Gender and Politics

Front matter

Gender and Politics: The State of the Discipline

The World of Political Science: The Development of the Discipline Book Series

Edited by Michael Stein and John Trent

Chapter 1: Jane H. Bayes

Chapter 2: Breny Mendoza The Geopolitics of Political Science and Gender Studies in Latin AMECA adenda 33

Chapter 3: Amanda Gouws Gender and The State of Political Science in Africa ....oooooooonnnccnnnoncccnnnns 59

Chapter 4: Ranjana Kumari Creating Political Space for Women in South Asia n.se 77

Chapter 5: Monique Leyenaar Taking Stock: 1955 — 2005:

Chapter 6: Jane H. Bayes

8 Table of Contents

Chapter 7: Elisabeth Priigl

Chapter 8: Mary Hawkesworth Western Feminist Theories: Trajectories of Change ...ooooonocnnncinnninmmmm..o. 199

Chapter 9: Marian Simms and Jane H. Bayes Conclusion AME AR aaa Ro: 221

Foreword

What a pleasure it is to see Jane Bayes and her team of authors terminate a long odyssey to bring this fine volume on Gender and Politics to fruition. Jane deserves great credit for her determination and persistence in bringing together this truly international, comparative evaluation of the development of the field of study of gender and politics.

As general editors of the Book Series, The World of Political Science, Michael Stein and I are truly pleased to see the agility with which Prof. Bayes has attained all the goals we have set for the editors of the volumes in the series. Not only does she present a very thorough, comparative overview of the field of gender and politics within the political science discipline, but she also manages to evaluate it, analyse and explain its development, and present a critique of its current status.

Readers will find that this volume pretty much covers the world with rich new analyses of gender and politics in Latin America, Africa and South Asia as well as new surveys of the field in the United States and Europe. But the book goes beyond regional studies to consider the theory, concepts and practice of gender and politics at both the national and international levels.

Perhaps of greatest interest is the challenge that this book poses to the “malestream” discipline of political science. A number of the chapters demonstrate how global power structures, cultural determinations and gender biases have, and still do, influence political science. Neither the discipline nor even gender and politics have been able to fully meet the challenge of genuinely internationalizing political studies and not simply imposing Western (or Northern) conceptions. This book also challenges the discipline to go much further in its efforts to represent the diversity of the world by including the intersectionalities of race, class and gender as well as ability, age and sexual identities. Finally, Jane Bayes and her colleagues also show how their field has been leading the way by introducing new political science concepts and broadening their scope of research through borrowings from other disciplines.

Once again, we want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Barbara Budrich Publishers for a level of collaboration well beyond the call of duty

10 Foreword and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for providing us with the research grant (no. 820-1999-1022) that launched this book series.

John E. Trent, Fellow, Centre on Governance, former professor, University of Ottawa.

Michael B. Stein, Visiting Professor, University of Toronto, and Professor Emeritus, McMaster University.

Chapter 1 Introduction Situating the Field of Gender and Politics

Discipline and Field Issues

This book concerns a new body of knowledge and an emerging set of questions that has accompanied national, cross national and international global political movements aimed at trying to understand and to improve the situation of women by eliminating gender inequities and injustices. To the extent that these bodies of knowledge, concepts and questions have become recognized, recorded, institutionalized and legitimized, they may be considered a field of study or, more formally, a discipline. Often, because of their grassroots origins and continuing links to specific communities and cultures, these ideas are dynamic and diverse. Although they remain united by their common interest in gender and power or gender and the political, different scholars in the same country as well as scholars in different countries and from different cultures have different views concerning what the field encompasses. Just as commentators on the discipline of political science as a whole have noted that major differences exist between the discipline of political science as practiced in the United States as opposed to Europe due to different intellectual traditions? and to varying degrees of professionalization * (Norris 1997), differences among gender and politics scholars occur not only along these lines but also are defined by a varied recognition of the political significance of social relationships and hierarchies that are not considered to be “public” or related to the state by mainstream political scientists. The chapters in this collection

1 Jane Bayes is grateful to Marian Simms for her very helpful comments and suggestions with regard to this chapter.

2 Political scientists in the United States, for example, tend to be heavily influenced by assumptions of classical liberalism with a heavy emphasis on individualism both in theory and in method (rational choice). In contrast, European political science is quite diverse but places more emphasis on institutional analyses (Norris 1997, 22).

