Two books that have caught my eye- the difference between Western and non-Western feminism (part I)

 As if I didn't have a whole stack of books to read on my ever-growing non-work-related pile, I keep finding new books to add. On my recent visit to Casa Dominicana in Oxford, I inherited a whole stack of books (just the ones on the stool!). In good Dominican tradition, more subjects keep adding to the pile.

Some of you may have heard of two I hope to read over the summer: Abigail Favale's Genesis of Gender and Louise Perry's The case against the Sexual Revolution (she does not argue for going back to pre-60 sexual mores). My interest in Favale is inevitable, after all the evolution of the concept of generation and gender from its 18th-century conceptualization to this day (assume the 18th c definition was the one used over many centuries) appears in my doctoral thesis. It is clearly an issue that needs to be more known because it would clarify the current confusing uses of these concepts. I suspect Louise Perry is coming from a different angle, the more secular recognition that not all is rosy and good for women under the current regime of sexual liberation, no-fault divorce, and no consistent family structure in most children's lives. It'll be interesting to see how she supports her arguments.

Seeing these two publications (I have yet to read them so will only comment based on what their reviewers say) I want to reach out to their authors because of their challenge to current ways of thinking about women, marriage, and feminism. As you may have guessed from this blog the concept of woman is the 'rote faden' of my research: how women are understood in the society they live in is central to how they are treated, what they can do without it being an 'act of rebellion', and how they perceive their own role in society, the family, and their ability to exercise their own agency. As a teenager and when in undergrad I felt that to identify as a feminist I needed to clarify that I was a pre-68 feminist. I could not and still don't agree with the type of radical, third-wave feminism that attacks other women for choosing to be stay-at-home moms. Working in an office is not for everyone, man or woman, and if being a stay-at-home mom fulfills that particular person and they can afford it financially then why not? While I realise that I may not be totally accurate in my own division between 2nd and 3rd wave feminism I suspect my more naive self was getting at something that many in the west can no longer perceive because the social justice that proto feminists, and first and second-wave feminists were fighting for has been, for the most part, solved in the west. In the west, it is rare for a woman not to receive an education because she is a woman and she is no longer forced to stop working if she gets married. That does hide the fact that women the world over continue to consistently earn less than men for the same job, revealing that there is something wrong under the surface that needs to be studied to understand why this problem continues.

But when you come from Latin America (LA) like me, from a country that while having one of the best literacy rates of that particular region of LA still falls considerably short of 50% of its population completing secondary school. When you grow up hearing how women are stupider than men and this is an acceptable 'joke' in men your age or when you know that in the rural areas of your country girls from poor families don't get sent to school because 'she will inevitably get pregnant and marry and she won't need it' then the perspective changes. This happens alongside persistently high numbers of single mothers, absentee fathers (dead beat dad's are common), and abortions performed under coercion. This is in fact more the result of the 'sexual liberation' movement that has seeped in alongside problems such as economic precarity and alcoholism.

 The social justice roots of feminism are still very necessary in the developing world because this notion that women do not have the capacity to study the same things as men or do the same jobs as men is still prevalent. That means more than half the women in the world are being discriminated against in what in the west is a given: education for all, the same education, and the opportunities that stem from that.

If all western feminism talks about is sexual liberation then it is disjointed from the needs and claims of most women in the world. It is such a radically different mentality that stems from economic, social, and religious realities the west simply does not appear to want to acknowledge.