Women and Politics in the Third World

WOMEN AND THE STATE IN THE THIRD WORLD 27
Feminists and hostile territories
Both political science and development studies were in the early days hostile
territories to women. While in political science issues of gender were ignored,
and even now are only patchily introduced, in development studies the case has
been different. While feminist interventions in development studies ensured that
issues of gender were present (especially in the form of critique) in its discourse as
early as the 1970s, the policies and politics of development that arose from
debates within development studies show less gender awareness (see also Waylen
in this volume). Feminists have had anxieties about the ways in which women
have been ‘added on’ to the projects and discourses of politics and development
rather than any reformulation of the central issues addressed by these disciplines in
the light of feminist contributions and debates (see Pankhurst and Pearce,
Chapter 3 in this volume). In particular these have centred around the question of
the state, a key concept in political science that evokes deep suspicion, anger,
fear, and hostility among feminists.
Similarly, in development studies, while feminists have engaged vigorously in a
critique of its primary concerns, there too we find that the central question —this
time of the developmental state—has remained largely unaddressed. This
suspicion of the state has more recently been buttressed by the development of poststructuralist
explanations of power. Indeed, since the 1970s, the concept of the state
has been so reduced in status that its very existence has been brought into
question. ‘Where the concept remains in everyday use, it is used descriptively,
mostly by the “practitioners” of social policy and social welfare’ (Pringle and
Watson 1992: 54–5). However, during the 1970s and 1980s there was also a
growing sense of the power of the state as the welfare state became more
important in the lives of individuals—regulating, defining, providing and
monitoring. Women began to enter the arena of local politics and legal dispute in
order to represent their own interests (Pringle and Watson 1992).
There have developed over a period of time two very different approaches to
the question of the state. Historically, both have roots in the experience of
women’s movements in different contexts. In countries with strong class
affiliations and a tradition of class-based political action like Britain, feminist
writing was dominated by the Marxist analysis of the state as an oppressive
instrument of the ruling (capitalist) class. Marxist feminists added the ‘women
question’ to the class question in capitalist societies by emphasising the role of the
state as a mediator between the two different but complementary systems of
patriarchy and capitalism (Eisenstein 1978; Wilson 1977). In countries with a
strong tradition of welfare state politics, there has been less resistance to dealing
with the state. In Australia and Scandinavia for example, a positive value has been
placed on state intervention, and the state has been more clearly seen as an arena
for bargaining among interests (see Hernes 1984). Women’s interests have been
regarded as one among others, and feminists have insisted that they must be
articulated within that space. Not only the question of interest articulation, but