3 Professionalization refers to “...the recruitment, training and certification by recognized standards (usually a doctorate) that individuals are qualified in that body of knowledge; the full-time employment of these scholars as teachers and researchers in the field; the promotion of individuals according to professional standards (recognized publications and awards) by an internal process of peer review; and the formal organization of the discipline into learned societies, in order to defend the interests of its members and advance the status of the discipline (ibid.).”

reflect a field that is emerging as a discipline, one that is working within the established constraints and assumptions of a variety of political conditions around the world and one that is only beginning to be professionalized in selected nations in response to political and social movements both national and global.

Four Major Themes

Previous surveys of the gender and politics field have identified particular themes that characterize the research and the questions being asked. This volume is organized around four major themes or approaches. The first offers a different and perhaps more fundamental perspective drawn from the point of view of scholars from Latin America and Africa who argue that the creation of knowledge about gender is deeply linked to global hierarchies of political, economic and linguistic power and show how this is manifest in their regions. A second major theme concerns the exclusion of women from democratic political institutions (legislatures, political parties, public bureaucracies, courts) and from political processes such as elections. The assumption of this approach is that the primary agenda is to improve the political representation and participation of women in political institutions — what Anne Phillips (1989) has called “the politics of presence.” The third theme involves approaches that include but also go beyond the traditional public/private boundaries of state-centric political science and instead, draw on theories, concepts and institutions more often addressed in the fields of sociology, philosophy, economics, psychology, anthropology, geography, women’s studies and history in addition to the discipline of political science. The fourth theme that characterizes the field of gender and politics focuses on evaluating and critiquing mainstream concepts, theories and discourse to show how these concepts and theories are gender biased, how they exclude women and gender from consideration, how they disempower and silence women and how they may be reconstructed.

The chapters in this volume loosely correspond to these four themes although some chapters include more than one theme or approach. The chapters on Latin America and Africa (chapters two and three) draw our attention to the first theme, namely the ways in which knowledge production or discipline creation is related to power. This refers to power not only within political institutions, but power in terms of economic, military, cultural and linguistic dominance. Because this is a new perspective not often discussed in disciplinary reviews, these two chapters set the stage for this collection. They remind us that knowledge production requires power and that social movements can be a source of such political support. In countries where states may be weak and/or undemocratic, where universities may be few in number and/or may exclude women, where political science as a discipline is not well established, excludes women or may be banned altogether, gender and politics knowledge production continues but under different circumstances. Non-governmental organizations often are the centers of such knowledge production. Global networks are extremely important. These chapters are particularly significant to this review because they offer a valuable critique of the Eurocentricism of the political science discipline? and of much of the work in gender and politics that focuses on women’s political representation in democratic nation-states. They suggest that because gender and politics scholars and practitioners are not so wedded to the dominant paradigm, yet forced to operate at least somewhat within it, they can be a source of innovation and creative new approaches. They can expand the perspective of the field of gender and politics and of political science as well. For these reasons, the chapters on Latin America and Africa lead this collection and are crucial to defining and understanding the state of the field.

The chapters on Latin America and Africa also make us acutely aware that the nature of the state, the economy, the openness of the society and the government, culture, religion and the prevalence and role of universities are all factors that shape the nature of inquiry in various parts of the world and consequently condition the study of gender and politics. Military dictatorships, whether in Africa, Asia, the Americas or Europe generally have a dramatic impact not only on what occurs at universities but also on what can happen in civil society — an impact that varies with the conditions of each country and region. In China, for example, the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 established a strong centralized government which has taken the lead in improving the well-being of women as part of its quest to liberate labor, a model considerably different from conditions impacting gender and politics in other parts of the world (Han 1997). National indebtedness has had a great influence not only on universities but also on the lives of women. Countries in civil conflict have created situations where women have served as revolutionary activists, as peacemakers or as peacekeepers. In these situations, the generation of knowledge about women and politics or gender and politics may occur primarily in grassroots and indigenous women’s movements, in non-governmental organizations, in networks of women activists and/or among scholars who communicate with one another within and across geographic boundaries.

4 See John Trent’s review essay which documents this Eurocentric focus of most political science research (Trent 2009).

The second theme — in contrast with the perspective of the chapters on Latin America and Africa — assumes the existence of democratic nation-states or of emerging democratic nation-states with representative political institutions. The chapters on South Asia, Europe and the United States (chapters four, five and six) fall broadly into this category. The approach in these chapters concerns the exclusion of women from democratic political institutions (legislatures, political parties, public bureaucracies, courts), and from political processes such as elections. They seek to identify the mechanisms and causes of these forms of exclusion as well as policies that can improve the situation. The assumption of this approach is that the primary agenda is to improve the political representation and participation of women in these institutions.

