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(Νίν{
2 Tournal on
VI. o N.
Editor - Selvy
WOMENS EDUCATION
 

2dint
gender Studies
1 June 1999
Thirucha Indran
AND RESEARCH CENTRE

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Our Objectives
To study and research the various aspects of women's subordination in Sri Lanka in order to sensitize men and women on gender issues.
To disseminate information relating to women and create awareness and increase consciousness On feminist issues.
To strengthen the women's network locally and internationally.
To extend co-operation to and solidarity with other oppressed and marginalised groups in Sri Lanka (such as refugees, unemployed and slum dwellers) with projects for rehabilitation and general upgrading of their lives.
To serve as a resource and documentation centre in Sri Lanka that will become part of the network of research and study centres on Women's Studies in the Third World.
What дoes Niредiиі иеаи7
Nivedini derives from a Sanskrit verb. It could mean either, that which is placed before you ritually and reverentially, or a carrier of knowledge with a female gender suffix "ni" (derived from the verb vid, to know.) We use it with the second meaning.
Women's Education and Research Centre

Contents ........
National Spaces and Collective Identities:
Borders, Boundaries, Citizenship and
Gender Relations
The Logics of Exclusion -
Nationalism,Sexism and the Yugoslv War
Rededfining an Agenda:
The Women's Movement in India
Recovering Women's Travel Narratives:
Women's Travel Writing in Ceylon 1890-1035
Morality and Standards
Ibsen's A Doll's House at the Carignano
35
69
101
125

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Board of Directors : Ms. Anberiya Haniffa
Ms. Bernadeen Silva Dr. Kumari Jayawardena i Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy
Dr. Selvy Thiruchandran
Editor Selvy Thiruchandran
Typeset and Cover design: Sunanda Seeli
ÚNihvediní - vol.7 No.1 A journal published by the
Women's Education and Research Centre
No.58, Dharmarama Road,
Colombo 06. Sri Lanka. Te: 590985/595296 Fax : 5963 13
ISSN 1391 - 0027
C Copyright 1996 by the organisation of Women's Education and Research Centre.
No.58, Dharmarama Road, Colombo 06, Sri Lanka.
No part of this journal may be reproduced without permission from the publisher except for review purposes.
Letters may be addressed to WERC, Women's Education and Research Centre No.58, Dharmarama Road, Colombo 06, Sri Lanka.
Printed by: Karunaratne and Sons Ltd.

From the editor.....
T issue of Nivedini is a mixed bag. It has a global
perspective covering various issues on gender. Some of the papers deal with the gendered positions of citizenship and the gendered implication of nationalism within the national liberation struggles (Nira Yuval-Davis and Mirjana Morokvasic). Attention is focussed on the tensions between socialism and patriarchy and between capital and the nation state and nationalism. The papers perceptively points out the relationship between citizenship and questions relating to blood, ancestry and religion. In fact the crisis of (constructed) identities, their authenticity, paradoxes and problems have raised gendered positions mostly detrimental to women.
Meera Velayudhan's paper, is an extensive exploration into Women and Development and Women in Development. It points to the general inadequacies and the lack of sensitivity in the development programmes designed for women and how the women's movement in India continues to respond to the issues. Women's Education Research Centre is engaged in a research project on Women's Writing in Sri Lanka. Minoli Samarakkody's paper, documents the earliest women's travel narratives as part of a comprehensive research.
The readers will be happy to read a review of the Ibson's play "A Doll's House' by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Cultural Marxist, written in March 1917. He has titled the review as Morality and Standards. He laments the lack of interest shown by the audience. The lack of appreciation by the elitist audience seems to have bothered him

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a lot. His equation with morals and the proletarian women who could understand the play better, though is interesting is typical of his Marxist essentialism. However, thanks to the Women's Movement even nonproletarian women cah also now understand Ibson's A Doll's House -
One event that merits comment is however the Hague appeal for Peace held between 11th to 15th of May 1999. It could rightly be called a quest for peace by the concerned citizens and is also rightly called the Civil Society Conference. The state is propelled against the civil society and implicitly blamed as having the apparatus that is conducting and managing the war. One need not emphatically blame this position as politically biased - but one need to take into account the various groups that are engaged in the war and conducting wars against the state - Are they part of a quasi or parallel states possessing war machinery, an army or a navy? Or do they belong to the civil society? There is a need then to go beyond shifting categories and shifting meanings and seek the causes of war. The causes of the war is again not straight and plain and transparent. They are also subject to interpretations. There are also explained as my view/our view, and your view/their view. The interpretations unfortunately lack codes of justice and honestly, not to speak of the fact that what is just and honest are also subject to interpretation on the sites of space and time. This is the dilemma that is confronting us. Societies have only a few who could rise above the imaginary, above the constructions and above the mental illusions. Did the Hague Appeal for Peace come close to solving these double edged questions?
The Hague Appeal for Peace tried to involve three key sectors in their agenda - the people, the international organisations and governments - to promote a culture of peace. Significantly the programme also picked up four strands as working strategies.

1. International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law and
Institutions
2. The Prevention, Resolution and Transformation of Violent Conflict
Disarmament, including Nuclear Abolition 4. The Root Causes of War and the Culture of Peace
3.
There is indeed a difference between theory and practise. When the participants reached home, having left the conference hall in the Hague, they heard the news of India's Air Strike in Kashmere against Pakistan.
The redeeming factor, despite all these was of course the feeling that more than 4000 men and women and children assembled under one roof to express their desire for a total peace in the globe. Let us hope that it is not a mere dream, an Utopia

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Wational spaces and Collective latentities; Aborders, Aboundaries, Citizenship and Gender relations
Nira YuVal-Da Vis*
Today though, I do not want to talk about flags, but about
the notion of a symbolic border or boundary which is implicit in Frida Kahlo's picture as well as in 'real' interstate borders. In cultural studies the words borders' and boundaries' are used interchangeably (e.g. Brah, 1996; Gupta, 1993; Welchman, 1996). Indeed, in The Concise Oxford Dictionary border is defined as a boundary and boundary' is defined as a limit-line'. For the sake of clarity, however, I shall relate to boundaries' when talking about imaginary limit lines and to borders' when referring to legal/territorial ones.
Borders and boundaries are two modes of delineating identities - the former is connected to territories and states and the latter to national, ethnic and racial collectives. In this lecture I would like to examine the ways these two modes of identifications relate to one another and to citizenship as a mode of participation, following Marshal's definition of citizenship (1950) as 'full membership in the community'. I shall also point out the gendered aspects of these processes and how
they relate to other aspects of social difference. 水
Nira Yuval-Davis is Professor of Gender and Ethnic Studies at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Greenwich. This is the inaugural lecture of a series that was delivered at University of Greenwich on the 22nd May 1997.

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BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES
When I was growing up in Israel borders were an absolute experience in that they were unquestionable. Although Israel is not an island like Britain and has the seas only on the western border, the state of war with the Arab countries meant that all the borders were impassable. From a couple of places in Jerusalam you could look through binoculars and see in the distance, on the other side of what was known as "no-man's, or rather the lawless' land, people moving in crowded streets - it was like observing a mime, the distance being too great for sound to carry, and they might just as well have been on a different planet.
When I first stepped out of Israel in my early twenties and came to Europe on my honeymoon, we were absolutely astounded to hear from the kind woman who gave us a ride one morning that even in these pre-EC days people were actually living on one side of a border and working on the other side, crossing it every day as a matter of routine, as if passing through a toll booth on the motorway rather than a state border, I remember how we hitchhiked back and forth between France and Switzerland three times in one day in order to experience that miracle again and again.
The borders which were experienced by me and the rest of my generation growing up in Israel as natural and ultimate, were however, only a result of but a moment of history. Israeli borders have been shifting and changing since the beginning of the Zionist settlement project. And of course Israel is not unique, as is hardly necessary to say on the eve of devolution in Scotland and growing integration within the EU. Since 1989 there have been more than ten changes to borders in Europe alone. Borders change through wars, negotiations and sometimes through straight purchase of land. That fixed binary border between Mexico and the USA in Frida Kahlo's picture is far from reflecting the historical reality, Lawrence Herzog (1993: 9) claims that the US-Mexico border region has undergone perhaps the greatest demographic and economic transformation of any border Zone in the world'.
And yet, the story which borders zones - even changing ones - can tell us is only partial, and it is important that we understand this.

There might be a position (as I have recently heard Martin Albrow arguing (1977) that describing a certain country as British, French or German and similarly in describing plants and birds as British or French, needs to be understood separately and outside of nationalist discourses claiming a country for the nation, However, the mere naming of a country as Israel or Palestine, Rodesia or Zimbabwe, Ceylon or Sri Lanka is at the heart of many nationalist projects, and I do not believe that describing a certain bird as British' or "Scottish' or the prickly pear as Israeli or Palestinian is external to nationalist discourses in the way that Albrow envisages. Even there is no specific clash on a specific territory, the naturalised equation of territory = state = nation is problematic, because states do not always correspond to their territorial borders, and nations very rarely if at all correspond to their territory and state.
STATES AND TERRITORY
As Floya Anthias and I have expanded elsewhere (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1989: 5), the state can be defined as:
"a body of institutions which are centrally organised around the intentionality of control with a given apparatus of enforcement(juridical and repressive) at its command basis...."
The reason we included the word 'intentionality' is that although states claim to be the only legitimate power in control, very often this intention is not realised because smaller or larger parts of the state's territory include other politics which do not accept partially or wholly the legitimacy of the authority of the state (Joseph, 1993). In many third World countries the state penetration of their periphery would be partial at best, and although to a certain extent modern means of transportation and communication have increased central control, and there are probably no more totally isolated communities in the world (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 1993), there are communities in jungles or in the mountains organised by traditional tribes which have not been incorporated into the civil society of the state. Such territories may also be controlled by revolutionary guerrillas attempting to establish a competitive Social and political order in the state. However, such communities which are not governed by the state do not necessarily have to be territorially remote. There are many cases of warlords in shanty towns or religious

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and other cults who are to a greater or lesser extent able to establish an alternative social and political order to that of the state, without the latter being able or willing to change them. Sometimes it is even desirable to those who control the state that there are enclaves within the state's territory which are to some extent outside their direct control. For example, the Batustans in South Africa under apartheid, and the West Bank supposedly under the control of the Palestinian National Autonomy, where more than 70% of the land belongs to the Israeli government.
Of course in many other cases there exists a more or less centralized regional of federal regime and central and local government share in the control of the territory. And in many cases, as remnants of older political orders in the post-colonial, post-second World War world (and as part of the new world order) one or more of the superpowers and UN forces have extra-territorial rights to use military bases for their own strategic goals, as buffers between warring polities, and as facilities of the work of international agencies (Enloe, 1993).
NATIONS AND STATES
If states do not always control their own territories, the relationships between nations and states is even more complicated.
Gellner (1983: 1,36) has defined nationalism as:
"a theory of political legitimacy which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state...... should not separate the power holders from the rest..... and therefore state and culture must now be linked."
Today there is virtually nowhere in the world in which such a 'pure' nation-state exists, if it ever did, and therefore there are always settled residents (and usually citizens as well) who are not members of the dominant national collectivity in the society. The fact that this automatic assumption about the overlap between the boundaries of the state citizens and the nation' still exists is one expression of the naturalizing effect of the hegemony of one collectivity and its access to ideological apparatuses of both state and civil Society. This constructs

minorities into assumed deviants from the 'normal' and excludes them from important power resources. Deconstructing this is crucial to tackling racism and I shall return to discuss the subject when discussing issues of citizenship.
Both ethnic and national collectivities are constructed around boundaries which separate the world into 'us' and them'. As such, they are both the Andersonian 'imagined communities' and depending on the objectives of different ethnic and national projects involving members of the same collectivity, or people outside it, the boundary lines can be drawn in very different ways. One example, of course, is the debate whether the English and the Scots are should be members of the same nation. Another is the difference between the Jewish Bund which saw itself as the national liberation movement which included in its imagined community the Jews from all over the world.
What is specific to the nationalist project and discourse is the aim of a separate political representation for the collective. This often - but not always - takes the form of a claim for a separate state and/or territory, although some states are based on bi- or multinational principles (like Lebanon or Belgium) and Some suprastate political projects like the European Union can, at specific historical moments, develop more statelike characteristics. Nationalist demands can also be aimed at establishing a regional autonomy rather than a separate statesuch as in the case of Wales or Catalonia, or it can be irredentist (advocating joining a neighbouring state rather than establishing one of their own), such as the republican movement in Northern Ireland or the Kashmiri movement for unification with Pakistan. Although state and territory have been closely bound together, there have been cases of nationalist movements which called for the state to be established in a different territory than that where they were active. Both the Jewish Zionist movement (which established Liberia) called for the mass emigration of their members from the countries where they lived. Others have not articulated any specific territorial boundaries for their national independence. It is the demand for activists' or those who call for the Khlipha", the global nation of Islam, from other committed Muslims. The Austrian Marxist, Otto Bauer (Bauer, 1940; Nimni, 1991; Yuval-Davis, 1987a) called for the separation of nationalism and the state as the only viablesolution to the hopeless mix of collectivities in the territories which

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constituted the Austro-Hungarian empire; and this might be the only viable long-term alternative to 'ethnic cleansing" in contemporary ethnic fundamentalist movements which have emerged with the fall of the soviet empire and in many other places in the post-colonial world.(e.g. Rwanda).
The separation of nationality and the state also takes other forms. In many parts of the world there exist immigrant communities which are culturally and politically committed to continue to belong to their 'mother country' - or more specifically to the national collectivity from where they, their parents or their forebears have come. The rise of these 'committed diasporas' has been co-determined by several factors. Firstly, technological advances both in international travel and in media and communication have made the preservation of links with the homeland' mush easier as they have ensured intergenerational, cultural and linguistic reproduction. Ethnic videos", for example, is one of the largest video markets and has been consumed by people who have very little or no access to the mass media of the countries where they live. Cable systems or satellite dishes have enabled many direct access to their own national and ethnic media as well as establishing new defused ethnic collectivities. (e.g. of an international South-Asian community).
At the same time, as a result of certain success by the anti-racist and civil rights movements there has been a certain shift in national ideologies in many western countries. Multiculturalism has until recently become an hegemonic ideology which, with all its problematics (and I shall return to these later), has eased the pressure somewhat on immigrants to assimilate.
This was aided by the fact that in the post-colonial world there are many ongoing nationalist struggles where different collectivities compete not just for access to their states' powers and resources, but also over the constitutive nature of these states. One cannot imagine the continued nationalist struggles of the IRA, for instance, without the financial, political and other help of the diaspora Irish communities, especially in the USA. In the case of the Jewish diaspora - the oldest 'established' diaspora - the hegemony of Zionism has meant that many have transformed Israel into a post-factrum homeland' even if they have never been. Let alone lived, there, and international Jewish support

has played a crucial role in the establishment and development of Israel (Yuval-Davis, 1987b). As Anderson commented (1955), not enough recognition is given to the role of diaspora communities in contemporary nationalists struggles although recently Robin Cohen (1997), for instance, has started to carry out such research.
However, the connections between diasporas and homelands or between associated diasporas do not depend solely on means of communication and political and economic assistance. The exchange of brides, which Levi-Strauss has seen as the basic cement of social cohesion (1969), is one of the major ways the close connections and the management of inclusionary relations within the imagined national community continue to operate between diasporas and homelands. This points to the important roles gender relations play in the construction of ideological and emotional attachments between territories, states, and nations.
GENDER AND NATION
The mythical unity of national imagined communities' which divides the world between 'us' and them is maintained and ideologically reproduced by a whole system of what Armstrong (1982) calls Symbolic border guards. These border guards' can identify people as members or non-members of a specific collectivity. They are closely linked to specific cultural codes of dress style and behaviour as well as to more elaborate bodies of customs, religion, literary and artistic modes of production, and, of course, language. Because of the central importance of social reproduction to culture, gender relations often come to be seen as constituting the 'essence' of cultures, as ways of life to be passed from generation to generation. The construction of home' is of particular importance here, and includes relations between adults and between adults and children in the family, ways of cooking and eating, domestic labour, play and bedtimestories, etc. Constructions of manhood and womenhood, as well as sexuality and gendered relations of power need to be explored in relation to these processes.
A figure of a woman, often a mother, in many cultures Symbolizes the sprit of the collectivity, whether it is Mother Russia, Mother Ireland or Mother India. In the French Revolution its symbol

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was La Patire', a figure of a woman giving birth to a baby, and in Cyprus, a crying women refugee on roadside posters was the embodiment of the pain and anger of the Greek Cyprriote collectivity after the Turkish invasion. In peasant societies the dependence of the people on the fertility of Mother Earth' has no doubt contributed to this close association between collective territory, collective identity and womanhood. However, women also symbolize the collectivity in other ways. As Cynthia Enloe (1990) has pointed out, it is supposedly for the sake of the 'women and children' that men go to war. Women are associated in the collective imagination with children and therefore with the collective, as well as the familial, future. But this does not only happen during wars. A couple of years ago, for instance, in the riots which flared up among the Muslim youth in Bradford, one of the participants clarified the motivation behind their actions to a Guardian reporter (Travis, 18/ 6/95):
"It's not about prostitution or unemployment or about all that nonsense of the Chief Constable. It's about the way two police officers treated one of our women.'
The burden of representation' on women of the collectivity's identity and future destiny has also brought about the construction of women as the bearers of the collectivity's honour. Manar Hasan (1994) describes how so many Palestinian women have been murdered by their families and male relatives because in their behaviour they brought 'shame" on their families and community. Women, in their proper' behaviour, their proper clothing, embody the line which signifies the collectivity boundaries. Other women in many other societies are also tortured or murdered by their relatives because of adultery, flight from home, and other cultural breaches of conduct which are perceived as bringing dishonour and shame on their male relatives and community (see, for example, Chhachhi, 1991; Rozario, 1991). A weaker version of retaliation against women who betrayed the collective honour was the mass shaving of women heads in different European countries after the Second World war. These women were accused of befriending the occupying Nazi Armies during the war (Warring, 1996). The other side of this is the use of systematic rape during war as a way of shaming the collective enemy. It is not incidental that until the success of the feminist campaign in the 1994 UN conference on Human Rights, the Geneva

Convention would not consider rape a war crime or a mode of torture by 'crime against honour' - the honour not being that of the woman alone (Pettman, 1996; Zajovic, 1994).
The centrality of women in nationalist discourse is even more apparent when we examine their roles in national liberation struggles both pro and anti-modernist. "Women's emancipation' or women following tradition' (as has been expressed in various campaigns for and against women's veiling, voting, education and employment) has been at the centre of most modernist and anti-modernist nationalist struggles.
Chatterjee (1986) observed that cultural decolonization has anticipated and paved the way for political decolonization - the major rupture which has marked the 20th century. This process involved not so much going back to some mythical golden age in the national past but rather a growing sense of empowerment, a development of a national trajectory of freedom and independence. A central theme in this process of cultural decolonization has been the redefinition and reconstruction of sexuality and gender relations, Franz Fanon encapsulated some of it in his famous call (1986 1952) for the Black Man to 'reclaim his manhood'. As Ashis Nandy (1983) has argued, the colonial man has been constructed as effeminate in the colonial discourse and the way to emancipation and empowerment is seen as the negation of this assertion. In many cultural systems potency and masculinity seem to be synonymous. Such a perspective not only has legitimized the extremely "macho' style of many anti-colonialist and black power movements; it has also legitimized the secondary position of women in these national collectivities.
And, yet, the 'emancipation of women' has come to signify much wider political and social attitudes towards social change and modernity in a variety of revolutionary and decolonization projects, whether in Turkey, India, Yemen or China (Kiniyoti, 1991). As Chatterjee(1989) has pointed out, because the position of women has been so central to the colonial gaze in defining indigenous cultures, it is there where symbolic declarations of cultural change have taken place. It has been one of the Important mechanisms in which ethnic and national projects signifiedinwardly and outwardly-their move towards modernization. However,

