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skhader

New Work on Gender and Development: Soledad Artiz Prillaman’s The Patriarchal Political Order

by Serene Khader on August 19, 2024

The value of individualism often comes up in attempts to make sense of the elusiveness of women’s empowerment. “Investing in women” has not uniformly yielded either the quick reduction in women’s poverty or the decrease in women’s adherence to sexist norms or deference to men policymakers had hoped it would. Of course, this is partly caused by the flawed equation of income with empowerment, which I have discussed at length elsewhere.

But it is often argued that women in the global South, and in South Asia in particular, do not have enough of a sense of themselves as individuals to want to form their “own” values or separate from the household (see, for example, the work of Veena Das and Naila Kabeer). I have always thought that there is something right about these claims.

At the same time, most of these claims about individualism are made in a course-grained way that is philosophically unsatisfying—and politically objectionable. The idea that South Asian women do not have their “own” values, in addition to serving as a justification for disrespect from political institutions, has always seemed to me to be downright implausible. After all, one has to know that one is separate from another person in order to make sacrifices for them, and many norms of femininity valorize self-sacrifice.

Soledad Artiz Prillaman’s wonderful book, The Patriarchal Political Order, is a gem for gender and development thinkers, because of the tools it provides for thinking beyond this course-grained individual/community opposition. The book is based on six years of qualitative and quantitative research across five districts in the Indian state of Madya Pradesh. (The dataset it is based on is itself a gem, but that’s for another time!)

Prillaman’s theory of women’s political agency is basically as follows: the fundamental unit of Indian political life is the household. The default setting for women is to participate in politics only by voting, and by expressing the same preferences through their votes that the senior men in their households do. This tendency can be understood is often an expression of self-interest within the status quo. Serving the interests of more powerful members of the household protects women’s access to goods that can be secured within the household, including protection from violence. It can also serve women’s interests outside of the household, insofar as women’s interests that can be secured by changes outside the household often align with those of their family members (women and men both, for example, might benefit from the presence of a new road nearby, or from a powerful family member getting a government contract).

Participation in microcredit self-help groups, according to Prillaman, causes women’s nonvoting political participation to increase. This happens because of the social connections women generate in these groups. Women talking to other women increases the salience of gender-based interests (like domestic violence) in their minds. It increased their skills at speaking in groups. And it decreased the costs of collective action, both by reducing startup costs (the self-help group is already there) and by spreading out potential punishments. And there are definitely punishments. Women in these groups experience backlash and violence, but they are less vulnerable collectively than they might otherwise be alone.

Okay, back to individualism. Prillaman’s analysis is particularly valuable, because it is fine-grained in a way that allows us to think more carefully about the values of individualism and community in women’s lives.

First, it specifies that what women gain is autonomy from the household where this is understood as a) the ability to conceive interests not shared with the household as capable of being politically pursued, and b) the ability to participate in political life independently from other members of the household. The rest of Prillaman’s analysis makes clear that autonomy from the household is not the same thing as what philosophers would call “personal autonomy.” Since Prillaman accepts that women’s default behavior is self-interested and reflective, she does not have to claim that their ability to have and reflect on desires, or even their ability to identify desires as their own, is impeded by the status quo. (Though she as not as consistent as a philosopher might like about the use of the term “autonomy.”)

Second, because she emphasizes that autonomy from the household can be expressed and developed through immersion in women’s groups, she offers a view that values something like autonomy while avoiding some of the troublesome implications of more mainstream views about women’s empowerment. As Kabeer has noted across her work, women in what she calls “corporate societies” may not value—and may have good reasons not to value—”striking out” on their own. This is often thought to be a strike against autonomy, and it probably is, but we need to get clearer about what form of autonomy it is a strike against.

Prillaman helps us see how joining a group can increase one’s autonomy; one develops an enhanced sense of what one wants and desires, and an enhanced ability to achieve these wants and desires, through involvement with supportive others.  It also makes clear why gender and development theorists shouldn’t jettison the value of autonomy, and adjacent values like political agency, altogether. Not every collectivity will equally be a place where women’s values are respected or cultivated, or one that makes action that realizes the more aspirational among these values likely to be effective.

Some Thoughts About Women’s Empowerment

by Serene Khader on February 8, 2018

A Valentine’s Day ad appeared in my feed today, suggesting that I give the meaningful gift of “sponsoring a girl.” Though getting such an ad on Valentine’s Day was a new one for me, these types of ads are nothing new. During the holidays, I saw ads suggesting I buy a poor woman jute to make baskets, a goat, and even, as Rafia Zakaria wryly remarked on at the end of last year, a chicken. Fifteen years ago it would have been a cell phone.

