Unknown Speaker  00:00
Number nine, modernization or accumulation boast revisited Lotus binaries and get us. Wrong Title I heard when I was going upstairs, somebody said what was buzzword I heard that seems I guess it's almost for us is almost inconceivable to figure out that somebody doesn't know who best Rob is. And that's how narrow minded one can get when you get into a subject. But must, must, must, must be one of the most quoted books, I listened to field of economic development. And it was for that reason that we decided that it was a good book for to revisit 10 years after its publication in 1970. And what we are doing actually is not only to look at the book as it appeared and have a criticism, come up with the criticism of the book, but also at what have we learned during the decade since the book appeared. So in a way, our criticism is somewhat unfair, because we're looking at at the book after a decade, in which the feminist theory and all the literature that hasn't been since then hasn't read so much what we know about women in development. But in any case, that's exactly what we're doing. We're looking at the book plus, we were trying to give an appraisal of how, what have we learned and how much we have moved behind beyond what the book was saying. And in 71st, of all, I guess I should say, what are we going to do, I'm going to just make some introductory remarks, we want to stick to the 15 minutes that we have been given, I don't know whether we will do that faithfully, we will try to. And that means really have to talk very quickly and things a little bit more schematically that we would like to do. But since we know that a lot of you know a lot about bus wrap, we expecting to bring things up in the discussion as well. I like to give that short introduction. And then Anita is going to talk about one of the parts of the PayPal, in a minute, I'll tell you what these parts are, then I'll come back and she'll come back soon, we will sort of be talking back and forth. Versus

Unknown Speaker  02:29
talking I intend without doing a little dance on the side when

Unknown Speaker  02:35
I first I think the bus rug deserves some praise. That when her book appeared, it was about time that somebody systematically put together a, a book an effort that brought up and focused on where women exactly stand in the process of development, the development literature had ignored tremendously, the role of women 50% of the population, and the process of development. So the work was really a pioneer effort. And it is no coincidence that it is being quoted all the time, it's because it really told us something that was extremely necessary. And that was the emphasis on where exactly women were in the process of development. Now, it's difficult to summarize her main contribution, just just let me briefly mention some of them and move on. We'll do it very schematically, first of all, she, she told us that gender as well as age are universal factors that we find across countries behind the division of labor, and that this division of labor is highly correlated to, to sex across country. But what some countries see as the natural division of labor according to sex is very different from what we find in other societies so that there is not such a thing as a in quote, natural division of labor according to sex, because we find a tremendous amount of varieties, according to what particular society are we looking into. So she definitely put into question this, especially when we talk about women's participation in non household production. The question of having a natural division of labor according to sex, which women's woman has been so strongly questioning all the time. She also provided some explanations about this division of labor according to sex. In some cases, she brought up explanations that we find to these days extremely interesting. Like I think that many of us may remember how interesting it was to read for the first time that polygamy has As an economic basis for existence, the fact that a man has more access to land, whenever wives can bring in more more units, more pieces of land provides for an economic for economic base for the existence of polygamy. And we found that very interesting Bastrop sometimes did not go far enough in analyzing this, this economic base for the existence of, of what are patriarchal forms and forms of subordination of women. But in any case, she pointed to very interesting explanations of the division of labor and the place where women were at in different societies. She also told us about the negative effects of colonialism, and the penetration of capitalism in in traditional economies, and how women in the development process often had lose the hat. Last out, that is that women, that development process, polarized workers, and polarize the sexes, by introducing hierarchies ation, and segregating out different groups of workers in a way that women were the losers by enlarge, so that the process of modernization did have negative effects on women. I think that some of us also were surprised when we first read this in such a systematic way as she did in her book. And another contribution of hers was to point out that the women's participation in economic activities is systematically underestimated that this is so not only for women's work in the household, but it's also for women's working in agriculture, and subsistence economies and so forth. This is a subject that is still very alive today. And she was one of the first one who pointed out in a very clear way. There were other other this is just by way of suggesting some of her main contributions. I think that there are others, but

Unknown Speaker  07:06
I will stop here. Now, in terms of our criticism, we have we are criticism concentrates around three main areas. First, the book is essentially an empirical book. It's very descriptive. But the problem is that it doesn't really have any theoretical framework that puts all these things together. It lacks a this framework that asks, starts out with some body of theory, looks at reality, and then goes back to the body of theory to tell us exactly where these empirical data that she brings up really, what exactly does it tell us. So it doesn't really move beyond this empirical body of data, which really, she has lots of it, it's very rich body of data, but she's really doesn't go beyond that. But yet, underlying most of her concepts are our concepts of what in economics we call neoclassical economics, that is, Orthodox economics, the concepts that she uses, if she has any theoretical framework at all, is a theoretical framework that derives if not directly, indirectly, from orthodox neoclassical economics. Our second type of criticism is that she takes us given a unique model of development, and that is a capitalist development, that the process of modernization that she's talking about doesn't really take into consideration, another type of process of women of development rather than capitalist development, she takes it as given, it's always in the background. So when she talks about modernization, she's really talking about capitalist accumulation and the effect of this accumulation on women's work and women's lives. And our third area of criticism is that she doesn't have a clear cut, or he would say, a clear cut feminist analysis, that is her analysis concentrates on the area of production, women's participation in non household production, and their problems around this area. But she really doesn't take into consideration women's role in the reproductive sphere. And by by doing so she she that doesn't allow her to concentrate on the real core of women's problems, that is the hierarchies and the the subordination domination, relations that come out of the household where the focus of women's oppression exists. So these are the three the three criticisms that we have. I'm only going to say a word about the theoretical framework, I want to extend myself there and then Gita is going to talk about the second one and I'm going to talk about about the third one that is reproduction. And finally it is going to give some conclusion so that's, that's the way we map out our our talk. Come in yeah

