Longish Response to Heather/Robin/Heather conversation

I'm posting this here rather than as a comment because my comment was apparently too long to be a comment. It, according to the character limit on Google Blogger, deserves its own post.

Here it is: On gender equality in the Third vs. the First World (And what to do about it)

I'd like to jump in on this to offer a different perspective, once again drawing (late in the post) from my experience living in Mali on the issue.

I think Robin is right in pointing out that there is something extremely problematic with the formulation that "we" (Western women of Enlightened cultural understanding about gender equality) must help "them" (the women of the Third World who have no conception of what it means to be free or equal) out of some sense of duty. I mean, this is just another formulation of a white (wo)man's burden, and we really, really need to think long and hard about the political and social implications of such a formulation of the relationship between Western and non-Western women. Particularly, this is important because, as Robin pointed out in class, often the Western feminist viewpoint is that women need to be given access to the marketplace in order to be given access to or even to begin thinking about the notion of their rights.

To a certain extent, there is truth to this. Men, who in many cultures have the only access to material capital, also hold the power in the household, the marketplace, the political sphere, etc. Where women don't have access to the market, they often don't have access to the political decisions that are made FOR them in spheres outside of the home, but this may not necessarily be true. I think that there's something problematic also about formulating women's cloistering within the domestic sphere as "choice" as if it were unconstrained, but I don't want to get into that now.

Nevertheless, if we (Westerners) construct economic access as the only way in which power can be gained, then we are as guilty (and often, I think we are) as devaluing the kind of work that women do (and have done for centuries) in homes, raising food and families, creating their own particular social spheres, cleaning, looking after the health of animals, livestock, and neighborhoods. In short, we import our Western understanding of the worthlessness of women's work, which Heather pointed out so particularly in class (the distinction between working as a cleaning woman vs. a landscaper).

But, as Heather pointed out in her post above, Western equality between men and women still isn't exactly model. Much improved, sure, but we have a major wage gap, haven't yet had a female president or vice president (even several Third World countries are ahead of us on that), still have unequal perceptions of what's considered "men's" and "women's" labor, and even those women who work still do considerably more housework than their male counterparts (ask me about this; I'll complain). In addition, the girls we raise are raised in a secularized society that has for some time equated women's ability to have sex with whomever they want with gender equality, or something. Nevertheless, supposedly sexually liberated women in the West are still often considered "loose" or morally degraded while men don't suffer the same stigma. And the pressures that young women face to be skinny, sexy, and sexual, certainly contribute to self-esteem, if not greater mental health issues (here's a fun article: http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/more_and_more_teens_getting_botox).

What I'm trying to get at is that it would be unethical to import this kind of blindness about the pressures and inequalities that women STILL face in the West wholesale into Third World countries or communities or cultures that understandably might (and should) have other conceptions of better ways to create gender equality.

Now, back to Mali. Something that I wrote in my journal while I was there had to do with observing my sister (who was 2.5 years younger than me, about 17 while I was there) interacting with men and her male schoolmates. It was something I then noticed later at the marketplace between the (male) artisans and (female) food vendors. There was a different kind of respect in the exchanges that occurred than I was used to in the U.S. In short, to put it bluntly, while I felt like an object of curiosity in Mali, I didn't feel like a sex object. Neither did I see men treating women as though they were sex objects or symbols. Women didn't appear to shy away from conversations with men or to lower their eyes or to adopt stances of inferiority in the marketplace. Nor did the primary form of interaction between men and women appear to be "flirting" as it so often is in Western spheres. I know that many women suffered mightily at home if they didn't have access to the labor market or their own money. But I also saw that the lack of sexual objectification empowered women in a very different way than I was used to seeing.

In the most common Malian language, Bambara, the greetings go like this: "I ni sogomaw?" which translates roughly to "how's it going?" but means, more literally, "You vs. the morning?" (the afternoon greeting is different, but formulated similarly.) The woman's response to any greeting is: "M'se" (which basically means, "good" or "fine," but which literally means, "me, myself"--or, I'm tackling the morning quite well, thanks.) The men respond, "M'ba" which for the purposes of conversation means the same thing. But it really translates to "my mother," or, "between me and the morning, I'm letting my mother handle it." Any man will explain this difference to you, and it's a common joke. The women do things on their own, the men rely on their mothers.

I think that what Robin was suggesting is that we need to be extremely careful about whether we import our understanding of gender equality (skewed in its own ways) to other places, or whether we commit to helping and supporting women in other places in conceptualizing and defending gender equality on their own terms. There's something ethically fishy about the former.