Third World movements need women leaders
Few of the Third World guests who attended the second Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference in Sydney at Easter were women. This reflects the oppression women in the Third World face. It also highlights the real and urgent need for progressive Third World organisations and movements to develop women leaders.
In most Third World countries, the Western imperialist powers imposed capitalism by combining it with existing exploitative social relations. Old hierarchies and ruling classes, along with their privileges and reactionary laws, were reinforced to maintain stability. These usually discriminated against women.
The family is an important productive unit in the exploited countries; men often have complete control over the women, who have scarce legal rights. Peasant women must work long hours and look after children as well.
In the cities, women have greater opportunities for education and economic independence. While women make up a smaller percentage of the work force in Third World countries, they are the majority of those employed in industries such as textiles. With lower wages than their male counterparts, women's employment in such industries is crucial for the superprofits of Western corporations. They are a source of cheap labour, and their employment keeps wages down generally.
Poverty in the Third World impacts hardest on women. Today, growing Third World debt and unequal trading relations between the rich and poor countries results in ever increasing poverty.
It is this double oppression — social and economic — of women in Third World that makes it difficult for them to become active in struggles, and even more difficult for them to become leaders of those struggles.
While it is much harder for Third World women to become politically active, it is nevertheless essential that men and women struggle together if the divisions in the workers' and peasants' movements are to be overcome.
Progressive organisations' conscious development of women as leaders, political thinkers, organisers and participants who struggle side-by-side with male activists can challenge sexist ideas that characterise women as inferior and passive, and only being capable of being baby-makers and second-class citizens.
Women will have more confidence in their ability to overturn repressive social traditions and laws that discriminate against women in the workplace, in education and in reproductive rights. Their male comrades will also be more likely to support their demands for greater participation in society.
The examples of Algeria and Nicaragua illustrates these points.
During the liberation struggle in Algeria, women freedom fighters were remained in subordinate positions in the political movement and were marginalised in the liberation army.
Shortly after Algeria's independence, discrimination in education and employment were introduced. Discrimination within the family was legally entrenched.
From that point on, Algerian women kept silent about the abuses and discriminations they suffered. They had internalised the movement's priorities: women's demands must be considered only after the liberation.
However, in Nicaragua, women played a big role before the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979. Forty per cent of the Sandinista guerilla fighters were women. Many were leaders. After the 1979 insurrection, women immediately took leading places in the revolutionary government and in other decision-making roles.
Childcare centres were built, the use of women's bodies for advertising was prohibited and laws that establishing joint responsibility for the raising of children were passed.
The Sandinistas lost the 1990 election, but the mass organisation of Nicaraguan women, AMNLAE, which was established before the Nicaraguan revolution, continues to fight to preserve the gains made by women.
The Nicaraguan revolution showed that struggles for land reform and basic democracy are necessarily linked to the struggle for social, political and economic equality for women. When women participate in a revolutionary movement, it puts demands of equality of the sexes at the forefront. Men's awareness about women's capabilities and roles are transformed.
The battle against the oppression of women is a conscious one. Progressive organisations and left parties must actively facilitate and promote the participation of women, both in the leadership of those organisations and in the broader struggle for democracy and socialism.
BY TAMARA PEARSON
[The author is a member of the socialist youth organisation Resistance and the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.
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