Unknown Speaker  10:08
just just the word about the theoretical framework was really describes all the time. She doesn't really go beyond, as I said, this data that you present her data are very rich in insights about what exactly women do, whether their problems and so forth. But she doesn't go beyond the ultimate questions aren't really asked, for example, one of the of the issues that come up in her analysis is the process of colonization, the introduction of capitalism in the Third World, introduced a process of polarization hierarchies ation where women lost out because I mentioned before, very often she says, This is really was due, it's due, she gives cultural explanation to the court, the colonies, the Europeans coming into the third world actually introduced the set of values in them, they were sexist and therefore women lost out well, this is this is leaving things at the level that is not really getting to the ultimate questions, because in addition to their culture, they will also bring with them a system and that system was the capitalist development with the emphasis on private ownership of means of production, with emphasis on on the market is structures that lead towards accumulation, therefore, to a class formation, towards differentiation of class differentiation. And this hierarchy session affected women as well. So that the ultimate question obviously, culture is important. But behind culture, there were also other forces such as economic forces, towards which she doesn't really point out. Another example of this kind of shortcoming, when she talks about wages with female wages and women's wages, she talks about the preferences of employers, male employees, as well as preferences of women in this in the following way. She says, women's wages really are lower because employers prefer men to women. And they say women tend to be in, in in home industries, because women actually prefer to be in home industries. Well, beyond this preferences, that is something else. First of all, we could say yes, in some cases, employees prefer women, especially now, when we look at what's going on in the third world, we realize when the economic forces are such that women can be employed easily and they can be employed to lower wages. Employers often prefer women. So that behind these preferences, there are economic forces that she really doesn't explain and it is it is really too simple to leave things at the level of preferences. In addition, we know that that female wages are not really seen as male wage isn't the male wages, male men are seen as the primary wage earners and therefore, are not going to accept the kind of low wages that women accept because they see themselves as secondary workers in a household. And so, when we talk about wages, we have to take all these things into consideration moving beyond preferences and, and and looking into how each worker sees itself and how society views what the role of wages is for in each particular case. As far as women's preference is concerned, we know that if women work in putting up industries for example, working in household in maybe because they have no choice the cases of women that work in in in domestic industries, because they are not allowed to do to leave the household like in cases of seclusion, they have no choice. So that their preferences are really highly determined by the patriarchal structures, household structures and communities where they live. So that also one has to go beyond these preferences in order to explain them they are the forces behind them that need to be explained.

Unknown Speaker  14:25
I think I will leave this as far as the theoretical framework here, and I'll let get to talk about the second part of our criticism. Okay.

Unknown Speaker  14:42
One of the things that when Lewis and I decided to start working on this paper we had each independently been thinking about Bowser had been influenced by Bootstrap and then wanted really to do a recap and and understanding for ourselves of what we had learned and what We felt ourselves differing from what she is what she had said. And we found, we said, Alright, we're going to sell ourselves this task, here's this nice little book, it's not very big, it's really simple. We're gonna go through it. And we since we have a fairly strong position in terms of what we think about both the so called development processes that are going on in the Third World, and a feminist perspective, in terms of how it is necessary to look at the position of third world, women, we thought be relatively straightforward to take this book, and figure out in what ways it was similar to what we had thought and in what ways was very different. It's not that easy. And that has to do a lot with the fact that as luda said earlier, while on the one hand, buzzard doesn't have a very clear theoretical framework, she has a very sharp empirical intuition. So that because she doesn't have a very clear theoretical framework, it's possible for her eclectically to put together bits and pieces of all kinds of interesting little empirical details. So if you, if you want to make a criticism like Bowser really does not take into account the fact of land ownership and landlessness, in defining her farming systems, and you look at her second or third chapter, you'll find this nice little sentence there that says that the male, the male and female farming systems are plow cultivation, and how cultivation and women's work really is affected by how much land is held and the extent of landlessness and landless laborers. So we scratched our heads a lot and said, this can be true, because the overall impression of the book is not one that is really that really comes from from a theoretical framework that strongly addresses questions of Class and Class differentiation. And no, and also, the book really lacks a fairness perspective in ways that Lewis will sort of make very clear as we go along. And we and so what I'm going to try and do today is to use really one example, that example of the farming systems to talk about, to try and point out how, why, because of her empirical intuition, she's able to point to things like landlessness. And so on the other hand, her theoretical, were in her theoretical framework does that come from? Because you can talk about landlessness from a variety of different perspectives. And that's what that's what one really understands. If you think carefully about what was rip is doing, essentially, then, our criticism, and what I'm going to speak about is the whole difference between the notion of modernization and the notion of accumulation and class formation in understanding the position of women in third world. And Bothrops work really derives from the first perspective, the perspective of modernization, and I'm calling that although she herself rarely uses the term itself. But one is ation as a broad term in the way it's been generally used in Orthodox social science as inherently beneficial and inherently beneficial process of development with multiple facets. It has an economic facet, which involves sort of technical improvement, technical change, new techniques, more and better machinery, more capital intensive economic growth, that kind of thing. And a and a more social and cultural counterpart facet, which has to do with things like the movement towards more individual norms, you know, that often says the modernization theory and sociology as cryptic versus Afinitor,

Unknown Speaker  18:54
conceptions all of that kind of thing. And in her work, it's very clear she is an economist, of course, deals primarily with the first although as Louise mentioned earlier, she uses culture as a filler every time her economics really doesn't work. And in her in her notion of modernization, it's clear that she sees the entire process as being beneficial, inherently beneficial, except that women don't get to share fully in its fruits and may in fact, be harmed, although it's never clear from her work, why it is that women get harmed and that rather than anybody else, so that that's the sense in which we using the concept of modernization. What this use of the framework of modernization does however, in her work is that it it has two very serious implications. One the one is that it ignores processes of accumulation and corresponding impoverishment. Proletarianization and the role of the state, both in the colonial period and in the post colonial period in many parts of the Third World, and the effect of this entire nexus of processes on the sexual division of labor on women's work, all of which get affected in this process, as, as I try and argue. And the second effect of the emphasis on modernization is that she's really not able to systematically analyze at all differences between women by class. And if there is one thing that anyone whether a woman from the Third World, anyone from the third world will be able to tell you like that is that while it may, while it may have taken the woman's movement, a little time here to figure out that there were differences between women by class, that nobody would even question that in the third world, that's obvious, you see that you see it everywhere and all the time and the class differences are so strong, that for someone who's writing about women in the third world, and the effect of economic development, and women, the third world not to be able to address that issue already points to a real, real problem in the conceptual framework within which is working. The example that I want to use to show how this modernization assets is in fact that one of cloud cultivation and farming systems and the connection between that to show although she talks about landlessness, where that's coming from, but in both groups work on farming systems and in agriculture in general, in order to understand what's going on in this book, one really has to know her previous book, which is a book about the relationship between population growth and agrarian change. What essentially what book What's the prime mover in both Europe's analysis of agriculture and farming systems, and it's an unmentioned prime mover in this book, Israeli population growth. And it's an exogenous population growth, which if you're aware of her previous work, you realize, plays a certain role in her understanding of what the process of of change in land structures and in farming patterns where that comes from, because in her previous work, it's clear that her argument is that an exogenous li given population growth leads to not the Malthusian problems of famine and war and those kinds of things, but rather to technological adaptation, that is, you move agrarian systems move from systems of long fallow to short fallow to plow cultivation, as population density increases, and as it becomes necessary to feed a growing population of the same land base. And it's from this from this conception of the relationship between plow and hoe cultivation and greater and lesser population density, that her notion about landlessness and the correlation of landlessness and plough cultivation, and greater land and how cultivation is derived from which you see in this book, so that when she says that if you look at male and female farming systems, that whole cultivation is a female farming systems. And it goes with the absence of landless labor and the greater availability of land. Whereas plow cultivation is a male farming system. And it goes with greater landlessness and less availability of land than you then the reason that she's saying that is not from a class perspective, which analyzes landlessness as coming from a hierarchy causation in class processes, but one that is really derived from an exogenous li given popular increasing Population and Population density. And that's why it's possible for her to talk about landlessness. But she's really deriving it from a completely different theoretical theoretical perspective, which is why it's possible for her then, for instance, what's the connection between women's work and plow cultivation? Why is it that plow cultivation and greater landlessness? Greater landless labor goes with lesser is a male farming system. Why is it that women don't work in agriculture as she claims? She says that because there are landless laborers available?