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these changes did not lack ambivalence, as the changes have had to signify at the same time modernization and national independence. The process of mimicry was limited at best.
Because the hegemony of the modern nation-state in the postcolonial world has often been very limited, being most confined to urban centres and the upper classes, the use of cultural and religious traditions as symbolic border guards have enabled, to a large extent, the continued co-existence of the 'modern' centre with the pre-modern sections of Society. At a later period, it also enabled, in many cases, the rise of a new generation of leaders who could turn to those very customs and traditions and develop ethnic and national projects of a very different kind. In these projects, what formerly symbolized progress and modernity was now constructed as European cultural imperialism. As an alternative, a fundamentalist construction of the true' cultural essence of the collectivity has come to be imposed. These constructions, however, are often no more similar to the ways people used to live historically in these Societies than the previous modernist 'national liberation' ones; nor have the fundamentalist projects abandoned modernity and its tools, whether it is the modern media or high-tech weaponry.
Once again women occupy an important role in these projects. Rather than being seen as the symbols of change, women are constructed in the role of the carriers of tradition'. The symbolic act of unveiling which played centre stage in the emancipatory projects is now being surpassed by the campaigns of forced veiling, as happened, for example, in post-revolutionary Iran. Even practices such as Sati in India can become foci of fundamentalist movements which see in women's following these traditions the safeguard of the national cultural essence, operating as a mirror to the colonial gaze which focused on these practices to construct Otherness (Mani, 1989; Chhachhi, 1991).
Cultures, however, are not fixed essential entities. As, for example, can be seen by the slogan of the Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism when they chanted in anti-domestic violence demonstrations in Southall and in countering the IslamistantiRushdie demonstration; Our tradition - resistance, not submission!
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Rather than a fixed and homogenous body of tradition and custom, 'cultural stuff, therefore, needs to be described as a rich resource, usually full of internal contradictions, which is used selectively by different social agents in various social projects within specific power relations and in political discourse in and outside the collectivity. Gender, class, membership in collectivity, stage in the life cycle, ability - all affect the access and availability of these resources and the specific positionings from which they are being used. It is important, therefore, to differentiate and avoid the conflation of cultural discourse, identity narratives and ethnic processes. (Anthias & Yuval Davis, 1994).they are being used. It is important, therefore, to differentiate and avoid the conflation of cultural discourse, identity narratives and ethnic processes. (Anthias & Yuval Davis 1992; Yuval Davis, 1994).
ETHNIC PROJECTS, IDENTITIES AND DIFFERENCE
Ethnicity relates to the politics of collectivity boundaries, and by using identity narratives, divides the world into 'us' and 'them' (as well as constructing and dividing 'them' into a variety and/or hierarchy of collectivities). Ethnic projects are continuously engaged in processes of struggle and negotiation aimed, from specific positionings within the collectivities, at promoting the collectivity or perpetuating its advantages via access to state and civil society power (Yuval-Davis, 1994). It is important to emphasize, therefore, that ethnicity is nota property specific to minorities but is present in all collectivities. The greatest success of ethnic projects is when their identity narratives become naturalized and their members are identified simply as "people'.
Identities - individual and collective - are specific forms of cultural narratives which constitute commonalities and differences between self and others, interpreting their social positioning in more or less stable ways (Martin, 1995; 13). These often relate to myths (which may or may not be historically valid) of common origin and to myths of common destiny. As such identity narratives often constitute major tools of ethnic projects.
The differential social positionings from which identity
narratives are formulated and stated is of crucial social and political importance in relation to the ways relationships are viewed with those
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outside the collectivity, the ways in which boundaries are constructed to decide who is 'in' and who is 'out' of the collectivity, and on power relations within the collectivity.
However, as Stuart Hall points out (1992; 1996) cultural identities are often fluid and cross-cutting. Even more importantly, perhaps, they are not only multiple, but they are multilayered. By this I mean not only the fact that boundaries of certain identities are by definition wider and inclusive of other more specific identities - local, regional, national, racial, etc. - but also that some identities which have no prefixed cohension or assumption of common origin, or even common destiny, may co-exist within individual or communal subjective narratives. Those hyphenated identities have been theorised as hybrid identities (Bhabhan, 1990; 1994; Anzaldua, 1987) located within the symbolic border (or, rather boundary) zone.
Hybrids have been celebrated in post-modernist literature as the symbol of the time, and are seen as both evoking and erasing the "totalizing boundaries' of their adoptive nations. Located within the context of globalisation, hybrids, nomads (Bradiotti, 1993) and other 'travelling identities' are being celebrated b writers like James Clifford and Rosy Bradiotti. Talal Assad (1993:9-10), for instance, contrasts James Clifford's (1992) celebration of 'the widening scope of human agency that geographical and psychological mobility now afford' with the deep pessimism of Henna Arendt (1975 (1951), herself a refugee from the Nazis, who spoke of the uprootedness and superfluousness which has been the curse of modern masses'. The difference, of course, is embedded in the construction of the notion of free agency versus what Amrita Chhachhi calls forced identities (1991). Whoever has been watching the terrible sights of the Rwandan refugees taken back to Rwanda from Zaire in the last few weeks would question the global validity of the celebration of the nomad.
The problems with the notion of the politics of border' (Brah, 1996; Welchman, 1996) and its associated constructions of the nomad, the hybrid and 'travelling cultures' are twofold. Firstly, its image of crossing boundaries, travelling and miscegenation relies upon a fixed notion of location and culture which brings back essentialism through the back door. Secondly, by concentrating on the imagery, the signifier,
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the agency, all too often questions of political economy disappear. As a result, there is not enough attention to the differential power relations between the different cultures and locations which are supposedly hybridized or traveled, Carl-Ulrick Schirup (1955) and Aleksandra Allund have called this mode of analysis and politics 'culturization' in which the cultural has colonized the social' (Allund, 1995: 319).
My argument here is that the conflation of borders and boundaries can have important political consequences. The example I want to bring to this relates to the politics of diaspora.
It is important to differentiate between what Avtar Brah calls the homing desire' and the 'desire for homeland' (1996:180), as well as between 'diaspora communities' (Brah, 1996; Lavie and Swedenburg, 1996; Lemelle and Kelley, 1994) and political exiles. Political exiles are usually individuals or families who have been part of political struggles in the homeland and their identity and collectivity membership continues to be directed singularly, or at least primarily, towards there; they aim to go back' the moment the political situation changes. For diaspora communities, on the other hand, participation in the national struggles in the homeland, including sending ammunition to Ireland or 'gold bricks' to build the Hindu temple in place of the Muslim mosque in Ayodhya which was burned in December 1992, can be done primarily within an ethnic rather than a nationalist discourse, as a symbolic act of affirmation of their collectivity identity. Their destiny is primarily bound up with the country where they live and where their children grow up in, rather than in their country of origin. Nevertheless, such acts of symbolic identification can have very radical political and other effects in the homeland', a fact which might often be only of marginal interest to the people of the diaspora. I came across this very clearly when I was speaking in the early 1970s in the USA on the effects the American Jewry's support had on the continued occupation by Israel of the territories it seized after the 1967 War, and the resulting violations of human rights by Israel. I was speaking to a synagogue audience known for its liberal politics concerning Vietnam and civil rights in the USA, trying to dissuade them from continuing to send money to Israel as a means of exerting pressure on Israel to end the occupation. You don't understand' a woman from the audience explained to me. I'm not interested in what Israel is doing - for me the most important thing is that I support Israel
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because Israel is part of me'. The sentiments are not always so extremely clear cut, but this is definitely one illuminating example of the danger of underemphasizing the difference between mythical desires for home and actual political realities as well as the conflation of identification and participation.
CITIZENSHIP, DIFFERENCE AND TRANSVERSAL POLITICS
So far, I have focused on identities and identifications; now I would like to move on to examine citizenship as a mode of participation.
Last year I co-organized with Pnina Werbner an international conference on Women Citizenship and difference for which I prepared a comprehensive background paper on various issues relating to the subject (1997b1996); see also ch. 4 in 1997a). I do not have the time or the space to develop that discussion now and so will limit my comments to the issues which I have been addressing in the lecture.
In the liberal tradition citizenship has been constructed in completely individualistic terms, Citizenship is defined as:
"as set of normative expectations specifying the relationship between the nation-state and its individual members which procedurally establish the rights and obligations of members and a set of practices by which these expectations are realised." (Peled, quoting Waters 1992:433)
As Roche (1987) describes it, in the liberal tradition the individual citizens are presumed to have equal status, equal rights and duties, etc. so that principles of inequality deriving from gender, ethnicity, class or other contexts are not supposed to be of relevance to the status of citizenship as such. The citizens are therefore constructed not as 'members of the community' but as strangers to each other, although they are sharing a complex set of assumptions and expectations from each other which, when not fulfilled, can be enforceable by the state.
This liberal abstraction of self has been criticised, however, by the 'communitarians' who claim that notions of rights and duties, as well as those of equality and privacy, have no meaning outside of the context of particular communities (Ackelsberg, 1995). The proponents
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of republicanism such as Sandel (1982) also find the individualistic construction of citizenship highly unsatisfactory. They argue that such a construction of citizenship denies the possibility of citizenship as constituting membership of a 'moral community' in which the notion of the 'common good' is an antecedent to the individual citizenship choice. Liberal construction of citizenship, according to Sandel, assumes the priority of 'right over good'. Republicanism, on the other hand, constructs citizenship not only as a status but also as a means of active involvement and participation in the determination, practice and promotion of the common good'. The will and capacity to participate constitute one's civic virtue and are not only an expression but also a condition of citizenship.
However, as Peled comments (ibid.: 433):
"This raises the question how the republican (moral) community is constituted and what qualities are required for active participation in it."
According to him, two distinct notions of community can be discerned in the current revival of republicanism: a weak community in which membership is essentially voluntary, and a strong, historical community that is discovered, not formed by its members. In a strong community its "ongoing existence is an important value in and of itself' and becomes one of the, if not the most, important imperatives of the 'moral community'.
Membership in a 'strong community' is therefore not completely voluntary or a matter of choice, but is bound together by 'enduring attachment', which is often, though not necessarily, a result of a myth of common origin and is clearly bonded by a myth of common destiny. In other words, this 'strong community; is the national 'imagined community'. As a strong community, there is no difference between republican constructions of the “moral community" and the gemeinschaft like constructions of the 'national community'. The communitarians go as far as arguing that:
"It does not make sense to speak if individuals constituting a community: rather, communities constitute individuals." (Ackelsberg, 1995:5)
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The question arises, then, what should happen to those members of the civil society who cannot or would not become full members of the 'community'? In virtually all contemporary states there are migrants and refugees, 'old' and 'new' minorities, and in settler Societies (where colonialist projects constituted new independent national collectivities Stasiulis & Yuval-Davis, 1995) there are also indigenous people who are not part of the hegemonic national community. In addition, there are many other members of the civil society who exist fully or partly in what Evans (1993) calls 'the marginal martrix of society' and who, although they might share the myth of the common origin of the community', do not share important hegemonic value systems (in sexual, religious and other matters) with the majority of the population and are therefore, at least partly, outside of the 'moral community'.
For Peled (ibid) this reality is not sufficient to reject the republican position which sees in the continued historical existence of 'strong national communities a moral dictate for its own sake even if it means the continued exclusion of all those 'outsiders'. His solution (following Oldfield, 1990) is a two-tiered construction of citizenship. This would mean full membership in the 'strong community' for those who could be included, and for people who could not, it would grant them:
"a residual, truncated Status, similar to the liberal notion of citizenship as a bundle of rights. Bearers of this citizenship do not share in attending to the common good but are secure in their possession of what we consider essential human and civil rights."
In other words, Peled is suggesting an institutionalisation of an exclusionary two-tiered system of citizenship as a way of Solving the discrepancy between the boundaries of the civil society and the boundaries of the hegemonic national collectivity. This solution, of course, is far from satisfactory, not only politically, as it openly condones discrimination and racialization of citizens on national grounds (Peled cites Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians who have been citizens of the state since 1948 as an ideal case of a state who successfully managed to do so), but also theoritically, because it dichotomizes the population into two homogenous collectivities. But it is not just being in or out of the national collectivity which matters but also all other dimensions of
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social divisions and Social positionings, such as gender, intranational ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, stage in the life cycle, etc. which I would argue are crucial to constructions of citizenship, as well as individuality.
Yet, with all these reservations the above position at least recognises the potentially inherent contradictory nature of citizenship as individual and communal, inclusionary and exclusionary. In the most influential theory of citizenship in Britain, that of Marshall (1950; 1975; 1981). These issues were not problematized at all. Marshall defines citizenship as:
"a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess he status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed.' (1950:14)
For him there is an automatic assumption of an overlap between the boundaries of the community', civil society and the boundaries of the national community. Not incidentally, Theodor Shanin (1986) who remarked the English, unlike other languages (such as Russian or Hebrew), lacks a term which expresses the notion of ethnic nationality to differentiate it from nationality which is equivalent to formal citizenship in the state. In different states and societies the relationship between these two differs hugely and can be structured formally or informally in a way which priorities one hegemonic ethnic/national collectivity or several; in a way in which such a membership may or may not be of prime importance to one's identity; in a way which would provide members easier or more difficult access to a whole range of social, economic and political facilities; and in a way which would or would not actually ground in law that members in different collectivities would be entitled to a differential range of civil, political and social citizenship rights. A common status in Europe, for instance, is that of the 'denizen' who is entitled to most social and civil rights but is deprived of the political national voting rights. Paradoxically, although Marshall's theory of citizenship does not relate to any of these issues, his conceptual definition of citizenship as a membership of the community rather than of the state can provide us with the framework to study specific cases of the differential multi-tiered citizenship that people have in their ethnic community, local community, the state, and more and more often these days also in
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supranational organizations.
A word of caution is necessary here, however. As I have elaborated elsewhere (Cain & Yuval-Davis, 1990; Yuval-Davis, 1991), it is important not to view the community' as a given natural unit to which one can either belong or not belong. As Chantal Mouffe rightly comments: Politics is about the constitution of the political community, not something that takes place within it'(1993: 81). Collectivities and 'communities' are ideological and material constructions, whose boundaries, structures and norms are a result of a constant process of struggles and negotiations, or more general social developments (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1992). This is especially important if we consider, as Stuart Hall and David Held (1989) point out that until recently in real politics the main, if not the only arena in which questions of citizenship have remained alive, at least in the West, has been in relation to questions of race and immigration. In other words, questions which have challenged both the identity and the boundaries of the community' in relation to both nations and States.
Debates around the citizenship of ethnic and racial minorities (Paul Gordon, 1989; hall & Held, 1989) have touched on all levels of citizenship - civil, political and Social. However, as mentioned above, the primary concern of many relevant struggles and debates has centred around an even more basic right - i.e. the right to enter, or, once having entered - the right to remain in a specific country. Constructing boundaries according to various inclussionary and exclussionary criteria. Which relate to ethnic and racial divisions as well as to class and gender divisions, is one of the main arenas of struggle concerning citizenship that remains completely outside the agenda of Marshallian theories of citizenship. The 'freedom of movement within the European community, the Israeli Law of Return and the Patriality clause in British immigration legislation - all are instances of ideological, often racist, constructions of boundaries which allow unrestricted immigration to Some and completely block it to others.
Even when questions of entry and settlement have been resolved, the concerns of people of ethnic minorities might be different from those of other members of the society. For example, their right to formal citizenship might depend upon the rules and regulations of their country of origin as well as those of the country where they live, and
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also upon the relationship between the two. Thus, people from Some Caribbean islands who have been settled in Britain for years were told that they could not have a British passport because their country did not recognise dual citizenship of their country of origin after it received independence. Concern over relatives, and fear if not being allowed to visit their country of origin prevent others (such as Iranians and Turks) from giving up their original citizenship. Thus, although they might spend the rest of their lives in another country they would have, at best, limited political rights in it (contradicting the evolutionary model of Marshall according to which social rights always follow civil and political rights). An issue which has been a specific focus of migrant women's campaigns has been the rule that women workers who have children in other countries are often illegible for child benefits. In addition, given specific combinations of laws on nationality, children can be born stateless in countries like Israel and Britain. Such countries confer citizenship on those whose parents are citizens rather than on those born in the country.
Immigrants can also be deprived of social rights enjoyed by other members of the society. Often, the right of entry to a country is conditioned on a commitment by the immigrant that neither she/he or any other member of their family will claim any welfare benefits from the state - this especially affects the position of immigrant women who become the major carers of their relatives. In most cases, a high-class position, such as proof of a sizable fortune in the bank, can be used to override national/racial quotas for the right to settle in a country. As Bakan and Stasiulis have argued in relation to women who are foreign domestic workers in Canada, constructions of citizenship have to be reconceptualised in ways:
"That simultaneously reflect both global and national realitions of power... IT]he acceptance of the regulatory authority of hegemonic states in determining access to citizenship rights is not only reflected in the recialised and gendered definition of who is who is not suitable to obtain such rights. It is also apparent in the assumption of the non-hegemonic status of the 3 world states... The unequal distribution of citizenship rights within the advanced.liberal democracies, principally along the lines of class, race and gender inequalities, becomes blurred and recedes in
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importance when considered in counterposition where far greater proportions of citizens suffer from chronic poverty and privation." (1994:26-28)
Citizenship needs to be examined, not just in terms of the state, but also in relation to multiple, formal and informal citizenships in more than one country. Most importantly these citizenship needs to be viewed from a perspective which would include the different positioning of the different states as well as the different positionings of individuals and grouping within states.
A whole different set of citizenship issues would relate to indigenous minorities in Settler Societies (Stasiulis and Yuval -Davis, 1995). It is not just that in many societies indigenous populations have entered very late, if at all, into the formal citizenry of the state, It is their claim on the country - in the form of land rights, for instance - taken seriously, this would totally conflict with the settler national collectivity's claim for legitimacy. Attempts to solve the problem by transforming the indigenous population into another 'ethnic minority' have usually met with strong and understandable resistance (deLepervanche, 1980). Formal treaties, which would institutionalise and anchor in law the relations between the indigenous people, and what Australian Aboriginals have been calling 'the imposing Society', often create a complex situation in which there exists two national sovereign entities over the same territory - one which owns the state and one which attempts to establish a sovereign stateless society within it. Somewhat similar, if less racialized, struggles are present in the many regionalist secessionist movements which claim the right of national selfdetemination vis-a-vis their states which themselves have been constructed as nations.
This situation can be seen as symptomatic of the present state of affairs in which individual and collective rights are no longer determined exclusively by the state, while identities are still perceived as particularised and territorially bound. As Yasemin Soysal (1994) argues, this state of affairs has come about in the post-Second World War era as a result of several factors, such as the internationalisation of labour markets and massive decolonisation(the latter bringing about new forms of migratory flows). Even more importantly, however, they have
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established new states which asserted their rights in universalistic parameters and participated in international agencies , such as the UN and UNESCO, in the development of international human rights discourse as well as legislation. This international human rights discourse was largely strengthened by the development of new social movements in the north as well as in the South which protest against both discrimination and the disadvantage to various marginal sectors and collectivities in society - such as women, Blacks, Fourth World People, disabled people, etc. At the same time, the executors of these international codes of rights and the members of international bodies are still the states and no international agency has the right to "interfere in the internal affairs' of other states.
The most problematic aspects of citizenship rights for racial and ethnic minorities relate to their social rights and to the notion of multiculturalism (see, for example, Bhiku Parekh, 1990; Laksiri Jayasuriya, 1990; Yuval-Davis, 1992 & forthcoming). For some, (like Harris, 1987; Lister, 1990) the problem remains within the realm the of individual, though different, citizens. As Harris Claims (ibid.: 49):
"The goal is to provide everyone with the wherewithal to enjoy and participate in the benefits of pluralism... there are common elements underlying cultural variations which can effectively define minimum standards.'
The homogenous community of Marshall is being transformed into a pluralist one by the reinterpretation of his emphasis on equality of status into mutual respect (Lister:48). However, such a model does not take into account potential conflicts of interest among the different groupings of citizens, nor does it consider the collective, rather than the individual, character of the special provisions given to members of ethnic minorities(Jayasuriya:23).
The question of a collective provision of needs relates to policies of positive action aimed at group rather than individual rights. Multiculturalist policies construct the population, or more effectively, the poor and working classes within the population, in terms of ethnic and racial collectivities. Those collectivities are attributed with collective needs, based on their different cultures as well as on their structural
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disadvantages. Resistance to these policies has been expressed by claims that constructing employment and welfare policies in terms of group rights can conflict with individual rights and are therefore discriminatory. However, at least in countries which officially adopted multiculturalist policies, such as Canada, Britain and the USA, it has been widely accepted, at least until recently, that in order to overcome the practical effects of racism rather than just its ideology, collective provisions and positive action, based on group membership, are the only effective measures to be taken (see Burney, 1988; Cain & Yuval-Davis, 1990; Young, 1989). Similar policies have been constructed in other pluralist states, such as Indian and South Africa.
The question becomes more problematic when the provision relates not to differential treatment in terms of access to employment or welfare, but to what has been defined as the different cultural needs of different ethnicities. These can vary from the provision of interpreters to the provision of funds to religious organizations. In the most extreme cases, as in the debates around Aboriginals on the one hand and around Muslim minorities and the Rushdie Affair on the other hand, there have been calls to enable the minorities and the according to their own customary and religious legal systems. While the counter arguments about social unity and political hegemony, those who support these claims have seen it as a natural extrapolation of the minorities' social and political rights. This raises the question of how one defines the boundaries of citizen's rights.
Will Kymlicka (1995) suggests that we differentiate between two kinds of group rights': one which involves the claim of a group against its own members, and one which involves the group's claim against the larger Society (or the state). Kymlicka opposes the use of state powers in support of claims against members because he suspects that very often individuals within the group would be oppressed in the name of culture and tradition. On the other hand, in the second case, the issue often involves protection of a disadvantaged group by others and here state intervention should be welcome should be welcome. While the general line of Kymlicka's argument can be supported, he reifies and naturalizes the group's boundaries and does not differentiate between the group' and people with specific power positionings within the group (which is not homogenous and can have differing and conflicting interests).
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Iris Young (1989) has suggested that representative democracy should treat people not as individuals but as members of groups, some of them more oppressed than other. She argues that a discourse of universal citizenship which ignores these differences would just enhance the position of already dominant groups. And would silence the marginal and oppressed groups. She suggests, therefore, that special mechanisms have to be established to represent these groups. Although Iris Young's insistence that difference and differential power relations should be recognised in the practice of citizenship is very important, her approach, however, is problematic in several ways. As elaborated elsewhere (Cain & Yuval-Davis, 1990; Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1992; Philips 1993), such an approach can easily fall into the pitfalls of identity politics in which the groups are constructed as homogenous and with fixed boundaries. The interests of people who are positioned in specific group vis-a-vis others would become the primary aim of political activities which concern and relate to the citizenship body as a whole.
Thus, Anne Phillips argues that:
"When so many of the problems that face us are general in nature and require a vision that looks beyond what is local - the prospects for a better democracy lie not in dissolving distinctions between public and private but in more actively revitalizing the public sphere." (Phillips 1993: 13)
Anne Phillips claims that she is following the arguments of Hanna Arendt. However, unlike Arendt (1951), she recognises that notions of difference cannot be ignored. She suggests, therefore, (following Mary Dietz, 1987) that the participation in the public arena of politics should be based on what she calls 'transformaiton', getting beyond one's immediate sphere rather than transcendence: she sees 'transformation' as rightly stressing the limits of localised and specific identities, while 'transcendence' involves pursuing this to the point of jettisoning all group differences and concerns. John Lechte (1994), when discussing Arendt's approach to the political, argues that Kristeva's theory of the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic can be used to posit the private, which is the domain of difference, and the public political domain - not as a dyad of opposites, but with the first
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being the materiality of the latter, which gives it is particular meaning. In other words, every discussion of individual differences already involves the public domain. Young's construction of "oppressed groups' is no more 'natural' than any other political discourse, and the transformation/transcendence process is inherent to the act of naming.
Suggestions of other feminists and activists who attempted to deal with the question of citizenship rights and social difference focus differentially on the social and on the political. Correa & Petchesky (1940, for instance, advocate that political rights should be enhanced by social rights. They argue that rather than abandoning rights discourse, we should reconstruct it so that it both specifies differences, such as gender, class, cultural and other differences and recognizes social needs. Sexual and reproductive (or any other) rights, understood as private liberties' or 'choices' are meaningless, especially for the poorest and most disenfranchised, without enabling conditions through which they can be realized. While. like Young, such an approach recognises the crucial importance of collective disadvantages and discrimination. They do not become reified in the construction of the political subjects and remain distinguishable from them. In the post-GLC era in London and the massive backlash to the identity politics which was practised there as a basis for resources allocation, some Black and other radical activists came to the conclusion that the alternative to group politics should be politics of disadvantage which would mean confronting these disabling conditions. The argument has been that if Black people suffer disproportionately from unemployment, for instance, political discourse which focuses on unemployment will also benefit Black people disproportionately without it being formally directed specifically at them. However, this approach would not exclude, nor create a construction of otherness, for other unemployed(Wilson, 1987).
Zilla Eisnestein's approach to questions of difference is to argue that (1993:6):
"the concern here is not with differences perse, but rather with how we can start with differences to construct a particularist understanding of
human right which is both universal and specific."
Her solution in her book published in 1993 was to construct a
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woman of colour as an alternative, inclusive standard norm to that of the white male. It might be more difficult, but I much prefer her former position (19890 in which she argues that while we cannot do without Some notion of what human beings have in common, we can and must do without a unitary standard against which they are all judged. Her latter position can assume that the needs of a woman of colour are more, rather than different, to those of a white man. It is also a position which cannot necessarily be used internationally.
Instead of a given unitary standard there has to be a process of constructing it for each specific political project. Black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins (1990) and Italian feminists such as Raphaela Lambertini and Elizabetta Dominini (see Yuval-Davis , 1994) have focussed on the transversal politics of coalition building, in which the specific positioning of political actors are recognised and considered. As I have elaborated elsewhere, this approach is based on the epistemological recognition that each positioning produces specific situated knowledge which cannot be but an unfinished knowledge. Therefore dialogue among those differentially positioned should take place in order to reach a common perspective as a basis for a common action policy. Transversal dialogue should be based on the principles of rooting and shifting - i.e. being centred in one's own experiences while being empathetic to the differential positionings of the partners in the dialogue, thus enabling the participants to arrive at a different perspective from that of hegemonic tunnel vision. The boundaries of the dialogue might still be differential projects for people and groupings positioned differently, but their solidarity would be based on a common knowledge sustained by a compatible value system which is what defines the boundaries of the dialogue.
A CONCLUDING REMARK
Border and boundaries, identities and difference construct and determine to a large extent the space of agency, the mode of
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participation in which we act as citizens in the multilayered polities to which we belong. When Tony Blair arrived in Downing Street and Labour's spin doctors staged his welcoming reception, I was heartened to see that they made a point to include, if not black in the Union Jack', then at least a Black woman (would a black man have been too threatening?) holding a Union Jack.
And yet, this picture and Labour's nationalist rhetoric during the election campaign have raised for me as many questions as it answered. For example:
a What are the implications of reclaiming the Union Jack by Labour from the BNPjust when Labour is talking about devolution and the changing borders and boundaries which are going to result from that?
Does Blair's notion of 'moral community have more than the imperative repeated so often these days of Britain's interest first'?
What is the meaning of the mantra of Britain as a 'one nation society? Is it a simple reversal of identity politics to an assimilatory, homogenous, nation" Is it Peled' vision of a twotiered democracy of citizens and denizens of is it a transversal nation in which differences are acknowledged, views from different positionings are listened to and considered, and boundaries of the dialogue are determined by the message rather than the messengers? And what political values would be determining that common message?
Only time will tell.
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Schierup, Carl-Ulrik (1995) Multiculturalism and universalism in the USA and EU Europe", paper for the workshop "Nationalism and Ethnicity', Bern, March.
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The Logics of Exclusion:
Nationalism, Sexism and The Yugoslawar
Mirjana Morokvasic”
And when the next war started, The women Said: NO: And locked up their brothers, sons and husbands in their homes
(Erich Kastner) Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a women's rifle
(Virginia Woolf)
Most of us in Yugoslavia's post-Second World War
generation grew up with war stories. These stories were told by women and women were their main protagonists. My early childhood was marked by these stories, perhaps because their tellers and the people they were about were women I loved or simply knew, or, if the stories were about those who were no longer alive, I knew their children, relatives or friends. The way these women acted was familiar to me: they helped and protected others, they were in a relatively weak position but sometimes their solidarity, courage, 'sang-froid", pragmatism or knowledge of languages protected them in the most dangerous situations. A few of them did not survive the war or were left invalids. I remember now the one who helplessly watched her house being set on fire and burnt down by the withdrawing occupier troops, another one escaping the celebratory violence of male liberators, and the teacher of mine who survived the dreadful concentration camp of Jasenovac. I 率 Mirjana Morokvasic is a Researcher, attached to the University of Paris,
France. This appeared in the publication Gender Ethnicity and Political Ideologies. Edited by Nickie Charles and Helen Hintjens
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also listened to stories about women who were executed and other women who were at starving prisoners, looked after the children of other women who were at the front, hid the partisans, and so on. It was as if self-evidently, naturally, women did what they thought had to be done. These female experiences remained in the sphere of the local and personal, there was no attempt (on the part of those who told the stories) to generalise about women resistance fighters as heroes of the revolution.
The vast majority of heroes were men, I learnt later at School, as were the unknown soldier and the important dignitaries of the party. According to the poems we learnt by heart and recited on important dates and commemorative occasions, women were their mothers or sisters. At that time I do not think that I was aware of the strangeness of this gendered perception of history. After all, I was born in a country in which "brotherhood and unity' was one of the most important slogans. It was only some years later that I noticed that Sisters were mentioned only in reference to brothers, and that women I knew about, who, in my opinion, also deserved a place in the history books, were simply not there. Although in my native language homeland' is of feminine gender, men were the ones who spoke and acted in its name as is the case for other nations(Lutz et al. 1995); but ultimately they also acted againstitas I try show in this chapter.
For years I was deeply convinced that war would never happen again in that region. The suffering had been so tremendous, the horrors perpetrated so immense, that it was unimaginable that something similar could ever happen again. There is no revolution, no ideal in the world, that is worth spilling blood for again asserted an old partisan friend of mine. And yet, at the age of 18, full of hopes and ideals, she had joined the resistance. I believed her; from now on we would be immune to war, thought I.
I was wrong. Yugoslavia became a theatre of atrocities unseen in Europe since the Second World War; millions of refugees, destruction, torture, rape, robbery, of all the east Europeans, Yugoslavs or exYugoslavs are experiencing the most difficult and the most tragic 'transition to democracy'.
36.

