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Shashi Warrier

Three cheers for women's lib

Women's lib is the best thing that's happened to us since sliced bread.

I've never understood our prejudice against women in governance. While individual women from Cleopatra to Chandrika Kumaratunga have made (or left) their mark on society, women at large have had woefully little influence on affairs of the state. There have been many exceptions in recent history, women like Golda Meir, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Gro Harlem Brundtland and Benazir Bhutto, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule: out of the nearly 175 countries in the world today, less than a dozen have had a woman head of government.

There have been queens in the past who have actually ruled - Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi, Mary Queen of Scots, Boadicea, Catherine of Russia and so on. But, in monarchies, matters were different: queens inherited their domains (I don't want to use the work kingdom because of its gender implications) from fathers or husbands; they weren't appointed, selected or elected and, in any case, they too are few and far in between.

Until the turn of the century, before sheer brawn became a negligible factor in society, the superiority of men over women was taken for granted. Odious phrases -- "Little woman", a favourite of the British, being the prime example -- find their origins in those dark days. But with the coming of technology and the removal of physical superiority, male bastions were invaded. As indeed they deserved to be. I can't think of a single reason why a woman can't better a man in the areas in which I operate (writing and computer software), but there's a certain absence of women in both.

It's the same in business and in practically every industry you'd care to name, with a few exceptions such as nursing. Look a little closer and a pattern beings to emerge. Fascist dictatorships such as those of Hitler and Mussolini concealed their male chauvinism behind hollow phrases that glorified the role of women -- in the home and the kitchen and, perhaps, in the hospital (as a nurse, not a doctor, mind you), but nowhere else. Even at the grimmest points of World War II, when defenders were falling on Germany's shrinking frontiers like leaves in an autumn storm, the Fuhrer insisted that women stay in their places. They were eventually allowed to work in factories, but that was the limit of the freedom they got (again, there were exceptions, such as Hannah Reitsch, the emotionally unstable ace pilot, and Lili Reifenstahi, the movie-maker). Ditto Mussolini.

Stalin's USSR was not very different: with World War II claiming a large portion of the country's male population, women were given awards for bearing and bringing up large numbers of children, but for little else (again, Valentina Tereshkova was an exception). Mao's China (and Deng's, for that matter) put women in their place: less than five per cent of the country's leadership were women. Totalitarianism, for some reason, doesn't tolerate women.

Neither do theocracies, especially during dictatorial phases. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, women aren't allowed out on the street unaccompanied, except in enclosed colonies of foreigners where a certain latitude is permitted! They aren't allowed to drive cars with manual gear changes. A glimpse of ankle calls for a beating from the mutawa , the religious police. Women in Iran, perhaps the most virulent of theocracies, are hardly better off, and in the Taliban-ruled part of Afghanistan, they are decidedly worse off. Other countries in the Middle East, Kuwait, Libya, Iraq and so on, are hardly models of equal opportunity. Fundamentalism, too, is no friend of women.

Women have a greater measure of freedom in neighbouring Pakistan, where there is a sort of democratic theocracy in the sense that people elect a theocratic government. But it's not the kind of freedom that they can take for granted while there is the possibility of the army taking over the government. Much the same situation prevails in our other close neighbour, Bangladesh.

What saddens one is that many countries seem to be moving backwards. Many actually want to move backward: Turkey's Islamic government, under the leadership of Necmettin Erbaken, have, in opposition to the army, taken the first step towards reverting to the days before Kemal Pasha brought in Turkey's first secular government. Similar movements have taken place in countries as wide part as the Philippines, Sudan and Algeria.

It's a pity that human rights organisations don't look at these countries in more detail. But there seems to be a distinctly economic bias to the workings of, say, Amnesty International: they seem to avoid criticising countries with which the countries of the OECD have large volumes of trade. Perhaps the outstanding examples are Saudi Arabia, with its repressive regime, and Kuwait: in both these countries, the oppression of women and non-white non-Muslim expatriates is open and unabashed. But there's not a whisper of complaint from Amnesty and co about these countries. One wonders, do those zillions of barrels of oil sitting under the desert sand have anything to do with this mysterious silence?

Be that as it may, there's some reason for pride in India's democracy: India must be one of the few countries willing to even consider a legal framework to reserve part of its legislature for women. The legislation has been postponed; though the government had made reservations of seats in Parliament for women one of the planks of its election manifesto, we've seen no real action on the issue.

You see the bias against women everywhere, even now: in the village where I live, a woman gets only half to two-thirds the wage a man gets, even if her productivity is not substantially lower than that of men doing the same job. We've got reservations for all kinds of backward classes but we've missed out on reservations for the most obviously downtrodden class: women.

Which, to my mind, is a big mistake. Given the historical evidence that totalitarian and fundamentalist governments don't treat women well, one of the best ways to ensure that such movements in our country don't take off is to ensure that women get a significant share of government.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier

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