Unknown Speaker  24:20
It's possible for women to withdraw from cultivation. Okay. Now, the thing, the thing that's interesting about that, is that first of all, it may be possible, why is it Why does what, why and through what mechanisms is it actually happen? Because something is possible doesn't mean that is necessarily going to happen. So what is it? And that that has to do? Of course, she doesn't explain that. But that, of course has to do with the whole question of women's place and reproduction, which is, which is what losers will address later on. But the point that I want to stress as another implication of that is in her definition of male and female farming systems. She really does not To look at women as agricultural laborers, that is she talks about male and female farming systems in one chapter. And then she talks about agricultural laborers in a completely different chapter. But if you look at parts of the third world where there is plow cultivation, the so called male farming system, like India, South Asia is like one of the big examples about a plow cultivation system, almost half of the agricultural labor population is women. And so, to define a farming system on the basis of those who own land, that is often landed households from which women may in fact, withdraw from be not appear as agricultural laborers is, in fact, a complete gloss over the class differences between women between agricultural laboring women from agricultural labor households, women from landed households, and really misses misses the close interconnection between the two. The other thing, of course, from a parent's perspective that that does as well is that it doesn't look at the whole question of women working as unsold unpaid family laborers in agriculture, within the landed households themselves. And that's, again, something we'll address later on. What so that that's the reason I want to use this example is that it's, it's a very, it's a very sharp example of the differences really between the perspective that would focus on the causes of landlessness, as arising from a process of accumulation, in which it's not that everybody loses land, it's not that population density, uniformly affects the entire population in the rural areas, that, that the process of the loss of land by some is also the accumulation of land by others. And that there is a tremendous class difference between in involved in this process of increasing landlessness that you can only understand by analyzing accumulation, and that you cannot understand by sort of taking population density is given from from before. The other thing, of course, is that the notion that population density is somehow exogenous ly given really doesn't address the entire question of how population density and fertility patterns themselves may get affected by the process of hierarchy, isolation, the process of land loss, the process of and those and those kinds. That is the actual patterns of accumulation in a particular area. Okay, having said this, and use this example, what I, what I'd like to do, fairly briefly, is to address here is to talk about how in the decades since Bose reps work, in fact, and there's been a fair, a large and growing literature on this kind of connection that is on precisely the connections between processes of accumulation, not only on the land, but in general in the urban areas in industry, and what happens to women and women's work. If we were to think about

Unknown Speaker  28:31
if we were to think about what are the most powerful tendency of a process of accumulation and hospitalization, what what is almost its basic character, if you think about the third world from the period of colonialism up to now, you could almost define a you could think about it in terms of the separation of a substantial proportion of the population from the means of subsistence and the means of production and the concentration of means of subsistence and means of production in the hands of of a of a small and some people will even claim declining proportion of the population. In the third world, the effect off this off this form of separation and polarization depends on women's work depends upon the specific patterns the specific processes by which this process of accumulation polarization harmonization has occurred in different regions. And let me give a few examples of the way in which of the different ways in which this has happened. It could have happened as happened in many parts of West Africa through initially initially forced forced labor and forced cultivation of cash crops, leading increasingly to a process of the differentiation among the peasantry between rich and poor and completely landless rural laborer households, in the in the rural areas, it could happen through a process of plantation production, where you have large large plantations with very small either subsistence plot holding laborers are completely landless laborers who will come in as migrants to work on the plantation, it could happen. Another example one could think of is, and which is one that's very important in the current phase to understand women's women's role in this in this accumulation process, through multinational corporations coming in to use cheap female labor as they do in Southeast Asia and the whole business of electronics and the Allied tourism industry and so on. What happens? What are some? What are some of the major major lines in which an analysis of these processes affect went up the ways in which these processes affect women's work? What are some of the major conclusions that some type of literature that is that has grown over the last decade has been able to come up with, first of all, one finds that the sexual division of labor may in fact change. And it may change so as to make women's work load much more intensive, it may increase the intensity of women's work and women's labor. If the double Day is a problem for women from working and poor households in the US in the advanced capitalist countries, it's an infinitely harder thing for poor women from the third world, because there is no question the if a way that one may think about it is that the stratum of the so called what you might call the pure housewife, which is declining very sharply, as we know in the advanced capitalist countries in the United States. Today, though it was a large thing for some period of time, is a very, very small stratum. In the third world as a proportion of the population, the number of women who are pure housewives, is small. With exceptions. Of course, there are some exceptions where this is strong, but by and large, the bulk of the population really suffers from a problem of double day, tremendous intensity of labor. Yet a book has done work on conda, which shows how the changing patterns of cocoa production and migration of male workers to produce cocoa and as increasing landlessness takes hold their their forced migration into the urban areas to look for income has increased the intensity of women's work in subsistence, for example, men in the previous period, used in fact to cultivate one of the major subsistence crops, yeah. But with men migrating as workers and being more involved in cocoa production, the women are having to do we're forced to take on this, this subsistence of this major crop. But what that led to as well was a shift from the cultivation of yams to the cultivation of cassava. Now, cassava as

