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Women are making steady in-roads into political office, changing and challenging attitudes and cultural images that are discriminatory to them. Above all women are being supported in their efforts to ensure gender equity and equality by policies that are against discriminatory practices in education and employment and more and more women organisations are effectively defending women’s interests.
However what is surprising is that despite all these efforts by Government and interest groups, violence against women persists or perhaps is even increasing, increasing in numbers of women are impoverished, occupational sex — segregation continues and the list is endless.
Chronicle recently published a story of a pregnant woman who was battered by her husband and his girlfriend despite the fact that they were on separation. Such brutality, such inhuman behaviour must be condemned. Women are still being treated like objects. Women continue to endure male domination in the home and outside it.
The dilemma facing women in the new gender order for the most part cannot be resolved through expanding anti-discrimination legislation and enforcement, no matter how broadly sex-discrimination is defined. Required solutions should rest on significant redistribution of wealth, re-ordered priorities in and expansion of Government spending through gender budgeting and involvement of women in the mainstream economy.
It is unfortunate that historically, women’s subordination was organised. Through explicit constraints legitimised by an ideology of inherent gender differences in talents, intellect and capacities women were excluded from the public life by various exclusionary rules and practices governing education, political participation and the labour market. Women were there to take instructions.
The new order is there to ensure that women enjoy their rights by dismantling the legal and normative edifice, which has mandated women’s subservience in marriage and denied them socially, politically and economic independence. It must be understood that in this new order households are not only arenas for privacy, intimacy and sexual pleasure but they are also basic units for survival where both the husband and the wife contribute to the welfare of children, hence the role played by both parties has to be appreciated. Women actually have a double burden, care giving and also working for pay. Men solely specialise in income earning.
Research has revealed that 40 percent of women who are divorced do not receive any support from their ex-husbands and most women end up with the burden of looking after the children on their own. Women’s greater domestic responsibilities will therefore continue to disadvantage them in the labour market. This disadvantage has an individual and collective aspect. At the individual level, women make strategic choices that limit their educational investment, interrupt their labour-force participation, and direct them into less competitive and poorly rewarding areas of occupations and into part-time employment or informal employment.
At the collective level, the double burden of women undermines women’s capacities for self-organisation in both economic and political arenas.
Actually, female-dominated professions have not achieved the sort of political clout that has enabled male dominated professions such as medicine, law and engineering to use the State to protect their interest as employers as well as entrepreneurs. Very few women are also committee members of workers’ unions.
Despite the challenges women face, their integration into paid work and their increasing access to independent income has created a pool of financial resources that enable them to be equal contributors to the family income as well as to the Zimbabwean economy. Apart from that, delayed child-bearing has increased the pool of working-class women who can participate in social, political and economic activities without many constraints.
A survey conducted in 1985 in the United States revealed that women felt that they did not have an equal chance with men in becoming business executives or entering prestigious professions. Sixty four percent of women agreed that being taken care of by a loving husband was more important than making it on one’s own but that has since been challenged. Of late a marriage where husband and wife share responsibilities is preferred to the male breadwinner family by 57 percent of all women.
Research has however revealed that younger women seem to be more supportive of women’s movement and more confident about their futures than older women. Young women believe that nothing is slighted when a woman combines work, marriage and children. In this new order the majority of women do not want to return to the traditional family where culture was used to instill a sense of dependency and subservience on women. Representations of gender have now become more diverse as working women have become a large and more differentiated market force and the media has also supported career women who have made it to the top.
Nowadays films also depict the same picture with very different representations on gender and are marketed with a specialised audience in mind. These images create a far more diverse popular culture than the hegemonic celebration of female domesticity that helped to marginalise them in the past.
l Vaidah Mashangwa is the provincial development officer in the Ministry of Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development, Bulawayo Province. She can be contacted on 09 889224/ 0772 111 592 email: [email protected].
Online Reporter