Document(s) 5 de 13

The problem regarding technology and gender in Africa is not a lack of knowledge, but the fact that the knowledge is fragmented. Understanding is structured by different conceptual frameworks derived from the different concerns and orientations of investigators in different professions, organizations, and fields. Furthermore, in much of the literature on Africa, technology is treated, if at all, incidentally or descriptively, as an artefact rather than as an active social force. Only by surveying the general conceptual frameworks can we uncover the assumptions underlying different explanations of technology, gender, and development. In the following review, it becomes evident that in many explanations a relationship between gender and technology has not been conceptualized at all.

Another dimension of the fragmentation of knowledge is the existence of different loci of research and action regarding Third World development in general and technology transfer in particular. Knowledge generated within each locus is not always easily shared or even sought by the other loci, although researchers and policymakers move between the loci as individuals, bringing insights and information from one to the other. The loci may be classified into five groups: academic research, multilateral agencies, bilateral research and development agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and African governmental institutions.

For the purpose of this study, academic research may be classified as either Western or African and Third World research.

There are four types of multilateral agencies. First, there are the United Nations agencies such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO); the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); the World Health Organization (WHO); the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW); the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA); the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR); the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF); the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco). Second, there are the financial agencies such as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Third, there are the African regional organizations such as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the African Training and Research Centre for Women (ATRCW). Last, there are the other multilateral agencies that do not fall into any of the above categories such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Commonwealth Secretariat.

The bilateral research and development agencies include organizations such as IDRC; the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA); United States Agency for International Development (USAID); Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA); Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA); Research Centre for Cooperation with Developing Countries (RCCDC, Yugoslavia); and Centre for Development Research (CDR, Denmark).

Nongovernmental organizations may be broadly classified as either Western organizations or Third World and African organizations. Western organizations include foundations, church organizations, and special-purpose agencies such as the Equity Policy Center, International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Centre for Development and Population Activities (CDPA); umbrella organizations such as the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC and WHES; and research institutions such as Isis International (for a useful survey of NGOs and development agencies, governmental and international, see Isis International 1983). Third World and African organizations include the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD); Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN group); and country organizations such as Women in Nigeria (WIN), Maendelao ya Wanawake (Kenya), Women’s Action Group, Zimbabwe (WAG), Women’s Research and Documentation Project, Tanzania (WRDP), and Babikar Badri Association for Women Studies, Sudan.

African governmental institutions include ministries responsible for rural development, women’s affairs, etc. (e.g., Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Community Development and Women’s Affairs) and government agencies, such as the Kenya Women’s Bureau.

None of these loci can be characterized by a single conceptual framework. Nevertheless, each locus participates in a particular set of visions regarding the nature of technology-transfer problems that must be seen in the context of broad developments in social science knowledge over the past 20 years.

The most familiar classification of approaches is the spectrum of assumptions regarding the causes of underdevelopment (the condition that creates technology transfer as a problem for Africa). At one end of the spectrum are many African governments, Western governments, and institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, who believe that Africa’s problem is a lack of modernism in all its aspects, that integration into the world economy is the route to development, and that any policies or societal structures that prevent such wholesale integration are obstacles to progress. In other words, the problem of technology is constructed as the problem of overcoming the obstacles to its adoption. At the other end of the spectrum are those who believe that such wholesale integration has created a dangerous dependency that is itself the source of the problem, in that it serves the international capitalist order and not the developing Third World society.¹ In other words, the problem of technology is constructed as the problem of limiting its negative impact and rendering it responsive to social needs. This view is espoused by some African governments, leftist political economists, and an increasing number of Third World feminists.

¹Dependency and underdevelopment theories have a complex history, stretching from the pioneering work of Frank (1967) and Baran (1968), through the African contextual applications of Amin (1972), Leys (1975), and Rodney (1972), to the nutrition activism of George (1977, 1979) and Lapp£ (1978, 1980). In the past 10 years, there have been variations on dependency theory such as the dependent development of Evans (1979); other scholars, such as Taylor (1979), have challenged the theory for its economism, arguing instead for a ‘modes of production’ approach. Some of the arguments of this important area of scholarly debate are dealt with in the following pages.

Less familiar is the spectrum of assumptions regarding the nature of the gender problem in the Third World. Feminism, which has provided much of the energy for the critique of development planning in the last 15 years, is itself a problematic issue. The media image of the Western feminist movement has often been negative, portraying women as grasping individualists, concerned only for their own well-being and not for their family, menfolk, or society. African and other Third World women have often distanced themselves from Western feminist goals as they perceive them.

Setting aside the popular prejudices against and stereotypes of feminism, it is possible to categorize feminist thinking to determine what is and what is not relevant to an understanding of African gender relations and the problems of development. Resistance to feminist theory and research by planners, policymakers, and many Third World women stems from the confusion of radical feminism, which is ideologically based and polemical in its approach, with other forms of feminism, which have a more thorough grounding in social science analysis. It is radical feminism, with its assertion that the oppression of women is biologically based and supersedes all other forms of oppression, that has been selected by the media and popular prejudice to represent all feminism. The argument that all women have been oppressed by all men throughout time and across all cultures is pessimistic, politically unpalatable, and scientifically unsound; it has created an easy target for a sexist backlash against more reasoned feminist positions.