The third theme can be found in studies that go beyond the traditional public/private boundaries of political science and instead draw on theories, concepts and institutions more often addressed in the fields of sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, geography, women’s studies and history rather than in the discipline of political science. This theme is found in several of the chapters in the other three categories. As illustrated in the chapters on Latin America and Africa (chapters one and two), the field of gender and politics has developed largely out of interdisciplinary work drawing on other social science disciplines and methods. The chapter on gender and politics in South Asia while focusing on women’s representation in political institutions, stresses the importance of family and kinship to this process in South Asia. The discussion of gender and globalization, and of gender and political economy in the chapter on the United States and the chapter on international relations (chapters six and seven respectively) illustrate how gender and politics scholars draw on other disciplines and intellectual approaches including economics, anthropology, history, geography and sociology. Feminist theory also is informed by a wide range of philosophical and historical knowledge in its creation of new concepts and new explanations.

A fourth approach to the study of gender and politics places more emphasis and importance on the way mainstream concepts and policies structure thought and discourse to exclude women and gender from consideration, a practice that disempowers and silences women and leads to gender-biased conclusions and policies. The agenda is to disrupt the mainstream “normal,” to explain and challenge its gender bias and to develop new concepts to rectify this situation. This is a primary focus for feminist theory as explained in chapter eight. Because the field of international relations is heavily involved with public policy discourse, gender and politics scholars have also been particularly active in challenging the gender biased concepts of those in the established and professionalized ranks of international relations within the discipline of political science as illustrated in chapter seven.

In summary, the chapters in this volume written by authors from a wide variety of regions in the world reflect all four of these approaches with some chapters representing more than one approach. The chapters on Latin America and Africa show how the field of gender and politics expands the concept of the political beyond the confines of the nation-state to include the impact of international power hierarchies and show that the locus of knowledge production is not necessarily confined to universities and established professionalized academic disciplines. The chapters on South Asia, Europe and the United States review a rich literature that focuses on the representation of women in democratic political institutions within the nation state. Several chapters including those on Latin America, Africa, South Asia, the United States, international relations and feminist theory in whole or in part illustrate the ways in which the field of gender and politics has moved beyond the public/private dichotomy that characterizes much of political science research to draw on the insights and methods of other social science disciplines. Finally, the chapters on international relations and feminist theory review some of the many ways that the field of gender and politics has challenged mainstream concepts that shape and propagate gender bias and how the field has developed new theories and new ways of viewing the world that promote social justice, gender equality and women’s well-being.

Three Streams of Analysis

Many factors have shaped the field of gender and politics as it exists today in the discipline of political science. The development of the field cannot be separated from 1) the changes in capitalism — specifically changes in labor markets — or from 2) the emergence of women’s movements globally during the 20” and 21“ centuries. Insofar as this project concerns the development of gender and politics within the discipline of political science, neither can the project be separated from 3) the state of political science as a discipline globally, especially as it is represented in the International Political Science Association. Each of these three influences help explain the emergence and development of the relatively new field of gender and politics and provide a framework within which to situate the variety of approaches represented by the subsequent chapters in this book.

Gender and Politics and Changes in Capitalism and in Labor Markets

Changes in global capitalism and subsequent changes in the gendered division of labor during the second half of the 20" century have altered the political position of women, albeit quite differently in different parts of the world. This in turn has impacted the development of the field of gender and politics. Prior to World War II, in most parts of the industrialized world — with some exceptions — industrial manufacturing was organized around the male wage earner. Some women worked for wages as domestics, nannies, prostitutes, schoolteachers, nurses, clerical and retail workers. Some women worked in textile and other factories. Almost all women were expected to do unpaid work in the home or on the farm, to bear and raise children and to care for the sick and elderly. For countries with social services, these services were organized either around the workplace (pensions, health insurance) or the state (welfare programs, social security). This model of production treated men and women as separate groups defined by law and by custom to have different responsibilities and different roles. To the extent that women were allowed to work in the waged economy, they were largely crowded into low paying gendered occupations such as clerical, retail, nursing, teaching, child care and/or domestic service. In industrialized and semi-industrialized countries, a few worked in low paying manufacturing jobs such as sewing, textiles, cigarette making. In non-industrialized countries, women worked in agriculture, in the market, and/or in the home, usually confined by law and custom to subordinate roles under male supervision and control.