We were all taken by surprise and perhaps "that is one of reasons why we could not do much to prevent the war' (Djuric 1995). Indeed, in various analyses of the Yugoslav situation there were several warnings of a possible political impasse after Tito's death (Martinet 1971). In the late 1980s, especially, studies focussed on the dangers of transition and the improbability of the Yugoslav state surviving (Glenny 1990; Krulic 1991; Pavlowitch 1988 Rupnik 1988, to mention just a few). These warnings came when the Yugoslav drama was already in preparation, but the country itself was not yet the focus of media attention and there was little international awareness of the situation. Other warnings came when it was already too late and they were not taken seriously. Take, for instance, the example of Georgy Konrad's speech in October 1991:
There are in the Eastern part of the Continent many more nations than states, and - should each nations manage to create a state of its own as a realisation of its own as a realisation of its historical dreams - a number of new states could be created. Homogeneous nation states would nevertheless not be created by such a multiplication of states, not to mention all the frontier conflicts that this would engender, because minorities would still exist. Since there would be no room for them in such states, they would be restless and there would be no peace in this region of the world if the creation of nation a states in the postcommunist era became a dominant political doctrine. A solution must be a multinational, multicultural state which as a federation would be capable of respecting multiple and complicated allegiances of individuals.
What we are witnessing at the end of the twentieth century is the return of nations and its ugliest face can be seen in former Yugoslavia. Here "new democracies' have been constructing political systems based on exclusion and discrimination against 'others', culminating in violence and aggression against them. Others' are members of ethnic groups who are identified as outsiders and those who refuse to identify themselves in national terms (traitors), as well as those with different political opinions, those who are weaker, etc. In these male-dominated and male represented new democracies' (in reality the extreme nationalist regimes) women are the largest social group to be discriminated against and excluded from decision-making processes and from representative bodies.
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How has it all been possible? Media coverage of the drama has been unprecedented. Since the beginning of the conflict in the early 1990s numerous studies have tried to shed some light on what has happened and why. While a few have succeeded in making sense of the extremely complex situation, shedding light on the multifaceted dynamics which led to war (Woodward 1995, among others), many have muddied the waters, contributing to the confusion created by the simplistic interpretations promoted by the media and attributing the conflict to 'ethnic hatred historical incompatibilities', 'one sided aggression', the dream of "great Serbia", and so on. This chapter is a modest contribution towards answering this question. But, given the complexity of the situation it can shed light only on Some aspects. It is limited to a discussion of internal factors and is in line with a trend in the literature which explains what has happened to Yugoslav as an outcome of the internal contradictions of the system, that is, as a followup of the previous system and not as a break with it.
Contrary to the widespread assumption that this is an inter-ethnic conflict, based on historical and traditional antagonisms, it can be shown that the war was ideologically prepared, provoked and carried out by the male power elites (some only changed their shirts). These elites are the product of a rushed and badly managed process of socialist urbanisation. They are incompetent, patriarchal rulers who have grasped hold of nationalism in order to remain in power. Only in contrast to their communist predecessors who were acting in the name of History and towards a better future for everybody' (at least they were universal in their rhetoric), the present ones are acting in the name of the interests of their nation, its salvation and purity - which, they believe, can be achieved only by a total dissociation from the Other, by destroying every reminder of a common past (i.e. 'impurity') and by physical elimination in order to achieve 'ethnically pure' nation-states.
Hence the 'urbicidal aspect of the war, destruction of the cities as places of mixing and of centuries-old civilisation, places of openness and of tolerance, destruction of bridges as witnesses of historical exchange and physical bonds between groups presently at war and which the warring elites try to present as historically, traditionally enemies. Hence also the treatment of women by the nationalists, as by definition more open towards the Other (Ivekvic 1993) and therefore
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more vulnerable, as guardians of purity but also more likely to endanger the project of ethnic purity; women are to be either excessively protected or violated - depending on whether they are perceived as 'ours' or Theirs' (Lutz et al. 1995; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; ).
The status that nationalists assign to women of their own group represents a formidable regression in comparison to their previous status of formal equality in socialism. As for Women of the 'other' group they are, as in all wars, seen as victory trophies, objects of gratification for the warrior. Many women, especially those who have themselves been victims of violence, are instrumentalised and may adopt the nationalist cause of their own group. A relatively small number of others resist and struggle for a universal good, peace.
The argument of this chapter is that both in the case of the disintegration of the country and as far as the position of women is concerned, there has been a continuity and not a break with the socialist past. I am arguing that both nationalism and patriarchal sexist ideology have been a constant in the history of Yugoslavia, and that socialism, in spite of its official discourses concerning the national question and the position of women, did not bring about a notable and lasting change. Under the polished surface of education, law, women's equality, the right to work, to participate politically or have free access to abortion, there was rigid system which maintained itself within the communist framework. The position of women has deteriorated even more since the so-called transition to 'new democracies'. And finally, one can argue that the disastrous effects of the war on women are an extension of the way in which socialism had 'solved the national and the women's question: they reach a paroxysm in sexual violence against women in the name of the nation.
Nationalism and sexism are deeply interwoven, one nourishing the other and relying on the other. One could say that Yugoslav women have always experienced contradictions. In the socialist system it was between, on the one hand, the official discourse of women's equality and, on the other, women's own reality in which patriarchal values prevailed. In the present nationalist 'new democracies' there is a contradiction between the symbolic importance of woman' for the nation, the official discourse which puts women on a pedestal", and
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their marginalisation, exclusion from the political scene and increased violence against them.
FROM SOCIALIST TO ETHNIC DEMOCRACY': NATIONALISMAS A TOOL IN THE HANDS OF THE POWER ELITES
The war was nota consequence of historical hatred but was necessary in order to create conditions under which the people, transformed into members of different entities' or ethnic collectives, will themselves say: We cannot live together any longer'. The nationalist propaganda which preceded and prepared the way for war found fertile ground, prepared by the way the socialist system had treated and solved the 'nationality question'. Socialism needed the pre-socialist history of ethnic hatred to glorify its victorious present, in order to create and sustain the socialist history of brotherhood and unity'. (Zarkov 1995: 109).
A number of analysts locate the beginnings of this process of dislocation, which accelerated in the late 1980s in the 1960s and, particularly, the 1970s when there were visible signs of rising nationalism: it had however been a significant force throughout the socialist period, both as discourse and as political practice. The political use of nationalism by the ruling power elites of the former Yugoslav republics induced a process of economic and political disintegration (Goati 1996). Scierup (1991) was among the first to analyse the general 'ethnification' of political processes in former Yugoslavia as a characteristic product of the socialist state system rather than as a perpetuation of past ethnic conflicts. The country was a victim of two contradictory trends: a trend towards economic integration, a unified Yugoslav market necessary for successful integration into the international economy, on the one hand, and a trend towards political and economic fragmentation (decentralisation in the local language), on the other. The latter centripetal forces were gradually destroying the bonds that kept Yugoslavia together while keeping the national communist power elites intact. In this permanent competition between decomposition and recomposition, it was the former that won.
The system of self-management which was the model for internal
policy served as a source of fragmentation. It did not undermine the state bureaucracy by giving more decision-making power to the workers
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(as in its rhetoric), but on the contrary, amplified the power of local oligarchies where political megalomania was coupled with a narrowness of economic vision (Scierup 1991). This tendency towards particularisation in the economy and the transfer of the economic functions of the federal state to the constitutive republics began after 1968 and received its legitimisation in the Constitution of 1974. From then on, the state apparatuses of the republics, with their ethnonationalities and loyalties, became the vehicle for centralising political power which was no longer at the federal level. The Communist Party had independent national organisations in each republic and in the autonomous regions. And because the national communist power elites were no longer, in their terminology, defending the class interests of the working people but the national interests of all of US (i.e. everybody of the same nation), their power was more absolute in character(it was easier to identify with the 'mother Nation' than with the working class).
The national economies of the republics tended to be more and more dependent on foreign capital, know-how and technology, but were increasingly isolated from each other. The most dynamic process throughout the seventies and the eighties was that of closing up." In the mid 1970s only about 3 per cent of all enterprises extended beyond the borders of a single republic and, in the mid-1980s, the figure had dropped to 2 percent. Inter republic trade did not exceed 25 per cent of the total while 99 percent of investments came from within the republics. (Djuric 1995:125).
In the Constitution of 1974 the republics were declared to be responsible for their own economic development and for the economic development of the federal state, so that the latter was stripped not only of responsibility but also of any opportunity to influence the economic development of its constitutive republics. The perogatives of the federal state were thus paralysed. In practice this meant the establishment of nation-states at the level of republics long before there could be any question of their secession. The ruling sub-elites (at the republican level) disregarded the interests of the state as a whole. The Yugoslav Federation was left without its most important functions and gradually became a complex and ungovernable state whose efficiency diminished (Madzar 1994).
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Despite its rhetoric of brotherhood and unity', Yugoslavia was virtually a state without Yugoslavs (Mrdjen 1996). Exclusive forms of belonging to one of the constitutive nations were either openly encouraged or at least considered as normal and natural. This can be seen in the way Population Census categories were manipulated: all the options within the 'nationality category' were exclusive of one another, that is, one could not be at the same time Yugoslav and Serb, Yugoslav and Croat, etc., but had to choose one of the other. This means that a supranational category Yugoslav', representing citizenship, was put on the same level as categories of nationality and, by definition, in opposition to them. Consequently the category Yugoslav was never chosen by more than 5 per cent of the population. Another example is the transformation of a religious identification as 'muslim' into a nationality category Muslim' in 1971. This had a double effect: it reduced the number of Yugoslavs(those muslims previously choosing the category Yugoslav now turned to the category Muslim) it also established a close link between religious and national identity - if a Muslim could not be anything else but a Muslim (not a Croat or a Serb or a Macedonian), then, as Zarkov perceptively points out, by implication a Serb could not be anything but orthodox, and a Croat could only be catholic (1995:107). In the present post-communist, post-Yugoslav states these exclusive forms of belonging to one's nations have been developed to an extreme. For example, though unconstitutional, questions relating to religion, blood and ancestry are often decisive in the attribution of citizenship.
The importance of blood' and 'soil' has not changed since communism, nor have the ways in which they are constructed. In the case of so-called mixed marriages for instance,
What has changed are the values ascribed to these mixtures. In socialism they were praised as victorious results of "brotherhood and unity' while in nationalism they are condemned ad treason' to the purity of specific nations. In both cases however, it is "purity that is normalised and constructed as natural. (Zarkov 1995: 110)
Ironically, a completely opposite manipulation of nationalism and national identity has in Yugoslav history served the same purpose: after the Second World War the communists, because they were the only force which could erase national antagonisms and, with their brotherhood
42

and unity' ideology, unite the population of Yugoslavia across national lines, gained power. Gradually, however, they started building on these very antagonisms in order to remain in power. Although there were earlier outbursts of nationalist rhetoric, the first real break with brotherhood and unity' came from Milosevic and the manner in which he exploited the situation of the Serbian minority in Kosovo.
In the late 1980s the novelty was that everywhere the nationalist power elites sought the support of the masses: their strategy Succeeded in transforming their own antagonisms into inter-ethnic hostilities which ultimately led to war. One has to remember that the military conflict was preceded by a media war (Pejic 1993): for several years the population had been exposed to the systematic broadcasting of news and reports which were a direct invitation to hate and to kill the Other. This media propaganda was needed to destroy the important legacy of forty-five years of peaceful coexistence. There was one television station in each republic of former Yugoslavia. Each was founded by the Community Party which wanted to establish complete control over the media. Consequently the media, especially television, began to broadcast programmes on 'our interest, they then stopped representing 'other's interests; and ultimately they established a closed news market and of course a closed society (Pejic 1993).
The war was, however, still not an inevitable outcome of this process. Rather - if we consider the internal factors alone - it was ultimately the result of a series of unilateral and hostile initiatives on the part of political elites. Goati(1996) enumerates a number of these decisions which were taken in Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia in a period of less than two years. The conflict among the republican elites polarised, first on the issue of the political system (decentralised-pluralistic versus centralisedmonistic) and second, on the issue of the future of the Yugoslav state (federation versus confederation). With the help of the media, the advocates of these opposing tendencies Systematically emphasised the threat posed by the Other and the external enemy served as an instrument for internal homogenisation. Hostile feelings developed into hostile actions. Thus the fracture of republican elites had been transformed into an inter-ethnic conflict with the focus on issues of 'identity' and of
national survival'.
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These elites in conflict agreed on one important matter: they were against having the first free elections on the level of the federation. Thus the population was not given a chance to demonstrate its opinion about a further state project in truly democratic free elections on the federal level, before it got completely intoxicated by the merciless nationalistic propaganda: no formation of a transnational Yugoslav party was allowed and in the first free elections, which took place in 1990 in each republic separately, the nationalist parties had a sweeping victory. The terrain was also favourable to nationalists because of the disastrous economic situation, existential insecurity and the drastic fall in the level of living of the population.
Later, as the war started, the only way the population could show its disagreement with the politics of violent disintegration of the country was through massive demonstrations for peace, in particular in BosniaHerzegovina, and through massive desertions from the federal and other armies, Hundreds of thousands, mostly young and highly educated people, 'voted with their feet': they left the country before large-scale conflict took over (Morokvasic 1996). None of the new states has so far declared an amnesty for these young people which would guarantee them a safe return.
During this at first gradual and then rapid ethnification of society, of the emergence of policies of exclusion of the Other and closure, there has been a simultaneous process of silencing women and their disappearance from the public scene, as the next section will show.
WOMEN AS LOSERS: FROM INSTITUSIONALISED EQUALITY TO MOTHERS OF THE NATION'
The brothers' project for sisters' emancipation
There is something paradoxical about the status of women in postcommunist societies, including the post-Yugoslav 'new democracies': while they promise improvement for the population in general, the status of women deteriorates as far as employment rights and the possibilities of employment are concerned. The argument of this section is that the position of women in socialist Yugoslavia was not as good as it seemed and that it has deteriorated even further in the new ethnic democracies.
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The socialist system did indeed proclaim equality between men and women, it opened up possibilities for political participation, gave women the right to employment, to abortion and so on, but at the same time it left gender relations practically intact, maintaining and reproducing the patriarchal system. The foundation of the socialist egalitarian project was women's massive participation in the war of national liberation from 1941 to 1945; 100,000 were active as partisans and almost as many were either killed or wounded. The anti-fascist Front of Women (AFZ) brought together some 2 million women. They acted primarily as a support for male-dominated resistance groups (Sklevicky 1984); the AFZ was created by the Communist Party, the party co-ordinated and steered all its activities until it decided to abolish it as early as 1950. (It was the first of the 1941-5 institutions to be abolished). Nevertheless the massive participation of women in the war and in the AFZ left an important legacy: it became a source of spontaneous emancipation of women from the traditional patriarchal system of subordination in the family. Women experienced their country's liberation as their own (Milic 1993). The socialist rhetoric in which the 'emancipation of women' had an important place, at least suggested possibilities - though these possibilities were beyond the reach of the majority of women. The result was formal, institutionalised gender equality: civil, political and social rights were experienced by women not as something granted to them but as achieved and deserved. However, in spite of the changes that has occurred in life outside the family (i.e. for 'women at work) there were hardly any changes within the family itself. Women remained subordinated and discriminated against and in practice were stuck with the well-known double burden (Morokvasic 1984). Their reaction was a gradual withdrawal from public life and a return to the family and home. This, along with the disappearance of women from the political sphere of influence, provided fertile ground for nationalist ideologies to develop: women became symbols of nationalist politics and at the same time ever more numerous victims of war and everyday violence (Djuric 1995: 122).
The socialist project for women's emancipation, one has to recall, was implemented in an extremely heterogeneous country where the status of women mirrored the stage of development and also varied enormously depending on whether women came from urban or rural backgrounds. Socialism not only concentrated on women who were
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activities in the labour force (i.e. a minority) but also did not question or require the transformation of gender relations. So women, in spite of having de jure equality, could not achieve de facto equality because of traditional gender relations both in the family and in Society at large. Roughly two-thirds of the female population of Yugoslavia lived in circumstances which were not active in the labour force' but were 'dependents'; and the more underdeveloped the region the higher the rate of female dependency: over 90 per cent in Kosovo, 69 per cent in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and between 58 and 50 per cent in the more developed regions of the country (Djuric 1995: 128).
Formal equality was proclaimed in education as well. There was indeed an advance in the educational achievement of women during the socialist period: the illiteracy rate went down and the level of education improved. Despite this, however, men and women were affected differentially so, as far as the literacy rate is concerned, the gap between them increased. Likewise, improvements in educational level did not eradicate discrimination against women in employment and their concentration in the typically female sectors, neither did it help them get better-paid and more interesting jobs (Kavcic 1990). Besides, although women represented only one third of the work-force, they were more than half of the unemployed. Moreover, it was the less-educated and less-skilled women who tended to find jobs more easily and it was gender rather than ethnicity that was the major determinant of woman's position in the labour market throughout the republics of former Yugoslavia (Blagojevic 1991). To sum up: not only was the socialist project of women's emancipation likely to affect only a minority of women (those who were not 'dependents' and who were in the more developed parts of the country), but even the otherwise notable improvements in the sphere of Schooling and education neither eradicated discrimination nor facilitated women's access to the labour market.
Exclusion from the political scene in the new democracies'
In the 'new democracies women find themselves more and more excluded, even from those spheres which they previously occupied in the socialist state' (Djuric 1995: 132). On the one hand, the worsening has occurred because of the overall economic disaster and, on the other, assumptions about the proper role of women (never seriously questioned
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under socialism) have contributed to this exclusion, finding ligitimisation in nationalist ideology. The political representation of women in the Federal Parliament before disintegration was 55 percent compared with 2 per cent in the assemblies of the republics. Their representation in the new pot-Yugoslav states is about the same’.
One can therefore say that the election results were distorted in the first multiparty elections which were experienced by women as chaotic. The programmes presented did not include those issues that would attract them. Most party leaders presented an extremely aggressive, masculine image. It is typically an aggressive and violent masculinity that was launched as the universal masculinity. Those men who opposed war and violence were not men'. This significantly reduced women's participation and contributed to their orientation towards the parties they knew; this benefited those who already had power and needed only elections to legitimise it.
Women in Nationalist discourse
Women often embody the nation, they are bearers of its honour. and love. In nationalist discourse woman is either the mother of the nation or the sex object. She is either a protector and regenerator of the collective or a possession of that collective. These symbolic images have been used by the media, in particular in the preparatory stages of the war, thus getting the nation ready to face the enemy. As a matter of fact the 'enemy' to be constructed; having been a part of US, as our neighbour, cousin, friend, it had to be turned into THEM'. One of the most famous media images was that of a young women with a gun over her shoulder, marching through the fields with one child in her arms and two others by her side. Another one was the image of a nun also with a gun in her hands, which accompanied the story of nuns attacked and raped in the Serb monasteries in Kosovo. These images conveyed a clear message; these women were ready to defend their 'own identity' by means of violence. Only their 'own identity' by means of violence. Only, their, 'own identity' was not the individual self, but a superior collective: family, nation, church (even Christianity against Islam). This even implies sacrificing the individual self for the higher cause of the collective. Raped women were also directly exploited as a symbolic image of the threat that mixing represents for a nation (Meznaric 1994). As we
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shall see in the next section, in nationalist discourse rapes are condemned only in so far as they are committed by men of the other group. Thus images of women under threator violated serve to homogenise the nation and to define its boundaries in relation to others. This reaches a paroxysm
War.
Even when women are not directly present in the images of a nation, nationalist discourse is implicitly addressed to them. In the nationalist construction of the image of the Serbian nation for instance, the Others are Albanians who have too many children'. Whether explicitly or implicitly, this concerns non-Albanian (Serbian or Macedonina) women too: they are those who do not have enough children' - so the Serbian (or Macedonian) nation is 'threatened with extinction'. All the post-Yugoslav post-communist nationalists expected women to accomplish their 'duty' towards the nation and bear more children. Their constitutions protect women as 'mothers' and address them as guardians of ethnic purity - allegedly the basis for the existence and maintenance of the group. That is why their sexuality has to be controlled. Well-known demographers started calculating the number of years it would take for the Serbian nation to disappear if the birth rates did not increase, poets were producing verses in praise of the fertility of women of their nation, legislators came up with draft bills which threatened the reproductive rights acquired by women (namely the right to abortion). These draft bills were discriminatory and exclusionary: for example taxing childless couples and depriving those with three and more children of social assistance. In Croatia the streetcars carried posters: each unborn baby is an unborn Croat', whereas after a political meeting brother Croats were urged to; "go home and make a new Croat' (see Bryson). This was all echoed and amplified by the media. It is only thanks to the vigorous reaction of independent feminists that the adoption of these retrograde bills was prevented (Djuric 1995; Milic 1993). Nevertheless, in spite of the absence of anti-abortion laws, it is much more difficult for women to obtain abortions in new democratic Croatia than it was in the previous socialist Croatia.
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WOMEN IN WAR WOMEN AGAINST WAR
A war always becomes a war against women and the Yugoslav war is "an extreme male war, as Helke Sander (1992)said. Women can fully claim that this is not their war - they were already virtually absent from the political scene when the nationalists took over and have since been even more marginalised by them. The nation has taken over without having asked us women'. Says the Belgrade feminist Zarana Papic (1993).
With the militarisation of the conflict, women clearly emerged in their vast majority as victims, either indirectly as victims of everyday violence, economic disaster and political chaos in the states at war or as direct victims of the warring parties, killed, raped, forced into prostitution, as refugees and displaced persons. A minority of women is active either in supporting the war - fighters and nationalist supporters, or in opposing it - peace activists and 'mothers against the war'.
Everyday violence and humiliation
In war the majority of the population is transformed into victims and most of them are women. Violence against women has increased everywhere. They also face male violence where the bombs and grenades seem remote. The "SOS line for women and children victims of violence' from Belgrade registered more calls from battered women than ever before; the use of guns and other weapons among the civilian population in general and in cases of violence against women has dramatically increased."
But most women have to cope with ordinary life, trying to turn it into the 'normal' given the circumstances. Whereas in a queue in Sarajevo one risks one's life, elsewhere there is daily humiliation coupled with the risk of facing uncontrolled violence. Here is a quote from a letter from Sarajevo in 1993:
You would not recognise the city, half destroyed with grenades trees
in parks cut down for heating, we are living, or rather, surviving, hungry. We live on humanitarian aid which we get every 21 days: a
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little oil which we use for light instead of electricity which we have not has since October, we do not have water, we have to walk two to three kilometres to get it. We do not know if we will come back wounded or will be shot dead on the way. We also get a little flour, a little sugar, Sometimes milk powder and once in a while a tin of corned beef. Someone with Deutschmarks can even buy something; a kilo of beans costs 25 DMa kilo, one kg onions is 15 DM, one candles is 2 DM. I have not seen vegetables and fruit for months. My pension in BH bonds is enough to get a kilo or bread or a roll of toilet paper.... If one does not get privately a parcel from Croatia or Serbia, one can die. But all this is not so horrible when a life is at stake; please do something for my son. If he at least could leave this hell.
The woman who wrote this letter is now a displaced person somewhere in Europe, so is her son.
About the same time my 81 -year-old mother wrote from Belgrade, the capital of the country which, according to its official propaganda, had nothing to do with the war, but which in fact had most responsibility for it.
If one does not get up at four o'clock in the morning and queue for bread, one does not get any. It is the same with milk, I have not had fresh milk for the past six months. The same with meat, I do no remember when I had it last... one day I Saw a piece of meat at the butchers and I thought I could buy a bit for your aunt and me. The piece was already Sold. My pension is enough to buy several kilos of potatoes at the market or several packages of soup, should something happen to me, I would not even be taken to the hospital, they do not have medicine, not even for the younger ones.
Like millions of other citizens of former Yugoslavia she has been robbed by the state banks of her hard currency savings.' That is the unbearable thought for many who can still hardly grasp what has happened to them, let alone those who have been displaced by force, lost their children or friends in war: "It is with our money that they are financing their war!'
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Refugees and displaced persons
This war has displaced several million people; many have lost members of their families or have been forcefully separated from them for many years or for ever (Morokvasic 1992). Most of those who left the country did so before 1993, before the governments of the states of destination introduced measures - in particular visa requirements - to stop further arrivals. They are in general a young, urban population, with a high educational and professional profile. Women represent less than half of the refugees currently dispersed abroad, mostly in different countries in Europe (the majority in Germany), but also North America. Australia and New Zealand. Some of these people will remain, particularly in those countries which offer them more than a 'temporary protection' status. The majority will have to return to their countries of origin where the recent, theoretically peaceful conditions should allow it. Repatriations from Germany, where temporary protection status was abolished in 1996, are already under way and most voluntary returns' are scheduled for 1997.
Among the internally displaced persons women and children represent over 80 per cent. They have usually lost everything and are separated from closer members of their family. Even if they have not been victims of physical violence they have experienced situations of fear, witnessed executions and carry the psychological scars, There is little prospect of return to their home regions: the September 1996 elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina were a testing ground and have shown that only a small number of voters dared return to vote in their former place of residence (14,000 out of over 100,000 expected).
The displacement of the population is not only a consequence of the conflict and tensions, but also a strategy of the warring parties and their ultimate aim in this war over territories and boundaries. From the very beginning individual suffering of all kinds had been used and manipulated for the purpose of constructing new national histories. Journalists in the service of the new power elites, politicians, filmmakers novel writers and also some Social Scientists, used refugee narratives/ testimonies to form the image of their own nation as victim or used them in the service of a nation they considered to be the victim (or against the aggressor) In such productions the individual disappears and is
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replaced by the collective. There are a few texts which reflect critically on this strategy (Bausinger 1996; Greverus 1996; Korac 1996; Mcneill and Coulson 1994; Nikolic-Ristanovic et al. 1995, o mention only those relating to the Yugoslav drama).
Women victims of sexual violence
Rapes have always been part of the male war strategy. It would have been a miracle had the present conflict in the Balkans gone without this ghastly practice. It is a generalised war crime which has so far remained unpunished. In spite of the complete dossier and testimonies prepared after the Second World War for the Nuremberg Tribunal, war criminals were mot condemned for rape (Sander 1992; Freitag 23 November 1993). Korean women have spoken up about the rapes committed by Japanese soldiers only half a century later.'
Dominating, humiliating, conquering and destroying the Other is being done via women. The hatred and the violence are crystallised in rape, it becomes the instrument of war, the weapon of the conqueror over the conquered. Women are the gift of the warrior and his trophy, the proof of his victory over enemy males (i.e. the enemy group represented by males). That is why rapes in war usually have the following features; women are raped in public, or in front of their husbands, brothers, fathers, soldiers rape collectively, they have to have witnesses; it is also an initiation rite for those who are considered weak(i.e. not male' enough in war terminology) and finally, women are often killed at the end. 'I was the twentieth, all I remember was that she was dirty, full of sperm and the I killed her'."
It took almost a year of war before the stories about raped women filtered into the media. Independent Zagreb feminists were the first to launch an appealin spring 1992, but they were not taken seriously because they did not have a 'clear national approach'. It was only when the nationalists of the warring parties grasped the propaganda value of women's suffering that rape stories spread all over the media, both local and international. Raped Bosnian women, possibly pregnant and speaking English, were in great demand, a Zagreb feminist noted.’ For a certain time Croat nationalists exhibited Muslim women as the prime victims of Serbian aggression, but stopped doing So when the
52

hostilities between Croats and Muslims in Bosnia intensified because it became politically counterproductive. The stories of raped women kept in custody until they could no longer abort spread simultaneously in Croatia and in Serbia and were quasi-identical: the "Others' raped 'Our women, they want to spoil 'Our Nation'.
Almost all international observers pointed to the rape of women as a means of intimidation of the whole group, that is, it was implicitly or explicitly politically motivated (Amnesty International 1993; Helsinki Watch 1993; Jones 1994). Their information not only points to the systematic use of rape by Serbian forces, but also stresses that rape is used by all sides. In the international media, however, journalists obviously overwhelmed by the complexity of the conflict, grasped the once-in-a-lifetime chance of an ideal news story and tried to simplify it as a conflict of the baddies against the goodies. Their instrumentalisation of rapes, and the division of rape victims according to their nationality into goodies and baddies, clearly had other purposes and outcomes than denouncing rape as a crime against women and as a gendered political strategy in war: on the one hand, it demonised the Other, their barbarian rapist, the perfect aggressor' (the Others, the rapists are always Serbs and the victims invariably Muslim and to a lesser extent Croat women), on the other, it aimed to destroy the transnational solidarity of women, who are less inclined than men to identify with the Nation only and its conquests.'
Thus in the media accounts, the rapes of Muslim women in Bosnia are 'unprecedented' because of the political purpose behind this practice, "a systematic attempt to cleanse territories in order to establish Greater Serbia'.' Journalists or ad hoc women activists constructed their victims to fit this general political strategy of the Serbs (since the Serbs are only aggressors, the Serb victims are hardly ever mentioned). They let the victims in their narratives set the priorities and point to the real issues:
They the raped women) did not want in any way to let rape overshadow the real problem which is the extermination and execution of thousands and thousands of men and women.
(added emphasis)?
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When quoted and re-quoted in respectable journals, by allegedly respectable social scientists, or when published in book form (Jones 1994; Nahum-Grappe 1996; Stiglmayer 1993, etc.) this information, collected in "a questionable way and launched by the media, gains respectability and a legitimacy for the construction of historical truth".
It is as if the rape of women as the usual war practice of men was not worthy of attention unless it was presented as a crime against a nation. Rape could be condemned only from a nationalist perspective. This is most clearly formulated by the US feminist and law professor Catherine Mackinnon (1994) for whom rape is an attack on human rights only when it is associated with genocide. She, among others, gave a certain legitimacy to the figure of 50,000 to 60,000 raped women, which although an underestimation (Nahoum-Grappe 1996), was widely circulated and is used even today; this is despite these figures having little basis in independent fact-finding (Neier 1993). Since it was apparently the first time in history that world-wide attention was focussed on sexual violence against women in war while it was happening (and not decades after), the present case was important as a 'cas de jurisprudence’*
In this kind of argument women as individuals cease to exist. The value of their suffering is measured by the value of the suffering of their nation - they are good victims only as long as their nation can de demonstrated to be a good victim. The fact that women unwillingly speak of their atrocious experiences, preferring to stay silent about them or at least, if they speak, to preserve anonymity (Nikolic - Ristanovic et al. 1995) should at least make social scientists curious about those women who do talk and about the nature of their testimonies in front of the TV cameras. There is no evidence of such an awareness on the part of any of the great promoters of the uniqueness of therapes in the Balken war Nahoum —Grappe 1996; Mackinnon 1994; Stiglmayer 1993). Ironically, rape becomes a political concern only when it ceases to be a crime against women and becomes exclusively a crime against the group to which a woman is assumed to belong (Zarkov 1995:114). It is useful to refer to Ina-Maria Greverus's perceptive analysis of the use of testimonies and of professionalising the victims:
54

Their refugees' stories, especially if they are stories of suffering, are being made into history. Native writers and ethnologists, national politicians and international critics and NGOs of every creed and kind are constructing the 'objective' written history of events out of the individual fates of "lost lives'..... Out of their lost lives they are being raised into the witness stand, to testify for - or against - national history. But as witness, person is only visible and audible in the witness stand, his individual testimony is being collected into a general one, his identity, his being is dissolved into collective identities. After the testimony he is invisible again or becomes captive of his own statement, turns into a monument of ideological fixations of the political and intellectual elites with ideological claim to leadership.
(Greverus 1996:281)
Because gender relations cross-cut other social and political relations and gender identities are constitutive elements of other identities, a war rape cannot be considered simply as a crime of men against women, but also not only as a crime against the state, nation, community. As a specific form of sexual violence against women it is also a specific gendered political strategy (Zarkov 1995: 115). Turning rape exclusively into a crime against an ethnic community obscures the fact that women are raped because they are both the 'female Other'. In a war situation, however, they are primarily assaulted as women, their ethnic otherness can be constructed or deconstructed. This means that women of the enemy are the prime targets, but if the women of the enemy are not available, any other will do. So one soldier said that he would get DM 100 for each bus-load of women he could bring to his fellow soldiers. When women they wanted were not available, Ibrought others." Whether or how his order-givers later checked women's nationality he did not know - for him it was important to gets load of women in order to get his money. This belongs too to the spectrum of the political use of rape in war (the aim being intimidation of the civil population) but tends to be forgotten by those who are scandalised by war rapes only when they are linked to genocide or when they are committed by an absolute aggressor on a perfect victim.
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This issue of rape was focused on by the media for a relatively short period of time in 1992-3. It stopped being an issue while the war was still raging and women were no less and probably more raped. The question is whether rape will suffer the same fate before the Inter-national Tribunal in The Hague as it did in the Nuremberg Trails. It seems impossible to prosecute the perpetrators: the International War Tribunal in The Hague needs proof of an explicit order on the part of a military commander that his forces should rape. Otherwise, rape is considered an arbitrary act and the sole responsibility of a single soldier. It is in those terms that some asylum claimants from Bosina were rejected in 1993: "Rape and fear of war are not sufficient reasons for asylum, rape being a normal criminal act and not a politically motivated one.' A man rapes a woman - and that is no longer in the jurisdiction of the International Tribunal. In practice these raped women may be considered as victims either of a a banal criminal act' or of 'a normal war act'. When the war really ends, will women again be expected to hide their tragedy, their shame", while as usual monuments will be erected to male heroes and unknown soldiers?
Women adopting the nationalist cause and women fighters
Few women are actually involved in the creation of nationalist policies on practices, but when they are, they do so mostly but not exclusively, in a way which is congruent with their place within a system of patriarchal domination, as mothers of heroes or protectors of their offspring (Djuric 1995). Some women's organizations were not only "in line' with the nationalist political correctness of the moment but also actively engaged in nationalist policies and propaganda.
Women fighters embracing the cause of the nation are even smaller in number. With war propaganda being typically based on an aggressive, violent masculinity, women are not usually promoted as a media image-unless the message can show the superiority of the nation over other identifications and allegiances (including family). When it is for the sake of the nation, local nationalist discourse can even build on the remnants of egalitarian ideology: "a woman is the equal of man, she can fight equally, she can love her nation equally', etc. The superiority of the nation and the impossibility of living together was also a constant image in the international media. That kind of message was, for instance,
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promoted in the German weekly Der Spiegel in Summer 1991, at the time when, at least in their official statements, the European states and the USA still supported the integrity of the Yugoslav state.
A photograph showed a young woman holding a machine gun and wearing a uniform of the Croation Militia. She was from a town in the mixed Serbo-Croat area where the hostilities started sporadically in 1991 before degenerating into an open conflict. The woman declared to the reporter that 'she would not hesitate killing her ex-husband if it were necessary. He is, namely, fighting on the 'other side. The couple (in that area there was a very high rate of inter-ethnic marriage) "had a child and used to live happily. But nevertheless the woman is reported to have said, "he left me because he could no longer be married to a Croat. If one day we run into each other, I will kill him, otherwise, I know he vill kill me“.
It is irrelevant whether the story is true or not: what is important is that this kind of testimony is perceived as true, the woman has a name, she is pretty, blonde and carries an important message: 'we cannot live together any more, we are prepared to kill each other for a higher cause, the Nation'. The pattern is the same as on the other images of women with guns mentioned above which were used in Yugoslavia during the preparatory stages of the above war: the individual is prepared to renounce her or his personal autonomy and happiness for the sake of a higher cause and is ready to use violent means to achieve it. Stories like this one, whether true or not, contributed to building distrust and constructing hatred in the population which was then more ready to accept war and violent 'solutions to existing tensions which originally did not necessarily have an ethnic component. When a neighbour, friend and even wife or husband is ready to kill, what can one expect from a more distant 'Other'? And once the atmosphere of fear and distrust is established, a neighbour or friend can even show readiness to help and make peace, but can no longer be trusted. Hardly any newspaper, local or international, was prepared to bring stories of love, tolerance and solidarity if they were taking place across those borders that the nationalist leaders and their followers were determined to draw for ever, even by means of terrible bloodshed.
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Nevertheless, it is a fact that in this war as in other wars women show incomparably less violent behaviour than men and manifest a desire to help and understand the other side (Ivekovi 1993:192). Women whom Italked to seldom expressed hatred or hostility towards the Other, whether they participated actively in military actions or were among the numerous victims of the war (or both at the same time). Most did not go to fight of their free will, nor did they fight for life", but for sheer economic survival.
When the war started, we had just come back from Slovenia, built a house, nicely settled down and thought we had saved enough for a decent living. We thought that we would not have to go and work Somewhere else again. This is all gone now, Says L., a woman in her thirties, from the Tuzla region. She looks back to the outcomes of the recent war and peace for herself and her family: We were all in the war, my husband, my two teenage daughters and myself.' Why? Which Army? She says she does not really know what the war was about, why she took part in it except that We all had to survive' and the army she joined provided for that - while the war lasted. We went there where the conditions were the best, she says "Now we have to look for work outside of Bosnia again as guest workers, as before; our daughters who were children when the war started, married in the war. One is already a widow, alone with their child... Her husband was killed only a few months after their marriage.'
Peace activists
The first genuine opposition to the war came from the mothers of soldiers drafted into the Yugoslav Federal Army, who happened to be stationed in Slovenia and were sent at the end of June 1991 to protect the borders' of the state. The parents' (mainly mothers) protests against the war took place all over Yugoslavia and Soon gave birth to peace movements. Helke Sander (1992) noted that there was a real potential for opposition to the war. Yet in the first spontaneous actions mothers appeared more as protectors of their Sons than opponents of war. The movement was immediately manipulated by the nationalists in power for their own purposes. Broad media coverage was given to those mothers who were against their son's participation in the Federal Army, but who encouraged his "patriotic duty' towards his nation and his
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own people'. On Croatian television one could listen to mothers who were prepared to 'sacrifice their sons for the Nation'. This was also the theme of a number of Songs which were supposed to raise the morale of the troops. In Belgrade mothers with patriotic messages to convey found it easy to enterparliament where the TV cameras were easy and waiting.
Public demonstrations of mothers against the war were also used to create distrust and hostilities between national groups. For instance, in the town of Temerin in Vojvodina where Hungarians and Serbs have been living together for the past few centuries, several dozen women of all nationalities, mothers of Federal Army soldiers sent to fight on Croatian territory, gathered in the autumn of 1991 to express their Solidarity with other mothers protesting in front of the army headquarters in Belgrade. This display of transnational solidarity among mothers was soon destroyed by the arrival of Milosevic's ruling party delegates and some Serb refugees from Croatia, shouting slogans which were hostile to Hungarians, Hungarians should go to Hungary, Serb mothers have suffered enough from them in the Second World War'. The refugees were presented as 'the victims of Croats, who are friends of Hungarians'. Accused of treason and under threat, the Serb mothers then withdrew and only the Hungarian mothers continued their protest the next day.
CONCLUSION
This paper has attempted to approach the violent dis-integration of Yugoslavia from the women's perspective. As an observer of the catastrophe embracing the country which used to be mine and therefore as an indirect participant, I would like to finish this account with a drop of optimism.
As I have already said, we were all taken by surprise. And yet now, after the state has collapsed in a violent outburst, in this relative post-war period, we continue to Search for good reasons for the collapse and discover/analyse all the evil that has germinated over the years in the country that today does not exist any more except with the prefix 'former'. That is also what I have done in this chapter. However, by doing so one tends to minimise or even forget the forces that tried to
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produce something else but lost because they were weaker. And yet in this long and painful process of learning about democracy these forces are likely to play an important role. This initiators of protests against the war and activists in various peace groups are in the majority women. These peace groups are among those rare political groups which, in the context in which pure ethnic entities' have been created on the territory of former Yugoslavia and isolated from one another, still keep in touch and try to communicate. Feminist and autonomous women's groups who are actively opposed to nationalism, sexism and war are numerous, but their activity has so far been located in big urban centres and their political influence is limited (Djuric 1995).
As organisers and co-ordinators of peace groups and anti-war campaigns, women are likely to derive awareness and strength from their resistance to war. Therein lies a hope. Although some have fallen into the nationalist trap, many feminist groups all over former Yugoslavia have kept their networks in spite of the communication blockade. Because they have the moral integrity to declare that this is not their war', they are the ones who can best express the feelings of the silent majority of the population. Beyond women's issues they can raise the common issues and propose global choices to counter the global (but always male) choice of destruction, And as Dubravka Zarkov said, "as long as solidarity exists between women's or other groups across the borders, transnationally, it will be a reminder of other possibilities, even if these are obscured, erased of reinterpreted in nationalist discourses' (Zarkov 1995:116).
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NOTES
In my case it was grandmother, my mother, my aunts and their friends.
From a speech of Gyorgy Konrad (a famous Hungarian writer and human rights defender, president of PEN International) gave in October 1991 in Frankfurt/Main, when receiving the peace prize, in the presence of the German President von Weiszäcker. He received one of the highest peace prizes and applause. But Germany acted precisely in the way Konrad warned against: only two months later it decided to recognise Croatia, independently of its other European partners (i.e. it was not prepared to await the results of the Badinter Commission on Yugoslavia).
Namely, through the scenes around the threatened Serbian minority in Kosovo: raped Serbian women, the forced migration of Serbs, intimidation and discrimination against the Serbian minority by the Albanian majority in power. The 600-year anniversary of the Kosovo battle in June 1989, a commemoration of one of the foundation myths of the Serbian nation, was a blow in the face of the local Albanian minority (but the majority in Kosovo).
Yugoslavia used to be a federal state consisting of six republics: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. Serbia had two autonomous provinces: Vojvodina and Kosovo. The initiatives include: amendments to the constitution of 1974); the economic blockade of Slovenian products by Serbia in 1989; the removal of the autonomy of the regions of Vojvodina and Kosovo in 1989 by the Serbian government; the declaration of sovereignty by the state of Slovenia in 1990; the decallration that Kosovo was a republic by the Albanian delegates to the Kosovo assembly; the proclamation of the Croatian state as the state of the Croatian people in 1990.
The fact that they were not paid for their work (i.e. that they were not officially active) does not imply that they "did not work'.
This was for instance the case in Croatia where seven women and 134 men were elected in 1993 (Freitag 17 1993); six of the women belonged to the party in power. In federal Yugoslavia in the 1992 elections women won less than 3 percent of the seats (Djuric 1995).
From an interview with Sonja Liht, Pacifik 1991.
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10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Drakulic (1993) mentions that in November 1991 doctors in the largest Zagreb hospital were prevented from practising abortions.
While admitting that thereisgender specific victimisation in war, some authors warn that it should not be reduced to the dichotomy female victims and male aggressors (Jones 1994):men are victims too, more often singled out for killing, torture and elimination. Although this occurs to women as well, Jones argues it is not on a gender-specific basis. Quoting Amnesty International (1993) the author argues that the atrocities due to sex assault constitute the central and perhaps the sole case where women have been subjected to specific forms of human rights abuse which they face primarily because of their sex. Some field data tend to confirm that women themselves, in their self-perception as victims of violence in war, tend to restrict violence to sexual violence (Nikolic-Ristanovic et al. 1995).
Antiratni Bilten SOS-a, Belgrade: SOS telefon za zen idecu zrtve nasilja 4, 8 March 1993.
For more information about the strategies the Milosevic government employed to strip the population of their hard currency savings, including superinflation, see the fascinating analysis by Mladjan Dinkic; Ekonomija destrukcije, Belgrade: VIN (this now exists in English, Economy of Destruction).
Ibid
Men are more likely to have the support of their families to flee abroad and are considered more under threat, especially if they are avoiding being drafted. Women are less likely to be granted asylum because, so far no gender-specific grounds for granting political asylum have been officially recognised. Women fleeing persecution are generally put into the category of economic and poverty refugees.
Tageszeitung 9 December 1992.
Borba 1-2 August 1992.
The same demand has been made in other similar situations. Eye
witnessing the convulsions in the Congo in 1961, which was seen in Europe from the angle of the rapes of Belgian nuns, the journalist
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17
18
19
20
21
22
Edward Behr (1978) entitled hisbook Y a-t-il ici quelqu'un qui a ete viole et qui parle anglais?) (Anyone here been raped and speak Englsih?) New York: Viking. Fact finding about rapes and the raped women themselves are ultimately unimportant: it is the message that can easily be spread around the world (in English) and that can capture attention which is important.
At the end of 1992 and beginning of 1993, from the Vancouver Sun to the New York Times, from Tageszeitung, Bild, Frankfurter Allegemeine, to Le Monde, Liberation etc., the rape story was on the front pages until the first Scandals occurred concerning the accuracy of information about the number of rapes, 'estimated' as between 50,000 and 60,000 and the first critical voices were heard after the controversial Zagreb Women's conference on mass rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina on 7 February 1993. On that occasion one of the prominent participants in that well publicised meeting, the president of the Bundestag, Rita Sismuth, visited the Home for raped women' and instead of the expected women found only drunken Croatian soldiers (Erich Rathfelfer in Tageszeitung 8 February 1993).
See interview with Neva Tölle from the Autonomous Women's house in Zagreb (Freitag 23. April 1993).
S. Drakulic, Women hide behind a wall of silence', Nation 1 March 1993, quoted by A. Jones (1994).
In the German press, which I followed most carefully at that time, I found only a couple of articles which stressed that rapes are committed on all sides in war implying that Serbian women were also among the victims (Helga Hirsch in Die Zeit 11 December 1992, Gaby Mizchkowski, TAZ 7 December 1992).
From an interview with woman activist Marsha Jacobs, quoted by A. Jones (1994:119).
See interview with C. Mackinnon in Tageszeitung 5 February 1993. Mass rapes are seen by her as an instrument in the policy of 'genocide by Serbs'. Therefore this is the opportunity to legally recognise the nature of the crime', (i.e. to establish the rape of women in war as part of a crime against humanity. This can be done only by proving the link between genocide and rapes in war. So far this has not been done: mass rapes were not explicitly stated to be part of Nazi was crimes for instance. According to the interpretation of other jurists, however, the
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23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
issue is not to create new legal instruments but to implement those that already exist (H. Fischer in Die zeit 11 December 1992).
Tageszeitung 25 January 1993.
Bedem ljubavi in Zagreb or the Women's Movement for Yugoslavia are examples.
A good example is the Yugoslav comic Kninja, where the main protagonist is a woman named Milica who is presented as an equal fighter.
Der Spiegel 19 July 1991.
See the EU Declaration of Yugoslavia of 13 May 1991 and James Baker's declaration of 21 June 1991 both supporting a 'democratic and united Yugoslavia' (Goati 1996).
The same is true of some surveys of refugees where the narratives basically convey the message 'never together again" (see also Jambresic -kirin and Povrzanovic 1996).
P. Kende and M. Morokvasic (1994): L’Evolution des rapports interethniques entre les Hongrois et leurs voisins dans L'Europe Danubienne, Paris: Datar.
They include, for present Federal Yugoslavia: the Women's Party; Women's Lobby; Women's Parliament; Women and Society; Women in Black; SOS line for women and children victims of violence; women's studies; group for women raped in war; centre for rape victims. In Croatia there are, among others: Zenska Infoteka, Zenski Lobi, centre for women victims of war, women's groups' anti-war campaign.

