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.