The more reasonable feminist approach has been to describe and theorize the precise ways in which women were and are oppressed in most human societies. The aim has been to generate models for change based on more egalitarian experiences of the past, and on the democratic principles of the present. The following review surveys the emergence of women’s studies as a field of inquiry in the past 20 years. On the one hand, the review charts the diverse experiences that led to the different theoretical frameworks in Western feminism; on the other hand, it charts the emergence of feminist concerns within the field of African studies — itself a developing area of social science. The review reveals that radical thinking about women is not necessarily left wing (i.e., concerned with issues of social justice and redistribution of resources); conversely, radical political economy is not necessarily feminist (i.e., concerned with issues of gender equality and women’s rights). Furthermore, radicalism of both kinds can be guilty of ethnocentrism and can share mistaken assumptions about non-Western societies with mainstream development thinking.

For the purpose of theoretical clarity and for the benefit of researchers and policymakers seeking to make sense of gender issues and to develop tools for structuring empirical evidence, I propose that we should identify a new perspective that has emerged to explain African gender relations. Feminist political economy is the term I give to the small but rigourous body of writing embodying this new perspective. Although it is based in certain Western scholarly traditions, the perspective avoids the ethnocentric biases and conceptual errors of those traditions. Central to the development of this framework is the work of certain Third World feminist theorists.

Women’s studies and Africa: a history

In North America, both women’s studies and African studies have a common origin in the popular movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. The ideological impetus provided by the civil rights and antiwar movements in the United States fueled the inquiry into both women’s oppression and neocolonialism in the Third World. African studies itself was generated by a desire for a nonracist understanding of African civilization. The new opportunities for women scholars at this time, combined with the powerful ideology of the women’s movement, blew the doors of academia open and led to the questioning of the very premises of Western social science, not to mention its methodologies and conclusions.

The first spate of feminist writing in the early 1970s was popular, enthusiastic, and from the gut; some of it was wildly radical. On the one hand, women took the skills and knowledge gained during their liberal education in the 1960s and used them to critique that education and its sacred texts (Millett 1970; Slocum 1975). On the other hand, they took the radical political activism of the 1960s and turned it in a new direction. The sexism of antiwar activism in particular (“women make coffee, not revolutions”) triggered the women’s movement and its supporting literature — from Ms. magazine to the S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto (Solanas 1968) and Sisterhood is Powerful (Morgan 1970). It is important to mention this nonacademic movement because out of it flowed the energy and directions for the different feminist schools of thought that matured in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The second stream of feminist writing emerged immediately out of the first: this was the academic movement toward women’s studies. Established scholars and graduate students conventionally trained in different disciplines turned to feminist inquiry. Those of us who initiated the first women’s studies courses in the early 1970s had to comb the literature for useful texts. A course on African women had to rely on the rare nonsexist anthropological studies such as Cohen (1969), a collection of French articles hastily put into paperback (Paulme 1971), and the now-classic survey by of Boserup (1970). The shortage of materials forced us to do our own research (Van Allen 1972; Stamp 1975–1976) and to anthologize our own texts and special journal issues (CAAS 1972; Bay and Hafkin 1975; Hafkin and Bay 1976). Some of this work began to critique mainstream social science, but most of the work of the early 1970s was within the liberal tradition of “adding women on” rather than presenting coherent challenges to the social science corpus. It was vital work, however, providing the critical mass of evidence necessary for new theories of gender relations.

As for the relations between the activist and academic feminists, the two groups were having different life experiences on the whole and, thus, formed two distinct feminist political cultures. Third World scholars in particular were not centrally involved in the issues and struggles of the activists. It was only when North American activist attention turned outward to the Third World in the late 1970s (the Women’s Decade having much to do with this change), that “established” women’s studies scholars were forced to face the other feminisms (for criticisms, see Davies 1983; Morgan 1984).

In African studies, the 1960s and early 1970s were also a time of liberal scholarship. The sociology of development, or modernization theory, following the tenets of Rostow (1971), perceived society as on a linear path between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern.’ This concept saw indigenous economic, social, and ideological practices as obstacles to progress, which was constructed as a cumulative process of expansion. Microlevel studies focused noncritically on the problems of the family and of urban life, often isolating them from larger political and economic processes (e.g., Hanna and Hanna 1971).

This work had little to say about women, except that they occupied the sphere of the ‘traditional’: it was only in this context that they were considered legitimate subjects of analysis. Out of this liberal tradition, however, arose a radical critique of developmentalism. In Africa, the critique led to a new political economy that endeavoured to generate more accurate and powerful analyses of past and present conditions. African political economy began in the early 1970s, when several scholars, inspired by the Latin American school of underdevelopment theory (e.g., Frank 1967), began to recast Africa’s problems in the historical context of colonialism and the international capitalist economic order (see Amin 1972; Rodney 1972). It was not long before underdevelopment theory was also criticized. Although it opened up the possibility of analyzing the economic exploitation of the African ‘periphery’ by the colonial and postcolonial ‘metropolitan centres,’ it perpetuated a static and ahistorical view of Africa’s internal relations. In particular, the approach was not adequate for understanding the class relations that developed in African countries in the colonial and postcolonial eras. By the mid-1970s, dependency debates were in full swing (for a summary of these debates, see Kaplinsky et al. 1980).

Scholars now turned to Anglophone and French Marxist theory in their quest for a more rigourous understanding of African political economy. Neo-Marxism, a development of the 1960s in Europe, had overturned the “vulgar Marxism” that dominated the era between the 1930s and the 1960s. “Vulgar Marxism,” with its reductionist focus on the class struggle of advanced capitalism, had been of little use in the analysis of African societies, where a very different form of capitalism had developed. The French structural Marxism of the 1960s, translated into English in the 1970s, was a particularly useful tool for the new political economists of Africa. The provocative theories of Althusser (1971, 1977; Althusser and Balibar 1970), Poulantzas (1973, 1978), and Laclau (1977) challenged Africanists to develop more sophisticated analyses of the complex relations between the economic, political, and ideological aspects of society. The aim of much of the work produced during this time was to create theories about the nature of African political economy that relied less on Western models than earlier studies, both Marxist and non-Marxist, had done.