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genocide', in A. Stiglmayer (ed.) Mass Rape: The War against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.
McNeil, P. and Coulson, M. (1994) Women's Voices: Refugee Lives,
Woonona:The Book People.
Madzar, L. (1994) Suton socijalisticke privrede, Beograd: Institut ekonomskih
nauka.
Martinet, G. (1971) Les Cinq Communismes: russe, yougoslave, chinois, tchèque et
cubain, Paris: Seuil.
Meznaric, S. (1994) "Gender as an ethno-marker: rape, war and identitity
politics in the former Yugoslavia", in V. Moghadam (ed.) Identity Politics and Women, Boulder, CO: Westview.
Milic, A. (1993) Women and nationalism in Yugoslavia", in N. Funk and M.
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Morokvasic, M. (1984) "Being a woman in Yugoslavia: past, present and institutionalized equality', in M. Gadant and A.M. Barret (eds)
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Women of the Mediterranean, London: Zed.
(1992) *La guerre et les réfugiés dans l'ex Yougoslavie, Révue européenne des migrations internationales 8(2):5-25.
(1996) "La mobilité des élites scientifiques de l'autre Europe: exode ou circulation, Revue d'études comparatives est-ouest 27(3): 31 – 73.
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nationalités', Revue d'études comparatives est-ouest 27(3): 103–43.
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Nikolic-Ristanovic, V., Mrvic-Petrovic, Ni, Konstantinovic - Villic, S. and
Stevanovic, I, (1995) Zene, nasilje i rat (Women, Violence and War), Beograd: Midim Print.
Papic, Z.(1993) "Ex-citoyennes dans I’ex-Yougoslavie, in M. Morokvasic (ed.)
Yougoslavie:Logiques del ́exclusion, special issues of Peuples Méditerranéens 61:205-16.
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Redefining an Agenda: The Women's Movement in India
Meera Velayudhan
s in the mid 70s and in the International Women's Decade that
followed (1975-1985), the women's movementin India is today, once again, debating the interlinkages between the position of women and the process of development. The major issues being debated by the women's movement, be it the liberalisation of the economy and the declining sources of livelihood and income for the majority of Indian women, or the level and nature of women's participation in the process of democratisation of decision making and public bodies, from the Panchayat to the Parliament level, or the need for gender just laws for women in India who belong to diverse religious traditions, all invariably lead to a few fundamental questions:
0 What happened to the promises of equality which was built into
the Constitution of free India? 0 What were the goals set and priorities outlined for national
development? 0 What has led to the increasing devaluation and marginalisation
of women? 0 Was it the problem of lack of implementation of programmes
alone or was it something more deeper and intrinsic to the process and plans of development?
Meera Velayudhan is a freelance feminist researcher from Kerala. This paper was presented at a Workshop held on Political Restructuring and Social Transformation: Feminist Perspectives from South Asia, organised by DAWN in Bangalore in August 1998.
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These questions were posed in the mid 70s when the findings of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) set up by the Government f India, highlighted the declining position of women, particularly since independence. This decline was manifested in the trends of:
0 Excessive mortality among women and female children 0 Disparity between men and women among the poorer sections in
access to health care and medical services. 0 Continuous decline in the sex ratio of the proportion of women to
men in the population 0 An increasing gap between men and women in literacy, education
and training for employment
• An accelerated decline in women's employment since 1951 0 Increasing number of women forced into prostitution owing to
poverty 0 Growing trend of trafficking in women and commodification of
WOne.
The crisis and Women's Struggles
While the significance of these startling findings was somewhat weakened in the context of the political emergency, it was not totally lost owing to the struggles among broad sections of women in India in the 1970s and the revival, for the first time since independence, of the national debate on women. Women participated in large numbers, in the 1960-70s, in agrarian struggles for land and food, in working class agitations for higher wages, in the anti-price rise movements, against violence inflicted on women such as rape, dowry, sexual harassment and in the struggles for civil liberties. These struggles touched many parts of India, in particular, Kerala, Tamilnadu, Andhra in the south, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa in the west: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi in the north, West Bengal Tripura, Assam in the east. These struggles took place within the context of the crisis-both economic and political-towards which India was moving.
Development planning since independence had led to the poor
becoming poorer, price rise and wide-spread unemployment. The crisis of the 70s was reflected in the trends of heavier tax burdens, growth of
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external debt and an increasing expenditure on sectors such as military, police and the bureaucracy. The economy of the country was also characterised by its uneven regional development. That women's low economic condition and social position made them more vulnerable to the crisis became evident from the dismal demographic indicators pointed out by the CSWI Report itself. The development process had not only led to the declining position of the large number of rural and other working women but also to the growth of social attitudes and values, which according to the CSWI Report, represented a "regression from the norms developed during the freedom movement".
Planning, without Women
The Government's Five Year Plans perceived women mainly as targets for social welfare. With the exception of the Second Five Year Plan, all others focused on "women's legitimate role in the family". By overlooking women's productive role and ignoring the need to create conditions for removing the barriers to women's full participation in the decision making process as equal citizens, the government deprived women of the opportunity to influence social transformation or determine its direction. In effect development itself was leading to the displacement of women from agriculture, industry and trade. The increased visibility of middle class women in white collared jobs had created illusions of women's advancement. However, even where women figured in the services sector, they always occupied the low paid, low status jobs.
The failure of the Five Year Plans to address women's needs and concerns also lay in the fact that the administration of the programmes and resources lay with the bureaucracy, with Panchayats and other decision-making bodies which were, in general devoid of any awareness of the need to change institutions of the peoples perceptions, in particular, those whose roots lay in social inequalities. Even the official attempts to promote grassroots women's organizations, the Mahila Mandals, since 1950s, for income generating activities, proved to be ineffective without the democratisation of decision-making bodies such as the Panchayats. The decision making bodies, from the Panchayats to. the district levels needed to be transformed from being a preserve of the rich, upper caste and other vested interests to genuinely represent the
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voice of the people. Besides, there was the need to foreground gender concerns, through a vibrant women's movement, to such process of democratisation.
A small beginning was made in that direction, when the women's movement, strengthened by information and insights, challenged the official data and perceptions on women (such as those cited in Census) and persuaded the Government to incorporate, in 1980 for the first time, a chapter on women's organizations conducted wide campaigns, lobbied with members of Parliament, in particular with the women members and even with sections of the bureaucracy during 1977-79. The struggle was for a national policy on women.
While the inclusion of women's concerns within the framework of the Sixth Plan was an affirmation of the constitutional commitment to equality of opportunity, in no way did it ensure practical changes, which was mainly the function of the strength and power base of the women's movement."
Campaigns and struggles by women highlighted the need for a changes in the traditional welfarist approach to planning for women and focused on four main strategies:
a) Promotion of women's equality by combining the issue of
women's economic independence with access to education, healthcare, including reproductive rights. b) Need for using disaggregated data in planning so as to highlight the male-female, caste and class differences in the distribution of resources and power. c) The important role of grassroot level organizations of women, in particular rural poor women in conceptualising, developing and managing programmes. d) The need for women to have an asset base and independent
access even to family assets, by giving joint titles to husband and wife, to single women in the case of female-headed households, widows and deserted women, in all programmes involving asset transfer such as distribution of land, house site, etc.
Such interventions, at a very small but significant level, questioned the prevailing notions of development. It highlighted the
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need to change the indicators and concepts used to measure women's position in society. For example, official categorisation and recognition of only waged work as "work" ignored the participation and contribution of the majority of poor women in India in non-wage productive work and subsistence activities so crucial for the poor households. It ignored the prevailing social norms which assigned to men and women a different and unequal relationship with:
0.
X
Ownership, access and control over productive assets, Workroles,
Workloads,
Earnings and entitlements
Occupational mobility and Distribution of subsistence resource (food, health care).
Ꮉ
O
X
Xo
This awareness, also brought into sharp focus the question of power relations between men and women within households and whether these varied according to caste, class, community and region. Also, demystified was the conception of "the family' as it was now evident that the impact of colonisation, with its legal systems and reallocation of resources, was not uniform within and across colonised societies. Changing forms of division of labour and wider economic processes constantly redefined the role of women in society in varied ways."
Insights into the multiple roles that rural women perform in the agrarian sector indicated that the women's movement could identify with the issues taken up by movements such as the environmental movement. It also unraveled women's historical role in the discovery of agriculture, pottery, textile production in India. It was the increased awareness of women's low position in the economy and political process, within family and household structures, in education, in science and technology, in communication and the mass media, that turned the women's movement into one of the strongest critics of the prevailing conception of "development".7
The alternative approach suggested by the women's movement,
implied that any evaluation of programmes, for example, income generating programmes, must consider if:
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8 Increase in income earned leads to women's increased status within the household, including control over income and role in decision-making 8 Increase in skills/knowledge also includes knowledge of the
market 8 Work and income earned leads to changes in the household division of labour, increased food intake, medical care and more physical mobility for women.
Underlying this new approach was a different concept of Development itself and what it meant for women. This debate had gained world-wide significance in the 1970s. It was not an accident. It was linked with the contemporary world events such as the collapse of the monetary and trade systems, energy crisis, arms race and military conflicts, increasing problems of food availability in much of the growing mass poverty. The developing countries being most affected by such adverse trends, had signalled (through forums such as those of the Non-Aligned countries) the need for the struggles for an economic development and self-reliance which would enable them and their people to live a life of freedom and dignity.
Self Reliance and a New International Economic Order
Increasingly, it was felt that the deteriorating conditions of the developing nations was due to the dependence of the economics of these countries on the developed nations for credit, capital, technology, training and markets. The crucial link between trends in international economic order and the status of women came into sharp focus when, in their limitless chase for profits, the multinational corporations began to relocate certain factories (textiles, garments, branches of electronic and military industries) in developing countries in Asia and Latin America. About 80%-90% of such low skilled assembly jobs were done by women and under difficult and inhuman conditions. Almost 70% of the labour in the "free trends zones' consisted of women in the 15-24 age group. At the same time, they fired workers and lowered the wage rates of female workers in the developed countries too. New dimensions were added to the debate when the women's movement posed questions such aS
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8 How has the transfer of technology from the developed to the
developing countries affected the lives of women in terms of their status, the sexual division of labour, gender relations at work and within the family, women's work loads, avenues for employment? & How did women's limited and decreasing control over
productive resources constrain their use of technologies that can increase their productivity and give them access to credit, education and land? 8 How can women gain increased access to modern technology and
participate in its generation? Did "appropriate technology" mean that women gain new technology for domestic work while men become the focus of the technology training for new work opportunities?
Φ
Х•
The transfer of technology to new social contexts had led to women losing their customary rights to land (as in many regions of Africa), to women's exclusion from agricultural development projects and also deprived them of access to new techniques and tools. In India, innovative agricultural methods and Sophisticated technologies, had a negative impact on women, displacing them from their traditional productive activities, reducing their income, and whatever power and status they may have enjoyed. It adversely affected the poorest households.
Studies indicated that macro-policies for development adopted by many of the newly independent nations itself was leading to women's declining position. Rural, in particular dalit and tribal women's livelihood and social position were deeply affected by policies relating to agriculture, forests, water resources, land distributions and land use. Women from artisan households in rural and urban areas were equally affected both macro-policies such as textiles, science and technology, commerce, credit. As the NAM report, 1985, put it, "The process of marginlaisation of women in development has been intensified by the current processes of economic change and may continue in future. The marginal position of structural changes in the economy of developing countries which are likely to follow future developments in science and technology must be based on the increased and genuine participation of all members of society".
It was, therefore, emphasised, that the struggle for industrialisation, for codes for transfer of technology, needed to be linked
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to the struggles for women's rights, for women's equal participation in development, for opportunities for new avenues of work for literacy and education and training in new skills, for access and control over productive resources. The debate also stressed the need for new enquiry into the impact of family and household structures, caste and cultural values on women's access to technology, income, training and education. Gender concerns, therefore, widened the scope of the debates on technological development and its applications."
Redefining Conceptions of Justice and Civil Rights
In the wake of the popular movements in India from the mid 1970s against the imposition of political emergency and the ensuring campaign for civil liberties, emerged varied struggles against the growing violence against women. A broad based women's movement arose in the early 1980s to focus on the specific oppression that women faced, such as rape, dowry related murders, sexual harassment. It was the debate following the Supreme Court judgement acquitting two policemen involved in the rape of a minor tribal girl, Mathura, that led to new insights into the concept of women's rights. It underlined the fact that:
0 Women as citizens had a right to live in a secure environment and that the state's inability to protect the rights of its citizens was a violation of its own commitments.
• The role of public servants and the judiciary in upholding the constitutional guarantees needed to be emphasised
• Power relations (caste, class) formed the background of the increasing violence inflicted on poor women in particular dalit and tribal women.
0 The character of the victims of rape cannot be a consideration in
determining rape.
0 Cultural attitudes have an impact on the way law is interpreted
within the judicial system.
0 Rape was an act of physical, mental and psychological violence
O WOle.
During 1990-1994, 54,016 women have been victims of rape, i.e. approximately, 10,803 rapes take place per year. In the same period, 108,292 cases of molestation, 52159 cases of sexual harassment have been reported.
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The struggle to change the laws concerning rape brought to the forefront the notions of custodial rape within the legal systems and "power' rape (eg. by employers, Landlords, contractors, police, local officials) within concepts of civil rights. The women's movement which viewed the legal systems as an instrument for social change stressed that concepts of equality, justice needed to be widened, through a more broad-based debate, gender sensitisation programmes, legal help and "know your own rights' campaigns among women.
Brides are Not for Burning
When dowry became the "burning" issue in the early 1980s, it became evident that the nature of dowry had changed. In pre-colonial times, dowry signified the alliances between the powerful, landed and high status households as also the upper caste ideology which (by enforcing women's seclusion and isolation from productive work) considered women as economic burdens. Among many communities the tribals and dalits, customs of bride price prevailed. It was the compensation paid to the bride's parents for the loss of a working hand. Even among such communities, with commercialisation and declining opportunities for livelihood, the customs of dowry began to creep in. Dowry had now spread to all castes and communities and across regions. In varying degrees, dowry, ritual expenditure, conspicuous consumption has been adopted by all classes, castes, religions. Dowry encompasses the entire married life - from engagement to marriage, child birth, festivals.
Dowry may provide the groom's family the many luxury goods (now viewed as necessities), upward economic mobility, capital for investment, or even the funds to marry off a sister. The vicious cycle continued. The bride's parents, struggling to comply with the continuing demands, advice their daughters to "adjust", while unmarried working class or middle class women work to collect their dowries. Young girls, socialised to view marriage as their destinations, face psychological traumas, to see their parents struggling and also if their marriages are delayed owing to their inability to pay dowry. Suicides by young girls, including group suicides by sisters in a family have highlighted the brutal face of dowry. Consumerism and aggressive advertising campaigns for consumer goods showing "good housewives' or a
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"modern" couple to be those who buy certain luxury goods, play a significant role in the creation and perpetuation of new social images and new needs. They also add to the list of dowry items sought.
メ
During 1990-1994, 25,707 dowry related murders took place in India. 5,141 women are killed every year for dowry. Each day, five women die owing to dowry.
The anti-dowry movement enabled women's and other social organizations to intercede on behalf of the affected women and their parents. Neighbourhood demonstrations, street corner meetings, legal action, Seminars and marches stressed that dowry was no longer a "private", "family' affair. It indicated women's devaluation, commodification and a negation of their personhood. The comprehensive legislation suggested by the women's movement stressed that dowry could not be seen in isolation but had to be viewed in the context of women's economic dependence, lack of legal and social rights in their natal and marital homes. This included women rights to property.
Dalits Negotiate Citizenship
The dalit population in India total 138 million, as per the 1991 Census. The majority of the agricultural labour force, landless, workers in the unorganised sector, bonded labour and bonded child labour in agriculture, are dalits. While violence is the lot of dalits everywhere, sexual violence against dalit and tribal women, including rape, murders, stripping and parading naked are a marked feature of their lives. While the rich, powerful, upper caste landed sections use violence as a weapon against the rising assertion and consciousness of the dalits and tribals, a large number of cases of rape and molestation involve the upholders of law and authority, the police and para military forces.
Caste prejudice, in particular the widely prevalent practice of untouchability, (although punishable under the law) is an extreme form of mental violence as it is a violation of an individual's personhood and also has an impact on the victim's self-worth. In the face of the upper caste dominated local power structures, it is almost impossible for dalits to file any legal charges or even to expect punishment of the guilty.
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Φ
w
ex
Xo
Φ
X
At Chennapatti, 5 year old dalit schoolgirl, Dhanam was severely beaten up by a teacher and her eyes damaged as she drank water from a glass kept aside for upper caste children.
In Chilakurti (Nalgonda), 35 year old Muthamma, an agricultural labourer and a Golla by caste was beaten, paraded naked on the streets, and arrack forced down her throat by uppercaste Reddis on the pretext that she had helped a Reddy caste girl elope with a Golla boy.
In Orissa, a dalit woman and her husband were beaten up by the landlord for her refusal to come immediately for some work he wanted done. She had replied that she would do the work after her husband had finished his meals.
In Alwar, three dalit women working on their land were tied to trees by upper caste landlords who brought their tractors to plough the land so as to make a false claim on its ownership.
Faced with severe mental harassment, a dalit woman judge sent in her resignation papers.
A seige of dalits occurred in a village in Orissa as a dalit woman dressed well, with oiled and combed hair when she went to receive her wages. A comment from the Kshatriya landlord that she was dressed like "his" women resulted in all dalit women going to work in their best clothes. In response to this, the landlord remarked that they (the Kshtriyas) could now start taking dalit women home as their wives.
In Sikar, Rajasthan, Dalit women who lack toilet facilities, were prevented by upper caste women armed with lathis, from using a secluded spot of the landlord's fields.
In several states, where drinking water is not available dalit women seeking water from upper caste households were forced to perform "begar" or "free" labour, sometimes upto seven hours per week in return for water.
Most cases of "witch-hunting" which prevail in many parts of the country involve low caste, tribal women. Underlying such murders and tortures are the women's resistance to sexual harassment by the upper castes or a single or widowed woman's assertion of independence. More often that not, the villagers themselves consent to such acts of violence.
In several cases of inter-caste marriages, village level and caste-based Panchayats have known to have ordered stoning, public hanging and hacking of the young couples as lessons of vengeance, humiliation to particular castes, as warning to young girls to conform and more importantly, to assert that women signified "the honour" of the caste, community and its identity.
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While the women's movement was able to forge alliances and broad-base its struggles on issues of violence against women such as dowry, murders, rape and sati, it has only, in recent times, began to identify and define the complexity of dalit women's rights. This was more in response to the growing strength of dalit women's struggles and the formation of dalit women's groups in the 1990s in particular. While the intensity and spread of dalit women's awareness of their rights are yet to receive recognition, these stem from both a sense of unease and lack of understanding of the nature of these struggles. Moreover, in the contest of the varied ideological positions from which struggles of the oppressed castes are being conducted in contemporary India, the underlying factor, namely, the process of negotiating citizenship, is overlooked. This has come up sharply in the debate surrounding the Bill for reservation of seats for women in Parliament.
The Violence of male Preference: Amniocentesis and Female Infanticide
In the mid 70s, a hospital in Delhi began a survey to detect foetal abnormalities through amniocentesis. Within a year, it was evident that such tests were being used to abort female foetuses. Even as such tests were stopped, medical clinics in Amritsar in the prosperous state of Punjab, offered their services to help families reduce their "liabilities' and the nation its population, According to another report, during 19781982, 78,000 female foetuses were aborted after such tests. The women's movement's campaign focussed on:
* Need to restrict amniocentesis tests to research and teaching
institutions 8 Responsibility of the Indian Medical Council to take severe action
against members resorting to such unethical practices 8 Vigilance by the women's organisations against the misuse of such
tests for commercial purposes.
However, modern technology continues to be used against women with more such clinics coming up even in Small towns while many regions which practiced female infanticide have turned to female foeticide. The incidence of female infanticide is acknowledged as a
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practice directly linked to male preference and devaluation of women and to cultural practices which discriminate against women and was most pronounced in north-central and northwestern states such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. Its emergence and growth in south India, in particular in Tamilnadu in South India have raised many questions relating to the processes of change and the link between gender bias and child survival within castes, or in a region. What are the economic, social and cultural factors that shape gender bias in one direction or the other. Much of the findings depend on the variables included in an analysis and raise questions, such as:
8. Is gender bias in child survival relatively low among poorer
households, oppressed castes and among households with high levels of female work participation, as many studies point out? 8- Does poverty have a positive or negative impact on gender
bias independently of caste or female work participation rate?
Clearly, studies need a wider framework of investigations. One such study based on district level census data for 1961, indicated that increased employment opportunities for adult women raised the relative survival chances of the girl child. Another study (using district level Census data for 1981) stressed on the economic and cultural value assigned to daughters to investigate their survival chances in relation to male children. Here, economic value was measured in terms of female labour force participation, while the incidence of patrilocal exogamy was considered as an inverse indicator of cultural value, thereby pointing to the relationship between kinship system on female survival.
The study indicated the significance of both factors for girl child survival, i.e. the survival chances are higher in areas where female participation rate is higher and where patrilocal exogamy is lower. Another study held that the trend to cash dowries by Paraiyar castes in Thanjavur 'testifies to the low economic value ascribed to married women's labour' a reversal of their earlier position.7 Also, notable are the changes in cultural practices, such as marriage practices among non -Brahmin communities. A 1960 study of a village in Thanjavur indicated that among castes including Kallar and Paraiyar, divorce and widow
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remarriage were prohibited for the past thirty years. They also point to regional variations.
It is the low status assigned by the community to its women members, the socialisation process which make women to consider themselves as burden, the emotional pressure from members of the marital family that forces a woman to collude in the ending of the life of her own child. A woman giving birth to female child may also risk being discarded by her husband.
Data from PHC records indicate that in 1995, a total of 3,226 female infants were victims of infanticide in the State, and six districts accounted for most of these deaths: Dharampuri (1129), Salem (1033), Madurai (571), North Arcot (177) Dindigul (129) and Periya (69). Both the PHC data and district survey data suggest that female infanticide accounted for around one sixth of all female infant deaths in the state. Female infanticide accounted for over half (59.42%) of all female infant deaths in Dharampuri and 53.85% and 33.33% in Madurai and Salem respectively.
Study by Venkatesh Athreya, Sheekarani Chungat
Every year about 15 million girls are born in India. Almost one quarter of this number do not see their 15th birthday.
Country Report, Ministry of Human Resources, GOI, 1995
Female infanticide spreading to communities which had no traditions of the practice are often linked with the upward mobility of a community in terms of wealth and the entry of its educated members into various new professions and where practices concerning women become the sites of contested status. The prevalence of female infanticide in some of the Green Revolution areas as in Punjab and Haryana suggests that the process of modernisation has differing and unequal impact on women when the new technologies impinge on pre-existing patterns of unequal gender relations within the family and outside. It was, therefore, important to understand the impact of local traditions, culture, power relations, within the households and outside on women's access to technology, training, education and income.
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According to a study by Institute For Development and communications, Chandidigarh, the number of dowry deaths in Punjab rose from 50 in 1991 to 164 in 1996. Of the 402 rape cases reported during 1992-1996, as many as 117 involved minor girls. So far there have been only 23 convictions, 258 cases are ongoing while 29 are still under investigation. Hundred more cases of rape, molestation have been brought to the notice of panchyats in rural areas, municipal commissioners or NGOs in urban areas.
The women's movement has been conducting a sustained campaign against the violence of certain reproductive technologies inflicted on women including steroids and hormonal injectable. Underlying this is a population policy which targets women's reproductive role without taking into consideration their health, the right to information, or the cultural values assigned to such roles when community based distribution of hormonal contraception are undertaken. The targeting of poor women by the state to promote contraceptives, the nexus between the state policies, medical establishments, private practitioners and the interests of multinational pharmaceutical companies, was highlighted by the women's movement in 1992 when demonstrations were held outside the Drug Controller's Office. The struggles include those against efforts to legalise coecive measures such as changing the Maternity Benefit Act to restrict the benefit to two children per couple (combined with increased leave for abortions ) or to amend the People's Representation Act to disqualify those persons with more than two children.
Even as the health budget faces decline and the Family Planning budget an increase, injectables have found their way into the private sector. Norplant manufacturers are for ever searching for new entry points. The hazards to women's health persists with efforts of vested interests to introduce female sterilization using Quinacrine pellets and RU486 linked with abortion. Certain international aid to NGOS for target oriented Schemes and the adoption of the popular slogans of the women's movement such as "women's control over their own bodies and right to choice" or "reproductive rights and contraceptive choice", often mask the use of women's bodies to try out new reproductive technologies.
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Changing Contours of women's Position
From the mid 1980s, the context within the struggles for women's rights were being conducted, began to change. It was the period which saw a more pronounced move towards economic liberalisation. the period also witnessed the rise of religious fundamentalism and communalism. Blatant attacks began to be made even the existing rights of women. A year after the Supreme Court judgement in the Shabano case for maintenance, came the Muslim Women's Bill of 1986 which deprived divorced Muslim women of their right to seek maintenance under section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, a law open to all communities. A few months later, the women's movement was to, once, again, face the challenge of religious fundamentalism when a young bride, Roop Kanwar, from Deorala, Rajasthan, was burnt to death on the funeral pyre of her husband. Increasingly, women's rights are being violated and violence justified by conservative and revivalists forces in the name of a community's "identity" or the re-asserting the "honour" of a landed caste. Violence also underlies the ideology of "honour". Crimes related to inter-caste and intra-caste marriages which, in the form of run-away marriages or elopement, infringe on cultural codes and practices, are on the increase in rural north India.'
Equally dangerous is the appropriation of the language and slogans of the women's movement by fundamental forces. Witness, for example, the change of the slogan of the women's movement, "nari mukti' (Women's Liberation) to 'nari shakti' which serves the dual purpose of glorifying motherhood as well as legitimising women's role as investigators of violence. Women are projected as "shakti" a force to awaken male Hindu valour. Various religious cults are providinf women a social and cultural space, as evident from the increasing number of women, particularly middle class women, seeking solace in cults such as that of Pandurang Athavale.
In the context of the growth of regressive ideologies, how do popular movements such as the women's movement, deal with such issues? If egalitarian values within religion are to be upheld, how can this be done? Take for example, the use of religious symbols. Such symbols have varied interpretations and its use could lead to either a reinforcing of traditional attitudes towards women or ignore the cultural
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diversities in which women's lives are embedded. Efforts to create an alternative secular cultural space must take these issues into consideration.
Education for equality and empowerment
While the social reform movements from the middle of the last century and the women's, movement in the pre - independence era, perceived the significance of women's education in varied ways in terms of women's roles, it was only in 1992, when the National Policy of education of 1986 was revised to promote adult literacy and primary education with a focus on girls and other disadvantaged sections, that the removal of women's illiteracy and barriers to their access to and retention in education, received more attention. It also visualised an important role for the educational institutions in promoting the values of women's equality, through changes on the curriculum and textbooks, systematic gender sensitisation and training of teachers, policy makers and administrators. To a large extent, lobbying by women's groups, the resurgence of a national debate on women's issues since the late 70s, ensure this policy shift.
- Of the 948.1 million adult illiterates in the world in 1990, about
29.0% of 280 million were from India.
• Half of India's adult population is illiterate, and two thirds of Indian women are illiterate. 8 Female illiterates in India, including the 0-4 age group, rose
steadily from 185 million in 1961 to 253 million in 1998. 8. In 1991, only 39.29% of Indian women were literate. 8. In the age group 7 and above, illiteracy rates for rural female
population was 69.7% and 36.1% for urban female population. & Over 90% of rural female illiterates were dalits and tribals according to the 1991 census. For girls born in the states of Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttara Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, belonging to dalits and tribal communities, the landless of agricultural; worker's households, prospects of education are very bleak.
As compared with the pre-occupation with "women's" issues such as violence, legal rights within marriage, female literacy and education have received less attention from women's movement in the post
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independence era. However, a wide range of organizations, in particular the people's Science movements, have played a significant role in the 90s in carrying the Total Literacy Campaigns (TLC) to large sections of women, in different parts of India. While such programmes were region or area specific, time bound, volunteer based, outcome oriented, it also involved the development of more creative ways of addressing regional diversities, the cultural context, in particular the caste and community backgrounds and women's position within diverse family structures. An evaluation of the TLC campaigns by an expert group highlighted the large scale participation of women (more that the men) and how women were found to be more confident, articulate and assertive after having gone through TLC. The mobilisation of women in varied ways, was crucial to the advancement of the campaigns.
| "Rajnidevi, Samudradevi, Pramiladevi, all pale, weak but full of enthusiasm to learn. They wanted take this one opportunity to develop their village. But the village menfolk, in particular the mukthiya did not like this. How can he tolerate that Rajni commands more respect than him? He started to spread rumours about her and even instigated her husband against her. Her husband stopped Rajni from going outside the house. But Rajni was determined and refused to accept defeat. She involved herself wholeheartedly into the campaign. Other women joined her. When her husband realised the truth, then he did not stop her from going out."
Saksharta, 1997 ||
Since literacy was now perceived was a process to create an environment in which women can, at their own pace, gain knowledge and seek information so that they are in a position to make informed choices, issues which concerned women as group, had to be addressed. Incidence of wife beating, resistance from menfolk in the family, alcoholism, female seclusion in the community or caste, opposition from village headman and the significance of women's work to the survival of their households, their childcare and household responsibilities such as fetching water and fuelwood, could not be ignored. Where such issues were addressed, women became more conscious of the barriers that led to their marginalisation and began to identify the ability to read and write as skills which can contribute to their empowerment.
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“I am Biribala, a member of the zilla literacy committee. When I first started the literacy campaign in my village in Jamalpur, the village Mukthiya abused me and also gave me a few slaps. I was then involved in flood relief work and when Mukthiya asked me to take some of the items like polythene to his house, I refused. I said that it was for the poor. Angry, he tried to push me off the boat and crush me but my friends save me. I did not file an FR against him as I felt that it may come in the way of starting a literacy unit... I was also slapped by the police chief of Mangachchi because I refused to perform labour..... since childhood I dreamt that my sister and I would have the freedom to study. I also wanted to choose my own life partner, which I did. I am a Bhumihar married to dalit. One way of my bringing people close to each other is through inter-caste marriages, the other is literacy....”
Saksharta, 1997
While in many places, the literacy movements have moved forward with the emergence of a wide range of organizations among women such as cooperatives, thrift societies, the organizations involved in such activities need to address some fundamental questions. They need to be informed by the wider debates have been part of the women's movement since the mid-seventy.”
The critique of varied approaches to gender issues was at the core of these debates. It held that the anti-poverty approach, for example, which focused on poverty, generally ignored addressing women's subordinate position in society. The emphasis was on reducing income inequality and often the tendency was to initiate programmes in traditional sex and caste specific occupations or where women were targeted as head of households. This was considered to have less of an impact on the power relations between men and women within the family. It had little potential to change the sexual division of labour within the household or the caste based division of labour outside.
By the early 1970s, the significance of women's employment in its own right, was emphasised. The target was the 'working poor' and the informal sector' was considered to have the capacity for autonomous growth, and this was viewed as the solution. This ignored the experience of women in their gendered roles (the roles assigned by society), including the problems of women's self-perception, in differentiating
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between productive work and reproductive activities like domestic and child care activities. The underlying assumption was that women's unpaid work (child care, gathering fuel, preparing meals, processing food, nursing the sick and elderly) was elastic and their productive work was "supplementary". The need to reduce women's domestic and childcare burdens, are not given its due significance. Such an approach can and has, to some extent, merged with the "efficiency and productivity" perspective of Structural Adjustment Programmes, where the focus shifted from women to development. This also involves the shifting of costs from the paid to the unpaid "informal" economy, through the use of women's unpaid labour?
The approach that the empowerment of poor women through collective action and organization can alone ensure changes in social attitudes and enable women's full participation in the development process, emerged from the third world women's movement from the mid 70s. It differed from other approaches not only in its origins but also in terms of what it identified as the cause, dynamics and structures of women's oppression. It noted that the aspects of race, class, colonial history and position in the international economic order underlie the varied experience of women's oppression and women need to confront these structures at many levels. In India, such an approach sought to differentiate itself from the welfare oriented mahila mandals which focused only on women's reproductive roles and often had an upper caste/class bias.
A wide range of women's organizations emerged such as the SEWA, Ahmedabad, which has developed into a movement of "informal sector women workers. The base of this movement was provided by the development of
a) the SEWA Co-operative bank which catered to a fundamental
need of small scale production, i.e. credit and banking facilities,
b) the 100 odd-co-operatives and
c) 1000 producers groups at the grassroots level.
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"Women need access to capacity building mechanisms. They need opportunities to upgrade skills as well as to take advantage of available new technologies, better tools, improved product design....To us as women, business is not equal to personal profit alone. Having achieved profitability, the focus shifts to what is done with that surplus and how, with whose efforts and in what circumstances this profit is made. When an economic enterprise at Sewa becomes viable, almost all profit goes to the producer.... Also, the working conditions, the whole world of work becomes more comfortable to the women. The unbroken record of profits at SEWA Bank has ended up in hands of its shareholders and depositors who are poor women; the bank team, the bank buildings and branches, the bank related services are now in one of the largest user-managed social Security Scheme."
Ila Bhatt 'SEWA's Perspectives and early years after Independence'
SEWA's women's co-operative for landless agricultural workers in Mehsana district in Gujarat was set up after a long struggle against upper caste interests to gain access to village land in 70s. Today its members grow crops for cash and domestic needs. Trees were planted for fodder and fruits. Organic fertilisers are being used and rainwater was harvested into a pond lined with plastic sheet to prevent. The women use power tiller, ensuring higher productivity and lesser drudgery.
"The co-operative has given me the chance to own land. It is our collective property. The land is in my service and I am not in the service of the land'
Shantaben, member, SEWA women's co-operative, 'Vanlakshmi'
SEWA also highlighted the importance of viewing water as a productive asset. Women's control over water, its source and supply, made them joint owners of land in the arid areas of Banaskantha. This had initiated changes not only in the power relations within the villagers but also in the ecological equations.
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"How eagerly we agreed to the logic of Economics can, indeed be separated from social reality. It is only in these later years that we have started suggesting that laws of economics operate in social reality, that society cannot be reduced to the market, that social capital is the basis on which economic capital can have a stable and sustained growth."
Ila Bhat
The approach which linked the process of the organization of rural poor women with the struggles for democratisation of the local decisionmaking bodies, such as the panchayats, has gained more recognition in recent times. It raised fundamental questions concerning the relationship between power and development. It viewed women's ennpowerment in terms of their self-reliance, their right to determine choices in their lives and influence the direction of changed, and the were made, the women have had to face stiff opposition from vested interests, upper castes, menfolk from their own families, and male-dominated panchayats. However, the formation of such organizations have had far reaching impact as evident from the experiences of women from the Nari Bikash Sangha in Bankura.
Before we got together and formed our Samiti, we had no position in the village. We were afraid to talk to the men or stop them from felling trees. We worked harder than any man, but earned much less. When our husbands beat us or threw us out of our homes, we could do nothing... I did not know I had the right to talk to, anyone in the Panchayat or the Government. Since we formed the Samiti, we learnt our rights... we got wasteland from the men in the villages and from the government... we got money from the government to develop Tussar plantations and other economic activities. I served as a Panchayat member, learnt about many schemes for development. I made sure women knew about them and placed their demands before the Panchayat and the government. Now we tell the Panchayat and forest officials - Don not plant eucalyptus-plant trees that we want, then we will look after them....... Village people respect us now and bring their disputes to us to settle,. None of these things would have
happened if we had not organised ourselves."
Voices of Peasant Women \l (CWDS, Delhi Puhlication, 1991)
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Liberalisation and SAP
In the 1970s and 1980s, the women's movement in much of the developing countries linked itself to democratic struggles in their respective countries to build a new international economic order, to strengthen the self-reliance and freedom of the nation states. In the 1990s, on the other hand, globalisation, the "global village", the "free market" are being projected as central to a New International Economic Order which calls for privatization of state run industries and services, access for foreign investors to India's growing industrial sector, removal of trade barriers and through Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) seeks to increase the inequality in incomes and access to resources between the developing and developed countries and between the rich and poor within each country.
f In 1994, about 80.90 lakh of women registered in the
employment exchange seeking work.
In India, where the lives of the majority of the people, women in particular, are characterised by depleting sources of livelihood, poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, the SAP is having a disastrous impact. The cost of living in rural and urban areas are rising sharply and unemployment remains high, with over fifty five million estimated to be without work. In the informal sector which employees 85% of India's workers, including child workers, work conditions are worsening and the rate of bonded child labour increasing? Given women's unequal position within the family, the reduction in employment and rising prices of essential goods in the so-called "free" market and its impact on household resources, inflict a heavier burden on women, in particular those from the poor households who play a crucial role or are solely responsible for the economic survival and management of the household.
With the cuts in subsidised food, the consumption of staple foods such as cereals, pulses etc. have declined. Food has become scarcer and even the minimum nutritional requirements for survival cannot be met. Children suffer and the girl child the most. Women and the elderly go without food to feed the children. The gender differentiated impact on intra-household resource distribution (food, health care etc.) has been noted by many studies of low income populations. The declining capacity
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of poor households to meet the burdens inflicted by the SAP have resulted in increasing domestic violence, mental disorders, and a growth in the number of female-headed households.
The large majority of women, more than 90%, work in the unorganized sector. 76% of all women workers are in agriculture. The 1991 Census held that 28.3 million women were employed as agricultural workers at very low wages, with less than 100 days of work a year. Over 30 to 35% of poor rural households were female-headed, depending solely on women's earning for survival. Also, 21.5 million women worked as cultivators on family farms owned by their husbands, brothers, fathers or male relatives. Property laws exclude women from equal rights in land. Much of their work in family farms is not recognised as it is unpaid, and considered as "women's work".
There has been an increase in the number of female children in the age group 5-14 in agricultural work. A sample survey by NSSO revealed that 6-7% of the labour force consisted of girl child in the age group 5-14 during 1989-1991.
Rural women: Rights to Land, Livelihood, Food and Shelter
The "Food First" policies of the 1950-1990 period in the sphere of agriculture was replaced by the "exports first" policy in the 1990s with trade liberalisatiohn and SAP.” An export oriented agricultural policy has led to increasing cultivation of cash crops in areas meant for cultivation of food crops and land used for collecting fuelwood, fodder or grazing cattle. This has reduced the availability of food, loss of the livelihood of rural poor women in food production and increased their burden of collecting fuelwood and fodder.
Women play a key role in maintaining the soil's fertility, protecting plants and maintaining genetic diversity of basic food crops. Increasingly, these roles are being taken over by agri-business corporations, pesticide and seed companies. Over the years, the rural poor, forest dwellers and women in particular, have lost not only their crucial role in food production, but also much of their traditional skills and knowledge of crop /plant species varieties, of how soils, forests, water are formed or
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sustainedo Wealthy farmers, contractors, builders have encroached on pasture lands or lands belonging to tribals. The state too has taken over or contracted to private interests large areas which served as Common Property Resources such as forests, tank bunds, grazing lands.
Village Commons Provide 91% of the fireWOOd and 69% of the grazing lands of the poor.
- Fhe-Common-Preperty-related-aetivity-take-up-mueh of womer's time. This includes women's work in artisanal production for which they depend on the tank bunds, and forests, for their raw material. This is an "informal economy" which operates within the village, run mainly by women. This is largely invisible to the economists and planners, but vital to the poor. Unlike the "black market", there is nothing hidden about this activity. But our planners, administrators and men in general are reluctant to acknowledge its existence.
Access to common Property Resources contributes, in a substantial way, to household subsistence. It also ensured less dependence on the rich for loans and other kinds of support. Given women, in particular, the dalit, tribal and landless, sources of livelihood which is not controlled by menfolk in their families. The decline in Common Property Resources and degradation of land owing to privatisation, large Scale deforestation, excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides, intensive agriculture-growing too many crops for commercial purposes, mining and silting of rivers and reservoirs have had an adverse impact on rural poor women in particular, They have led to:
& Loss of livelihoods 8. Alienation from land and to women living in constant fear of
losing small land holdings to moneylenders. 8 Women living in constant fear of men selling off the land. 8 Women becoming victims of violence in conflicts overland
ownership 8. Shortage of fuel and fodder, thereby increasing women's work
load (they have to walk long distances for fuel, fodder and water) 8. A weakening of their ability to cope with scarcity and drought conditions availability of drinking water. Dalits and other low caste women are affected more acutely by drinking water
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shortages owing to their restricted access to water. It often leads
to violence against them as also opposition from upper caste
WOer. 8 Increasing dependence on the rich, powerful upper castes
Φ
& Lack of power.
Studies indicate that nearly 50% of rural poor women's income comes from forests and common lands as compared with only one eighth for men. Forests provide women subsistence wages and income through collection of what is officially termed'minor forest produce' like tendu leaves and sal seeds. Women from poorer households spend 30-40% of their labour time in collecting such products. Women's contribution to cash income is also higher in villagers closer to forests.
There are varied activities that comprise farming and these are performed by women. In rice cultivation, for example, women are involved in transplanting, weeding, manuring, fertilising, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, drying stacking, carrying the crop. In states such as Andhra and Orissa, women outnumber men as agricultural workers and during 1981-1991 more women (a 36.15%^ increase) than men (A 31.18% increase) joined the agricultural labour force. 66% of the women workers here were dalits, mainly landless.
Women also earn 75% to 100% less wages are paid in kind as in parts of Bihar and Uttar Predesh, 2 Kg. of food grains for 10 hours work. Even in areas of Punjab, such as Malwa, women cotton pickers are paid Rs. 5 per 5 Kg of cotton, although the official rate is Rs. 1.62 per Kg. Transplanting and weeding which are skilled work and involve long hours of work, are paid much less that other types of work. A survey by Agricultural Workers Union in Andhra pointed the growing trend of replacing male workers with female workers at lower wages as well as the move towards certain areas where cotton, chillies, turmeric tobacco and flowers are cultivated. Refusal to work for long hours for low wages have resulted in violence being unleased by the upper caste landlords or to social boycott, preventing dalits from access to common property resources for their basic needs, such as drinking water.”
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In Trouble waters
Fishing in India is a traditional means of livelihood for 30 million people, half of whom are women. Estimates put the number of active fishermen at 6 million. Despite the increasing financial outlay by the states and also as the share of the allocation to the agricultural sector, the fishing communities are the most deprived sections in terms of indices such as health, education, basic services. Studies have highlighted this complex link between the development priorities of the state and the well being of its citizens.
In the late 70s when fisher-women in Kerala launched a struggle demanding transport facilities to go to the market, the development policies of the state came under review. The women had to beat the arrival of fish from the mechanised landing centres. Faced with a crisis of balance of payments in trade in the 1960s and perceiving the potential of shrimp as a foreign exchange earner, led to the introduction of trawlers and heavy state subsidy for the creation of infrastructure facilities. This affected artisanal fishing and women were forced to procure fish for sale under severe conditions, travelling long distances and threatened by the big merchant-exporters. Many women turned to wage work, sorting and drying bycatch of worked in shrimp peeling units in Kerala. In the 1970s, such units sprouted in Tamilnadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra using migrant girls and women from Kerala. They lived and worked almost as indentured labour brought by labour contractors.
The over-exploitation of coastal fish by mechanised fisheries have severely depleted the availability of fish, a significant source of cheap protein for coastal and inland people. Modernisation led not only to women's loss of control in the distribution of fish but also their traditional work of weaving and mending fish nets. With the loss of sources of livelihood in the local communities, women provided the skill and served as the source of cheap labour in the fish processing plants located far from their homes.
The lives of people living along large stretches of India's coastline are increasingly being destroyed by the export oriented shrimp monoculture industries dotting large parts of the coastal areas. Paddy lands in Tamilnadu, Andhra and Orissa in particular were being converted for prawn and shrimp farming. Fertile agricultural lands near the coastal areas have been degraded and men women have lost
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their traditional means of livelihood in agriculture. This gave rise to widespread protests all along the Coromandal Coast, the dispute finally reaching the Supreme Court.
In a landmark judgement, the apex court prohibited the setting up of aqua culture farms which violated the Coastal Zone Regulation Act. This forced the government, which supported the growth of aqua culture industry and lay down environmental safely norms. In Myladuthurai (Tamilnadu), landless dalit agricultural workers led the struggle against the prawn farms. Many have lost their lives in the struggles to retain their traditional fishing rights in Chilka Lake, Orissa after the state government decided to restrict these rights in favour of intensive prawn farming.
A large number of poor women who trap fish from the backwaters and estuaries have also lost their sources of livelihood. The excessive sea and ground water used by the shrimp farms have reduced the availability of potable water and water for the cultivation of crops. With increasing private investment in fishing, the local people are losing their land use rights. Women's access to public land for toilet needs, access to potable water and their movement to interior markets have been severely curtailed. Increasing domestication of women owing to loss of sources of livelihood have led to a devaluation of their social status. This has also made them more vulnerable to violence, within the family and outside.
The tourism industry, even on the hunt for newer, "unspoilt" areas with ecological "appeal" for pleasure tourism, has taken over vast stretches of beaches. What may appear as a "non-polluting" industry is rapidly becoming a threat to both the local people, their culture and the environment. The displacement of local population is accompanied by the vulgarisation of cultural traditions through a process of selling culture for hard currency. Sexual exploitation of women, including female children, have become a marked feature of the changes taking place. It is ironic that tourist complexes have water and electricity while nearby fishing villages remain in darkness and go without potable water.
Bonded Child Labour Export Oriented Industries
As the world's second largest producer of silk but accounting for only 5% of the global silk market, the silk industry in India has
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received $230 million from the World Bank during 1980-89 and further loan and assistance to Karnataka state in 1994-95 to upgrade the production and quality. In Karnatake, of the estimated 400,000 workers in this industry, 100,000 are child workers. A detailed study of one taluka near Bangalore found 10,000 bonded children.” Within silk factories girl child workers are often targeted for sexual assault by owners. Owing to the high rate of such abuse, the girls are shunned as potential brides. Similarly, a significant part of the growth of the export oriented leather industry, rests on the backs of children. The decline of the traditional shoe making as a cottage industry by the low castes in Rajasthan and poverty increases the pressure on the households to sell their children. The children are trafficked from the rural villages to Bombay as bonded workers.' -
Forging New Alliances
The late 1980s and the 1990s have witnessed a realignment of varied trends within the women's movement as well as the emergence of new trends such as the dalit women's movement. Newer platforms, regionwise as well as on an all-India level have been formed, many outside the political party related framework. With liberalisation ans SAP, the issues involving the women's movement have widened. On issues of basic needs, such as food security, the women's movement have forged links with environmental movements. Organisation of rural women around activities such as afforestation, wasteland development, animal husbandry, horticulture, sericulture and combing them with health care, education, child care programmes are growing.
Dalit and tribal women have forced their way into vigilance committees for forest protection and guarding newly planted plots, rallied against mining, struggled for titles to land, for water. Many have evolved organisational methods to share work, and savings schemes. They faced opposition from powerful, landed upper caste vested interests, from Panchayats controlled by such interests, from men in their own families and outside." There is a need to foreground issues of women's representation in the panchayats and the democratisation of the decision making bodies from the panchayat levels, through a vibrant and broad-based women's movement.
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Reference
1 Meera Velayudhan, "The Crisis and Women's Struggles", SOCIAL
SCIENTIST,
2Towards Equality: Report of the Committee On the Status of Women. In India,
Ministry of Education & Social Welfare, Govt. of India, 1974
3 bid
4 V. Mazumdar, "From Research to Policy: Rural Women in India", STUDIES
IN FAMILY PLANNING, 10(1979)
5 Leela Dube, Women and the Household, Report of the Regional Conference
For Asia, New Delhi, January 1985.
6 Meera Velayudhan, Changing Roles and Women's Narratives, SOCIAL
SCIENTIST, Vol. 22, No. 1-2, Jan.-Feb., 1994
7 Vina Mazumdar, 'Women's Studies and the Women's Movement in India',
WOMEN'S STUDIES QUARTERLY, nos. 3 & 4, 1994
8 Vida Tomsic, WOMEN, DEVELOPMENT and NON-ALIGNED MOVEMENT,
Centre for Women's Development Studies, Delhi publication, 1988
9 National Perspective Plan for Women (1988 - 2000): A Perspective from the
Women's Movement, Report of a Debate, Aug., 1988, Delhi
10 Women in Development, Report of the Ministerial level Conference of Non
Aligned and Other Developing Nations, Delhi, April 1995.
11 Maithreyi Krishna Raj, WOMEN AND SCIENCE:: SELECTED ESSAYS:
Himalaya Publications, Bombay, 1991.
12 Human Rights Watch, "The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labour
in India', 1996.
13 All India democratic Women's Association, National Conference, June 1998,
Bangalore. See Commission Paper "Fighting for the Rights of Dalit movement'.
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14 Jean Dreze and Amrtya Sen. ed., INDIAN DEVELOPMENT: SELECTED
REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES, OUP, Delhi, 1997, pp. 366-370
15 bid
16 Ibid, citing M. Rosenzweig and T.P. Schultz, "Market Opportunities, Genetic Endowments and Inter-Family Resource Distribution: Child Survival in Rural India', AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, 72, 1982
17 Kathleen Gough: "Dravidian Modes of Kinship and Modes of Production".
Irawati Karve Memorial Lecture, Delhi, ICSSR Pub. No. 115, 1978
18 Kathleen Gough, "Caste in a Tanjore Village", in E.R. Leach ed., ASPECTS OF CASTE IN INDIA, CEYLON AND NORTH.WEST PAKISTAN, Cambrige University Press, 1960.
19 Prem Chowdhry, "Enforcing Cultural Codes: Gender and Violence in Northern India", Paper presented at the 26th Inter-disciplinary Research Methodology Workshop, MIDS, AUG, 1996.
20 Caroline O.N. Moser, "Gender Planning in the Third World: Meeting Practical and Strategic Gender Needs", in WORLD DEVELOPMENT, 1989
21 Ibid
22 Centre for Women's Development Studies Publications Including" Voices of
Peasant Women", 1991, "The Seeds of Change", 1987.
23 Renana Jhabvala, "Structural Adjustment Programme: Issues and Strategies for Action for Peoples' Sector Woman Workers in India". Paper presented at the ILO/National Commission For Women, workshop on Employment, Equality and Impact of Economic Reform for Women, Jan. 1993, Delhi
24 Ela R. Bhatt, "Doosri Azadi: Sewa's Perspectives on Early Years of Independence", ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY, Vol. XXXIII. No. 17, April 25-May 1, 1998
25 Pradeep Mehta, "Cashing in On Child Labour", MULTINATIONAL
MONITOR, April 1994
26 Human Rights Watch, "The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labour
in Irudia", 1996
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27 Utsa Patnaik, "Food Security, Globalisation and Poverty", paper presented at Plenary Session, IAWS 8th National Conference, Pune, May - June 1998
28 Vandana Shiva, "Ecology, and the Politics of Survival-Conflicts over natural resources in India", UN University Press, & Sage Publishers, Delhi, 1991.
29 National Conference of the All India Democratic Women's Association, Bangalore, June 1998. Refer Commission paper "Issues Concerning Women Agricultural Workers".
30 Nalini Nayak, "Stable Livelihoods versus Pursuit of Profit: Acase of Fisheries and the response of the fish-workers movement". Paper presented at the IAWS National Conference, Pune, May-June, 1998
31 Ibid
32 Ibid
33 Vandana Shiva, "Women, Ecology and Eco-Globalisation", Keynote address,
IAWS, Vlth National Conference on Women's Studies, Jaipur, 1995
34 Meera Velayudhan and C.P. Geevan, "Rural Women and Environment", A
Platform For Action Reader, UNESCAP Publication, May 1997 35 bid
36 Public Interest Research Group, "The World Bank and India", New Delhi,
1994
37 Human Rights Watch, "The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labour
in India", 1996, pp. 74-75
38 Ibid, pp.81
39 Ibid, pp.91
40 Centre For Women's Development Studies, Voices of Peasant Women", Delhi,
1993
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Recovering Women's Travel Narratives' Women's Travel Writing in Ceylon 1890-1935
Minoli Samarakkody"
T period between 1815 and 1914 was considered the heyday of imperialism because during this time Europe established political control over almost eighty-five percent of the earth's surface. A large number of western men and women travelled to colonial countries at this time and recorded their experiences and impressions in the form of memoirs, travelogues, essays and sketches, works of fiction, letters, diaries and in visual representations such as drawings, paintings and photographs. In this paper I hope to explore women's travel writing within colonial discourse since travel writing was inextricably linked and was essentially an instrument within European Imperialism. Although their writing both facilitated and was made possible by colonial expansion, western women were not seen as agents or active participants within the colonial context. Sara Mills in Discourses of Difference(1991) writes, "this is because of social conventions for conceptualizing imperialism which seem to be as much about constructing masculine British identity as constructing a national identity per se.” Therefore, women as individuals or writers are always seen as marginal to the process of colonialism. Their writing and involvement in colonialism
Minoli Samarakkody is an Instructor in English at the Department of English, University.
of Colombo. She has B.A. (Hons) Degree in English and currently working on M.A. dissertation.This paper was presented at a Seminar on Women's Writing in Sri Lanka organised by Women's Education and Research Centre.
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were significantly different from men's writing since different discursive frameworks and pressures informed their work. This was mainly because of the way that discourses of femininity circulated within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women travel writers were unable to adopt the imperial voice with the ease with which male writers did. Their writing was more tentative and they were less able to assert the 'truths' of British rule without qualification. Therefore it is important to explore the possibilities of interpreting this writing within its period and its discursive constraints.
The selection of women's travel writing in this paper deals with texts written by western women who travelled in Ceylon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They travelled in an age considered as repressive for women however, some of them travelled alone and had a rare and unusual opportunity to establish a voice of authority and move outside the limits of the domestic sphere. They were invariably financially independent, free of domestic ties, belonged to the upper classes in European Society, white and privileged. Among these women travellers to the colonies were those who seem to have evidently broken away from the stereotypical and conflicting image of the idle, frivolous and insensitive memsahib’ in need of protection. It is also imperative therefore, to work against the stereotypical 'feminine' image since it excludes all other sorts of representation.
Although most women travellers were unable to adopt the discursive frameworks of the period in the same manner as their male counterparts, certain discursive elements are shared by both men and women writers. For instance, both male and female travel writing presents a clear notion of the difference between the British as a race, of whom the narrator is a representative and the nation which is being described. Most travel writing is imbued with and embody imperialist notions and attitudes which stem from a sense of racial Superiority characteristic of both male and female colonial writers. Their writing is therefore representative of "Orientalism' which Said defines "as a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience.' Said also points out that this
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Othering process is essential for Europe to regard European behavior as the norm and therefore to assert itself as a superior race. Colonial travel writing therefore, included descriptions of the native people's mode of dress, appearance, local customs and beliefs, behaviour, mentality and picturesque narratives of the landscape. These, descriptions are however, problematic in that they are never 'objective's and are largely determined by the Socio-historical contexts within which they are written.
Among many of the travellers to Ceylon, were also women who attempted to communicate reality through visual representations in the form of drawings and paintings. Constance Gordon Cumming, Lucinda Darby Griffith, Caroline Corner, Mary and Margaret Leitch included in their texts illustrations of native inhabitants and landscapes. Selective reproduction of male colonial artin Ceylon during the nineteenth century have been documented in R.K. de Silva's Early Prints of Ceylon but it excludes women artists-travellers who had as much to contribute to colonial art. Visual representations were also an important means of producing knowledge of the colonies and as Nicholas Thomas in Colonialism s Culture (1995) points out European writers and scholars created a texted Orient through persistent images and metaphors which are either debased, picturesque, Seductive or threatening. Therefore, these images and metaphors are distortions and reveal more about the interests and motivations of observers than they do about whatever is represented. These artist-travellers brought to those in the West visual evidence of Ceylon - a place they had previously only heard or readi about. The artist's selectivity of which scenes, peoples, monuments, or landscapes were to be depicted, which were to be ignored, was in turn informed not only by verbal texts but by British Society's larger, culturally accepted idea of the 'Orient' as different, exotic, and Other. The Orientalist construction of Ceylon as a land lost in antiquity, filled with backward and colourful people, was "authenticated' by drawings of the ruins of ancient capitals and architecture. Constance Gordon Cumming illustrates her text Two Happy Years in Ceylon (1892) with etchings of elaborate ancient monuments and exoticized landscapes. A particularly alluring one to the western imagination could well be the illustration of
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the shrine on the summit of Adam's Peak and the shadow of the peak. The etching is striking in its attention to detail, however, the visual images of the shrine, the shadow of the peak, and the human figures at the summit have an unreal quality which conveys a deliberate attempt by the artist to mystify the shrine, depict the shadow as mysterious and to distort reality. Native women were also featured and were invoked by both male and female like the landscapes, in the exoticism of their costumes and jewellery, as mysterious and submissive and as close to nature. Both men and women artist-travellers helped to make Ceylon visible and usable for British capitalism." Their works contributed in defining how Ceylon and its people appeared for the mass of the British population and fuelled its collective imagination with the idea of empire.
Bella Woolf was a travel writer who came to Ceylon in 1907 to visit her brother Leonard, then an Imperial Administrator in the Ceylon Civil Service. Western travellers like Woolf were attracted to the East as a result of a large body of knowledge produced about the East which unfortunately was never "a free subject of thought and action." By writing exclusively for a western audience, Woolf herself contributed to this knowledge production by publishing two dozen books which included a travelogue titled How to See Ceylon (1914) which appeared in three editions since publication. Based on many socio-historical accounts of Ceylon by other western writers, it provides general information to the Ceylon traveller in the way of carriage and rickshaw hire, customs duties, useful hints, itineraries, distances between rest houses on principal roads and pronunciation and meanings of certain Sinhala words occurring in the names of places. She also wrote two collections of sketches and essays on Ceylon titled Eastern Star-dust (1922) and From Groves of Palm (1925), and a number of miscellaneous articles.
In the foreword to Eastern Star-dust, Woolf clearly indicates her audience as well as her motive when she writes, "my aim is to convey to those, who live under western skies, Some of the magic and colour and humour of Eastern Life." The introductory comment on the cover of From Groves of Palm, by the publisher, is typical of how colonial
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literature was received in Britain in that it makes a vast generalization of a heterogeneous multiplicity of humanity. "These sketches and essays revealan inner knowledge and understanding of life in Ceylon and India. From grave to gay the author touches on every phase of life spent amidst the mystery and glamour of the Tropics.' The highly romanticized, exoticized and sensualized depictions in visual and verbal texts of this period were because the East, "was almost a European invention, and has been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.' Therefore, the East is the construction of a mythic space which has always been associated by the West with sexual fantasy, as the place for adventure, far removed from the West, with mysterious, isolated and beautiful landscapes. Also, travellers who were attracted to the East believed that they could achieve either self-realization or self-annihilation depending on their ability to survive its 'mysticism' and harsh environment. In a short essay titled Unchanging East, Woolf describes the atmosphere of a temple as overpowering and writes: "The sense of mystery enveloped us from the moment the darkness of the Temple swallowed us up from the light outside." References to the Sublime, to a sense of mystery and awe are recurrent in most travel writing of the period. In How to See Ceylon, Woolf writes in the afterword: "romantic feelings so characteristic of the East and the sense of mystery that pervades all Eastern life only enhances its fascination.' She also writes in an essay called "The Point of View' that "everywhere in the East you stumble upon sudden mystery.' The landscape in almost all of her writing of this period is romanticized and exoticised. In an article titled Tulips and Palmyras' Woolf writes of her journey to Jaffna in the following manner:
There was never a draught purer, cooler, more fragrant. The trees and bushes and ground are steeped and drenched in dew, sparkling, glittering, twinkling, millions of drops flash into your eyes as the train passes. Birds dash out from the undergrowth, butterflies dart into the light and vanish. Here are cascades of white blossoms hanging from a tree top, there a mantle of yellow flowers. You draw in great draughts of air as you could never have enough of it, and at last, returning to
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your sleeping compartment to prepare for arrival at Jaffna, you feel with him who on honey-dew has fed and drunk the milk of Paradise. As the train rolls on, you can see the jungle disappear and palmyra palms advance in battalions, their dark fans spread against the golden dawn.'
In many of the travel writers, British as well as American which include the writings of Mary Thorn Carpenter, Clara Kathleen Rogers, Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Margaret Mordecai, there are innumerable references to colour in every scene whether it be descriptions of native flora and fauna, dress or jewellery. Contained within these descriptions are words such as 'dream,' 'vision,' 'fairy-tale, and 'enchanting, which occur liberally in order to mystify reality and reveals feelings of wonder and awe. Almost every traveller in Ceylon describes their journey to Kandy, the changing scenery, the botanical gardens and the Temple of the Tooth and its rituals as strange and exotic. The scenery while being quintessentially depicted as exotic is also portrayed as being isolated and alien when Woolf writes of "the strangeness and remoteness of this world....' and is also depicted as being hostile. Survival is arduous since Woolf refers to the mortality rate of the Dutch colonizers as a "pathetic record" in Tulips & Palmyras. However, it is an atmosphere charged with fantasy which is portrayed and Woolf deliberately chooses to ignore reality when she writes: "it is useless to dwell too much on the sombre side of the picture.'”
Many of the writers of this period while attempting to portray the colonized positively, were also blatantly racist in their depiction of the 'native' as stupid, irrational, intellectually deficient in their passivity, and their behaviour and "mentality' were likened to that of children. Implied in these attitudes is the need for and justification of imperial rule. Woolf's views of the villagers convey a racist ideology, when she makes a value judgment about them in How to See Ceylon and writes: "even in the villages the people walk along thinking of nothing at all.' In Eastern Star-dust there is a similar description of her ayah, Celestina when she writes: "I wonder what thoughts passed through her head, or if she thought at all' and again in reference to the house-boy: "All goes well in fact until the fatal day when he begins to think." ? The
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loyalty and Service of servants are acknowledged by many writers however, the attitude of condescension is unmistakable when Woolf writes: "there is a trait of the boy's which is most irritating but must be borne with patiently. He will pretend he understands you and will go away without the foggiest notion of what you mean. When I feel inclined to be annoyed at Some tiresome incident arising from this peculiarity, I Soothe myself by the thought: It is typical of the immemorial East - the age-long desire to be polite at all costs and to do and say what you think the other party wishes you to do and say." Stereotyping or representations of this type become problematic when they are not finetuned to be distinct from others. Such vast generalizations derive from a sense of internalized superiority most writers of the period possessed in relation to the 'native.' It also conveys the celebrated notion of the colonizer's ingenuity in comprehending the 'native.'
Western notions such as the idea that Oriental customs remain unchanged for thousands of years consigned the other nation to a time Scale which is unchanging and which is distant from their own. Therefore the East is portrayed as unchanging in contrast to British progression through time. In the essay "The Unchanging East" Woolf writes, "We who live in the East fully realize the changes that lie on the surface, but We know also that much remains fixed unalterable.' Constant references to the Arabian Nights' in many of the writings under review and to the days of Solomon' convey the backward' and antiquated methods of the 'Oriental". Further, there are innumerable allusions to ancient monuments which have fallen to ruin and current Societies are reduced to the vestiges of a glorious past.
Even in the most romanticized writing there are perceptions of Ceylon which are negative. Mrs. Arthur Thompson in her book titled A Peep into Ceylon (n.d.) in which she constantly addresses a western audience, denounces almost every aspect of Ceylon. She begins by condemning the catamarans as "primitive' and as the "oddest looking canoes," describes the native men as effeminate paying particular attention to native clerks whom she refers to as the "drollest figures of all." She is critical of the dirt and Smells, and the general state of the
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villages. The problem with such depictions lies in the fact that the exploitative economic and social system which controls these people is never questioned and their status is treated as "natural.' Her condescending manner.is evident when she writes: "...the owner was generally to be seen Squatting (the natives favorite position) in the midst of his goods, chewing betel leaf and arecanuts - a most disgusting habit - which both Tamils and Sinhalese indulge in." This racist attitude is further heightened when she likens the native to animals in the lines: "nothing more like monkeys at the Zoological Gardens you could not imagine." In colonial literature, the equation of the natives to monkeys is typical in that the colonized have been likened to apes and therefore thought to be in a state of "primitivity" and "under-development" both emotionally and intellectually. This attitude of superiority is again evident in her descriptions of the Temple of the Tooth - the sacred tooth is regarded as "only a piece of ivory', the priests as deceitful and false, the wall paintings a disfigurements "all very badly drawn and very hideous" and the Hindu kovil as possessing an overpowering Smell. Such was the attitude of many travellers and missionaries of the nineteenth century since art critics of the period favoured classical ideals of order and rationality and regarded this type of temple art as defying all ideas of rationality. Thompson also makes a generalised statement when she claims that 'the natives are cruel to all animals." However this statement is ironic in the light that she writes a highly objective and unsympathetic account of the horse-keeper treating him as though he was a sub-human: "I think I forgot to tell you that whenever you ride in Ceylon, the horse-keeper who has the care of your horse always follows on foot, and wherever and whatever pace you go he runs after you. They run in this way for miles and miles and never seem tired. The luggage too, is always carried by coolies who always carry it on their heads. They must have wonderfully strong necks....." Most travel writers including Thompson were also critical of the native's habit at staring at them. This is ironic considering that the western travellers, main objective in travelling to the East was to make the natives the object of their gaze, the justification of which is never problematized. Writers such as Thompson also tends to limit the natives to an object position and do not confer full human status on them as the natives are not
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described as full individuals but as composed of separate parts of the body. Sara Mills makes the point that this dehumanizing element constructs the Orient and other nations as the Other for European nations. Furthermore, such representations of the Other become all the more Suspicious considering the fact that Thompson's impressions were Superficial as suggested by the title of her book - A Peep into Ceylon.
Contained within these negative images of the East is the justification for colonial exploitation itself, in the name of the "civilizing mission." Those engaged in producing the East in this fashion had the notion of empire and had definite views on race and imperialism. Said writes, "Orientalism, which is the system of European or Western knowledge about the Orient, thus becomes synonymous with European domination of the Orient.' Thus the colonial writer's relationship with the East was one of power and domination which gave them the license to write in this manner. This system also helped them to strengthen the identity of the West, which set itself off against the East, perceived as its 'self consolidating other.' Accepting this fundamental difference between East and West as a point of departure, the writings of the time also included theories, social descriptions, historical and imaginary accounts about the East, its people, customs, mentality etc.. Therefore it was essential to contrast East from West and this is a recurring aspect in most travel writing. This helped to define the West since it has always been viewed in direct contrast to the East in every aspect. The contrasting images of the tulips and palmyras, in Bella Wolf' article "Tulips and Palmyras' are symbolic of the huge disparity between East and West. However, what is striking is that despite the wonder and awe of the sights described there is a deep, Subliminal sense of nostalgia and feelings of alienation. Woolf writes at length about the celebration of St. Nikolaas, the Dutch pre-Christmas festival, traditions which she believes the Dutch women cherished and surely missed, She also shows acute awareness and sensitivity to the predicament of the white woman who "far from their own land made a new home for husband and children....I have a fondness and admiration for any woman who in those days shared her husband's fortunes in the East and braved dangers and discomforts." In an essay titled "By Waterway to Negombo" she again refers to the
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nostalgia experienced by the Dutch with special poignancy. In these sentiments there is an implicit indication of the 'white man's burden' and therefore the legitimizing of the 'civilizing mission. Even when Woolf refers to the Dutch and Portuguese invasions of the island, she is critical of their governance in comparison to the British but her writing is never critical of the imperial venture as a whole and the absurdity of one culture imposing its values on another. This also conveys the complex role played by western women in Sustaining imperialism, by remaining staunch adherents to the 'civilizing mission' even during a time when imperialist motives were being questioned by progressive Europeans and Nationalists, while at other times resisting and undermining it.
Therefore it can be seen that women's writing embodied Orientalism' as did the male writers of the period. However, their status in relation to the discourses of colonialism was problematic at times since they had to negotiate with other discourses such as the discourses of femininity. Both men and women travel writers on the whole never failed to describe the appearance of native women although their perceptions seemed to slightly differ - this is shown in The Gaze of the Colonizer (1994), a study of British views on local women in nineteenth century Ceylon by Elizabeth J Harris who writes: "In very general terms, therefore, it is the women who bring in romanticism concerning external appearances rather than the male writers. The men are arrogantly judgmental in their assessments, betraying both racism and chauvinism.' The colonized woman was the 'Other' to Western travellers, however, it is mainly male travellers who were able to adopt the many and varied discourses of imperialism which depicted native women as the "noble Savage" portrayed as sensuous and living close to nature. Rana Kabbani states in Europe’s Myths of Orient (1986) that 'the articulation of sexism in his Richard Burton's narrative went hand in hand with the articulation of racism, for women were a sub-group in patriarchal Victorian Society just as other races were sub-groups within the colonial enterprises.' A slight discursive difference can be seen in Woolf's Eastern Star-dust' where she describes a procession of women going to the temple in a highly fanciful manner. "They were visions of
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delight as they moved along under the yellow flowers, the Sunlight dappling their black hair and bronze rounded cheeks and arms." The allusions of such 'visions' are numerous along with repeated references to "large Sombre eyes" and "dark eyes under curling lashes." The main difference in the depiction of native women in male and female travel writing appears to be in the strong alignment that women Writers had with the 'native' women. Kumari Jayawardena in The White Women’s Other Burden (1995) also points out that some of the famous "lady adventurers' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries "reflect a concern with indigenous societies and the condition of their women and children usually absent in the writings of male travellers." Bella Woolf's sensitivity towards the colonized women, in this case Sinhalese women, as an economically oppressed group is revealed when she writes in How to See Ceylon.
"It is the woman who have the poorest time in village life. The ordinary villager cultivates his patch of paddy and then lazes on a cane couch before his door, while his wife pounds the paddy, collects and chops the firewood, fetches the water in the heavy chatties, cooks and does every other odd job. Women occupy the traditional oriental subservient position among the village Sinhalese. When they are educated, their influence will do much to elevate the tone of village life. Vernacular girls' Schools are gradually being established in Ceylon."
Constance Gordon Cumming also refers to the native women and the Oriental customs of feminine seclusion and States, "not that these are by any means so stringent in Ceylon as on the mainland.' Therefore, these social conventions which were also oppressing women in Victorian England, made these writers align themselves and sympathize with the 'native' women showing a feminist connection between restrictions on women's rights in Britain and British Imperialism abroad.
Woolf also shows remarkable perception into the complexities of
representation and is aware of inherent ideological biases which seek to homogenize a multiplicity of cultures when she writes that: "To all who
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travel in the East comes the thought, what of the life below the surface that is only skimmed by the tourist? Those whose lot it is to dwell in the East, learn in time something of oriental life and nature, but they also realize that much must ever remain a sealed book.' She also repeatedly condemns modern methods or material progression characteristic of the 'civilised western world. For instance, She sees modernization as an intrusion and cause for regret and writes that the motor car: "scorching along the crowded Eastern roads is one of the worst forms of selfishness in the calendar of vices." In an essay titled 'Magic Casements' she also observes two American and Australian Ocean liners and refers to them as 'two monsters' and as 'vulgar and Supercilious' while the catamaran is compared to a cockleshell and referred to as "a humble fishing craft. While she rejects modernization in this essay she also tends to romanticize an aspect of life which is alien to her when she concludes this essay with the lines, "But to me all the romance of the sea lay in the cockleshell.' Woolf is clearly a romanticist and appropriates the 'Other society as the "alternative model" which should not change by industrialization or modernization. She also promotes ideas of cultural revival during this period of national awakening by deploring the westernization taking place in Ceylon when she shows regret for the western dress adopted by local women and children.
There is ambivalence in the most Orientalist of her writing in that when she repeatedly ventures to reveal the disparity between East and West, she deliberately shows a preference for the East. However, there is also an unmistakable sense of nostalgia for England revealed in many of her essays which appears to be subliminal. In From Groves of Palm she refers to the scent of wood fire and writes: 'smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart strings crack..." Also the inevitable enraptured descriptions of native flowers nevertheless make her nostalgic for English flowers. The deliberate preference and attraction for the East and the empathy towards the colonized nation and its people, particularly the native women, may have been because of Woolf's own oppressed condition within patriarchal western Society as a whole.
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ASSessing this selection of Bella Woolf's writing reveals that she was able to adopt, at least in part, the powerful textual position afforded by colonialism. She does make statements which are clearly colonialist and therefore upholds imperialism. However, her resistance at times to imperialism shows that she is unable to speak wholeheartedly from a position within colonial discourse. Despite the fact that Woolf was a supporter of the women's suffrage movement, she does not reveal the oppression that Victorian women collectively shared during this time in her published works except indirectly through her sensitivity to issues of the native women's status. It is in a letter to Leonard Woolf written in 1909 that she says "women stand to lose so much by marriage nowadays, at least women with brains, that it takes a great deal for them to go in for it....', and therefore challenges Victorian ideology concerning women and shows that she does not simply accept her imposed role within Society. However, she was also an ardent admirer of her brother who incidentally was indifferent to women's suffrage as revealed in a letter to Lytton Strachey and in a letter from his sister Flora Woolf. She also accepted unquestioningly her brother's account of the native villages he governed while he was in Ceylon. She writes in the Foreword to How to See Ceylon, "From his intimate and introspective knowledge of the people so strikingly set forth in his book Village in the Jungle, I have gathered in a small way a fuller understanding of the island." Also while in Ceylon, she married within her elite circle Robert Locke and after his death Wilfrid Thomas Southorn, Colonial Secretary in Hongkong and after being knighted Governor and Commander in Chief of Gambia. Furthermore, the reality of colonial women was such that they were regarded as the guardians of the purity of a superior race and those who did not conform to this image were seen as a threat to colonial rule. These factors indicate that Bella Woolf like other women travel writers was writing within a multiplicity of constraints such as race, gender, class, textual and Social conventions, purpose of travel and audience which acted upon and formed her Writing.
There were also many women who travelled and wrote in published works, presenting themselves as strong, active and fearless
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individuals in search of adventure. Therefore, there were women even before the nineteenth century who bravely ventured over unknown and 'dangerous' terrain defying the common belief among imperialists that the colonies were "no place for a white woman.' Constance Gordon Cumming appears to have been a veteran traveller who came to Ceylon in the late nineteenth century. She published her travels in a book titled Two Happy Years in Ceylon (1892) in two volumes which include a number of illustrations in the form of etchings. She appears to have travelled widely to different parts of the globe and this is evident from the many travel books she has authored - She travelled for a month from Colombo to Batticaloa and then in the interior through the district of Tamankaduwa to visit the ruins of the ancient city of Pollonaruwa. She also visited Trincomalee and Jaffna and records her impressions of the American missionary Schools and the work done by the American missionaries Mary and Margaret Leitch.
Despite the extent of her journey and its intensity, she tends to downplay the dangers and only mentions in passing that: "Where there is bedding, it is essential to turn over the cushions and anything of the nature of a mattress, as being only likely to conceal centipedes and Scorpions - possibly snakes.' Therefore no account of the journey appears to be sensationalized and she clearly does not adopt the adventure narrative voice. This may be because the adventure narrative which is usually a male narrative is problematic for women writers since convention does not decree elements in 'adventure' as proper.' Adventure narratives were at their height when women travellers were also writing in large numbers. However, the adventure hero who is master of the situation and maintains a 'stiff upper lip' clashes with other discursive constructions of how women behave. When this role is adopted by women, they are often undermined or modified by disclaimers and by humorous interventions. Women writers are therefore clearly not given the same discursive possibilities to assert as male writers and are modest in their assertions. Those works which had a revolutionary potential and adopted the adventure narrative were received critically and viewed with suspicion. Women travel writers such as Gordon Cumming were generally accused of exaggeration and
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falsehood and therefore had to guard themselves against such accusations. As a result they structured their texts in Such a way that their writing tends to be less authoritarian. Women travel writers were caught between the conflicting demands of the discourses of femininity and that of imperialism. The discourses of colonialism demand action and intrepid, fearless behaviour from the narrator while the discourses of femininity demand passivity from the narrator and a concern with relationships.
There are some adventure narratives however, that openly reject both the discourses of colonialism and femininity. Caroline Corner in her novel Ceylon: The Paradise of Adam, the record of seven years residence in the island (1908) was mindful of a culture which suspected unaccompanied women travellers who went against conventional acceptability, and which branded them "eccentric.' Her views are expressed through Cynthia, the female character in her novel, who is portrayed as a "New Woman." Cynthia is determined, self-reliant and subverts conventional reader expectations of femininity in her defiance of social convention. She asserts her independence from patriarchal restrains which dictate that women should travel with an escort and to journey was to put oneself at risk. The adventurous woman was perceived as odd and "eccentric' but Cynthia rides unchaperoned (by a European male) and is aware of the European reaction towards her behaviour:
"The Europeans she encountered later on her return stared and may have wondered, "where had she been? What business could a European have, a gentlewoman too, beyond the prescribed limitations of the Park or Galle Face Drive?" Little did they dream of the interest these Solitary expeditions had for that eccentric English girl, as doubtless She was called.'
Corner undermines many of the notions held within the discourse of femininity. For instance, patriarchy dictates that women be portrayed as weak and therefore given to Swooning and hysterics in dangerous situations. Cynthia recounts a dangerous encounter with an elephant in
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a chapter humourously headed - Bungalow and occupants in deadly danger." The deliberate subversion of Cynthia as not conforming to femininity is revealed in the following lines:
"Would it the elephant come their way, was now the thought in each human mind. Cynthia's feminine intuition answered, "No." Then Cynthia ought to have fainted, but she didn't nor even had hysterics for the first time in her life. No, she had a whiskey and Soda instead, and afterwards went to sleep again."
The opening page of the book contains a Spanish Proverb which sets the tone of the narrative - "Travellers and inquisitive women see strange sights." The seemingly light-hearted narrative style is already in place while the sexist implication of the proverb implies an awareness that convention does not accept women to move outside the domestic sphere. Corner is also critically aware of the patriarchal notion that travellers are fundamentally male and that women adopting this role are perceived as being "inquisitive." The reference to 'strange sights' is characteristic of the genre of travel writing but takes a tone of ambivalence in Corner's writing for she not only questions what she sees in Ceylon but voices strong criticism of her country's treatment of the colonies.
Corner subverts reader expectations from the beginning when she records Cynthia's first impressions. Her new home Cynthia perceives as: "an idyllic home So far as appearances go. "A Grecian temple set up in the Garden of Eden, she likened it to first beholding. 'Can ordinary mortals live ordinary lies in such abodes, and such surroundings?' she asked. Personally, she thought it impossible, so might any newcomer." Although Woolf was highly subjective and poetic in her descriptions, Corner refuse to indulge in fantasy and accepts her surroundings for what they are particularly because she is aware that she is a newcomer and that her observations are superficial. She can appreciate the tropical flowers in bloom, their colour and fragrance as did every traveller in Ceylon, however she is conscious that it is more fatigue that causes her drowsiness and not the air possessed of narcotic properties."
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Corner seeks to undermine the colonial enterprise by questioning its ideology when she criticizes the whole colonial venture allegorically within a dream. Cynthia is greeted by a Bird of Paradise which in its opening address to her, undermines the emotional and intellectual superiority of the West:
"A newcomer, eh? Enraptured with our lovely isle, I'll warrant already. A contrast, certainly, to your foggy London and its dirty sparrows... Ahl you didn't know we could talk and are given to discussing your affairs? There's Something yet to learn. Perhaps even we of the jungle could teach you Something if you gave us the opportunity. We often "talk you over, as you Say, and sometimes terminate the discussion with a vote of censure on Some of your (Ua/S.
The sense of racial superiority, which the Bird of Paradise subverts was present even in the most liberal of colonial writing. Most western writers subscribed to the social Darwinist evolutionary thinking of the day and did not question the Superiority of the white civilization. It was material progression in terms of Science and technology which was believed to have brought about their emotional and intellectual Superiority. The colonies on the other hand were perceived as primitive', undeveloped and backward' and close to the animal world and therefore depicted as being devoid of emotional and intellectual development.
The discourse of feminism inform her text since this was a period of feminist debate and action on a wide range of issues including women's education, employment opportunities and working conditions, women's suffrage and property rights, and reforms in marriage and divorce laws. Corner also addresses many commonly held notions of patriarchy which dictates that women are intellectually deficient, passive and Submissive. Concurrently she also rejects colonialist discourse when she exposes the discriminatory nature of the law pertaining to the
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matrimonial rights of women which she accuses her countrymen of retaining. In doing So she also undermines many conventionally decreed notions of femininity:
"Cynthia's first experience of a Court of Justice in Ceylon - indeed anywhere - caused her to think-fatal condition in woman! Moreover, it caused her to ask questions. Reckless of consequences, Cynthia's thirst for knowledge goaded her on ....... Cynthia was possessed of a mind that demanded food.... likewise was she endowed with heart that oft times ached at the injustice of man - not "mere man" mankind in full, broad sense - and sometimes rose in rebellion and hated the cruelties perpetuated on the weak around her. Europeans thought she must be lonely. Europeans were mistaken. Cynthia was never lonely. The gamut of her musings was wide - unlimited. The more she thought, the more there was to think and the wider the gamut grew. Everything has interest if one did take the trouble to look for it - search it out. Why did not her countrymen on taking possession of the island of Ceylon take their own law with them? A wife being regarded as a mere chattel of her lord and master which tiring of, may be exchanged, when the lord and master chooses to transfer his affection elsewhere."
Corner's rejection of the discourse of colonialism is evident in her criticism of the colonial venture as futile: "To attempt to graft European habits and principles on to the Oriental, however, is a waste of time and energy." She refers to the civil servants of Ceylon as "those little tin gods' and exposes their sense of arrogance in the lines: "The Civil Servants are the blue blood' of Ceylon - particularly in their own estimation.'
Although Corner writes within the framework of Orientalism, she rejects some of the most commonly held Orientalist notions and exposes the prejudices held by the Europeans towards a subject people and therefore transcends many racist and classist assumptions. For instance, many writers of the time were highly critical of the passivity and lethargy of the 'native' who is recurrently described as Squatting by the roadside
18

