Contents of this Issue

• The Simplicity and Complexity of Women's Movements (Mary Des Chene)

Reviews

• Célébrer le pouvoir. Dasai, une fête royale au Népal (Gisèle Krauskopff and Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, eds.)
• Le Palais et le temple. La fonction royale dans la vallée du Népal (Gérard Toffin)
• The Political Ecology of Community Forestry in Nepal (Elvira Graner)

Mary Des Chene

Last year I helped a Nepali doctor carry out a survey on the incidence of neo-natal tetanus in a VDC near Nepalgunj. To hear, in a few days, dozens of women recount the history of the births‹and the many, many deaths‹of their infants is a sobering experience. Amid all those tales of birth and death one young mother and her husband brought their baby to be looked at. It was weak and sickly, malnourished. My doctor friend examined the baby gently but he spoke in uncharacteristically sharp tones, telling them what needed to be done, what to feed it, where to go for treatment and so on. And that if they did not do these things it would surely die quickly. I later chided him, saying what is the point of giving all that information if it won't be followed? Issuing orders in a commanding tone when the hospital may seem an impossibly intimidating place or there may be no money for medicine or better food will do no good. You have to find out why they haven't done these self-evident things already and together work out a practical path to doing them. In other words, pay attention to the "cultural", said the wise anthropologist.

I had been looking at the woman while he examined the baby. She was teenaged, as anemic-looking as her baby, skeletally thin, wearing an old worn sari. And shy and hesitant even before this doctor who was right in her neighbour's courtyard. It was her I was thinking of as I spoke. But my wiser friend had taken in a wider scene. He had looked behind her at her husband, a young man in strikingly robust health. His clothes were new and fancy. He carried a portable radio. He had sunglasses. I had taken in these details, but not their significance. Nor had I taken in the significance of the fact that the baby was a girl. My friend's curt instructions were directed at the man behind‹standing, healthy and indifferent, proudly displaying his expenditure on luxuries, behind an undernourished wife and a dying girl child. On that day I learned a simple thing I thought I already knew: sometimes, to understand the problems of women the place to look is behind, to the men.

But of course, as my story also witnesses, men are not always part of the problem and gender is no sure guide to who will have the greatest insight into the sources of women's oppression. Nor is it enough to look behind to the men, even when they are agents of women's oppression. We must also look behind the men and women to systems of patriarchy and class, which brings us back, in a more useful way than I proposed to my doctor friend, to "culture". Although I concentrate in what follows on the barriers to gender-based organizing within a class-based society, we must note that patriarchal ideologies in many guises support male advantage within classes, castes and ethnic groups, and work simultaneously against both women's movements and against trans-gender struggles organized on other bases.

The world over women, collectively, are more undernourished, more under-compensated for their labour, and more under-represented in formal decision-making bodies than men, collectively. The only measure in which women collectively come out "ahead" is life-span; those who endure seem to be hardy (though in Nepal, according to the statisticians, even women's lives are shorter than men's). Except to those who profess to find in the universality of women's subordinate status across disparate societies evidence of its "naturalness", these sorts of facts declare something very simple: the imperative for a women's movement‹here, there and everywhere.

From that simple realization to the creation of a united women's movement lies a path strewn with complicating barriers. First among them is the nature of women as a collective body, united by virtue of subordination on the basis of gender, divided along every other social criterion that usually serve as the rallying points for social justice movements. Women‹not the world's women and not Nepali women‹do not speak one language, do not share one political ideology, do not have one ethnic identity. Above all, women are not a class like dalits, peasants or workers.

Women may effectively be the dalit of each social class, but such unity of relative subordination hardly supercedes the very real class interests and sensibilities that separate women, one from another. Herein lies the great potency and the great difficulty of creating a women's movement. More than any class-based revolution, a truly united women's movement has potential to produce revolutionary change from within every class, for it has ready-made cadres at every level of society, top to bottom. And for just that reason many forces converge against any sign of trans-class unity among women, women's movements frequently have conflictual relations with class, ethnicity, and party-based movements, and women's movements are often splintered from within by the contradictory class interests of their members. These challenges, natural to any effort to organize against the grain of social hierarchies, have beset women's movements everywhere, not just in Nepal. They are a better explanation of the contradictions within and limitations of women's movements than those that anti-feminists like to put forth to disparage them and deflect notice from the revolutionary potential of female unity: women's "inherent" tendency to "squabble", women's "weakness" (mental, physical), and so on.

One result of the contradictions that work against a united women's movement is that class-based women's movements are far more common. And women's organizations organized around a class-based issue, on the basis of ethnicity or in affiliation with a political party are far more common than organizations that would unite women across such differences. This is not uniformly the case‹within Nepal the current anti-alcohol movement, though so far largely a peasant-based women's movement, is an example of an issue-based movement that has potential effectively to unite women across classes, parties, and jaat. Yet in practice even such issue-based movements have limited potential to unite women across class interests unless they become a vehicle for breaking down class divisions. While abuse by an alcoholic spouse knows no class barriers, there is a world of difference in what is at stake for poor women in whose homes the purchase or brewing of alcohol replaces their consumption of food and for those for whom the financial outlay goes unnoticed. Similarly, efforts to legalize abortion impact women across classes and yet, if successful, it will remain the case that actual access to safe abortions will be unequal among classes along with access to other kinds of medical care, even while it might be that women of some janajati groups relegated mainly to the lower classes, economically and through social discrimination, would face less religious and social pressure against using such services if they had access to them. Such limitations to the potential for trans-class unity on the basis of a common issue, and to equal initial impact for all women of a given right or reform, seem to me not an argument for inaction, but rather a reminder of the necessity to go well beyond first fruits in any reform-oriented work on behalf of women.

This discussion is meant to highlight two things. First, that something so seemingly simple as a united women's movement cannot emerge in a society riven with other hierarchical distinctions but only in tandem with the elimination of other social bases of subordination besides gender. And second, that efforts to improve the lot of women through organizations and movements inevitably permeated by the other divisions existent in society, may actively‹even if inadvertently‹work against creation of a united women's movement. That is to say that class and party, and ethnicity-based organizing in the name of women can serve to entrench female subordination overall.

(Extracted from the introduction to a commentary section on the Nepali Women's Movement containing 18 essays in English and Nepali published in Studies in Nepali History and Society, Vol. 2, No. 2)