At 06:21 16/10/2006, Yoshie wrote:
Yes, but struggles to improve conditions (of workers, blacks, women)
produce leaders (of same), no?
They do, but I wonder if those women leaders who emerge at the
workplace, community, and social movement grassroots levels don't get
shunted into "women's political career tracks," so to speak.
1. Modern political parties, especially ones on the Left, tend to
have "women's sections." Both women intellectuals and women
grassroots leaders get groomed into leading "women's sections" in
particular rather than parties in general on the Left, though they
apparently aren't on the Right?
Such sections (as well as mandatory quotas on executive committees,
etc) have tended to emerge as the results of the demands of an active
women's movement (rather than from paternalism), and in my view are
important in the development of capacities. In the absence of an
active movement, of course, they become career paths for
individuals... but that begs the question as to why the movement dissipates.
Maybe it all comes back to the same question--- a set of
social relations and norms that permit(dissuade) men(women) in
general to devote much of their waking hours to a focus upon
political struggle; however, the original question that you posed---
the absence of women in the top leadership in societies attempting to
build socialism-- seems more interesting to me than the issue of
leadership in left movements in the barbarisms of the west.
(Specifically, eg, in addition to the examples you gave, why does the
assembling of the leadership in Cuba look like the old boy's club
after all these years?) I recognise, of course, that others on the
list may have a different, more immediate focus for them and see no
reason why both discussions can't go on.
in solidarity,
michael
2. Parties on the Left have usually had two power bases: workers'
organizations (usually trade unions) and peasant organizations; and
those parties that emerge from or enter into revolutionary stages of
struggle have had another power base, which becomes the primary one:
the armed forces. They have also had other bases, especially in more
recent decades: organizations based on geography (e.g., community
organizations); organizations based on issues (e.g., environmental
organizations); and organizations based on identity (e.g., women's
organizations). Trade unions, peasant organizations, and armed forces
have been more likely to be male-dominated than the other kinds of
organizations. The top leadership of trade unions have been very male
almost everywhere, because the most powerful unions that can control
the key chokepoints of national economy, such as manufacturing and
transportation unions, are the ones that represent male-dominated
occupation, even though they may by now have come to occupy smaller
and smaller shares of national economy, due to the growth of the
informal sector and service jobs, where more women are found. While
much of subsistence farming has often been done by women in many
countries, it is men who have tended to have deeds to lands (if their
families have such formal land titles at all) and thus become
household heads, and men appear to have more often engaged into
commercial farming than women, which gives men more power in
households and opportunities to organize such things as peasant
organizations nationwide.
Because of 1 and 2, women intellectuals and grassroots leaders on the
Left have not been so positioned in national economy and left party
structure to develop their power bases that could eventually propel
them to the top of party and therefore national leadership?
>Leadership
>
>Qualities that leftists have trouble thinking straight about are
>qualities that encompasses ability, ambition, charm, charisma, etc.
>These are qualities of which some leftists say they disapprove and
>about which other leftists are silent, but those are the very
>qualities found in men who rise to the top, especially on the Left
>outside the West, which are tacitly recognized by all (though
>sometimes explicitly denied by some). Those are qualities that, if
>found in women, are regarded as troublesome rather than awesome.
Very true, but I regard this last point precisely as a product of
patriarchy whereas you appear to limit the latter concept to
practices within kinship networks
(thus excluding its generalisation within cultural norms including
those supporting not only an unequal division of labour but also the
definition of admired gender qualities).
It seems to me that patriarchy subordinates the common run of men and
women to the common run of patriarchs, but it does not block women
from taking power at the very top of politics, before or after the
beginning of modernity: Hatshepsut (the fifth pharaoh of the
eighteenth dynasty, 1479-1458 BC) of Egypt, Elizabeth I of England
(reigning from 1558 to 1603), the Empress Dowager Cixi of China (from
1861 till her death in 1908), etc. before modern times; Sirimavo
Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike (the modern world's FIRST female prime
minister, 1960-1965, 1970-1977, and 1994-2000), Benazir Bhutto (the
first Muslim woman Prime Minister, 1988-1990, 1993-1996), etc. in
modern times. In very patriarchal social formations, what matters the
most is whether you have the right blood, come from the right family,
belong to the right class, rather than whether you are male or female.
Strange as it may seem, gender matters more at the top _after_
patriarchy. Hence the paradox: only in premodern times were women
able to run some of the largest and most powerful states of their
times, like ancient Egypt; nowadays, women get to run mainly such low-
to mid-ranking states as Bangladesh, Chile, Liberia, and Norway that
are not all that politically interesting.
>Patriarchy
>
>For my purpose, I define patriarchy as a prevalent condition in a
>premodern society in which extensive kinship networks that entail
>mutual obligations define individual lives, in which patriarchs have
>power over both men and women in their families (or in their clans),
>and in which older women (usually after childbearing) have power over
>younger women. That's a condition that can be eroded or destroyed
>through socialism or capitalism or Islamism or secular nationalism or
>whatever that brings about urbanization, proletarianization,
>transformation of the family structure from extended families to
>nuclear families to single lives, etc. The destruction of patriarchy
>doesn't automatically lead to gender equality, though. Much of the
>remaining gender inequality after the end of patriarchy comes from an
>unequal division of labor, in which women shoulder much of care-giving
>labor (taking care of children, the sick, the old, the ill, etc.).
>--
Still, let's get back to your original question--- the
absence of women in the leadership of societies attempting to build
socialism. Was/is there something systemic that thwarts the emergence
of women as leaders in these?
1 and 2 that I suggested above may have functioned as blocks.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela.
NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBERS
Can be reached at
Residencias Anauco Suites
Departamento 601
Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1
Caracas, Venezuela
(58-212) 573-6333, 571-1520, 571-3820 (or hotel cell: 0412-200-7540)
fax: (58-212) 573-7724
