Challenges for Feminism in a Globalized World
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Is it possible to challenge the existence of gender discrimination? Is feminist ideology no more than hopeless utopianism? Can we imagine a society without gender discrimination? Can we view discrimination as just another form of crime, which can be eliminated or at least controlled, like any other crime?

By comparison with other forms of discrimination, is gender discrimination a particularly entrenched form of discrimination, which is more difficult to eliminate than other forms of discrimination? This paper attempts to identify and analyse the main factors, which underlie these questions.

Why are we comparing crime with gender discrimination, as if they are two different things? Because, in most countries, most forms of discrimination are not a crime. They may not even treated as socially unacceptable behaviour! They may even be treated as very acceptable forms of behaviour!

Let us look at the difference between the concept of gender discrimination, and the concept of crime. Crime is defined as an aberration from the law, and all the institutions of the state are expected to follow the law, and eliminate crime. Crime is therefore seen as the aberrant behaviour of an aberrant minority of misfits.

In most countries, most forms of gender discrimination are not against the law. On the contrary, gender discrimination is institutionalised within state and religious institutions. It is considered ‘normal’ by almost all men, and perhaps by most women. Most forms of gender discrimination are not only allowed by the law, in some cases they may even be prescribed by the law. In my own country of Zambia, the (1991) Constitution has an article which purports to outlaw all forms of discrimination in public behaviour and the provision of services. But this same article has a qualifying clause, which excludes this protection from discrimination in the areas of personal law and marriage law, and in all customary law and traditional practice. In other words, gender discrimination, in its most common forms, is allowed and legalised in the Constitution!

This points to the difference between talking about ending crime, and talking about ending gender discrimination. Crime may never end, but we shall be left with the residual crime, that which remains despite the dictates of the law and the efforts of various law enforcement agencies. Governments may pursue policies to eliminate crime, even though they know they can never be completely successful. They will remain in a perpetual state of war against crime, although it remains sensible to look forward to an ideal state when crime will be eliminated.

But how can we eliminate discrimination, if it is legal and normal, and even institutionalised within the government bureaucracy and other public institutions? In most countries the difference between gender discrimination and other important forms of discrimination (such as by wealth, class, race, religion) is that gender discrimination is more legalised (especially in matters relating to marriage and inheritance), or otherwise more tolerated as ‘normal’ social practice.

The feminist view is that gender discrimination is not only morally wrong, but is a detraction from fair governance and democratic practice. It is a form of oppression which leads, at the level of government, to male preference in the allocation of public resources and opportunities. From the feminist perspective, gender discrimination should be treated as a crime, like any other form of discrimination.

The difficulty of removing a form of discrimination depends on its level of social ‘embeddedness’. Here we define embeddedness in terms of how deep-seated a particular form of discrimination is in terms of the following spectrum:

The first implication arising from this list is that it is foolish to try to remove discrimination at the superficial level of inter-personal behaviour if such discrimination is actually rooted and legitimated in an underlying foundation of tradition and law. (Many development agencies have a policy on introducing ‘gender sensitive’ development, when this is blatant lip-service and window dressing, addressed only at inter-personal relations within donor funded projects, quite overlooking the underlying issues of gender injustice in the wider community).

Conversely, it is foolish to imagine that legalised discrimination can be eliminated merely by making it illegal. In Zambia, the robbing of widows by their in-laws used to be legalised under customary law, but this practice was made illegal under the Intestate Succession Act of 1989. But in practice, very little has changed since then, because custom and tradition have remained resistant to change. If a case comes to court, local court justices are more influenced by custom and tradition, and are studiously ignorant about statutory law. The government has not established any administrative rules or machinery to actually implement the Intestate Succession Act. So everything remains much as before.

Sometimes practices, which have no basis in law, may nonetheless exist at the administrative level of government. An example from Zambia is a citizen’s entitlement to a passport. Under the law, all citizens, whether male or female, single or married, have equal entitlement to a passport. But a married woman who applied for a passport used to be asked for a letter of permission from her husband. It took twenty years of protest from the women’s movement before this illegal administrative behaviour was finally stopped. Even to this day, most government health clinics will ask a woman for her husband’s permission before making contraceptives available.