There were two closely related lines of inquiry within the new school of thought; together, they succeeded in generating a more accurate understanding of African political economy, past and present. One school explored the nature of the colonial and postcolonial state as it related to emerging capitalist classes (see Leys 1975; Mamdani 1976; Shivji 1976; Saul 1979; Kitching 1980; Stamp 1981). The debates on the state were carried out largely by political scientists. Another related line of inquiry explored the concept of “mode of production” in the African context and sought to develop an understanding of the ways in which precapitalist modes of production were articulated with capitalism in the colonial era (e.g., Mamdani 1976; Taylor 1979; Katz 1980). Anthropologists and historians were the most preoccupied with mode-of-production theories. The work of these scholars has yielded a rough consensus regarding the nature of society before colonialism. Africa is now considered to have been characterized by two modes of production: a tributary mode of production underpinning the trade-based kingdoms of the continent and a communal mode of production characteristic of Africa’s numerous small-scale, kin-based societies (Amin 1972; Terray 1972; Coquery-Vidrovitch 1977; Crummey and Stewart 1981).²

Theories regarding Africa’s contemporary mode of production have been more contentious. Many argued for the notion of “articulated modes of production,” where elements of precapitalist modes are articulated with the dominant, capitalist mode of production that characterizes Africa today. Although there has been sound criticism of the notion of articulated modes of production (see CAAS 1985), there is general acceptance of the idea that precapitalist elements are retained in a dominated and distorted form in the service of capital accumulation. One such transformed and distorted element is ethnic identity; the theory thus rescues the concept of “tribe” from the realm of timeless, primordial conflict (another retained element is the sex-gender system; see Chapter 4). A wealth of studies on the peasantry also relies on the theoretical insights of this line of inquiry (e.g., Bernstein 1977).

Analyses of the state and of modes of production combine to produce a theoretical understanding of contemporary African class relations. In Africa’s nascent class structure, there is neither a strong bourgeoisie nor a strong working class. The two main opposing classes of capitalism in Africa are thus not bourgeoisie and proletariat as in the Western model, but a dependent bourgeoisie and the peasantry.³ In the field of politics, however, Africa’s diverse and vibrant petty bourgeoisies have had a voice and impact out of proportion to their numbers. These classes began to form early in the colonial era around the new occupations created by the colonial government and economy. Made up of African traders, civil servants, professionals, and white-collar workers, the colonial petty bourgeoisies soon became politically active and economically significant It was from among their ranks that the new indigenous bourgeoisies emerged after independence. Today, the petty bourgeoisies challenge the economic dominance of these new ruling classes, as they challenged the colonial bourgeoisies of the past.

The Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), founded in England in 1974, was a crucial forum for the different Africanist debates discussed above. In it, for the first time, appeared a coherent analysis of African development problems based on an historical analysis of indigenous political and economic processes, as well as on an understanding of Africa’s relations with the West through the mercantile, colonial, and postcolonial eras. Women, however, were largely invisible in this political economy school of thought (e.g., Lawrence 1986). With a few socialist feminist exceptions (Conti 1979; Sacks 1979; Bryceson 1980), work on women was left to liberal scholars, or relegated to anthropology or sociology readers on women and to ‘women’s panels’ at conferences, where it was largely ignored.

²There is a debate regarding appropriate terminology for precapitalist modes of production. For example. Sacks (1979) terms the latter “kin corporate mode of production”; Meillassoux (1972) labels it “domestic mode of production.” For its simplicity, I prefer, as does Mamdani (1975), “communal mode of production.”

³Some political scientists who worked within the political economy tradition have rethought the emphasis on capitalism and are returning to investigation of earlier concerns, such as clieniflisin and the problems of theorizing the personal rule that characterizes many African societies (see Sandbrook 1985).

It was these liberal scholars, who had been steadily conducting empirical field research throughout the 1970s, that saw the value of the new political economy. Their work described both the complexity of African gender relations and the declining position of women in recent years. Although their studies were not theoretically grounded in historical materialist method, they appropriated some of the insights of political economy in their attempts to explain the oppression of women. In particular, the concrete circumstances of African life observed by these scholars prompted them to challenge the assumptions underlying developmentalism’s traditional-modem model of progress (see Elliott 1977; Staudt 1978; Buvinic et al. 1983; Lewis 1984; Afshar 1985).

The feminist scholars working on Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s also drew on insights from the theoretical debates on gender, production, and reproduction (in both the biological and social sense) that burgeoned in the West during this time. Of particular relevance were the questions, what is patriarchy? and is patriarchy a valid unifying concept for understanding women’s oppression? These questions were argued vociferously in the West (see Barrett 1980; Duley and Edwards 1986). These debates, however, did not capture the attention of Africanists. The largely empirical thrust of research in Africa did not yield coherent theoretical frameworks, as in the West, and the understanding of the position of women and of gender relations, in general, remained rather fragmented. By the 1980s, however, two opposing positions on African gender relations had emerged in the literature. Some scholars talked about an egalitarian past for African women and charted women’s “lost political institutions” and the decline of their autonomy and power from colonial times on (Van Allen 1976; Okeyo 1980; Muntemba 1982a; Stamp 1986). Others took an opposing position, promulgating a more negative approach to the past and a more optimistic vision of the present and future. They, too, saw colonialism and class structures as oppressive of women, but argued that women had always been oppressed in Africa. Such studies promoted the prospect of women being released from their traditional bondage once neocolonial and class oppression were overthrown (Urdang 1979; Cutrufelli 1983). Meanwhile, Third World scholars, including African women, were beginning to make their voice heard, particularly with regard to their dissatisfaction with Western “intellectual colonialism.” Western feminists were seen as being as guilty as mainstream academics in this regard (AAWORD 1982, 1983).