The changes brought on by World War II in the United States whereby women were brought into the waged labor force for the war effort was a harbinger of what was to occur globally in the late 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, as off-shore production proved to enhance profits and contribute to what some called “the deindustrialization of America (Bluestone 1982).” In the United States, manufacturing plants organized under the Fordist mode of production (with strong unions, stable employment, manual or craft-based employment and paying family wages to long time male employees) moved abroad where they established factories employing large numbers of women. As men lost their jobs in the United States, family incomes fell and more and more women joined the waged labor force to supplement their family incomes. In 1989, Guy Standing wrote his famous article, “Global Feminization through Flexible Labour,” showing that the feminization of the workforce was a global phenomenon. As Standing noted, his term, “feminization of the labor force,” referred not only to the increased number of women in the global waged labor force, but also to the changes in the structure of the jobs that were available (Standing 1989). Instead of steady life time jobs for primarily male waged workers, the global manufacturing structure had changed to one of flexible production — what has since been labeled “commodity chain production” (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). Flexible production refers to off-shore global production where factories (often with primarily male workers) move at will to sources of ever cheaper labor and where primarily women are recruited to take low waged manufacturing jobs often in export zones set aside for foreign direct investment in developing countries. These jobs are generally low paid, insecure and irregular. In 1999, Standing updated his 1989 article to conclude that the global trends he noted in 1989 were accelerating and that around the world, women not only were being recruited into these unstable, low paid, part time jobs, but that these were primarily the kinds of jobs available to men as well under this system of post-Fordist production (Standing 1999).

In the 1980s, many women in middle income developing countries moved out of agriculture and into white collar occupations such as teaching, nursing, sales, clerical and services. In general, more women participated in agriculture in Asia than in Latin America (Horton 1999, 576). Goldin has shown that in the United States, the shift of women out of the home and into the waged labor force occurred in stages beginning in the late nineteenth century and evolving through three evolutionary phases to a revolutionary phase beginning in 1970 (Goldin 2006, 2). Early phases of the process saw young single women entering the labor force. As industrialization progressed and more white collar jobs became available and women obtained higher levels of education, larger numbers of married women entered the labor force for longer periods of time. The revolutionary phase was marked not by any particularly dramatic increase in numbers of women in the labor force, but rather by a more highly educated female labor pool. This correlated also with a change in women’s self reported life expectations, social norms concerning family and work and individual identity (Goldin 2006). Beginning in the early 1980s, 80 percent of young women in the United States expected to work when they were thirty five years of age. Women were getting more education, getting married later, getting divorced more often, and spending less of their lives in married status. They expressed an interest in employment as part of a long term career which had equal importance to that of their husbands (Goldin 2006, 10-12).

Another important change with regard to global capitalism in the last half of the 20" century that impacted women as well as the discipline of political science has been a major shift from state centered economies based on Keynesian beliefs to a neo-liberal philosophy articulated by Frederik von Hayek and Milton Friedman. The neo-liberal view holds that the role of the state in the economy should be limited to maintaining a stable supply of money in proportion to the rate of growth in the economy. Capital, goods, services and (in theory even labor) should be allowed to flow both within and between states with as little state regulation as possible.

With the oil crisis of 1973 when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of their oil three and then four times in one year, many oil importing developing countries had to borrow funds from international lenders to pay for the increased cost. For many of these countries, this was the beginning of a debt burden that forced them to restructure their economies towards export production. The extra monies accumulated by the OPEC countries made their way into western banks which in turn lent them at high rates of interest to developing countries. With the demise of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank served as the gatekeepers to global capital by requiring those countries in need of international loans to implement neo-liberal policies as a condition for obtaining a loan. In exchange for loans from these institutions and ultimately from private lenders, countries had to agree to neo-liberal structural adjustment policies (SAPs) that usually called for cutting state spending on domestic consumption and services (especially services to women and children) in favor of investing in the extraction of raw resources and/or production of commodities that could be sold for foreign exchange to repay the foreign debts. These neo-liberal policies had a profound impact on many women in developing countries as they experienced cuts in education, health care, water distribution, energy, welfare and food subsidies for the purpose of servicing foreign loans. In many cases, state funded public services such as piped water or electricity were privatized and marketed. University curricula around the globe were impacted as neo-liberalism, also known as “The Washington Consensus,” became the new mantra. For many women in industrializing and poor countries, these neo-liberal changes were mobilizing factors, ones that brought the inequity of the global order into sharp focus. This ideological change also impacted the industrialized countries of Europe and North America as welfare systems were reduced and state services were eliminated or privatized.

