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48 RESOURCES, AGENCY, ACHIEVEMENTS • KABEER constraints, structural inequalities cannot be addressed by individuals alone. Individual women can, and do, act against the norm, but they may have to pay a high price for exercising such autonomy and their impact on the situation of women in general remains limited. It goes back to the point made earlier that individual empowerment is a fragile gain if it cannot be mobilised in the interests of collective empowerment. The project of women’s empowerment is dependent on collective action in the public arena as well as individual assertiveness in the private. In methodological terms, the discussion in this section reminds us why empowerment cannot be conceptualised simply in terms of choice, but must incorporate an assessment of the values embedded in agency and choice, values which reflect the wider context. It points, in other words, to the need make a distinction between ‘status’ and ‘autonomy’ as criteria in evaluating agency and choice from an empowerment perspective. ‘Status’ considerations relate to the values of the community, whether these communities are hierarchical or egalitarian, and they draw attention to the influence of the larger collectivity in ascribing greater value to certain kinds of individual choices over others and hence in giving greater value to those who abide by these choices. When such considerations set up a trade-off for women between their ability to make independent choices in critical arenas of their lives – such as marriage, reproduction, friendship and so on – and their ability to enjoy status within the family and community, status becomes antithetical to autonomy. As Sen comments in relation to reproductive choice: “The point is especially apparent in gender hierarchies where, for example, a woman’s status may be linked to her fertility. Bearing the approved number of children will grant a woman the rights and privileges accorded to a fertile woman, but do not necessarily give her greater autonomy in decision-making’ (Sen G., 1993, p. 198). More strongly, in such contexts, status is also likely to be antithetical to empowerment. The need to bear the approved number of children in order to secure social status and family approval takes its toll on women’s bodies and on their lives as they bear children beyond their capacity. Furthermore, status considerations in cultures of son-preference require women to give birth to a certain number of sons, to favour their sons over their daughters in ways which help to reinforce social discrimination against women and to bring their daughters up to devalue themselves, thereby acting as agents in the transmission of gender discrimination over generations. Status considerations also lead to the more hidden costs of dependency, difficulty to measure but testified to eloquently by women all over the world (Kabeer, 1998; Rowland, 1997; Villareal, 1990, Silber-
KABEER • RESOURCES, AGENCY, ACHIEVEMENTS 49 schmidt, 1992). Finally, in the extreme, status considerations can lead to cultures where female infanticide and foeticide, female circumcision, widow immolation all become ‘rational’ responses to social norms. Outsider values and women’s empowerment: between altruism and autonomy I have spelt out in greater detail the rationale for the various qualifications on the notion of choice which informs my understanding of empowerment by pointing to the significance of social values in justifying the subordinate status of women and to the internalisation of these values by women themselves. However, these qualifications entail an external normative standpoint, a set of values other than women’s own, as the basis for assessing the meaning of their choices. The problem that this raises is not one of a normative standpoint per se – the whole idea of development is, after all, based on some kind of normative standpoint – but in determining the extent to which this normative standpoint expresses values which are relevant to the reality it seeks to evaluate. There is always the danger that when we assess ‘choice’ from a standpoint other than that of the person making the choice, we will be led back to ourselves and to our own norms and values. The tendency to re-present ‘the self’ in representing ‘the other’ has been noted by Mohanty (1991) who describes the way in which third world women from a variety of contexts tend to get reduced and universalised, particular in texts coming out of the field of women and development: ‘This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being third world (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized etc.)’ (p. 56). Although this portrayal of the ‘average’ disempowered third world woman was intended to evoke sympathy and action on their behalf, its reductionism reflected the fact that the social distances of location, class, nationality and language which often separate researcher and ‘researched’ in the social sciences are particularly large in the field of development studies. The same distances help to explain why attempts to define and measure women’s empowerment have given rise to similarly ‘averaging’ tendencies in the portrayal of the empowered woman. I want to point to two distinct examples of these tendencies, coming out of quite different forms of scholarship and advocacy, both containing some elements of truth but large elements of simplification. One model promotes what could be called ‘the virtuous model of the empowered woman’ and is associated with the instrumentalist forms of gender advocacy that we noted before. It draws on various examples of gender scholarship which document the
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Page 4 and 5: Sida studies can be ordered by visi
Page 7 and 8: Foreword This volume offers a selec
Page 9 and 10: Further adjustments of GAD discours
Page 11 and 12: SUMMARY 9 calls current development
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Acknowledgements Sida would like to
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