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More capable than men
- (un)common sense
MAR 29 -
To say that women are as capable as men in a society where they work the longest hours and do the hardest jobs with little expectations in terms of material resources and societal recognition is utter underestimation of their actual capability. They are capable not as much as men, but a lot more than men. That is why I found Himal Khabar’s (Vol. 19, No. 22) title “Women are as capable as men” (purus jattikai sabal chan mahila) for its transcript on a roundtable it had organised among several of Nepal’s women political leaders totally misleading. Since it was put inside quotation marks, I expected that the discussions might contain that sentence. However, unless that particular sentence was edited out, it appears no woman at that discussion uttered that sentence. That in itself was not the source of my unease, for sure.
In fact, I would not have been surprised if one of the women leaders at that roundtable had actually said that. After all, an important part of the Nepali women’s movements has been to publicly claim that they are not inferior to men. Maybe the editor tried to sum up the main “feel” of the discussion through that title.
“You can’t do multi-tasking,” my wife rebuffed me not long ago when I proposed to her that I take our son along with me to my field research site in Chitwan after I arrive in Nepal in May this year. For the last two years, she has been handling both the home and the office. And her office requires her to go around different parts of the country on field visits, whereas I have been living a bachelor’s life as a graduate student in Toronto.
Suprabha Ghimire said at Himal’s roundtable that the “male power does not want to recognise” the reality that women have contributed to the economy through remittance, tourism and cooperative enterprises. The other way women’s contributions to the economic sphere have been seriously underestimated is that much of those contributions, until now, have been part of the household and non-monetised economy, and they have not been included in economic calculations.
Venezuela was the first country, and perhaps the only country so far, that began officially calculating womens’ contribution to household work and making appropriate compensation for that. How will the picture look, for instance, if we begin to calculate the myriad of intricate jobs that women perform in making sure food is ready either on the table or the kitchen floor? How will it look if we calculate the hours of work women put in to make sure the baby is carried to term before it’s born? What about all the hours of work required everyday to make sure that a baby grows to be an adult and continues what Marx called the responsibility of a “species being”?
My friend and one of Nepal’s most prominent feminist intellectuals Seira Tamang has forcefully argued that any claim to talk about “Nepali women” would be very superficial. “Which one do we mean?” she would ask. Are we talking about the upper class women of Kathmandu’s Maharajgunj enclaves or the ones in Kalikot? Are we talking about Brahmins or Dalits? Are we talking about Hindu women or non-Hindus? What about Janajati women? How can we forget that there are women who work in public offices because they have others working for them to take care of their kitchen and kids? Are we talking about young ones or old ones?
Fair enough. Still the point is that in every grouping, it is true that women do much more than men. Exceptions exist. Several years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see Chepang men in a mountain village in Chitwan with their children strapped to their backs, cooking food for the family and doing many other chores that are associated with female work in the rest of our society.
My friend Teeka Bhattarai, who worked with Chepang communities for many years, later showed us many other pictures in which the gendered roles that have become entrenched in most of our society had been turned upside down in Chepang villages and households. Both men and women were gathering food from the jungle. They both cooked, took care of their babies, and fetched water from the spring downhill. Because they did not participate in sedentary agriculture, it was not possible to see how their division would have looked if they had to plough the field for cultivation. Well, Chepangs in the villages where sedentary agriculture has become the norm are already seeing new divisions of labour among men and women. We have to accept, however, that these practices of division of labour have become rarer.
To say that we have to recognise that women are capable of much more than men, however, should not be a license to continue business as usual. Let’s not forget the bodily violence that this unbalanced division of labour at home is generating. Women who work hard are the ones who are also suffering from a lot of illnesses. In both rural and urban areas, uterus prolapse has become fairly common. Suicide as a cause of death has become the number one killer for women of reproductive age. Women die earlier than men. Is the increased stress women must deal with related to the violent conflict that deeply scarred the social landscape? Is it because of the growing polarisation between generations as old expectations are taking a severe emotional toll on both the young and the old? Is it because women are left to take care of the home while increasing numbers of men go out in search of cash-earning and globe-trotting opportunities?
In a society where the belief that women are inferior to men is normalised, it is understandable that women leaders are claiming parity with men. But isn’t it time to ask more substantive questions, too? There is no doubt that the presence of women in public space leads to changes in the enormously masculinist public culture (don’t forget how male-only offices are filled with filthy jokes about women). Still, we have also seen that, when it comes to setting public priorities, it is not enough that women are in public places. The most important thing to see is what future vision they carry. We have seen how callously a woman defence minister could justify gruesome rape and killing of women at the hands of security personnel. What else does the killing of three women in Bardia National Park and its aftermath indicate? Did it matter if Bidhya Devi was in public office?
The presence of women in public places is a necessary precondition for transforming the deeply entrenched patriarchy, but it is not enough. It needs to be accompanied by programmatic visions for different social relations altogether including relations at “home”. If anything, feminism is the only political orientation that has brought to the fore how what we call patriarchal society is being reproduced everyday at home, in the bedroom, in the kitchen and on the farm, and not only in parliament, local government chambers and corporate boardrooms. For instance, run a test by asking a man to take charge of his kitchen or to take care of the baby. Will he agree to multi-task?
Anil Bhattarai
anilbhattarai@gmail.com
Posted on: 2010-03-30 09:09
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