Unknown Speaker  33:27
maybe not everyone knows, because how is a much less nutritious crop than Yam is? So why would they shift from yam to cassava? And in fact, you often get these are governmental do gooders, right, who come in for agricultural extension services and so on, and they say, Oh, my God, look at these stupid people they shifted from, there's more nutritious crops as much less nutritious crop. The reason they do that cassava is much less labor intensive than yam, and women's workdays and the intensity of their work has increased so much that they are forced to shift from something that they are very well aware, is much more nutritious than the cassava to cassava. And that, of course, affects the way it affects the pattern of labor. It affects the work that is done. And it affects, of course, the nutrition and subsistence standards of the families themselves for which they were not providing. The second, a second major thing that one sees is that where women may have had effective control in regions where women may have had some effective control over economic resources, they may tend to lose that control as well. And you'll find that in, for instance, work that's been done by Kate young on Wahaca and Mexico, where she where she talks about the difference between an earlier period of what she calls merchants capital when women were involved in weaving and selling cloth to merchants, and we're able in fact to have strong access. Now, Eve of course, even during that period, the merchants were increasingly trying to take take control of that process of weaving from the women through a putting out system and so on. But the shift in that region from the production of cloth to coffee production really meant that not only did women lose complete control over the labor process and cloth that clock, plop weaving declined as a source of income, but that the entire process of coffee cultivation is controlled by somebody else altogether. And women entering a secondary migrant laborers in coffee production so that it can even where women may have had some kind of control over economic resources. But you can't see that is simply being men versus women, because the women, it's not only that women lose out in this case, but it is entire households that are getting proletarian eyes in this move from the production of cloth to the production of coffee. Another example that one sees is, of course, the very famous one of young women appearing as wage laborers for multinationals. And the biggest example of that is Southeast Asia. And this goes hand in hand with an an emerging international division of labor and the silicon so called the silicon industry, the computer, the like electronics, the semiconductor industry, is a classic example of that, of a hierarchy, causation of the labor process in that industry, such that you have a very small, extremely skilled labor force of engineers and technicians, all of whom, in fact, are either even geographically really narrowly concentrated, they all sit around Stanford in California, in the Palo Alto, so called Silicon Valley, and you have these infinite numbers of electronics, corporations, clean industry sitting there, all these people making 5060 $70,000 a year. But that's one part of the labor force. The other part of labor force is the women who looked through microscopes for eight hours a day ruin their eyesight in the process of doing so. And these are young women in Southeast Asia who are involved in putting the semiconductor chips together. And of course, they come in as young women, this first half 2020 vision when they come in, by the time in four years, the vision is gone. So they're no good to the industry anymore. And then of course, this, the industry just puts them out. And what where they get many of them get picked up is in the tourism, but which is essentially a glorified prostitution racket that goes on, in fact, to help to funnel it to fuel the tourism and business, particularly businessman who come in from Japan and from Western Europe, and so on into the area. So it's a nice symbiotic relationship between between the two that goes on as well. So that that's one way again, in which women really come into into this process. The fourth form

Unknown Speaker  37:54
is the fourth fourth aspect, which is very interesting to look at is what happens to patriarchal relations that may have existed in prior to the beginnings of a process of accumulation like this in a pre existing class based system. I'm currently on a deer riding on Peru, one region in Peru where she did fieldwork pointed to some very interesting things in in that region, just prior to the coming in of Nestle's and the shift in that region to produce a whole dairying and pasturage based on Nestle's coming into my milk, what you had were largely servile relations of production was not a free wage labor system, it was a system based upon based upon course, even bonded labor forms, but in that previous system, patriarchy within the peasant household was very closely tied to the continuation of the servile relations of production. And that women's position within patriotically dominated peasant households made it possible for the large landlords then to exploit women's labor and to control the entire labor force on the plantation in a very in a crude through the mechanism of that patriarchy. What happens, of course, is that as the shift says, as that entire Productions production system shifts from being based on those kinds of relations, to wage labor relations, is that the the capitalist which is what these people now becoming don't need this kind of labor system anymore, so people get thrown off the land. What that means for women is in some ways, the clothes the reinforcement of peasant household patriarchy by the class relations disappears in that very direct way. So it would seem that women in fact, are more freed from patriarchal control within the peasant households. And to some extent it is true. But of course, capitalism does not just remove patriarchy, it creates an rewires patriarchy in different ways and it rewires patriarchy for women, particularly through their dependence upon money incomes. And the extent to which they have access to money in comes in a system, which is completely based upon money incomes. And of course, that doesn't come that I mean, the fact that the class relations don't reinforce patriarchy anymore, doesn't mean that women therefore are somehow completely freed. And she shows how, in fact, the that rewiring occurs. And the final and probably one of the most important points is, in fact, the differentiation among women by different classes. And a very good example that processes like this bring about and a very good example of this is an stallers work on Java. One of those articles is in the science women national development collection, where she talks about the tremendous differences between rich middle and poor women, and how what Ross Perot Chesky was talking about in the morning about the connections between reproduction and production between women's role in reproductive tasks and productive tasks are vary depending upon which class of women you're looking at, although I disagree with some of the ways in which was talked about class this morning, but essentially, if you use an more traditional conception of class, it's very clear that even if you look within peasants, there's a tremendous difference in the way in which these processes affect control of economic resources, whether you're looking at rich peasant women, or very poor, peasant women, and that on the one on the one side, you get the double de and, and the burden of doing both domestic work and work outside the home. And on the other side, you get women who both have access to resources, and also don't even have to do their own work and domestic work, because they have domestic servants who come in and do do that work for them, so that those kinds of variations are extremely important. So to summarize them, the process of accumulation means for a substantial proportion of the population alienation from the means of subsistence, it means a process of differentiation based on plus, it means a growing vulnerability for particularly women from the class that loses out from the emerging proletarian and marginal classes in the rural or the urban areas. And this vulnerability

Unknown Speaker  42:45
is one that differentially affects men and women, because women being more vulnerable and more dependent because of their responsibilities in the sphere of reproductive work.

Unknown Speaker  43:00
No, you get ready for the dance, right? It's the third area of criticism, then it's the area of reproduct. The fact that last rep really doesn't take into consideration what comes out to the reproductive role of women. I think that by now, the emphasis on reproduction that the women movement has, has brought up so much during the past and is something that we can take forgiven, especially after this morning's plenary session. It has been brought up so vividly that I don't think we have to repeat but in any case, let me just say that, that the traditional approach to to women's issues and women's solution was has not only on on the liberal on liberal politics, but also on radical and left politics has been to look just at the sphere of production as that is out there in the so called public social relations of production. That's where the solution of women or women's problems has to be located. The great contribution of the present women's movement which is also different from from the old feminist movement, is that the emphasis I think that once and for all has been placed on the reproductive sphere as well telling us but unless we also take into consideration what goes on in the household in in the reproductive sphere women's solution is not going to be fun. And what we have it's obviously true that bus wrap as Geeta has said she has so many insights into all these things. It's not that she doesn't mention women's role in reproduction at some areas of her book, she talks about different forms that women subordination take and therefore,