Feminist theories: a classification

From our current perspective, we need to consider how to organize this great outpouring of ideas in a way that is useful for exploring African gender relations. Specifically, we should investigate how to put the new African political economy to work for feminist scholarship. Conversely, the work done in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World has been a test for the theories and assumptions of Western feminist theory, and we should consider the ways in which Hard World feminist scholarship has contributed to the theoretical field.

The most useful rallying point for this dual exercise is the work of an imaginative, synthesizing American feminist theorist, Alison Jaggar. Jaggar (1977) developed a “classification of feminist theories,” which she has expounded in an undergraduate textbook with Paula Rothenberg (Jaggar and Rothenberg 1984) and in a major theoretical work (Jaggar 1983). Although the boundaries between her “feminist frameworks” are to some degree arbitrary and unfixed (as she admits), the classification is grounded in a clear understanding of the historical context of each school of thought First, she analyzes the conservative, sexist traditions in scholarship, from Freudianism to the sociobiology of Wilson (1975), that feminists have challenged. Conservatism, which reaches back as far as Aristotle in social thought, has argued that a sexual division of labour and gender inequality are natural, whether God given, in our genes, or psychologically inherent Jaggar (1977, 1983; Jaggar and Rothenberg 1984) then surveys four feminist frameworks: liberal feminism, radical feminism, traditional Marxism, and socialist feminism. The following discussion builds on Jaggar’s frameworks, pointing out their limitations and opportunities for the cross-cultural study of women.

Liberal feminism

Liberal feminism has its roots in the social contract theories of the 16th and 17th centuries, with their ideals of liberty and equality based on man’s rationality and the premise of a sharp demarcation between public and private spheres. Taking Wollstonecraft (1792) as its starting point, liberal feminism looks to Mill and Taylor (1851) for its inspiration. Arguing from the principles of the social contract and the rights of the individual, this feminism adds women on, basing its call for equal opportunity and equal rights upon the claim that “women, too, are rational” and, hence, worthy of being the beneficiaries of the social contract In this framework, inequalities of wealth and power are not questioned: there is no critique of the structures of oppression that created sexist ideologies and inegalitarian laws and practices. The primary object of any study in liberalism is the individual; groups are construed as collectivities of individuals, and the notion of contradiction within a wider societal structure is usually absent

Liberal feminism flowered during the First Wave of feminism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was revitalized by the activism of the 1960s. It continues today as a significant force for legal reform and women’s political participation, and its reformist vision inspires the struggles of many Third World feminist politicians, jurists, and academics. This is the feminism that motivated the United Nations Decade for Women and, because it did not challenge underlying assumptions regarding the structural causes of gender relations, it has proved an acceptable basis for reform in many Third World countries. The document that emerged from the end-of-decade United Nations conference in Nairobi, Kenya, Forward-Looking Strategies, exemplifies this point in its call upon governments to “identify the impact that unemployment has on women; provide employment equity programmes; provide equal access to all jobs and training for women; improve the conditions and structure of the formal and informal labour markets; recognize and encourage the small business initiatives of women; provide and encourage the establishment of child-care facilities; and encourage, through education and public information, the sharing of responsibilities for child and domestic care between women and men” (O’Neil 1986:20). It is under this umbrella that the major proportion of WID research (including the work on women and technology) has been carried out

Radical feminism

Radical feminism exploded into being as a reaction against the sexism of the 1960s radical movements. Fundamentally ideological in its impetus, radical feminism does not offer a coherent theory. Rather, it is eclectic, borrowing concepts and language from several traditions. Notably, radical feminism uses Marxist language, applied analogically to women’s oppression (Firestone 1970). Herein lies the great confusion created by radical feminism: a theory explaining women as an “oppressed class” appears Marxist but, in a rigorous sense, is not Marxist Furthermore, it allows for an ahistorical approach to women’s oppression. The premise that patriarchy is universal, preceding and superseding all other forms of oppression, obscures the cultural diversity and historical specificity of human societies. In addition, like conservatism, radical feminism reduces gender relations to a natural division based in biology. Yet the notion of global patriarchy has a powerful appeal to feminists and continues to compete for scholarly allegiance. As such, it impedes feminist progress in understanding and acting upon the oppression of women, particularly in the Third World.⁴ It is in this realm that Western feminism stands accused of ethnocentrism. The moment of truth occurred in 1980 when African women walked out of the Copenhagen mid-decade conference because the Western feminists presumed to lecture them on clitoridectomy as a “barbaric patriarchal custom.”

Radical feminism has made an invaluable contribution, however, precisely because of its ideological power. Because it is a direct response to women’s experience in Western society, its critique of, and action on, Western sexism is highly relevant Particularly important is its work on sexual violence and pornography (e.g., Brownmiller 1976). It has also led the crusade against sex tourism in Asia. Above all, it contributed the insight that “the personal is political,” thereby creating the political space within which gender relations could become a legitimate subject of analysis. The legitimation of sexuality as an issue has led to several important cross-cultural studies on the subject that go beyond the limitations of radical feminism (see Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Caplan 1987).