Why does it seem so obvious to so many that earning an independent income will lead to, or just is, women’s empowerment? I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the origins and persistence of that association.

I’m not asking why it seems that earning more money will improve the lives of poor women. The answer to that question is, I think relatively straightforward. If poverty is conceptualized as a lack of money, then it is easy to see why more money seems like the solution. (However logically sound this line of reasoning may be, it is unclear that income usually improves poor women’s lives; often, as Sylvia Chant points out in her important work on the feminization of responsibility) making an income often just means more hours of exhausting and unrewarded work—but more about this below)

I’m also not asking why women’s entrepreneurship seems like a good thing in general. Narratives about the poor pulling themselves up by their bootstraps have tremendous power, at least over Americans–whether the contexts they are analyzing are domestic and international. A body of feminist literature also suggests another reason, in addition to capitalist ideology, that women earning an independent income seems desirable. The cultural ideal of the economically self-sufficient individual is androcentric. It frames what is possible and desirable for human beings in general in terms of what is possible for those who do not have care work socially assigned to them.

Important as this feminist literature is, what I want to know is why it has been so easy to convince Northern audiences that income generation empowers women. Many representations of women as farmers and small business owners treat income-focused development interventions as feminist. And it’s not just pop cultural representations; it’s not uncommon to find international development organizations whose entire women’s empowerment agenda is about income generation—often, though decreasingly so in recent years, through microcredit. Feminism is opposition to sexist oppression, so the implication of the empowerment language seems to be that gender relations are improved by income generation.

But why would this be? I’ve been thinking the answer has to do with underlying assumptions about the causes of sexist oppression, especially the oppression of “other” women.

One line of thought that would make sense of the view that income could reduce sexist oppression takes women’s male partners to be a cause, or at least major source of reinforcement of, sexist oppression. Women who live in nuclear households with men on whom they are utterly financially dependent are vulnerable. This vulnerability is to both abuse and deprivation. Data suggest that women and girls receive lesser shares of household resources than men.

There is certainly truth to this line of thought. But it is worth noting that even if economic dependency causes the vulnerability, it is unclear that income will eliminate it. As Chant’s work on the feminization of responsibility I mentioned above shows, income often causes men to increase their personal expenditures and contribute less to the household, leaving women’s bargaining position unchanged. The classic example of this is the recasting of children’s school fees as something women are responsible for.

But this line of thinking is not just empirically questionable; I think it also misses the role other factors play in causing sexist oppression in the global South. The gender division of labor, and the genuine need for household and caring labor to be performed, are not reducible to the actions of individual men. Without supports for the socially necessary labor that women perform, we can expect a common result of income focused interventions—in the North and the South– to be exhaustion rather than empowerment.

To put the point more bluntly, a key cause of women’s oppression is a system that depends on uncompensated labor from women, and the idea that income through additional public sphere labor is empowerment misses this.

I also think there’s another view about the causes of sexist oppression lurking in the background of the view that income is empowerment. To get at it, we need to pay attention to what are touted as the most important by-products of income-focused interventions. These include self-esteem, critical thinking—and something that has been loftily described as the ability to control or transform one’s destiny.

I think the idea that women’s entrepreneurship constitutes their empowerment appeals to the underlying view, widespread in the West and North, that “other” women are oppressed by customs, traditions, and cultures. (This view about the cause of “other” women’s oppression, and its deep flaws, has been theorized at length in transnational feminist scholarship.)

The idea that women become empowered by being able to think critically, to see themselves as distinct from their families, and to liberate themselves from a socially pre-determined future seems plausible if the background assumption that “other” women are oppressed by custom and culture.

Why income would cause these byproducts remains somewhat mysterious. But the idea that capitalism causes reduction in adherence to tradition has a long history in the West, as Naila Kabeer notes in her important intellectual history of women and development. Kabeer notes that modernization theorists thought that a nice byproduct of capitalism was that it would shake up the existing social order; social roles used to be assigned by custom, but now they would be allocated according to efficiency. But it’s unclear either that the division of labor caused by women’s double shift is economically inefficient. And more importantly, the fact that a division of labor is different from the one that preceded it does not mean it is more gender just.

The idea that income will empower women in the South has become a commonplace—so obvious that it needs no justification. The pop cultural images associated with it have been incredibly seductive. But I think it’s got its diagnosis of the causes of the oppression of women in the global South wrong.