Unknown Speaker  45:10
to the productive sphere. We thought that we could summarize what we have learned from this emphasis on reproduction, we have learned about the role the economic role of women, we have learned about the origins of the of the oppression, the forms that it takes, and we have learned about what solutions we can we can visualize for women, and we thought we would we could summarize these, what we have learned in three different areas, three different aspects, the area of domestic work to the area of how reproduction and production have a relationship very much along the lines that Ross Maciejewski was talking about this morning. So, they when we talk about where women are added women's work, we cannot forget the two and we have to learn to understand the mechanisms between production and reproduction, how they reinforce each other. And third, we thought we could talk also about what all of this means, for example, for the area population control, birth control policies and so forth. So, these three areas what I would like to let elaborate a little bit I will do it quite schematically because we are running late and and then Geeta is going to talk about conclusions out of all this, about domestic work. The domestic labor debate in what we have learned about domestic work, which has been a lot during the past 10 years, especially in the early 70s was really focusing on the family structures existing in the in the industrialized countries. And so, what we learned about how domestic work really is highly connected with the economy out there, so that it is very artificial to to separate out the private sphere production from the public sphere of production, because domestic work is highly connected with commodity production in two in two ways at two different levels. domestic worker industrialized societies consists of buying inputs from the market, transforming them in the household and producing used values. So at that level domestic work is is connected by way of inputs into the household with the market. But in addition, we learned that domestic work also produces a commodity and that is the commodity labor power, so that there is another connection with the market with the market that domestic work has. And in the process of this so called domestic labor debate, we learned a lot about the nature of the nastic work, what exactly that means and the crucial role that it plays for the functioning of the economic system. But essentially, it was a debate that was fully focusing on the on the conditions prevalent in industrialized societies, that is nuclear family, a wage labor system, and that it's such conditions, the burden of subsistence falls upon the wage, whoever earns the wage, that the wage and what domestic work does is to transform that wage into use values for the consumption of household members. Now, when we look at the third world countries or agricultural societies, we can see other extremes and obviously each country and each community find itself in the process of transformation that may be somewhere between these two extremes. We can find differences in domestic work and what what exactly domestic work consists of in the Third World, an agricultural society, differences with industrialized countries, as well as similarities. So let me talk about differences first, and then similarities in terms of differences in agricultural societies. Housework is highly linked in time and space with subsistence agricultural activities. To the extent that it's very hard to separate out what exactly is domestic work? What exactly is an activity that falls entirely outside of it, for example, the when when women go out and get wood for the fire, is it domestic but it's not it's really it would be artificial to draw a line of separation between the two, the two of them are domestic work and the gathering of wood are highly connected. In the same way, you know, when women carry their babies and work with the babies in their back or next to them in the fields or in the backyard, where they grow vegetables, their reproductive activities are highly connected with their productive activities. So again, the line between two is very difficult to, to, to draw. And in any case, the isolation of domestic work that we see in industrialized society is not as visible in the third world, because men and women both work in in time and space very much Much, much closer together. Another difference is that the degree of production for the households own consumption is much higher in the third world, in agricultural societies, that is industrialized societies, to the extent that produce for example, the processing is a food begins from very much from the very, the very first stages of processing rather than buying the process some food inputs in the market already process makes a difference in terms of the content, so, that the amount of production that of transformation of

Unknown Speaker  50:39
goods into use values is much higher degree of degree of production much higher in the third Well, in the same way it was higher 100 years ago for domestic work in the now highly industrialized societies. And what this means is that subsistence, to a great extent falls much more upon women's work in the third world and in that in industrialized societies in the sense that, to the extent that it's not the wage that that guarantees subsistence, but the work around household around around cultural subsistence activities and to the extent that women are so highly engaged in all these activities, the burden of subsistence falls very heavily upon women, women's shoulders, in the case of, of female agricultural systems, like for example, in the case of Africa, subsistence falls extremely heavy on the shoulders of women, because they, they are the ones that not only work as domestic workers, but also are the main responsible for food production. Now, in terms of similarities, what we find is that the cross country's Reproductive Activities fall upon the shoulders of women, and this is is overwhelming is an overwhelming fact that in which there are no exceptions, the great bulk of Reproductive Activities fall for upon the shoulders of women. And despite the fact that we can in the English language has this fantastic possibility of distinguishing between childbearing and child rearing, and that only childbearing is biologically determined and that child reading is not biologically determined the fact the fact that child reading is not biologically determined yet across countries we find that women concentrate on this as well. And by the way, this distinction cannot be made in other languages as far as I know. So, it is something that is worthwhile thinking about why it is so. So, this overwhelming concentration, we do find across countries, despite no regardless of the level of transfer of economic transformation that we may be talking about. Another similarity is that to the extent that women work outside of the household, the double day syndrome, the problem of double bay, is, is with women, regardless of whether we talking about agricultural societies, semi industrialized societies are totally industrialized societies. And at third similarities, that the household really becomes the focus of patriarchal relationships, the focus of the mechanisms of subordination and domination at the very private level of relationship between men and women, that it isn't the household where the control of a women's sexuality, of a women's mobility comes from. That is, in fact, in the third world, we find the most extreme examples of this kind of control over women's sexuality control, reduction and women's mobility. So just for example, like seclusion or the segregation of the of the sexes, that we find in a country like unlike Portugal, where seclusion is doesn't exist, but yet the separation of the sexes in the public square is is a mask. All of this means that it has a the importance of what women do in the household the importance of domestic work and how this determines the lie has a bearing upon what women do outside of the household, and that leads me to the second area that that is highly related to reproduction, what the concentration of women in domestic word has three basic determining

Unknown Speaker  54:47
basis for what they do outside of the household. And first, I would say it is basic, the reduction the reduction of mobility to which women And our subject is highly determined in a way exactly women are going to work outside of the household. I was interested in the common that the respite Jessica made this morning about where exactly women work in places not far from the household, although in the in the industrialized societies, women's mobility has been increased tremendously. It seems like women are able and ready to move to jobs that are far from household much more than they did in the past. I think it's still with us, that entity is much more so in the household. The fact that the the concentration of women's activities in the in this household really reduced the choices that they have to work outside of the household so that in agricultural societies, for example, we see women working in the fields not far from the household, they tend to concentrate with taking care of domestic animals more than men because they can, they are close to them to their daily, household and Reproductive Activities. And this, I think, reduces women's choices and women's opportunities to work outside of the household, for example, the fact that women it's not a coincidence that in in areas like West Africa, where we find women traders, overwhelmingly dominating retail trade, it seems to me that one of the reasons for that is that this retail trade is highly compatible with their relatively low mobility and we their reproductive activities, they take their children to the marketplace, the marketplace becomes like a reproduction of the household at the public level, all of them take the kids there that are they change the kids there, they cook their meals there. And the that becomes like a second household. For them to the end, the reduction of mobility has a very interesting expression there. Because what we find is a concentration of younger women with younger children, really dealing with the retail market. That's not that it's just in the in the local markets, whereas some of the older women are able to concentrate in wholesale market that actually requires that they travel a little bit, the younger women cannot do that. A second consequence of our second way of looking at how domestic activities determine what women's situation, the condition in the in the labor market, or in activities outside of the household is, is that the concentration of women in domestic work implies that the Dummett, their primary concentration in these activities. Has the