Traditional Marxism

Traditional Marxism has, since Engels’(1884) important treatise on the family, private property, and the state, rejected the idea of a biological basis to gender differences. Scholars interested in social revolution (e.g., in Mozambique or Cuba) sought to apply Marxist theory to an understanding of women’s oppression. Not interested in either Western feminist struggles or the liberal Third World scholarship on women, they argued that women’s oppression is a function of class oppression, which supersedes all other forms of oppression (Urdang 1979⁵) Such an approach is fatally flawed in its reductionism: gender relations are reduced to relations of production. Critics of the application of “vulgar Marxism” to gender

⁴Coward (1983) engages in an exceptional critique of the use of the concept over the past century. Her study, which is an ‘excavation’ of the discourse on patriarchy, suggests that the patriarchy debates have deflected us from clear understandings of the family and of gender relations.

⁵In this and more recent studies, Urdang has performed a valuable service in describing colonial and independence government policy toward women in Portuguese-speaking Africa. She has also given vivid, insider accounts of the struggle of women in these societies (e.g., Urdang 1985). relations have argued that Marxist theory is “sex blind” and incapable of theorizing the autonomy of gender relations in human society (Hartmann 1981). The contribution of this framework, however, is its insistence on a shift from a focus on the individual, which characterizes both liberal and radical feminism as well as conservatism, to a focus on the structures of oppression: state, family, and class. Furthermore, theoretical Marxism provides the underpinning for the fourth framework, socialist feminism. We should note that few feminist scholars now work from a strictly traditional Marxist understanding of gender relations.

Socialist feminism

Socialist feminism has proved to be the most theoretically fruitful of the feminist frameworks. Its value lies in its synthesizing approach. According to Jaggar (1983), socialist feminism combines the rigorous, historical, materialist method of Marx and Engels with the radical feminist insights that “the personal is political” and that gender oppression cuts across class lines. Through this synthesis, Marxist concepts are expanded to take account of the specificity of gender relations, and the biological reductionism of radical feminism is transcended.

Socialist feminists have their own view of the problem of women’s oppression. As they see it, a contemporary individual’s life experience is shaped by her sex and gender assignment from birth to death. Equally, however, they believe that an individual’s experiences are shaped by her class, race, and nationality. The problem for socialist feminism, then, is to develop a theoretical account of these different types of oppression and the relation between them with a view to ending them all.… In answering the questions that it sets itself, socialist feminism…seeks the underlying reasons for women’s subordination in human praxis, in the way that people in each society organize to produce and distribute the basic necessities of life. Socialist feminists, like traditional Marxists, believe that politics cannot be separated from economics. Consequently, their project is to construct a political economy of women’s subordination.

(Jaggar 1983:134)

Unlike traditional Marxism, however, socialist feminism does not commit itself to the position that economic oppression is more fundamental than gender oppression; neither does it give priority to gender oppression, as does radical feminism. The framework draws widely from cross-cultural and historical studies, which provide the empirical raw material for a rigorous theorization of gender relations. It is no accident that anthropologists and historians are at the cutting edge of theoretical inquiry within the framework. Of particular value are studies that explore the complex articulation of gender relations and relations of production in precapitalist societies (e.g., Etienne 1980; Leacock 1981).

It should be noted that although Jaggar’s (1983) terminology is widely accepted, some confusion remains in that certain scholars identified as socialist feminists according to their theoretical orientation claim to be Marxist feminists. Indeed, the boundary between more orthodox Marxist analysis and socialist feminism is porous. Beyond a certain point of utility, preoccupation with precise designations can obscure more than it clarifies.

Studies of gender relations in contemporary Third World societies pose a more significant challenge to Jaggar’s (1983) system of classification. In the non-Western context, the separation of liberal and socialist feminist studies constrains rather than illuminates our understanding. The reason for this is that liberal feminist scholarship has a profoundly different political context than Western liberal feminism. The starting point is the oppression by international economic and political forces of the entire region where they conduct their research. Whereas much work on the Third World, including many WID studies, perpetuates liberalism’s blindness to inequalities of wealth and power, a significant number of liberal scholars in the Third World transcend the framework’s limitations because the subject matter demands a more critical stance. Such scholars are more inclined to identify and challenge the structures of oppression and inequity than are Western liberal feminists. The Third World liberal scholars do this not on the basis of a theoretical understanding grounded in historical materialism, but on the basis of their subtle and detailed empirical knowledge of Third World gender oppression and their understanding that this oppression is rooted in wider exploitative structures and practices. Even if they do not adopt the entire theoretical approach of underdevelopment theory or another radical analysis, they cannot avoid adopting the critical attitudes of such theory. In other words, “the evidence of their own eyes” demands that they challenge liberal assumptions. The fact that Third World liberal scholars make their challenge on empirical grounds does not devalue the political importance of their assertions.

Thus, although one can, in the African context, clearly identify studies that use a historical, materialist method on the one hand, and that perpetuate classical liberal assumptions on the other hand, there is a body of literature, consisting of both scholarly case studies and WID texts, that falls neatly into neither camp. Whether overtly inspired by Marxist analysis or not, many works take account of class relations, the importance of relations of production, and the complex relation between the economic and social realms. In particular, they recognize that there are inherent contradictions in gender relations — a notion often missing from Western liberal texts. Furthermore, these studies are not satisfied with simplistic universal explanations laying all problems at the door of an ahistorical condition known as “patriarchy.” In these detailed empirical studies, a complexity of gender relations and of women’s positions is encountered that belies the simplistic sex-class division of radical feminism. I therefore suggest that the concept of liberal feminism must be refined and a distinction must be made between critical liberal analyses and those that operate from the uncritical, individualist perspective of Western liberal thinking. In this book, therefore, I refer to liberal texts in two ways:

• to critique the application of Western liberal theory and ideology to the study of African society and
  
  
• to identify those critical liberal studies that challenge the hegemony of Western thought.