At the level of private or corporate business institutions, there are similar instances. Hotels may exclude women who are unaccompanied by a man. Banks refuse to open an account for a married woman unless she has the written permission of her husband. Credit institutions may similarly require a husband’s permission before a married woman is given a loan.

The above-listed ‘levels’ therefore provide criteria to diagnose the level of embeddedness of gender discrimination. In the liberal democracies of the West, discrimination exists more at the level of administrative and social practice, and is more difficult to find in law. (But law, which is not discriminatory on its face, may nonetheless be discriminatory in its effect.) In the West there is some anti-discrimination legislation, especially in the areas of employment and remuneration, although such legislation usually remains ineffective in practice.

In those Third World countries which are relatively more democratic, the pattern is similar to the West, except that there is a general absence of anti-discriminatory legislation. The law tends to be silent on gender discrimination, which by default paves the way for discrimination in administrative and social practice. But in the more authoritarian or Islamic countries there is a greater tendency for discrimination to be found embedded very overtly in the law of the land.

It is useful to make a comparison between gender discrimination and racial discrimination. We may ask ourselves whether it is possible to envisage a world without racial discrimination. Is it possible? Is it an impossible challenge?

The plain fact is that, by comparison with gender discrimination, there has been enormous success in eliminating racial discrimination. In the 1960s there was legalised and institutionalised racial discrimination in the United States, especially in the Southern States. This institutionalised discrimination was removed by the action of the Civil Rights movement, mainly by highlighting the contradiction between discriminatory state law and the more egalitarian federal law.

In South Africa, apartheid was similarly a system of legalised and institutionalised racial discrimination. Extensive and comprehensive racist legislation, supported by racist ideology of the superiority of the whites, ensured that the minority whites completely monopolised government and administration for the purpose of giving massive priority and privilege to whites in the allocation of all state resources. This system of institutionalised racism was ended in 1994 after an armed struggle which reached the point of civil war, and which was supported by international sanctions.

The lesson for feminists is obvious. To a greater or lesser extent, all countries are infected with institutionalised sexism, backed up by the ideology of patriarchy. If the battle against institutionalised racial discrimination has been largely won, the battle against institutionalised gender discrimination is only just beginning. Some feminists cannot even contemplate the battle, and have instead attempted to set up feminist enclaves or alternative societies, supposedly outside the control of the patriarchal state.

In the fight against racial discrimination in South Africa, there was a useful distinction made in the specific definition given to the words racism and racialism. The term racism was used to denote the institutionalised and legalised form of racial discrimination, based on an ideology of racial superiority which had been adopted by government as the legitimisation for it’s the establishment of the apartheid state. By contrast, the word racialism was reserved for the lesser or social form of racial discrimination, practiced at the person and social level. Pre-1994 South Africa exhibited both rampant racism and racialism. Racism was effectively abolished in 1994, but racialism lingers on, perhaps to lessen gradually now it has lost its ideological and institutional base.

I am not sure whether, in the feminist movement, we have developed a sufficient parallel vocabulary to assist us in distinguishing between the institutionalised and merely social forms of gender discrimination. Perhaps, for more precise discussion, we could reserve the word patriarchy for the institutionalised and governmental forms of male supremacy, and confine the word sexism to denote the system of male supremacy at the level of society and family.

However, if our main problem is institutionalised gender discrimination against women, here called patriarchy, then we need to understand it better. Understanding is the essential basis for action. Only understanding and analysis will enable us to identify the weak and vulnerable aspects of patriarchy. We need to locate the weak points of intervention, where quite small explosives can bring down the whole structure.

The word patriarchy means two things, and we need to distinguish between them. Firstly it may mean patriarchal government, which is a system for the male monopoly of decision making. Secondly it may mean patriarchal ideology, which is set of values and beliefs, which seeks to justify and legitimate the continued existence of patriarchal government.