Unknown Speaker  58:09
corollary, that they concentrate their work, their participation outside of the household is a secondary, comes as a secondary concentration. And this explains, for example, the marginality of their work, how they move in and out of the labor force much more than men, it is at the root of women's higher unemployment rates, which is which is overwhelming in any of this becoming more so in the Third World, and explains the the willingness of women to accept lower wages and the tendency to for everybody, society as well as employers and workers to see women's wages as secondary. And finally, the the patriarchal relations that get that are set in the household have also projected into the labor market, by way of women's adopting subordinate positions in the labor market, as well. So these three these three areas, what they tell us is that when we look at women's participation outside of the household, we have to find the connections between this participation and how the forms that it takes with what goes on at the sphere of reproduction. Now, as I said, Orthodox economics of Orthodox thinking about women's problems normally has only concentrated on one what we're saying is that the two of them have to be looked at from the Marxist and radical perspective. What is interesting to note is that if we look if we go all the way back to angles, angles actually saw the connection between reproduction and production. When when in his thesis the connection is so clear when he He talks about how the introduction of private property had the consequences they had, I don't have to extend myself into the English thesis. But what I'm trying to say is that the the connection between private property the organization of production and women's lives is so clear in endless pieces. And yet some somewhere along the line, this connection has been blurred angles as well as Mark and the left that tradition on women's issues has been that the elimination of private property as well as the reorganisation of production would take care of itself a women's problems and industrialization would make would make things easy along these lines. So, it seems to me that what we what the the Marxist feminist approach has been doing, and the research that has been coming out during the past decade has been to to some extent, go back to this connection between the production and production build up and make up from from Make Up For the

Unknown Speaker  1:01:04
concentration for the shortcomings of the tradition, left position that was concentrating only on the area of production. Now, for example, when we look there are many examples we can give many examples of the recent literature that has been, has been concentrating on the interaction between these for example, Maria Mies, a German sociologist that has been studying the participation of women in the putting up lace industry in India has a very interesting analysis of how this lace industry, which is really based on women's work, women working inside of the household as much as 678 hours a day. During the same time, the domestic chores really can add at very low wages to the extent that what they receive is 1/3 of what is considered officially the minimum wage for agricultural workers. This can only be explained by the interaction between what their role isn't household which is in this in the case that she studies, she's talking about women secluded women that are not allowed to leave the household. So one of the few things that they can do, are the kind of job that doesn't have to take place within the walls of a factory. So the putting out system is a perfect, a perfect example of an activity that can be carried out inside of the household, the combination between their seclusion and the limitation of their of their possibilities for employment. And the the putting up system that has been organized in connection with the international market has developed is a an industry which has grown tremendously during the 1970s to the extent that the local area that she's talking about derives the two thirds of the export earnings from this industry has been able to organize a highly exploitative system, which is has, which is possible thanks to the combination of women's role within the sphere of the household and and the capitalist production that has been organized. Finally, let me give you one more example of how it is important to look at both production reproduction when we look at the area of migration. It is, for example is It is surprising to find to realize that in Latin American countries, women have been migrating more than men. So the female migration seems to prevail over listing in certain areas of a male migration. Whereas in Africa, the opposite pattern seems to have prevailed that male migration is is higher than female migration. Well, in order to explain that, just looking at the way women and men go is insufficient, which is what some authors have done in the past. Yes, women go to service industries in Latin America, whereas in Africa, in Africa, there are no so many employment possibilities for women, the service sector, so they don't have this, this pull factors that they can find in Latin America. But in addition, we also need to look at what happens in the personal economies and in the household sector in order to understand what are the factors that expel with women in the case of Latin America and retain them in the case of Africa, Kate Young's again to mention the study that are one of the studies of Kajang that Sen. That gives us and was talking about, Kate Young's analysis makes it very clear in the case of Latin America, given that men have concentrated more than women on agricultural activities, and that land is being passed on from male to male from, from parents to sons, the first ones to go when a family is large and when labor becomes redundant are the young female young women whose labor becomes redundant. And they move to the industrial urban areas in search of employment. In Africa, on the other hand, where women have concentrated in food production traditionally much more than men, and they have shown that they're not only capable that they but they've been the main food producers and they have been carrying the the the tasks of subsistence, they are the ones who stay in the in the background. And the redundant labor male in this case, is the one that first moves. So I think that all these examples point to the possibility and also the usefulness of focusing on on both areas of reproduction in production and how this this focus plus the analysis of the interaction between between the two is so much richer in terms of providing the the kind of explanations that we're looking for to understand women's work and where they have been going and getting to return them. So whether you finish with the conclusions,

Unknown Speaker  1:06:21
just mentioned anything

Unknown Speaker  1:06:23
about oh, yes, about the area of population, let me be brief. I think that the issue of reproductive freedom has been so much emphasized during the 1970s in this audience, we didn't have to really, we can take it as given you know, the importance of reproductive freedom, minutes expressions such as abortion rights, safe, contraception, struggles, against the recession and so forth. Now, for the third will the issue sometimes gets very complicated, because it's mixed up with the whole question of overpopulation and how this the issues behind it can be can have a different expression or different meaning for men and women. The the policies to limit population growth, that have been going on in the third world sometimes have had in the in the in the background, the very clear assumption that limiting population growth is good for everybody. Well, for the peasant household that is barely subsistence, subsisting and cannot hire labor, when labor is needed. Having children provides the possibility of having the amount of labor that's necessary for survival, so that there may be a very clear economic base for large families and the opposition for example, the opposition of Indian persons against forced sterilization may have a very clear clear bass, because the the large family can provide the labor that is necessary. So, in a case like this, I think that left politics in this case have have realized that and the the, the limit limitation of population growth has to be looked at with all these complexities, that when, when when peasant families oppose for example, sterilization or any kind of policy that is seen as being imposed a superimposed from the outside, it is not an irrational, it may not necessarily be an irrational or a cultural expression that they are having, but it is it has a very clear, rational explanation in the background. Now, even for those who do understand this issue, and realize that the the opposition to population control may have a very rational basis, very often have forgotten that this has also a dimension that affects women in a particular way, that when women when families are large, and and children aren't wanted, this affects women's work in a different way that in affects men's work. And women are the ones who, who bear the children who they kill them, who bring them to the doctor to the clinic that sometimes is far away, who have to worry about a child being blind because of lack of vitamin A, and so forth so that it does have a very clear impact differential impact on men and on women, which explains why women's position towards birth control policy is not necessarily identical to men in the third world as well. And what this means is that in terms of population policy, population control, we have to emphasize the fact that they have a different impact according to what's actually talking to But and that this dimension has often been forgotten. So that that left is that have clearly seen population control as being an issue much more complex that what the population cancer will make us believe, although population cancel is also changing nowadays, I have often forgotten the the specific dimension that affects women. I think I'm just going to say that and this is one of the areas that we could discuss later on what's will take too long.