The Emergence of Women’s Movements and their Differences

The 1960s, a time of state organized (Keynesian) as opposed to globalized or neo-liberal capitalism, marked the beginning of what is sometimes called “second wave” feminism in the United States and Europe (as opposed to “first wave” feminism which refers to the suffrage movement). In this period, states used Keynesian economic policies to organize and direct investment, devise industrial policy, regulate business and use taxation to redistribute wealth (Fraser 2009). Gender relations were expected to be (and for many were) those of the waged or salaried male worker and the house keeping, childrearing woman. Authority structures and decision-making tended to be hierarchical and dominated by males. Feminists of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States chafed against the gender inequities of this era. They mobilized to help pass the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 making discrimination on the basis of sex illegal. They campaigned to enable women to control their bodies through legalized contraception and abortion. With momentum building in the civil rights movement and more women in the waged labor force, unraveling and exposing patriarchal practices, campaigning for equal treatment by the state and other institutions, consciousness raising, and trying to pass legislation were some of the main activities. These second wave feminists eschewed authoritarian structures, challenged traditional hierarchical authorities and attempted to build horizontal democratic participatory organizations.

Some elements of second wave feminism (radical and socialist feminist) challenged liberal conceptions of the public and the private to argue that gender power was located not only in the public arena involving the state and its institutions, but also in all perceived relationships between men and women, be they in the accepted norms of the society, symbols, institutions (both public and private), and in identities- both individual and group (Scott 1986). This understanding considerably broadened the study of gender and politics and constitutes a major contribution of gender and politics as a field to the discipline of political science (Hawkesworth 2006)

As Nancy Fraser has noted, the second wave feminist struggle in the United States against the constrictions of post World War II state organized (Keynesian) capitalism and the gendered bias of institutions (such as the barriers to women in the waged working force, the expectation that girls should be wives and mothers first, if not exclusively, the barriers to women in higher education, in the professions, and in the public and political arena) ironically coincided with the transformation of state organized capitalism into neoliberal capitalism as it developed in the 1970s and 1980s (Fraser 2009).

Neo-liberal capitalism brought with it a cry for the deregulation of business and a reduction of government spending including welfare payments and state services, but it also was associated with a reorganization of many businesses into networked rather than hierarchical structures with off-shore production bringing women of all ethnicities and nationalities into the waged workforce. It generated dramatic changes in the family as the two-earner family and the double or triple shift became the norm for women. Single parent families increased with most being female headed households. Many second wave feminists celebrated the economic independence, increased education and increased public awareness that women gained from employment outside the home, while at the same time struggling with the recognition that unwaged care work was vital and necessary and had to be valued and significantly rewarded as waged work. Most second wave feminists sought help from the state in this enterprise calling for public childcare programs, mandatory pregnancy leave policies, parental leave policies and more responsibility by males for care work. Meanwhile, neo-liberalism’s emphasis on the individual and individual self-sufficiency encouraged women to assume an individual identity rather than a family identity. Second wave feminist scholars developing the gender and politics field were caught up in these debates and movements.

While elements of the second wave feminist movement wished to have women recognized as different from men and therefore to be treated differently by the state, most feminists in the United States during this era were concerned with how the patriarchy treated all women as a class in a systemic way to maintain women’s inferiority and subordination. They sought to obliterate the differences between men and women by seeking recognition and representation in public and private forums. Differentiating among women according to race, class, or ethnicity was a high priority for only a few.

Women Organizing Internationally

Globally in the 1960s and the 1970s, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (created in 1946) was moving beyond its early legal emphasis on obtaining equal citizenship rights for women who married internationally to emphasize social and economic rights for women in the world. In 1975, the United Nations held its First World Conference on Women in Mexico, a meeting that some Mexican feminists boycotted in a move that highlighted their anti-imperialist resentment against the West. This reflected the negative sentiments that developing and colonized countries often have had for the imposition of what they have considered a western imperialist feminism that they did not feel they had had a fair opportunity to shape or direct. In spite of these reactions, subsequent United Nations World Conferences on Women in 1980, 1985 and 1995 mobilized large numbers of women in many countries in local, national and regional meetings to discuss women’s issues in preparation for these world conferences. The early meetings were characterized by splits between the Eastern Soviet bloc countries and the West. The differences between North and South continued in all these conferences. Conflicts among Middle Eastern delegates characterized the 1985 conference in Nairobi, while Catholic and Muslim delegates opposed key provisions of the agenda proposed for the 1995 conference (Bayes and Tohidi 2001). As improved communications, especially the telephone, fax machine and ultimately the internet evolved, transnational women’s non-governmental organizations became more numerous.

Prior to 1995, United States foundations and many northern European governments funded projects for women in developing countries. In many cases in developing countries, this favored a class of educated, internationally oriented women who established organizations that addressed issues that appealed to western funding agencies such as domestic violence and reproduction. In contrast, local grassroots women’s movement organizations were concerned with survival issues such as poverty, education, health, children, the environment and working conditions. In some countries, still a third sometimes overlapping group of women emerged to run for public office.