The Struggle to Survive

Long hours of hard work are a necessity for many women, especially in the developing world.

In many countries in Africa and Asia women are the main farmers: they till the land, sow the seeds and tend the crops. They also perform most of the housework.
    Aid charities say that women form an essential, but largely ignored, part of the economy of developing countries. Studies suggest that often the work undertaken by women is harder than that done by men and involves working longer hours than they do. A study in Tanzania, for example, showed that women work 3,069 hours per year compared with 1,829 for men.
    According to the United Nations women grow more than half the food produced in developing countries: over 80% for sub-Saharan Africa. Women collect most of the water needed for families and crops.
    In some families, women are in charge of all the farming work because the men have migrated to the towns in search of paid jobs. A third of all rural households in developing countries are headed by women.
    A study by Oxfam in Nepal found that females tend to perform more work than males from an early age. Girls rarely go to school because they have to look after younger brothers and sisters or help their mother. As a result, as few as 18% of all Nepalese women can read compared with 52% of boys.
    There is a growing trend also for females to migrate to towns in search of factory work. Clothing factories in the Philippines, for example, employ 90% female labour. Most women work for just 2 or 3 years in the factories partly because the work is so wearing.
    Other women in towns earn their living on the "informal market". This means they have no regular paid work but make ends meet selling goods on the street or doing odd jobs.
    Feminism, the fight for women's rights, is often seen as a western ideology which is a luxury for poor women in developing countries.

DOCUMENT 2

Based on 'The Whole Woman'
by Germaine Greer (publishers - Doubleday 1999)

     The notion of equality takes the male status quo as the condition to which women aspire. Men live and work in a frighteningly unfree and tyrannical society, constructed upon the oppression of junior males by senior ones... As soon as a woman enters a male preserve, be it the police, or the military, the building site, the law, the clergy, she finds herself in an alien and repellent world which changes her fundamentally even as she struggles to exert the smallest influence on it. Aspirants to rank in such groups have to learn the ropes and then bounce their rivals on to them. The woman who becomes leader of a conventional political party can only do so because she has become tougher than the men in it. It was often said of Margaret Thatcher that, despite her frothy bows and four-inch heels, she was the only man in her cabinet.

     The Wilson government of 1975 that brought in the Sex Discrimination Act along with the Equal Opportunities Commission was made up of businessmen and lawyers. The Sex Discrimination Act was designed to give people the illusion that women's oppression had been recognised and that something was being done about it and, at the same time, to reassure that no great changes were likely to ensue and business would go on exactly as usual. There was never the remotest chance that employers would find themselves facing thousands of hours of lucrative work for lawyers as case after case was argued interminably only to be lost.

     For the young women who now outnumber young men graduating in law, life in chambers can be a nightmare of discrimination amounting to outright prosecution and harassment. A report by legal recruitment consultants Reynell, published in January 1997, found that a quarter of women solicitors have suffered harassment and almost half have been disadvantaged because of discrimination on grounds of sex. Yet women lawyers seldom bring cases under the Sex Discrimination Act. As lawyers they know better. In their struggle to build a career, even if the woman lawyers won their cases, they would lose their prospects.

      Every week brings new evidence of the struggles of women in male-dominated professions. The solution, some say, is to have equal numbers of women. This cannot be done because women will not be recruited in large numbers unless a policy of reverse discrimination is adopted. This cannot happen because it is illegal under the Sex Discrimination Act to allocate resources or jobs to women as it can be argued that this discriminated against men. Equality is cruel to women because it requires them to copy behaviours that they find profoundly alien and disturbing. If women can see no future beyond joining the masculine elite on its own terms, our civilisation will become more destructive than ever. Women. need liberation, not equality. They should be free to define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate.