Do I Dare!
Woman as the Measure of Things
A Z M Obaidullah Khan
PLATO once mused of man as the measure of things. President Vaclav Havel writes in his memoirs: "The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structure, and not that man be made to measure for those structures." The same refrain reverberated in the Social Development Summit in Copenhagen when the President of the summit, Poul Nyrun Rasumussen said: "Man has often treated Nature unwise and short-sighted. But man has treated man even worse. We are gathered here to promote social development and social justice placing the needs, aspiration, and rights of the people at the centre of our decisions and joint actions."Since then national and international elite, ministers and managers have routinely reiterated the importance of security of the people. Discussions have ranged from human rights to probing the frontiers of information highway. The problem is that large segments of the population, women who hold up half the sky, are invisible in the country-side or visible and considered a nuisance in the city slums. Their lives if fortunate, are centred around a paddy field and a cooking pot. Mother and daughter trek for miles to collect a few dead branches or twigs to cook for the little ones or keep them warm in harsh winter. Some mother scavenges the harvested fields for left over grains to find the dream of her child - a morsel of food. The big decision for many others, the young and the hungry, is whether to prolong the miserable existence or move out to make shift hovels in urban centres or be co-opted by body merchants.
Assetless, rightless, remote and knowledge-deprived as they are, they live far from venues of conferences on human rights, and even further from a national or international airport, not to speak of the computer terminal and the information highway.
Yet, if security of the human kind, is the key indicator for a civil society, woman should be the measure of things. Why? The best answer is given by Professor Yunus: "It is due to a basic difference in the vision of life of men and women. It is almost a universal truth that a man's first priority is himself, his world view is "me" - centred and focusses on "today". A woman likes to make things pleasant for others - her children, her husband, her household and she herself is the last on her list of preferences. Women also tend to have a longer term vision and they yearn for security. They are therefore effective managers of scarce resources .... and more reliable as agents of change." In fact, it can be argued that in poor households if men aggravate the poverty, it is the women who contribute to the livelihood strategies in most difficult and sometimes hostile circumstances.
But the conventional norms of society in Bangladesh are stacked against them. Their access to land, the most productive asset is through kinship entitlement, inheritance and marriage. Daughters inherit land, though less than the sons. Divinely ordained as it is, women can rarely enforce their entitlement. They often waive it in favour of their brothers in exchange for possible protection in case of endowed, abandonment or divorce. Inequities in land entitlement are also manifest in educational opportunities and access to credit or income earning possibilities. Collateralless as the women are, access to credit has been an impossible dream for them, until Grameen Bank came forward with the innovative agenda of social collateral.
Yet what was the early experience? "If a woman applied for a loan", writes Professor Yunus, "She would be questioned whether she had discussed it with her husband and if he approved her move. Finally, she would be asked to bring him along for the meeting. Nobody demands this kind of spousal approval to sanction loans to women .... Therefore, I wanted to ensure that poor, illiterate women had an option for financial resources ..... Now almost 94 per cent of our borrowers are women".
Another example is the experience of members of SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) regarding the government's weaker section lending programme in Ahmedabad, India. "Being all women accompanied by children, filthy in appearance, unaccustomed to manners and business talks, they were annoying to and not much welcome by bank staff at their premises." Or as a woman worker in informal sector in an urban centre puts it. "If we go alone, who will listen to us? We don't know who to meet, what to ask for? People are rude to us, they think we are dirty and talk to us badly."
However, that may be, the Grameen Bank experience shows that as women become self-employed or entrepreneurs in their own right and get organised, they can question and sometimes reverse the heretofore "non-decisionable agenda", namely man's control over land, capital, technology and other valued resources. Some of them, who are now owners of their own houses cannot be thrown out, as often happened before, at the sweet will of the man of the house. Because, when a woman member gets a housing loan from the bank, the stipulation is that the title of the plot of land where the house is sited must be transferred to the borrower's name. The marital relationship thus becomes more sober and stable for the woman. Having said that, there is a new and exciting dimension. A Grameen member in a remote or isolated village is leap-forging into the information age using cellular technology.
What has been prevalent, in women's contractual inferiority in the capital market is also true in the reluctance to see women in the countryside as germ-plasm collectors, seed selectors, and as the key players in preserving nature's diversity. The taboo of nondecisionable agenda comes to the forefront. Land, capital, technology and information are all valued goods that imbue those who own or control them with power and prestige. Why should these resources be shared? Why should institutions be restructured and male power bases challenged? But challenged they must be. As Dr M S Swaminathan points out: "Traditional systems of farming depended on "in situ" conservation of genetic variability, mostly by women in the form of numerous land races." I believe that plant breeding efforts with rural women will help a desirable blend of frontier and traditional technology. It means a reversal of power relations in the scientific establishment. The challenge for the scientists, if they are humble enough to take it, is to accept that women farmers are germ-plasm consultants and research curators and to develop field methodologies and management strategies that support women farmers in their roles.
Further, as I have written before in another context, if the umbilical chord between ecological integrity and sustainable livelihood of the people are to be reestablished once again, it can only happen in an engendered environment. If biodiversity is threatened, it is the women's livelihood security and that of their families which is in jeopardy. When forests or lands or rivers or wells die, and I paraphrase from my friend Kamla Bhasin, it is the women who mourn the most, because they are the most affected. This is why, in struggles to save forests, struggles against pollution, in movements against militarisation, women are at the forefront. Because, historically and even today, it is the women who create, nurture and sustain.
Unfortunately, the enlightenments doctrinal belief in the supremacy of man over nature is the paradigm for the endless series of superior/inferior dichotomies that is characterised as masculine/feminine. And I quote Sandra Scheneider: "At the male pole are divine creativity, power, intelligence, activity, goodness, independence, and at the female pole are natural passivity, weakness, instinct and emotionality, receptivity, evil and dependence. The short-hand cipher for this pervasive dualism is the spirit/body dichotomy, spirit representing everything divine, and body representing everything natural. The spirit is male, the body is female. Culture is the triumph of male spirit over female nature."
Perhaps it is time to let this deeply patriarchal theology stand on its head. Women reintegrates what has been dichotomised, empowers what has been marginalised and liberates what has been enslaved.
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