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Frene Ginwala, MP, is the Speaker of the South African National Assembly. A barrister, Ms. Ginwala headed the research department of the African National Congress (ANC) and its Commission for the Emancipation of Women. After leaving South Africa as a student to help arrange the escape of the late ANC President Oliver Tambo, she completed her studies at the universities of London and Oxford before returning to Africa to become managing editor of Tanzania's principal English-language newspaper. In 1990, she returned to South Africa to help establish the ANC Women's League. Ms. Ginwala has published several books on apartheid and on gender issues.
A year ago, we shed tears for the waste of the past and the joy of the future as blacks and whites in South Africa went to the polls for the first free elections in our country's history.
The attention of the world was focused on the election of a multi-racial parliament, and on the spectacle of white generals saluting a black President whom they had held prisoner for most of the previous 30 years.
But when the dust settled, it was also noticed that 100 of the 400 members of the new National Assembly were women.
Many have been impressed by the fact that this is a greater percentage than many long-standing democracies, and considerably higher than the United States or the United Kingdom.
The women who are in that parliament are perhaps less surprised and less impressed: less surprised because we have been working for some time to integrate the emancipation of women into the liberation struggle; and less impressed because we do not choose to compare ourselves with the US or the UK but with countries like the Nordic nations which, as the tables on the following pages of The Progress of Nations show, are leading the way towards equal representation. Like them, we believe that 25% is but halfway.
Women's movement
We also believe that increasing the number of women in parliament is not an end in itself. It is not only a matter of equity or justice or good democratic practice. The point of having more women MPs is that women bring different experiences, perceptions and priorities to the decision-making process - which leads to different decisions being made. Informed by both male and female experience, the decisions are likely to be more appropriate for the entire population.
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For political decisions to be shaped by women's experience, those women who have broken through into positions of political leadership must retain their links with the women's movement. It is easy to let those ties be loosened. With many different issues to address, committees to attend, speeches to make, it is tempting to say, "Oh well, I won't talk about women on this occasion." And soon the links weaken, the roots shrivel. |
The responsibility does not rest only with MPs. The women's movement must claim its women in parliament, it must demand from them that they speak out at every opportunity, and that the positions and decisions they take are informed by women's experience. Where we come from is not enough. It's whether where we're going is still connected to where we come from that matters.
In the case of South Africa, the good start that has been made towards greater representation in parliament is largely the result of the strong women's movement that has been built up over recent years.
In 1991, when it became clear that a new South Africa was fast approaching, women from across the divides of race, religion, class, and political parties came together out of a common concern that the transformation of society should not proceed without us, and without addressing our concerns. The result was the Women's National Coalition, and its aim was to entrench the principle of gender equality in the new Constitution. In the process, hundreds of thousands of women from all walks of life were consulted about the changes they wanted to see in the new South Africa. The result was our `Charter of Effective Equality'.
In many ways, the experience of South Africa's women has been similar to the experience of women elsewhere. But it is an experience that has been intensified, thrown into more dramatic relief, by apartheid.
Apartheid and gender
Apartheid was gender specific. It moved African men to the urban, industrial, and mining areas, forcing women to remain in the rural areas to care for the children, the old, the disabled, the sick, and the community. In this way, the role of women as the reproducers of labour was institutionalized.
Men were isolated from day-to-day family responsibility. Demoralized, many spent or drank their wages, sending back little or nothing to wives and families and in many cases setting up new homes in the cities. Far from being dependent on male breadwinners, women therefore headed millions of homes across the country. Their earnings were not supplemental. They were essential for family survival.
Such women learned to cope. Many managed their lives alone and against great odds. Even though many were still subject to customary law, which treated women as minors, they were able to manage their day-to-day lives.
But the reality of their legal status caught up with them. Many, for example, would sell chickens or food from home. Because they were women, they had no access to the credit which small businesses need to expand. Many is the woman who has sought out her husband in some urban area to ask him to take out a loan for her, only to find that the money is spent before it reaches her, and that she must lose the business she had hoped to expand because its assets were pledged as security for the loan.