'thinking of nothing at all." However, this is Corner's estimation of this behaviour:
"A study, as intensely interesting study, is the Oriental, a product of the ages, of the soft sunlit scenery. He mediates asquat on his heels for hours, his eyes gazing far away, into infinity apparently. The European looking on him thinks him stupid, bovine. Is he? All the while thoughts are animating his subtle mind, a reservoir too deep for the average European to fathom, with all his "cram."
My main task in this paper has been to analyse a selection of, women's travel writing in Ceylon which contributed to as well as subverted the maintenance of the discursive frameworks of the period. I also attempted to show that their participation in imperialism has to be understood in terms of their personal experiences, motivations, complexities and ambiguities. As Mills points out, it is their struggle with the discourses of imperialism and femininity neither of which they could wholeheartedly adopt, and which pulled them in different textual directions, that their writing exposes the unsteady foundations on which it is based. In this regard their writing is labelled as bad writing" or as simple autobiographies and not considered within critical colonial discourse. In analysing women's travel texts it is imperative therefore, that they be considered within the discursive frameworks within which they were produced and received.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bagchi, Jasodhara (Ed) 1995. Indian Women: Myth and Reality. India: Sangam Books
Chaudhuri, Nupur and Strobel, Margaret (Ed) 1992. Western Women and Imperialism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
Corner, Caroline 1908. Ceylon: The Paradise of Adam London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
De Silva, R.K. 1985 Early Prints of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 1800-1900. London: Serendib Publications
Goonetileke, H.A.I. 1976. Images of Sri Lanka Through American Eyes, Colombo: United States Information Service
Gordon Cumming, Constance F. 1892. Two Happy Years in Ceylon, Vol. II, Ed. & London: William Blackwood & Sons
Harris, Elizabeth, J. 1994. The Gaze of the Colonizer, Colombo: Social Scientists' Association
Jayewardena, Kumari 1995. The White Women's Other Burden New York & London: Routledge
Leitch, Mary & Margaret 1895. Seven Years in Ceylon - Stories of Missionary Life, New Delhi: Navrang
Kabbani, Rana 1986. Europe's Myths of Orient, Bloomington: Indiana University Press
120