Unknown Speaker  1:10:35
Just one very brief thing about the practical conclusions that Bozrah would derive, for instance, and what the problems are with that, both all those practical conclusions about what to do stress education, and educating women more. And this, of course, is if you go to any of the agencies, whether you go to USA ID or the United Nations, they're all for educating women, and they're for educating women precisely in order to deal with the population problem, because they see a statistical correlation between education and fertility levels. That, of course, doesn't make them think about what the correlation may be between education and class position and the effect on fertility. But that's, that's one reason. And the other one is the whole business of women's role in subsistence production, and thinking that if you can give them better techniques that produce more food, and we can keep people at least fed and on angry in the rural areas. The problem, of course, is that that that focus on education ignores both accumulation and reproduction. It ignores accumulation because it does it completely is providing an individualist solution. And they does not talk about the enormous incidence of unemployment among educated people in the third world, there is a tremendous incidents of uneducated of educated unemployment. So where's the sense of giving an individualist solution that says educate the women more and you're going to get get rid of this problem just doesn't that's, that's really crazy. The second aspect is that it ignores reproduction. Because educating women that is not going to take is not going to remove women's double responsibilities for work in the home and work outside the home. And if as Bozrah argues, you're arguing that women's position, women have this lower position in the labor market and work outside and all of this kind of stuff, how is education in and of itself going to make gonna make the men in the work at home or even, or even make the tasks of subsistence and management of subsistence, in a situation growing impoverishment any easier. So really, that focus really, completely ignores both of those issues. What we would say then, is that one can have one needs to take both the short term and a long term perspective in terms of the kinds of practical and political and policy conclusions that one to derive from the kind of position that we've been trying, trying to lay out in the short run. I think we would argue, though, with great caution, that Marxist feminists cannot turn their backs on things like the basic needs strategy, and so on. That is the question. And the reason for saying that is that to the extent that we're talking about tremendous impoverishment, and a tremendous problem of overwork, and so on that question, such as a provision of water and electricity and clean, and sanitation, things like that are questions that are of significance and importance to us. And to the extent that those are things that basic needs is focusing on, we can just say, Oh, that's a repressive policy, we're not going to deal with that. The question, of course, we have to raise is the question of how such programs are implemented, and who precisely the benefit. And that would be what we would say very briefly in the short run, that that's the kind of thing that needs to be focused on. In the longer run, of course, what we would have to say is something that probably every every other person in all of the in many in most of the other workshops is also saying, which is that clearly what we're talking about is the is a radical transformation of society in which both hierarchies based on class and on gender, are removed and in which women in fact are not made to suffer because of their role in reproduction. In society, okay. I don't know how much time we have in terms of questions because I've been No idea what's going on. So I guess we can take questions. Sorry,

Unknown Speaker  1:15:09
we've taken too much time. We really didn't mean to. It's hard.

Unknown Speaker  1:15:17
Not a question, I just wanted to make a comment on something that I can't remember, which is setting on the question of the debate about the nature of women's work in the home. Now, I'm from the wages for housework campaign. And for my sins, I was one of those people who launched the debate with the book, The Power of women in subversion of the community. And from the beginning, it was a question of the international nature of women's work, the question of women in the third world was never outside of what we were discussing. It was outside of those people who were opposing us. They were saying that work out work inside the home was not productive, and that, therefore could not see the room community in the metropolitan countries, or in the third world. But that was a basic consideration. And the starting point of the campaign was the international nature, no the women's roles, but women's work. From there, we moved to the question of what means to be developed. And whether or not development in in third world countries meant the development of women, or the development of the suppression of women, and how crucial the development of imperialism was, for I mean that women had to be suppressed and repressed, in order for Imperialism to conference home, that it was that women were pivotal to the conquest, for example of Africa. That's the work that we did, so that it was always central to us and could not have been any serious theory unless you begin with women in the third world, who, of course, bear the major burden of housework in the world, because there is no technology to undermine the housework. I mean, the housework in a third world country is enormous takes up, you know, every single moment of the day, whether or not you're also working outside the home, the business of the baby on the back of the classic example, you take your housework with you when you go to the second job.

Unknown Speaker  1:17:19
No, I think you're right, that, but as a whole, you know, the whole the household debate doesn't was carried out, for example, in the New Left Review in England see come in and understand the Third World. That's right, racist. Yeah, well, no, no, no, I think you're right, that not everybody forgot about it. But the the the sort of main focus, and that's not coincidence, because people are talking about the circumstances that they're leaving. The it was really focusing on an example, the whole question of wage, what does the wage mean? How does that the wage get transformed into inputted, whatever it's bought in the market, and that becomes us values inside of the household? You know, and I think that most of this debate was around this kind of, of situation where you have, you know, a market connection at the beginning, then the house work and another end market connection at the end, where labor power is being sold. And that's not

Unknown Speaker  1:18:18
our point of view, our point of view was that the market was in the home because we were not producing us values, but the commodity labor power immediately pulled the market every day, until it was impossible to make that kind of racist. Yes,

Unknown Speaker  1:18:34
I'm not sure if I understood you correctly. But I got the impression that you were saying that throughout the world, the women's have housework is a very large part of their labor. And I would prefer to see some sort of differentiation, it seems to me that in the context of some of the societies that you were talking about in peasant societies, where production is printed primarily for use, and we're men and women producing primarily can use that you can't really make that kind of distinction, and that we should be done with things that housework is this enormous thing because women don't have the technology to produce it? I think we may be imposing a Western definition of what has

Unknown Speaker  1:19:15
no, I mean, if you don't have a gas cooker, and you cook on outside the home on a cold pot, which is very traditional in many societies very close to home, you know, the whole of the western world is like that. And the whole of south of Europe or in southern Europe is that as well. You spend four or five hours cooking a meal and you are sending that meal while you're telling the children.

Unknown Speaker  1:19:37
But I think in terms of in in peasant economies, that separation between what's produced for the men and what men are doing, also is producing for home consumption. I think there's not as clear a line in what you were talking about that in terms of processing not being done. So that sort of the men may I mean, it's not even just the men but the men, the men In certain tasks in agriculture, women are producing in the field. And then there's a continuous so that women are processing the food. I'm not an unwanted saying is that the food processing and housework? Housework is a little bit different in terms of how does society values?