All of this means that women in South Africa are very aware of the need for independence and equality. Under apartheid, many have become acutely conscious and resentful of the patriarchal order. This is not a theory to them. They do not need the theory. They need freedom. And they see the creation of a new South Africa as an opportunity to mobilize for an end to the patriarchal order.
Women in many countries today will recognize this experience. As migration for work becomes more common, and as traditional social structures break down, more and more households are headed by females, and more and more women are having to struggle and cope alone. In both industrialized and developing worlds, we are seeing a feminization of poverty.
In South Africa, because of apartheid, women have become acutely aware of the patriarchal society. But because of apartheid, also, they have experienced a kind of independence. Millions of women have run their own lives, their own families, their own homes, and their own communities. They have coped and managed over many years and against great odds. And at this new dawn, they do not take kindly to the assumption that men alone should manage their lives or their country.
Inequality
The concept of discrimination implies that the problem is a system which is generally acceptable but which unfairly excludes particular groups. If a golf club or a holiday resort excludes Jews or blacks, for example, then the problem is one of discrimination, and the solution is to end that discrimination by admitting all groups under the existing systems and rules. The problem is in the exclusion from a given structure, not in the structure itself.
Yet when discrimination against women is ended - when the laws that exclude women are repealed - the problem for women does not go away. Across the world there are countries where discriminatory laws have been repealed and where women can, in theory, function as equal citizens. Yet women do not, in practice, have equal opportunity - in educational systems, in professions, or in parliaments. They do not enjoy equality in decision-making, for self-development, for learning new skills, for leisure and experiment, for branching out in new directions, or for exercising their legal rights.
The reason for this persistence of inequality, even when discrimination has been ended, is that the systems into which women are being admitted are themselves skewed and distorted. In a word, they are man-shaped. They have been structured by and for males, based on male experience, male perceptions, male priorities, and male belief that the natural order of society is patriarchal. We should not, therefore, be surprised when entry into such systems does not result in equality for women.
Again, it is the apartheid years that have sharpened our understanding of this difference between discrimination and inequality. It took time to learn that apartheid was not a system which discriminated against blacks and to which blacks should be admitted. It took time to realize that the whole institution of apartheid was designed and built around assumptions about white and black and the predetermined relationship between them. And when in the 1980s a few doors were opened to a few blacks, most recognized that this was not a solution to our problems but merely a means of co-option into an unacceptable system.
Similarly, we need to understand that the subordinate status of women in society arises not from discrimination within a structure that we wish to join but from the inbuilt oppression of a structure that we wish to change.
In short, the institutions that discriminate are man-shaped and must be made people-shaped. Only then will women be able to function as equals within those institutions, and only then will all women be able to bring their own experience and their own perceptions to the decisions that must be taken.
Merely opening the doors to the existing system is not enough. In some Western countries the women's movement has, I believe, focused too much on equal opportunity, on opening the door, rather than on what happens once the door is opened.
Assumptions
Transforming structures is of course more difficult than gaining admission to them. Often, those structures are built on gender-based assumptions that are so deeply embedded in our societies that they are taken, by many women as well as men, to be a part of the natural order, a part of the landscape rather than a man-made edifice built upon gender oppression.
There is the assumption, for example, that women should function in the private domain of home and family while men should operate in the public domain of economic and political life. Then there are the related assumptions that the male is the breadwinner, while the female is the home-maker, and that labour expended within the home does not add value and therefore deserves no share of recompense while labour outside the home does add value and should be paid accordingly. Many aspects of our lives and our societies are structured in one way or another around these related assumptions - including our educational systems and our employment and promotion criteria.
To take one small example, parliament in South Africa follows the British tradition of meeting in the afternoon and continuing on into the evening - to allow men to spend the morning at the stock market or in offices or law chambers. It was assumed that they had no family responsibilities, and could return home at an unspecified time later in the evening knowing that the thousand small daily tasks of living and looking after families would have been taken care of. Is it any wonder that women, when admitted to such institutions, find it difficult to function as equals within them?
Opening doors into a male world is therefore not the issue. And so long as we treat the problem of inequality as one of discrimination there will be no real solution. A minority of women will be invited or allowed into the man-shaped world. A few will even succeed there. But for women as a whole, little will have changed.