Today, in assessing feminist scholarship on gender relations in Africa, it is appropriate to designate a framework that encompasses both socialist feminist writing and the critical liberal scholarship just described. It is to this body of literature that I assign the term “feminist political economy.”

Feminist political economy and the study of African women

Feminist political economy specifies the pluralistic framework within which the most rigorous attempts at theorizing African gender relations have been made. The theoretical core of feminist political economy is the work that has sought to demonstrate the centrality of gender relations to relations of production in both precapitalist and capitalist societies (e.g., Sacks 1979; Leacock 1981; Amadiume 1987). It also includes, however, those studies that, through the rigour of their analyses of non-Western societies, have corrected some of the biases and limitations of Western feminist thinking, including some socialist feminism. The materialist method has encountered some serious theoretical problems in its attempts to explain precapitalist and capitalist societies in the Third World (as the previous discussion of Africanist political economy reveals). The problem lies partly in the in appropriateness of Western class categories and Western economic conceptions.⁶ These categories are fundamentally rooted in the West’s historical experience of the development of capitalism.

Feminists have contributed to the development of more appropriate theories to explain Third World class relations and have performed the vital task of rendering visible the substantial economic contribution of women in the Third World. Nevertheless, they have rarely broken free of received Western truths about the nature of society (including gender relations) and truths grounded in assumptions held across the political spectrum of Western feminism and across the spectrum from Marxism to developmentalism. In particular, the fact that the economic realm is given priority over other aspects of human life may have more to do with Western experience than with appropriate theories of causality in the non-Western world, especially with regard to the precapitalist past. Analyses that recognize the complex interaction of economic, political, and ideological aspects of society, rather than seeing economic aspects as determinant in all instances, may be more appropriate. For example, the ideology of kinship and the practice of kin relations in precolonial Africa, far from being the mere superstructure of production relations, are central to the shaping of production relations. Economic work and fulfillment of kin obligations were inseparable both conceptually and in practice.

Another conceptual problem shared by much feminist thinking as well as by nonfeminist approaches to the Third World is the acceptance of a public/private dichotomy, whereby men inhabit a ‘public,’ more social sphere, while women are confined to a ‘private’ sphere that is closer to nature (see Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Sanday 1981). Thorough, gender-sensitive case studies have provided evidence that challenges the reality of this dichotomy in Africa’s past and present.

Another common mistake is the assumption that “family” and “household” carry the same meaning and structure as they do in the West Again, the evidence from many African societies challenges the notion of an undifferentiated “household” unit, devoid of internal contradictions or divisions. Instead, women and men within households are often revealed to have different, competing interests with regard to

⁶There is also a vigorous debate under way as to the appropriateness of traditional Marxist analysis for understanding contemporary Western society. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argue that it is not, and propose a “radical democratic politics” as the appropriate socialist strategy for the present. Wood (1986) argues vociferously against this position, charging that Laclau, Mouffe, and others have abandoned socialism in a “retreat from class.” family and community resources. A branch of Western feminism has explored the concept of the family at length (see Tilly and Scott 1978; Barrett and Mclntosh 1982; Thome and Yalom 1982; Briskin 1985; Dickinson and Russell 1986). Some studies have even raised questions about cross-cultural notions of the family (see Collier et al. 1982). Up to now, however, the issue has not been substantively addressed by feminist scholars studying the Third World. As a result of the lack of subtlety in conceptualizing family and household, these writers frequently resort to a reductionist argument attributing women’s problems within the family to “male domination,” a vague, ahistorical notion without much explanatory power. (See chapter 6 for a discussion of these and other conceptual problems facing feminist inquiry in the Third World.)

What certain liberal studies contribute to feminist political economy is not a theory of gender. As I have already indicated, the premises of liberal feminism limit its ability to conceptualize structures of oppression. Rather, in the richness of their empirical detail, these studies provide the basis for challenging Western epistemological assumptions regarding the universality of many features of economics, politics, and gender relations. A study that demonstrates this point is Ladipo’s (1981) comparison of two women’s cooperatives in Nigeria (see pp. 100–103). Through her careful exploration of the reasons for the failure of one and the success of the other, she makes a valuable contribution to the elucidation of African women’s organization for collective production, showing how traditional practices are an important means by which women combat both gender oppression and economic exploitation in the present Her analysis thus draws on a subtle understanding of the relation between gender and production, even though there is no overt theorizing of this relation. Furthermore, Ladipo’s account has more to say about gender ideology than a number of more theoretical studies because of her sensitivity to the local voice. It is studies such as these that become the testing ground for feminist theories developed in other historical contexts.

What I am calling for here is a reconsideration of both the political and theoretical value of empirical research. Studies such as Ladipo’s (1981) are valuable precisely because of their commitment to “description from the inside.” Empirical research tends to be devalued by theorists, who are prone to dismiss it with the often undeserved epithet of “empiricism.” Theorists of course have a very important point when they argue that preoccupation with the empirical often disguises, under its cloak of neutral description of ‘reality,’ a host of hidden values and biases. But theory that does not constantly test itself against “the real world” also opens itself to bias. Theoretical work without sound empirical referents is assuming common concrete experiences about which we can make general propositions and to which we can apply common concepts. Ideas about public and private and about the family are examples of the common concepts we believe we can work with. What the literature review in this book reveals, however, is that common experience is precisely what we cannot afford to assume. Not only are we ignorant of the differences in concepts of family, politics, and economy in the Third World, we are also unaware that such differences exist Our ignorance leads us to universalize our own Western categories and concepts. The concrete realities as constructed and lived by Third World people thus disappear from our view (and often, as a result, from their own).

