Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself (Again): Behind Western Eyes

“Women do all the work while men sit under the mango tree.”

I hate this statement.  It took me a while to determine why exactly I felt so uncomfortable whenever I heard it.  This is a well-worn idiom and opinion among volunteers, particularly female ones.  I hear it, its variations, and references to it all the time.  I thought just the fact that it was a broad, generalized, painting-all-with-the-same-brush kind of statement that bothered me, but it wasn’t.  I kept looking for observational evidence to back up this statement in my own community, but I couldn’t—at least enough to participate in its repetition.  I did see evidence to warrant this statement, but I also saw plenty of contradictions, and it’s the second bit that’s absent from this trope and the basis of my insecurity with it.  So here is what I see:

If we do compare “women’s work” to “men’s work,” then the scale is definitely unbalanced.  Women, as everywhere else in the world, have responsibility over the things that keep a household running—cooking, cleaning, childcare, keeping the house stocked, etc.  Things we are all familiar with.  Women also do many things to make their own money.  They have small informal businesses (selling prepared food, pure water, products, etc); formal businesses (sewing, hairdressing, baking, store ownerships); they do trading in the market place on a very large scale, or, if they continue in school, nursing, teaching, and whatever else they dream.  All this they do with childcare seamlessly woven into it.  If women can do any of these things, she has considerable financial autonomy from the men in her life.  They also have farms—groundnuts, okro, peppe, tomatoes, etc.  Men have occupations, trades, or, if they farm, it’s often yams (as they take A LOT more physical labor) or rice.  Men will sell these as cash crops, because it is his responsibility to provide hard cash for his family.  Women’s money, if their husband is able to fill his role, retains her own, but if all is not peach-keen, it could very well fall to her to provide financially as well.  But, just because women are responsible for all this work doesn’t mean she does it everyday or all the time or even alone.  Households consist of many women and daughters to do the housework and childcare.  Women may start and stop their businesses based on time, desire, or income.  Households consist of many men who can bring an income or help on the farm.  Depending on seasons, people may not go to farm everyday.  Their schedules are incredibly flexible.

So because of all this flexible time, I see men sitting around playing games under a mango tree, yes, but is it always the same men?  I don’t know.  If a man doesn’t have any work (and if you don’t you could at least farm something—everyone does to supplement income) then you are considered lazy.  Women I see doing the housework, yes, but I also see them napping on benches in the afternoon, sitting in a group yakking and cracking groundnuts, getting their hair braided (which can take two hours or more) at a hairdressing shop, laughing with sisters and girlfriends as they go to fetch water.  I see men hauling water in barrels all day for selling, carpenters working, tailors sewing, men repairing motorcycles and cars, drivers ferrying passengers out of town.  Everyone works hard and everyone sits around.  I don’t know how equal it is unless I actually sit and count up the minutes.

My frustration with this statement comes because I feel like its speaker is dismissing the contradictions in any given place.  Especially if they come from a Western background, this statement shows that they come from a place with very specific feminist sensibilities; in many cases with the expectation of finding “oppressed” women.  They are framing their observations in a purely Western feminist context (with all its unique histories and indicators) which doesn’t belong here.  I have been fortunate that during the development of my feminist theoretical sensibilities (mostly in grad school), I was aware that the paradigms, ideas, and histories, I was encountering were wholly Western and as such, only one of the myriad of ways women struggle for equity.  This awareness, I think, is the main reason for my hindrance at any assumption of women’s inherent disadvantage, my inability to participate in discussions about what a bum rap they get.  Of course there are disadvantages and imbalances of power and so on, just as there are in our own societies, but I think they are missing the power women do have in this structure and I don’t know how to challenge their assumptions.  I guess I feel unable to do that because I haven’t yet found evidence of it, but my feminist anthropologist spidey sense tells me it’s there somewhere.

When the Women’s Movement of the 1970s turned its head to international women’s issues, a woman named Chandra Mohanty wrote a very (academically) famous essay (titled "Under Western Eyes--pun in my subject intended) in which she stood on her soapbox and said: “feminism in the West happened the way it did because of a particular history and culture.  It won’t work the same in the rest of the world, so stop patronizing us “Third World women” by telling us we’re powerless and we need to be rescued by you.”  Of course I am only grossly paraphrasing; she said it much more wisely and professionally than that and in far more dense academic language.  This is why she is right:

Women in the West (let’s say America for example) fought for their equality by not changing the patriarchal system, but by clamoring to be a part of it—by entering male-dominated careers and demanding equal pay, by passing laws in a male dominated government system, by saying no to child bearing and running households and by seeking a sexual freedom—from men, from religion, from convention.  Much of the struggle didn’t seek to change the locus of power, just for women to have more access to it and men to have less.  Many feminist movements outside of the West have been different; they’ve centered on issues such as financial autonomy and more participation in decision-making, and reproductive choice.  Not that these fights haven’t taken place in the West, but the character of the movement that is created is such that the struggle looks more like women clamoring to keep their roles as mother and wives, they just want more power given to those roles.  Whereas, women in West fought for the choice to abandon those roles (example:  look at the value judgments we have about "working moms" and "stay-at-home moms").  In the West, the ultimate feminist fighter was someone who had a powerful career, no children and no husband to chain her to the house.  Third World women’s movements were more about power to wifing and mothering roles, and the freedom to work or earn money outside the home—financial autonomy.  Western feminism has often tried to “liberate” women it feels are “oppressed” and many non-Western women have felt that patronizing because someone outside has told them their lives are unfulfilling, made a judgment about the quality of their lives and situations without asking them.  Western feminism has told women they need to stop having babies, that they need to enter men’s jobs, that their traditional knowledge is ignorance, their commitment to households and domesticity is non-progressive, and that they are sexually constrained.  This is in sharp contrast to the Western woman (read: white) as educated, modern, having control over bodies and sexualities, and decision making freedom.  In essence, all women are oppressed and oppressed in the same way.  (Taken almost straight from Mohanty.)

What is wrong with the mango tree statement is that it is said in the spirit of Western feminism; that the fact that women do all the men do nothing is not only true, but that it is unfulfilling for the woman, that she has no other options, no power to change it, and so we have to do it for them.  And that men are somehow complicit in all this.

This isn’t to say that all is hunky-dorey and that everything is equal.  Of course it isn’t.  Women and girls are at a severe disadvantage in many ways, are victimized in many ways, and there are men who are scoundrels and no friend to women or their rights.  They are at a disadvantage based on traditional beliefs about education, opportunity, and gender roles which are only now beginning to change.  Women are forced into powerless situations, girls are preyed upon, but show me a society where that isn’t the case.  It doesn’t mean our Western ideas are better at fixing the problem or all-knowing of it.  My struggle is to decide whether the situations I witness are isolated incidents, the blame resting on the individuals involved or whether the situation is indicative of a larger cultural problem that needs to be addressed.

I guess the key is fulfillment.  To make sure every girl has the opportunity to fulfill her own life whether that’s through school, marriage, motherhood, becoming the president of Ghana, or whatever she chooses.  Really, I think this culture tells girls that they can be and do anything, just not that it will happen for every girl. 

So, that said, it is my intention to organize a Women’s Empowerment workshop in Damanko where we discuss mostly rights and health; where women and their daughters can learn about opportunities and support systems available for their needs.  I think many women think they have less power than they actually do.  I’ll keep you posted.