Mills, Sara 1991 Discourses of Difference, London and NewYork: Routledge
Morris, Mary (Ed) 1994 The Virago Book of Women Travellers, London: Virago Press
Said, Edward 1978. Orientalism. London:Penguin
Spotts, Frederick (Ed) 1991. Letters of Leonard Woolf. London: Weidenfeld. & Nicolson
Thomas, Nicholas 1995 Colonialism's Culture
Thompson, Mrs Arthur n.d. A Peep into Ceylon
Woolf, Bella Sidney 1925. From Groves of Palm Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd.
1922. Eastern Star-dust. Colombo: The Times of Ceylon
1914. How to See Ceylon. Colombo: The Times of Ceylon
1934. "Tulips & Palmyras" in The Times of Ceylon, Christmas Number. Colombo: The Times of Ceylon
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10
l
13
14
15
My grateful thanks to Dr. Neloufer de Mel for her direction, Shenuka Peiris and Amali Fernando for providing me with material from the Colombo Museum Library.
Sara Mills (1991), Discourses of Difference, p.3
ibid, p.3
Edward Said (1978), p. 1
See Constance F. Gordon Cumming (1892) Two Happy Years in Ceylon, Vol. 2, Lucinda Darby Griffith (1841-2) Ceylon during a residence in the years 1841-2, Caroline Corner (1908) Ceylon. The Paradise of Adam, Mary and Margaret Leitch (1895) Seven Years in Ceylon.
See in Jasodhara Bagchi (Ed.) (1995) Indian Women: Myth and Reality, p. 154
Edward Said (1978), Orientalism, p.3
See Foreword in Eastern Star-dust (1922)
See the cover of From Groves of Palm (1925)
Edward Said (1978), p. 1
See for example, From Groves of Palm (1925), p. 10
See Afterword in How to See Ceylon (1914), p.222 Bella Woolf (1925), p70
Bella Woolf (1934), "Tulips and Palmyras' in The Times of Ceylon, Christmas Number
See H.A. Goonetileke (1976), Images of Sri Lanka Through American Eyes
122