In the context of this intellectual hegemony, empirical studies that rescue detailed knowledge about Third World societies are vital. Foucault (1983:217) says that “the little question, What happens? although flat and empirical, once it is scrutinized is seen…to [attempt] a critical investigation into the thematics of power.” Studies of gender relations in Africa that carefully ask “the little question, What happens?” thus form the critical core of knowledge within which we can develop our theoretical inquiries, free of the assumptions of our own construction of reality.

The generation of Africa-centred knowledge of gender and society is aided by an important new avenue of inquiry that is currently stimulating new thinking in social science: discourse analysis. Feminist political economy studies in Africa have not up to now explicitly confronted discourse theory. With regard to their exposure of inaccurate Western conceptions of African political economy and in their exploration of discourses amongst women and between women and men in African societies, however, feminist political economy studies create the basis upon which discourse analysis can be developed. I see such theorizing as the next step for feminist political economy (for studies that move in this direction, see Mbilinyi 1985a; Stamp 1987; Mackenzie 1988).

“Discourse” is used in many different ways in contemporary social science. Cousins and Hussain (1984:77–78) provide a useful classification of its uses, which will serve to focus the term’s designation in this study. First, its use in the analysis of speech and language to elucidate social dynamics constitutes a branch of sociolinguistics. Second, it is used to explore the relationship between language and human subjectivity. Third, a more philosophical use of “discourse” explores the epistemological problem of the relationship between knowledge and reality. Fourth, it is used in the development of Marxist theories of ideology, where discourse is viewed as “a particular level of social relations” that has “particular mechanisms and effects.” These mechanisms and effects consist of both discursive and nondiscursive practices and are intimately connected to the processes of power.⁷

The study draws primarily on the fourth use of discourse, although it is also concerned with the broader epistemological issues (for a detailed discussion of the utility of discourse theory, see pp. 129–133 and 146–158). For the Third World, a starting point for this approach is Said’s (1979) ground-breaking study on ‘Orientalism.’ His analysis of the idea of the “Orient” as a Western construct and hegemonic practice focused on West and East Asia, but is also relevant for the Third World in general. Only by understanding the discourses created over the past several hundred years to explain the non-Western world can one understand “the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage — and even produce — [the Third World] politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively.…” (Said 1979:3).

Mueller (1987:1), in her study of WID discourse, explains why we should engage in discourse analysis:

⁷One lineage for this thinking on ideology can be traced from Marx through Gramsci (1971; his notes were written in the 1930s) to Althusser (1971; Althusser and Balibar 1970), to Poulantzas (1973). The other lineage is the work of Foucault (1973, 1979, 1980b), who, in turn, draws on several traditions (Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and the philosophy of Nietzsche and others). Over the past 10 years, the two lineages have converged in a number of studies (e.g., Poulantzas 1978; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Scholars such as Coward (1983) (see also Coward and Ellis 1977) have commenced the theoretical synthesis of materialism, discourse, and feminist analysis. This and related thinking is sometimes designated as “poststructuralism.” Weedon (1987) makes an important case for the utility of the approach for questions of gender, class, and race.

Much of what members of the North American intelligentsia know about the women who live in Third World countries is made available to us through official modes of knowledge. Few of us have the opportunity to travel to meet and talk with even a handful of women from other countries. Our knowledge is not of a directly experienced world. We are largely dependent for our understandings on texts which have been written in North America…[as part of] Women in Development knowledge, produced in the social organization of Development to bring women to the attention of Development agency policy-makers and planners.

Mueller (1987) argues that WID discourse, far from liberating women in the Third World, emerges from the development effort that fosters the international capitalist order and, in turn, contributes to the maintenance of that oppressive order. I am suggesting here that Western feminist scholarship must also be scrutinized for its contribution to the West’s hegemonic discourse about the Third World. It is important to stress that this approach does not retreat to a liberal position, which leaves underlying structural causes of inequality unexamined. Rather, it is an attempt to stand back and evaluate the historical context in which both liberalism and Marxism emerged and to render political economy analysis more accountable to the realities of Third World gender relations, past and present

In sum, I am arguing for a materialism that, on the one hand, sheds ethnocentrism and economism and, on the other hand, develops socialist feminism’s commitment to historicize gender relations. Another aspect of the project of socialist feminism that is advanced here is the attention to ideology as a vital component of gender theory. The aim in introducing the concept of feminist political economy is, thus, to identify a field of inquiry that presents the opportunity for the development of a coherent framework, both in terms of specific theoretical points regarding non-Western gender relations and in terms of the necessary empirical basis for developing those points.

I endeavour to show in Chapters 4–7 that the concept of feminist political economy, as a revision of Jaggar’s (1977, 1983) classic formulation, is a more expansive category of feminist analysis: one that builds upon the insights of socialist feminism to generate unbiased analyses of African gender relations. Jaggar called for socially responsible feminist theory. Indeed, Jaggar and Rothenberg (1984) responded to criticism from women of colour regarding the exclusion of race as a category of analysis from the first edition. Thus, the second edition included “feminism and women of colour,” not as a new framework, but as “a distinctive perspective on social reality.” The variation on Jaggar’s frameworks proposed here is an attempt to act on that responsibility, which, in the Third World context, is twofold: first, to uncover the ways in which Western knowledge has silenced the local knowledges of gender relations; and second, to rectify those silences.

