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Article Excerpt
Abstract
In a game theoretic framework it can be argued that a gender sensitive institution is an offshoot of certain social conditions, which in most cases need to be acted upon by some anti-establishment catalytic agent. Given the fact that among about half of the population there is a need for such an institution, the main function of a catalytic agent is to engineer a conversion of that need into an active demand. In a society characterized by gender exploitation, catalytic agent can only come exogenously. For a sub-society it is easier to come across such an exogenous catalytic agent. The specific community conditions prevailing in such a sub-society may also prove to be congenial for a catalytic agent to act upon, or even to emerge from. In a larger canvas, however, as the exogenous force transforms into mere endogenous entity, and the society takes on the general character of male-dominance, the space for exogenous agency shrinks. A democratic Government, insofar as it represents the society, cannot be looked upon as a prospective catalytic agent for the country as a whole. There are, however, three possible escape routes from this closure. Firstly, external effects of women's empowerment in one sub-society on another may snowball. Secondly, the awareness campaign presently underway on a global scale is itself a potent exogenous catalytic agent. Thirdly, general development programs undertaken within a patriarchal order may unwittingly create conditions conducive to feminist struggle.
Key words: empowerment, catalytic agent, patriarchy.
Introduction
Likening women to nature is a practice of ancient origin. Practice of exploiting women like nature is also as old. Moreover, both are global features of human behavior down the centuries. As Yugoslavian feminist Rada Ivekovic says, the globalization of patriarchy is the first of all globalizations (Menon 2001, p. 10). It can be argued that all primitive virtues and vices can be traced to a common ancestry. As Samuel Bowles (1998, p.79) reminds us, 'commonality of different traits of humans spread across different cultures may be explained by the predominance of the influence of the common ancestral social institution which lasted for ninety percent of the span of the biological modern human existence.' Primitive women were physically weak and biologically constrained, which seems to explain their subjugation of a primitive nature. They were mostly confined inside the house, engaged in household chores and rearing children. In modern days, however, importance of brawn has been replaced by the importance of brain. Advances in medical science, like measures of birth control and family planning, have also considerably lessened the biological dependence of women. Availability of modern household gadgets has considerably eased the work of housekeeping and has thereby given women more time of their own. Television, films and other forms of popular mass media have given them an exposure to the outside world and they have started perceiving a different type of well-being, a different type of life. Women have proved their abilities in diverse fields as successful professionals. Their profession is no longer restricted to nursing, and they have become successful doctors, architects, pilots and so on. Many have even joined the army and some have led nations. Still, male dominance refuses to give way. We may call it the inertia of patriarchy. But this inertia is long, much longer than the Newtonian physical one. Incidental power relations that put the male in the driver's seat thousands of years ago took firm roots in social institutions (4), which resist newer power relations even in the face of gender equating changes in objective situations. Despite the proven abilities of women, in most LDCs a male child is still preferred to a female child, the female members of the family get to eat what is left for them by the male members and among the poorer section of the population, expenditure on a male child is thought to be a better investment than on a female child. Even though she may have to forgo formal school education, she is 'educated' in the art of good house keeping, sacrificing everything for her husband and sons, in short, in making herself a glorious domestic. Thus the culture of patriarchy prepares the female mind to calmly accept discrimination and injustice. But as the objective situation tries to pull away from the social institution, a tension develops between the two. On the one hand, technological advances create an enabling condition for women in a technical sense, and development of democratic ethos fuel women's aspirations, and on the other, the patriarchal social order, because of its very nature, has all the mechanisms to suppress such aspirations. Feminist struggle is an outcome of this tension. Our effort in this paper is to investigate the possibility of such an outcome in terms of the contributing factors. Analysis is conducted in a simple game theoretic framework. The focus will be on LDCs, not only because conditions of women are worse there, but also because these countries need more of women's agency as an instrument of development. Examples are drawn from India. Since we do not claim that India is a good representative case for the LDCs, inferences that we have drawn from the examples should be contextualized.
A FEW RELEVANT ISSUES
At the outset let us clarify a few issues. This will help conceptualize the gender game and the related discussion that will ensue. Firstly, we share the view that women's empowerment is the acquisition by an average woman of the capability to actively participate in decision making activities of her family and community. Her empowerment is complete when she participates on equal terms with her male counterpart. Clearly, empowerment is a positive concept, and should not be confused with a rise in women's happiness, which is a normative concept. Women's happiness is a state of mind, conditioned as it is by historically determined social and cultural norms. Thus, a woman, subjugated and exploited in every possible way, may still remain happy (Sen 1985, p.8). Not only that, she may even profess her brand of happiness to her daughter or daughter-in-law. Our proposition is that human action is shaped not by the objective condition of life, but by subjective evaluation of that condition. Our emphasis on awareness as the prime mover of social change is grounded on this premise.
Secondly, empowerment is a process, namely acquisition of capability. Hence, lack of empowerment does not imply a state of absolute powerlessness. It merely implies that the process of acquisition of power is not at work. In every society women do have certain capabilities. Such capabilities might not have been won by women. They might have simply resulted from the need of self-perpetuation of the patriarchal order. It is found in most societies that routine household decisions are mostly taken by women though the strategic decisions are taken care of by male members.
Thirdly, patriarchy by its very nature is an antithesis of women's empowerment. Family is a seat of cooperative conflict (Dreze & Sen 1993, p.11), but the institution of patriarchy ensures that the breakdown position weighs so heavily against women in intra-family distribution that they have to cooperate more and get less. Dominance is bolstered by marriage and property norms and manifests itself through division of labor into paid and unpaid work. Unpaid work assigned to women underestimates their contribution and in the process makes them diffident to demand their fair share. In the end, they find themselves overworked but undernourished (Young 1993, p.20, Dreze and Sen1996, pp.140-174, Haddad and Kanbur 1990, pp.866-881). Even when marriage and property laws are matrilineal, decision-making process is largely patriarchal. No wonder, economic and political discrimination against women is prevalent even in these matrilineal societies (Ramachandran 1996, pp.277, 318). As a large body of literature on the impact of women's empowerment on social, economic and political development has evidenced, society can gain immensely by way of better eco-system, better nourished children, more effective human capital, and a world largely devoid of bloodshed and torture of war if women have a say in the society (Sudarshan 2001, p.23, Manchanda 2001, Sen 2000, pp.195-202, World Development Report 2000, pp.118-19). According to the Eco-Feminist school there is an apparent "closeness" between nature and women. Moreover, since women are directly dependent on the forests for their own survival and that of their children it is only natural that they would make more judicious use of the forest resources (Shiva 2001, p.200). Since deforestation makes women travel a longer distance to collect fuel-wood and water, it is no wonder that there are several instances when women resistance groups have stood up against private contractors and saved forests from the latter's onslaught. The Adwani forest in the Garhwal Himalayas was auctioned in October 1977, and the trees were to be felled in the first week of December that year. Bachhni Devi, wife of the local village headman, led a large group of women to the forest and persuaded the forest laborers to refrain from tree felling and demonstrated against it. They tied sacred threads around each tree and vowed to protect them. The contractors, who arrived with a strong contingent of police force, were forced to make a hasty retreat.
Surely, these benefits cut across genders. But these benefits lying as they are in distant future are often not well perceived. On the other hand, the loss of power and privilege to dominate is immediate and acutely felt by men. This seems to account for the indifference of patriarchy, if not cruelty, to women. This patriarchal indifference, however, is not the only stumbling block to women. Patriarchy has within it a mechanism of self-sustenance. If girls are less valuable and resources are scarce in the family (which they are in LDCs), parents would invest in boys and neglect girls. This will in turn make girls less valuable. In a society where a girl is meant only to be married off and dowry is the essence of marital engagement, educating girls only adds to the cost of marriage. The reason is that an educated bride can only be married off to an even more educated bridegroom, and the dowry rate is directly proportionate to the level of education of the bridegroom. Given this social matrix, the rational decision of parents is not to educate the female child (PROBE, p.23).
Women's empowerment, under such circumstances, has to be a result of adversarial public action. (5) It is true that some enabling conditions are created as byproducts of social, economic and technological changes. But these conditions by themselves do not change the...
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