"Women, Development, and Anthropological Fact and Fictions"
Excerpt from Leacock, Eleanor, “Women, Development, and Anthropological Facts and Fictions,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1/2 (Winter 1977)
Excerpted by Tiffany Kinney
The view is commonly held that women have traditionally been oppressed in Third World societies, and that “development” is the key to changing their situation. The opposing view is that women’s status was good in many (not all) Third World societies in the past, and that the structure and ideology of male dominance were introduced as corollaries of colonialism. Furthermore, accumulating evidence shows that, although contemporary development may afford political and professional roles for a few token women, given its imperialist context it continues to undermine the status and autonomy of the vast majority (Boserup, 1970; Bossen, 1975; Nash 1975; Remy, 1975; Rubbo, 1975). To discuss the impact of development on women’s status in society, therefore, means to confront the reality that women’s oppression is inextricably bound with a world system of exploitation.
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To analyze the status of women in order to change it, is to analyze the need for and possibility of the most fundamental social transformation.
Real development would mean bringing an end to the system whereby the multinational corporations continue to “underdevelop” Third World nations by consuming huge portions of their resources and grossly underpaying their workers. (The United States makes up less than 10 percent of the world population, yet consumes some two-thirds of the world’s irreplaceable resources.) To talk of development also means facing the reality that “under-developed” national groups exist in the heart of the “developed” industrial world—Black, Chicano, Hispanic, and Native American minorities in the United States, and immigrant workers from Third World nations in Europe. To talk of development means to talk of bringing an end to the present system of profit-making with its ever-present threat of war. It means talking about the desperate need for a peaceful and economically secure world in which people, not profits, are the central social value.
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Third World women suffer manifold forms of oppression: as virtual slave labor in households, unpaid for their work as mothers who create new generations of workers, and as wives or sisters who succor the present one; as workers, often in marginal jobs and more underpaid than men; and as members of racial minorities, or of semi-colonial nations, subject to various economic, legal, and social disabilities. All the while, women bear the brunt, psychologically and sometimes physically, of the frustration and anger of their menfolk, who, in miserable complicity with an exploitative system, take advantage of the petty power they have been given over the women close to them. Perhaps the most bitter reality lies with the family, which is idealized as a retreat and sanctuary in a difficult world. Women fight hard to make it this, yet what could be a center of preparation for resistance by both sexes is so often instead a confused personal battleground, in which women have little recourse but to help recreate the conditions of their own oppression.
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Although women bear the heaviest burden of national and of class oppression, they are often told that they must subvert their own cause at this time in the interest of the “larger” goals of national, racial, and class liberation from exploitation. To pit one form of oppression against another in this way is short-sighted and pernicious. The problem of ultimately transforming world capitalist society is so vast, so enormous, that to consider it seriously calls for the recognition of the need to combine the special drive for liberation of half of humanity, women as women, with the drive of women and men as workers and as members of oppressed races and nations.
Precisely because women’s oppression is so deeply embedded in the entire economic, political, and social structure of capitalist society, to the extent that women organize around the problems they face, they can unify diverse struggles for class, race, and national liberation. Third World women in both “developed” and “developing” nations have a central role to play. The very totality of their oppression means that when they move to change their situation, they move against the entire structure of exploitation.
However, attempts to clarify the source of women’s oppression and the potentials for change run up against the barrage of misinformation and misinterpretation concerning women’s psychology, history, and economic relations that characterizes Western social science.
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True, women’s oppression today is virtually world-wide, and though, much decreased, it has yet to be eradicated in socialist countries. Therefore bio-psychological arguments about women’s greater “passivity” or men’s greater competitive aggression sound persuasive. Furthermore, to project the conditions of today’s world onto the totality of human history and to consider women’s oppression as inevitable, affords an important ideological buttress for those in power. Arguments about universal female subordination gloss over the structure of women’s oppression in capitalist society and the negative and persisting effects of colonialism and imperialism on women’s status. Such arguments also aggravate the problems women face when they find they have to fight against man on many issues at the same time as they try to fight alongside them. These arguments help maintain and increase an antagonism between women and men that renders them both less effective in political battles for liberation.
The image of women as naturally the servitors of men, and men as naturally the dominators of women, reinforces the myth that traditional family relationships in Third World nations were based on the male dominance that characterized Europe, where the Calvinist entrepreneurial family was of great importance to the rise of capitalism. The idea of women’s autonomy is then presented as a Western ideal, foreign to the cultural heritages of Third World peoples. The fact, however, is that women retained great autonomy in much of the pre-colonial world.
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For descriptions of how women and men related in egalitarian societies in the early colonial period, one must turn to history... A detailed study of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Cherokee in the southeast United States, written recently by a lawyer (Reid, 1970) and describing women’s autonomy, has not found its ways into discussions of female status, and a report by the early anthropologist, John Wesley Powell (1880), that documents women’s political role among the Wyandot of the Great Lakes, is not mentioned in a recent ethnography on the related Huron (Trigger, 1969). The Cherokee and Wyandot were both matrilineal and matrilocal, that is, men married into households that passed down in the female line.
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The Wyandot were one of the Huron groups whose populous villages were reduced to scattered remnants in early colonial days in wars with the Iroquois over access to furs for trade. Powell wrote of Wyandot society that there were four levels: the family, the gens (or clan), the phratry (or group of gens), and the tribe, and he stated, “the head of the family is a woman” (1880:59). These family heads chose four women to serve on the gens council, and these four women, in turn, chose a “chief... from their brothers and sons” (1880:61). The term chief has many connotations, and in this case it does not mean holding the kind of authority the English word implies. Powell was explicit about the responsibilities of the women councilors to partition and mark gens land every two years; settle the inheritance of household goods that passed down to female kin; and consent to marriages proposed to them by mothers of young women.
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In his account of the Cherokee, John Phillip Reid (1970) stresses the absolute equality of women and men in tribal, village, and personal affairs. The town councils that met nightly except during the hunting season consisted of “an assembly of all the men and women” (1970:30). Everyone could speak and be heard. Some Cherokee women chose to become prominent in military affairs, and receive a title translated as “Beloved Woman,” “Pretty Woman,” or “War Woman” (Reid, 1970:197). In 1781, the Beloved Woman Nancy Ward was made responsible for negotiating a peace with an invading American army. A generation earlier her uncle, Little Carpenter, had startled a council meeting of white Carolinians by asking why they were all male. Among the Indians, women attended the councils, he said, and he asked why this was not the custom of white people as well (Reid, 1970:69).
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As women continue to seek effective forms of organization against oppression, anthropologists who study cultural evolution and cross-cultural comparisons have the choice: either to document the autonomous roles women played in egalitarian societies, for the perspectives they lend to organizational strategies and socialist goals; or to spin out ever more elegant rationales for exploitation.