The feminist political economy framework was inaugurated with Rubin’s (1975) germinal work on “the traffic in women.” The work was valuable not only for its theoretical insights but also for its contribution to feminist methodology: Rubin (1975) showed how nonfeminist theories could be recruited to a feminist analysis. She took the sexist ideas of Freud (on the psychoanalytic theory of femininity) and of anthropologist Levi-Strauss (on kinship systems and women-exchange) and developed them into a theory of “the political economy of sex.” Central to her thesis, and to work building on it (e.g., Collier and Rosaldo 1981; Mackenzie 1986; Stamp 1986), is a concept of relations between women and men that are grounded in biological gender but are expressed at the level of society in concrete, historically specific ways. The “sex-gender system” in any society (to use Rubin’s [1975] useful term) is closely linked to relations of production but is separate from them and not reducible to them.

Gender relations are not simply an aspect of mode of production, although certain types of gender relations are associated with certain modes of production and certain forces of production (technology and work organization). For example, the bridewealth sex-gender system of Africa is linked to the communal mode of production that characterized precapitalist society and to its hoe technology (Stamp 1986). Similarly, the dowry sex-gender system can be associated with the plough technology and tributary mode of production that characterized Asia. With regard to contemporary political economy, studies that document the differential impact of capitalism on men and women are beginning to appear (e.g., RFR/DRF 1982; CWS/cf 1986; Robertson and Berger 1986). Some of this work is developing a rigorous approach to the relationship between sex-gender systems and production. Many of these studies are by African women. Amadiume (1987), for example, is a particularly rich Nigerian case study that challenges the orthodoxies of anthropology while exploring the way in which Igbo sex-gender relations have been undermined in the colonial and contemporary eras (other African studies include Okeyo 1980; Muntemba 1982a; Mbilinyi 1984; Afonja 1986a, b; Obbo 1986).

The relevance of the feminist political economy approach takes on concreteness and immediacy in the context of current efforts to reinsert women into the heart of African studies, both in new fieldwork and in an interpretive reading of older, sexist texts (e.g., Clark 1980). Examples of the phenomena that may now begin to be adequately theorized are polygyny, and, as suggested above, dowry and bridewealth. Regarding the latter, the approach allows for an analysis of the custom in terms of a contractual relation that, in previous times, signaled the social and economic worth of women and provided the basis for a measure of power (Stamp 1986). However, this custom has now become articulated with capitalist relations of production. Bridewealth, formerly not a ‘price,’ has become a capitalist transaction of putting a price on the heads of daughters (Parkin 1972). The contract is thus now a commodity transaction and, as such, is oppressive of, rather than empowering for, women. In Zimbabwe, feminists have made the legal abolition of lobola (bridewealth) a priority (for an example of this concern and for a succinct analysis of the commodification of lobola, see Kazembe and Mol 1986).

Feminist political economy thus rescues history; as well, it has implications for action. The restoration of African women’s centrality and relative autonomy in most precolonial, precapitalist societies counters the negative image that has been given to many African women and engenders optimism for the future. The achievement of women in the past maps out the possibilities for overcoming the oppression that developed in the capitalist era. Furthermore, certain recent achievements by women can be understood in a new light as ideological and economic resistance to oppression rather than simply “coping with change” (see Chapter 4 for an exposition of this argument in the context of a case study on Kenyan women).

The following questions are central to the current work of feminist political economy scholars engaged in African studies.

Is the general assumption that women have been universally oppressed accurate? Under what conditions have women held relative power and autonomy, and what factors are responsible for undermining these conditions? African societies and native North American societies are seen to have provided considerable power, authority, and autonomy to women (Van Allen 1972, 1976; Sacks 1979; Etienne 1980; Okeyo 1980; Leacock 1981). Colonialism and its attendant underdeveloped capitalism are seen as primary agents of the decline in the power and autonomy of women, as the example demonstrates. In a special issue on African women, the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE 1984) has rectified its earlier indifference to gender relations with a collection of incisive feminist political economy articles which affirm the value of this approach. A substantial portion of its 1986 biennial conference in Liverpool was devoted to women’s struggles in Africa.

To what degree has the power terminology of Western society, and the use of unitary concepts such as “position” and “role” distorted our understanding of gender relations? The work of Schlegel (1977), Sacks (1979), Leacock (1981), Mackenzie (1986, 1988), and others attests to the multifaceted nature of power, decision-making, and authority in precapitalist societies and undermines the concept of a simplistic dominance/submission dichotomy. For example, Sacks (1979) argues that African women had more authority and autonomy as sisters than they did as wives. We cannot, therefore, talk of a single high or low position for African women. Role and position, furthermore, are essentialist categories, excluding a dynamic view of change. The focus on “roles” is a serious limitation of such potentially influential publications as the USAID-sponsored Gender Roles in Development Projects: A Case Book (Overholt et al. 1985) for example.

To what degree have cross-cultural studies been stunted by the separation of women from the central core of social science analysis and by the relegation of family relations to the realm of “women’s role?” The focus on “women’s role” often implies that women are more central to gender relations than men, a stance that supports the discredited public/private dichotomy, whereby men occupy the realm of “public affairs” and women occupy the “private” realm of the home and family. African studies show that the extended family is the public realm, continuous with wider levels of political organization, and that women are economically and politically central to it (see Mbilinyi 1984). There is a particular danger in the implication that women are more central to gender relations than men. Because they are the chief occupants of what is seen as the sphere of “the traditional,” the separation of women from the core of society constructs them as an anomaly for development, less likely than men to become modern participants in politics or the economy. Women become “the problem.”

Increasingly, questions such as these are informing the critiques and analyses of the most fruitful investigations on gender and technology — those studies that can be included in the nascent feminist political economy. The concerns embodied in these investigations, however, are neither dominant in the thinking about technology and gender, nor have they been used in concrete development research and planning. The following chapter discusses the continuing invisibility of gender in many of the research/action loci. Chapter 3, in summarizing the findings of the WID literature, reveals the need to develop a more systematic and powerful framework of analysis.

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