Of course it is the legitimating role of patriarchal ideology which should be a centre of interest for feminists, since lack of adequate legitimisation automatically means that the whole edifice of government stands upon a suspect foundation.

Patriarchal ideology is of variable content in different parts of the world, depending upon what is being defended, and also depending upon the gullibility of the audience. However, it is very likely to include the following components:

The last belief is different because it is a ‘last resort’ belief. It reveals the need to resort to violence when patriarchal belief begins to slip, and patriarchal rule is challenged. All government becomes more coercive and violent as its ideological legitimacy begins to slip. Pervasive violence against women is therefore a sign of collapsing patriarchy, or of crumbling at weak points, and may give the pointer for strategic action in accelerating this collapse.

From the feminist perspective of finding the weak links in patriarchy, the above analysis points to two main conclusions. Firstly we notice that patriarchy depends largely on women themselves believing this ideology, and accepting their positions as inferiors and subordinates. Similarly the fight against apartheid could not begin until blacks threw off their ‘Uncle Tom’ perception that the white bwana was a superior mortal who was entitled to his position of privilege and dominance. They first needed to believe in themselves as equal human beings, and therefore to reconstruct their own identify and perception of themselves.

So it is with women: conscientisation is the word most often used for women’s reconstruction of themselves, and their identification of themselves as gender equals. Conscientisation is the word most often used for women’s reconstruction of themselves, and their identification of themselves as gender equals. They need to stop blaming themselves for their difficulties and subordinate position, and instead blame the institutionalised system, which made them into second class citizens.

The second point, from the perspective of changing the world, is that patriarchal ideology is very fragile, and cannot even stand up to rational scrutiny. As with apartheid, patriarchy at every point stands in contradiction to the principles of human rights, equal rights, and democratic governance. It can only be overtly proclaimed as a legitimating ideology in systems of governance, which are explicitly autocratic and dictatorial. But in countries where governments claim to adhere to the principles of human rights, good governance and democracy, obviously the ideology of patriarchy cannot stand up. It can exist only as a covert ideology. It is the ideology, which dares not speak its name. In a society that claims to be democratic, it cannot be publicly propounded as part of governing principles. It has instead to proceed by the silent nod and wink in boardroom and committee, by men who know the quiet unspoken conventions of male dominance. It is implicit within the structure and traditions of government and church institutions, and is not usually available for scrutiny and analysis.

Women can only challenge patriarchy after they have managed to see it, analyse it, and step outside it. This is the pre-requisite for action. Without that, it is certainly impossible to challenge patriarchy. Women cannot challenge patriarchy if they live within it, and accept positions as honorary males or token females. You cannot fight patriarchy if you are one of its faithful and subordinated servants.

Conscientisation is the fundamentally necessary element within mobilisation and action. Mobilisation is collective action both for the critique of patriarchy, and for collective action to dismantle it. Analysis is the key to strategy, which must be focused on the weak links in the patriarchal armour.

Weak links are found especially in the contradiction between the covert patriarchal belief and behaviour on the one hand, and their proclaimed ideological principles of human rights and democracy on the other. Conscientisation begins when women recognise that their predicament arises from discrimination against themselves as women, rather than arising from their own inadequacies or lack of education. Mobilisation is more extensive and effective when many women, across countries, have the same grievance against systematic mistreatment by the male establishment. Global action is easier when women North and South can understand and experience a common feminist issue, and devote common resources for collective action.

Collective action is easier when it focuses on a single definable concrete issue, and not some broad and ill-defined general principle of gender equality. Examples are campaigns against stripping widows of their property, or against the genital mutilation of young girls.

With women’s common recognition of such common gender issues, we can put to the side differences of class, wealth, tribe, race, religion, or colour, and recognise our common sisterhood, and the common enemy of patriarchy.

*Zambian. Chairperson of the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET). Gender Consultant. She has contributed greatly towards the Women’s Movement in Africa. She is a radical Feminist Activist.g