a new cloth.
References
Chambers, Robert (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First, London: IT Publications.
Clark, Alice (1968) Working Life of Woman in the Seventeenth Century, New York: A.M.Kelley (originally published in 1919).
Faludi, Susan (1991) Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, New York: Crown Publishers Inc.
Eade, Deborah (ed.) (1997) Development and Patronage, Oxford: Oxfam.
Griffiths, Naomi (1976) Penelopes Web, Toronto: OUP.
French, Marilyn (1985) Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals, New York: Summit Books.
Jackson, Cecile (1997) Sustainable development at the sharp end in Eade (ed.) (1997).
Kantor, Rosabeth Moss (1983) The Change Masters, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation, New York: Touchstone (Simon and Schuster).
Newsweek The market for misery, 3 August 1998.
Rogers, Barbara (1980) The Domestication of Women: Discrimination in Developing Societies, London: Tavistock.
Notes
1 Interview with Gloria Scott, first Advisor on Women and Development, World Bank.
2 Special sessions of the General Assembly will focus on the follow-up to recent conferences: the Fourth World Conference on Women (2000); the World Summit for Social Development (2000); the second UN Conference on Human Settlements (2001); and the World Summit for Children (2001).
3 After Amaryta Sen's work on 'entitlements'.4 Personal communication from Peter Davison, Men for Change, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Other websites on men's networks include: www.conscoop.ottawa.on.ca/mensnet/; www.chebucto.ns.ca/CommunitySupport/Men4Change/m4c_back.html; Information on Healthy Relationships Curriculum: A Violence prevention Curriculum; and www.whiteribbon.ca