For the same reasons, the struggle for equality should not be diverted into the cul-de-sac of women's rights. Women's rights are no different from men's. And for most women the issue is not rights but the ability to exercise those rights.
The intensifying discussion of human rights over recent years has been, in the main, a male-dominated discussion. And it has tended to ignore the fact that equal rights are almost meaningless if large numbers of women are unable to exercise those rights because of the cumulative consequences of gender oppression.
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In particular, it is revealing that the human rights debate has largely ignored the question of reproductive rights. Yet for millions of women, reproductive rights are fundamental to their health and well-being, to their opportunities and freedoms, to their control over their own bodies and their own lives, and hence to their exercise of almost every other right. |
Rights
Rights in constitutions and the law, by themselves, have limited relevance to the women who must work the treble shift of caring for children, managing homes, and earning incomes; or to the women who lack skills, training, education, and confidence; or to the women who are committed to 20 years of child-bearing without the option; or to women who are subject to intimidation and violence; or to women who face inaccessible and gender-insensitive judicial systems.
Such inequalities both arise from and contribute to the structural subordination that prevents women from exercising their rights. And unless this issue of structural subordination is faced, equal rights will be little more than a hollow slogan for the great majority of the world's women.
One of the most important of the contributions that the women of the developing world have made to the women's movement over recent years is that we have refused all attempts to pose female emancipation as a social problem that can somehow be separated from political and economic realities. We have refused to accept that this is a struggle for women's rights in isolation, and insisted that it is a much more fundamental struggle for political, economic and social liberation without which equal rights can only bring a relatively superficial change for a relatively small number.
In South Africa, for example, we have applied this argument to our Bill of Rights, which is part of our interim Constitution. I would like to see written into the new Constitution the need to focus on the delivery of effective equality - to enable women to claim and exercise their rights. I would like to see some kind of parallel document that would be formally attached to the Bill of Rights in order to oblige people to be aware of the concept of structural subordination. Judges, politicians, civil servants, and administrators would be obliged to consult such a charter whenever they made decisions - so that they are informed about what is required in order to provide equality and human rights for women.
A different development
Changing institutions rather than merely gaining admittance, delivering effective equality rather than simply legislating for human rights, and revivifying the processes of participation to ensure that women's experience informs decision-taking - all of these are at the centre of the women's struggle. Together, these changes add up to the transformation of society rather than just the transformation of women's position within that society. This is what we mean by saying that the end result of increasing women's participation in politics must be a different and a better product.
Delivering effective equality for women, for example, implies changing the current pattern of development. It means reaching out to and responding to the needs of the poor, a majority of whom are women, far more effectively and consistently than political systems have shown themselves capable of doing in the past. It means, for example, a new emphasis on the achievement of economic growth through increasing the productivity of the poor majority in general and the poor majority of women in particular. And it means emphasizing the kind of labour-intensive economic activity that most directly assists families to meet their needs for adequate food, clean water, safe sanitation, primary health care, and decent housing. Strengthening these most basic of social services - all of them labour-intensive and best managed in a participatory way - would help to meet the needs and liberate the time and energies of millions of women. At the same time, it would create employment and invest in both human well-being today and economic capacity tomorrow. It is the intention of our Reconstruction and Development Programme that these basic, liberating investments would be funded not by borrowing without thought to the future but by restructuring expenditures around new priorities and by attracting foreign aid in support of these goals.
Similarly, the task of bringing the experience and perceptions of women to bear on the reshaping of society means a different and a better democracy. Too many of our male-dominated political parties have become little more than electoral machines. Too many of our male-dominated elections have become little more than the manipulation of images. Too many of our democracies have become little more than voting rituals. These crises, part and parcel of the alienation of people from political decisions, are common to most democracies. And the struggle to open up political processes to women through the devising of effective means of participation is an opportunity to revivify democracy itself.
To some, this will seem a far cry from the issue of female representation in parliaments. But it is the logical conclusion of seeing the women's struggle not as a struggle to transform the position of women in society but as a struggle to transform society itself.
"Millions of women in South Africa have run their own lives, their own families, their own homes, and their own communities. They have coped and managed over many years and against great odds. And at this new dawn, they do not take kindly to the assumption that men alone should manage their lives or their country."