Unknown Speaker  1:20:21
I mean, let me let me take up a little bit on that, if I, if I understand you, right, I think I somewhat agree, although there are points in which I agree with with what you're saying, in that. I mean, if I understood, if I understood the wages for housework movement, right. And granted, it's been it's been misrepresented, and all of that, and enormous man. But I would say that the political impact, substantially off other political, political impetus and the impact of the wages for housework movement, really derived from the large proportion, web, it came at a particular moment in the advanced capitalist societies, when women from the bulk of the working classes in society, we're increasingly being forced into coming back into wage work and having to do both wage work and work in the home. So that it came at a point precisely when the tensions between combining wage work and work in the home were being felt, both by people who were having to do both of those things, and also by the women who were doing wage, doing only work within the home and not work outside the home. And if that's the political, if that's the practical reasons for where the move where the movement came from, you may disagree with me about this, then, in fact, it says something about why the issues were raised in that particular way. And in advanced capitalist society, as she was saying, there is a tremendous difference between what between domestic work and waste work in the third world. I don't feel i i believe that despite the processes of accumulation, margin, that pauperization, marginalization, protests, whatever you call it, all the issues that have been occurring, by and large, on the one hand, both men and women where there is access to land, do what you might call subsistence work. Now, the fact that women know women, the fact that women do certain, the fact that there is a sexual division of labor, in that work, does not mean the same thing politically, there that it might mean here. I mean, it might, it might have the meaning of saying that you need better gas cookers, because that's the work that that's the work that women do. But I don't think it has the same implications in the third world that he does here. And that if you talk about wages for housework in the Third World, I don't know what one level, I don't know what meaning it has. But maybe maybe we should continue sort of the arguments after because I'm sure there will be a big argument and let other people Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:23:17
I think what what's on that question What's crucially not selects to define men out of housework? In other words, the crucial distinction is not whether, to what extent men in the third row are also responsible for reproductive tasks. That's not the crucial distinction. The crucial question is that women wherever we are, you know, are responsible for that housework, and that whatever, whatever the degree to which we'll respond to the theory, we're still responsible for it. And that that is a level of power that all women share in common internationally. And I think the fact that, that how they how the issue of wages for health, I'm also funny, were you shocked. But how the issue of wages for housework comes to be raised in the metropolis, you know, in the United States, or in Britain, or wherever, is a function of the fact that we have more power, you know, in the metropolis to raise it, you know, and that the question is, how do how do we put that kind of power at the disposal of women in the surgery world? You know, but you can't deny that. You know, the extent to which women are fundamentally responsible for a whole series of reproductive tasks for you. I mean, even the World Bank is acknowledging, you could definitely what they're saying at this time, right, is that in the money that they give out in third world, they're going to have to begin to direct more of it to women directly, and to projects that are designed for women, precisely because women are fundamentally fungible, particularly when you get to add when you talk about agriculture, because women are fundamentally responsible for that. But it's not only a question of agri culture where housework is an issue in the third world or reproductive tasks or issues in the Third World, I lived in Zambia for four years. And in Zambia in the city, the government was freaking out about the question of women's housework. Because one facet of the migration, you know, from the rural areas to the cities within Africa, is a kind of social breakdown what the government sees as a breakdown, you know, in people's work disciplines, because women are refusing a whole series of reproductive tasks in the urban area, and are making their own fight for money right there, you know, and refusing to be the good wives and good mothers, and these, you know, government, third world, governments are freaking out about that. So it's not only a real question, and that is precisely the same thing that's happening in this country, when the American government talks about welfare mothers, you know, not maintaining a proper household, or the divorce rates or anything of the time, it's the same issue, you know, that women and make your own fight for money or refusing that work, you know, of keeping everybody in line, you know, and being the good, you know, house worker, but when you talk about this just one thing, when you talk about education, I think it's important to say, why these governments in the third world are emphasizing education, because they're not only doing it on their own account, they are puppet governments, their clients, governments, of metropolitan government, of the United States, you know, so that the direct job of emphasizing education as a way to keep women in line to keep us maintaining the household and doing the housework, you know, is to, is to really force upon the Third World, the kinds of limits of what wealth is actually there. And there, it's connected very much with what kind of technologies there is a third world government, you know, is saying that, you have to, you know, be a what a woman has to take on double burdens to develop, right, and be a good wife, be a good mother, and work in agriculture, and work outside the home all this all this at the same time, and that she has to be educated to do that. All of that is saying that the poverty that is in the third world has to continue

Unknown Speaker  1:27:07
there. You know, as we use its

Unknown Speaker  1:27:11
focus, as opposed to we coming from right from the metropolis. And that's where women in the metropolis have a connection for me, with women in the third world, that that wealth belongs as much in the third world as it does right here in the metropolis.

Unknown Speaker  1:27:28
Couple of things. First of all, I hope you're writing the book, because you just gave us the outline.

Unknown Speaker  1:27:35
Are you going to do this beginning at this point,

Unknown Speaker  1:27:40
sounds like to me, but a couple of points. Mike brought your issue here. We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago, the Society of South Indian Studies in Philadelphia, where we had a panel on a couple of things, a couple of things came up there. Remember this, one thing that became very clear was what you're calling was sort of irrational cultural factors. Were part of the story when it came to India, we we seen a very strong contrast between South and North Indian women living in seclusion for irrational, irrational reasons adhering to this page, institutions are going to have different kinds of possibilities open. So the ones himself who aren't in seclusion, when I was just sort of amused and complex by as an anthropologist by your calling all these cultural things, irrational, because somehow, we decided it all pans out the system, the fact that we have a factor we had to consider who would want to be listened to click make some suggestions on what was possible. What we could or couldn't do in different places, whether we liked it or not, that was somehow a distinction that was kind of set apart. Maybe Maybe you should address that before. It was something influenced. Exactly your

Unknown Speaker  1:29:12
we weren't calling it irrational. On the contrary, we're saying that it was rational, that very often it has been said, you know, very typical, common that you hear in development circles is that there is overpopulation. And then there we are providing for all these past possibilities for limiting birth control to third world countries. And this limitation doesn't take place, for example, the country like Bangladesh, but the birth control, the policies to limit population control have been by and large, quite ineffective. And then the question is, how come how come women don't seem to care? And how come a business don't seem to care? And so this has often been classified as irrational behavior on the part of the person population. And what we were saying means that that's not so that it may be there may be a very good rationale behind these decisions why of why persons tend tend to have large families because they need them