Women and Politics in the Third World

WOMEN AND THE STATE IN THE THIRD WORLD 35
course, the spaces provided (or not) by the civil society to organise is an
important variable.
What we begin to piece together from our study of the women and the state is
that it is a highly complex picture, and one that is radically different from the
reality faced by Western women. In the next section I want to explore some of
these differences and themes.
IN AND AGAINST THE STATE?
It seems to me that there are two different standpoints that we have to keep in
mind when we discuss the question of the state vis-à-vis women. The first is that
of the daily lived realities of women’s lives. Here we have to consider both the
nature of the state formation under which particular groups of women live, as
well as different social and political variables that affect their dealings with the
state. The second is the standpoint of the feminist response to the state. Whether
as strategy or as critique the options before feminists have to be distinguished from
those before the first group quite deliberately in order that we might be in a
better position to understand both. The relationship between theory and practice
has to be foregrounded once again to be able to address the question of the
political role that women can and need to play in the arena of public power. I shall
come back to this later.
One of the most startling differences between the women in Western liberal
states and those in the Third World is the extent to which they are directly
‘touched’ by the regulatory power of the state. Women in Third World countries
are more removed from the state in all its manifestations than are Western
women. This is because the state in the Third World is unable to provide the
kind of safety network that the Western liberal state does with its welfare
provision. Both the upper-class women and those of the lower classes do not fall
within the ambit of state functioning. In health, education, child care and
employment the upper-class women have traditionally depended on the private
sector, and so too the poorest women: the first group because of the access to
private, non-state resources, the second, because the state can provide them with
very little support.
Second, as most Third World states can be categorised as ‘weak’ states, women
in these states do not become aware of many areas of state legislation and action.
The dissemination of information about new legislation is extremely varied and
patchy. Illiteracy and exclusionary social practices further exacerbate this isolation
from the processes of the state. The lack of political will to disturb traditional
family values is one manifestation of the ‘weak’ patriarchal state. Political
expediency overrules the rhetoric of social justice fairly easily when the state
perceives the threat to its continuance. Further, the lack of the infrasrtuctural power
of the state means that its laws are altogether ignored in many parts of the country.
So even though Indian women have constitutional rights of inheritance, divorce
and maintenance for example, the enforcement of these rights is at best patchy.