16
17
18
19
2O
2
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
3O
31
32
33
34
See Bella Woolf (1934)
ibid
See Afterword in How to See Ceylon (1914), p.222
See “Butler or Boy' in Eastern Star-dust,(1922)
ibid.
ibid.
See From Groves of Palm (1925), p.10
See for example, "The Maldive Tribute and "The Unchanging
East' in From Groves of Palm (1925)
Edward Said (1978), p. 197
ibid., p.3
In From Groves of Palm (1925), p. 26
Elizabeth J. Harris (1994) The Gaze of the Colonizer, p 19
Rana Kabbani (1986) Europe's Myths of Orient, p.7
See “Colour Contrasts' in Easter Star-dust (1922)
Kumari Jayewardena (1995) The White Woman's Other Burden, p. 162
Bella Woolf, How to See Ceylon (1914), p.220
Constance Gordon Cumming (1892), p.359
Bella Woolf (1914), p.220
ibid., p.222
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35
36
37
38
39 40
41
42
Bella Woolf (1925), p.2
Three essays titled "Rainy Days," "The Wilderness Blossoms," and "Rathe Primroses' reveal feelings of nostalgia. These are in Bella Woolf (1925), p. 48-65
See Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. F. Spotts (1990), p. 148
See Bella Woolf (1914), p. xi
See The Virago Book of Women Travellers, ed. Mary Morris (1994) The Following titles appear on the title-page of Two Happy Years in Ceylon: 'At Home in Fiji, 'A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-ofWar,” “The Fountains of the Sandwich Isles,' 'Granite Crags of California,' 'In the Himalayan and on Indian Plains,' 'In the Hebrides,' ‘Via Cornwall to Egypt' and 'Wanderings in China."
Constance Gordon Cumming (1892), p.4
For a discussion of the conventions of travel writing see Sara Mills(1991) p.77
1.

Morality and Standards
Ibsen's A Doll's House'
at the Carignano)
For her gala performance, Emma Gramatica brought Nora, the protaganist of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. To life again before a full house of gentlemen and ladies. The play was evidently new to most of the audience. But if most of them warmly applauded the first two acts, they were bewildered and deaf to the third, and applauded weakly: only one curtain call, more for the great actress than for the Superior creature that Ibsen's fantasy brought into the world. Why was the audience deaf? Why was it not moved to sympathy before the profoundly moral act of Nora Helmar, who gives up her home, her husband and her children to look for herself on her own, to dig down and find in the depths of her own self the strong roots of her moral being, to fulfil the duties that everyone has towards themselves even before having them towards others?
The drama, if it is to be truly such and not a pointless iridescence of words, must have a moral content. It must depict a necessary collision between two inner worlds, two conceptions, two moral lives. If the collision is necessary, the drama immediately takes hold of the minds
ck This review by Antonio Gramsci was taken from the book Selections from Cultural
Writings, a collection compiled by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
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of the spectators. They relive it in all its wholeness, in its most elementary as well as its more specifically historical motivations. By reliving the inner world of the drama. They also relive its art, the artistic form that has given concrete life to the world, that has made that world solid in a living and sure portrayal of human individuals who suffer, rejoice and struggle incessantly to go beyond themselves, to better the moral fibre of their historical personalities immersed in the present life of the world. Why then, was the audience - the gentlemen and ladies who yesterday evening saw the sure, necessary, humanly necessary, unfolding of Nora Helmar's spiritual drama - not moved at a certain point to sympathize with her, instead of remaining bewildered and almost disgusted by the conclusion ? Are they immoral, these ladies and gentlemen, or is the humanity of Henrik Ibsen immoral ?
Neither the one nor the other. What happened was simply that our standards rebelled against a more spiritually human morality. Our standards (and I mean the standards that constitute the life of the Italian public), which are the traditional moral garb of our high and petty bourgeoisie, made up for the most part of slavery, submission to the environment, a hypocritical masking of man the animal, a bundle of nerves and muscles sheathed in a voluptuously itchy skin, rebelled against another standard, a superior, more spiritual and less animal tradition. Another standard, whereby woman and man are no longer just muscles, nerves and skin, but are essentially spirit; whereby the family is no longer just an economic institution but is above all a moral world in process, completed by the intimate fusion of two souls which find in each other what each individually lacks; whereby the woman is no longer just the female who nurses her newborn and feels for them a love made up of spasms of the flesh and palpitations of the heart, but is a human creature in herself, with her own awareness, her own inner needs, a human personality entirely her own, and the dignity of an independent being.
The standards of the high and petty Latin bourgeoisie rebel, they cannot comprehend a world of this kind. The only form of female liberation which our standards allow us to grasp is that of the woman who becomes a cocotte. The pochade really is the only dramatic female action that our standards comprehend; the attainment of physical and
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sexual freedom. The circuit of nerves, muscles and sensitive skin remains closed in on itself.
A great deal has been written recently about the new spirit that the war has kindled in bourgeois Italian women. Rhetoric. The abolition of the institution of the husband's authorisation was exalted as a proof of the recognition of this new spirit. But the institution considers the woman as part of an economic contract, not as a universal humanity. It is a reform which affects the bourgeois woman as holder of a property and does not change relations between the sexes, nor even dent the surface of behavioural standards. These have not and could not have been changed, not even by the war. The woman of our countryside, the woman with a history, the woman of the bourgeois family remains as before a slave, without any deep moral life, without spiritual needs, submissive even when she seems rebellious, even more the slave when she discovers the only freedom that is allowed her, the freedom of coquetry. She remains the female who feeds the newborn, the doll who is the more dear the more stupid she is, the more beloved and extolled the more she renounces herself and the duties which she should have towards herself, in order to devote herself to others, whether they be her family or the sick, the human waste which charity gathers up and maternally succours. The hypocrisy of charitable sacrifice is another face of this inner inferiority of our standard of behaviour.
Our standard. A standard which is important in our present history, because it is that of the class which is the protagonist of this history. Alongside it, however, another standard is being formed, one that is more ours because it is that of the class to which we belong. A new standard? Simply one that is more closely identified with universal morality, that adheres entirely to it because it is deeply human, because it is more spiritual than animal, more of the spirit than of economics, than of nerves and muscles. Potential cocottes cannot understand the drama of Nora Helmar. Proletarian women, women who work, those who produce something more than pieces of new humanity and Voluptuous Shivers of Sexual pleasure can understand it because they live it daily. Two proletarian women whom I know, for example, understand it, two women who have had no need either of divorce or of the law to find themselves, to create a world where they would be better understood and more humanly themselves. Two proletarian women
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who, with the complete consent of their husbands, who are not gentlemen but simple workers without hypocrisy, have abandoned their families and have gone with the man who best represented their other half. They have gone on in old familiar way without thereby creating those licentious situations which are a network more typical of the high and petty bourgeoisie of the Latin countries. They would not have laughed coarsely at the creature Ibsen's fantasy has brought into the world because they would have recognised in her a spiritual sister, the artistic evidence that their act is understood elsewhere because it is essentially moral, because it is the aspiration of noble souls to a higher humanity, whose standard is the fullness of inner life, the profound excavation of one's personality and not cowardly hypocrisy, the tickling of sick nerves, the fat animality of slaves who have become masters.
(Avantil. Piedmont edition, 22 March 1917 Y
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