Public space remains slippery for women

In this column last week it was argued that women face shifting standards when it comes to accessing high political power. However, prejudice against women goes beyond politics; It is a lived reality that stretches in other arenas of their professional life. In the business world, for instance, the corporate glass ceiling prevents women from aiming for top positions so much so that for many women the game seems rigged before it starts. When the problem facing women is considered at its roots, “the picture that emerges,” as the Kenya novelist Tee Ngugi has observed, “is one of a tortured and dehumanised womanhood.” Consequently, women have had to fight for dignity. Feminists, for instance, have challenged standard setting, or the rules of the game, in the public space because they believe achievement, recognition, and the entire reward system continues to be informed by masculine conceptions, set in ‘the image of man.’ Because they are inherently biased against women, feminists argue, the rules identify ‘successful traits’ to be those that are ground in masculine socialisation, with those qualities that result from feminine socialisation considered undesirable in the public space, and, therefore, overtly or covertly punishable. This has led to the conclusion by radical feminists that a feminine woman cannot achieve success in the public space. They argue that for her to do so, she must first acquire masculine traits, which then serve as her launching pad that propels her to achievement and recognition. In ‘a man’s world,’ therefore, women must first get outside of their sensibilities, pour themselves into masculine sensibilities, in order to find high level success. In other words, the reason the game appears rigged against women is because their success is measured in terms of the extent to which they are able to ascribe onto themselves masculine traits, despite their initial conditioning (socialisation) as feminine women, something that all women are born into, and one they have no control over. Consequently, because social (masculine) rules constitute a social straightjacket, most ambitious women must find innovative ways to circumvent them. Often, they find that they have to acquire patriarchal norms and values in the spirit of “if you can’t beat them, you must join them.” That is where liberal feminism differs from radical feminism in the search for dignity for women by confronting the problem of “dehumanising masculinity,” as put by a column in here questioning why there has not yet been a woman president in our region. Where the former rests its hopes to achieve gradual change through policies such as gender mainstreaming and affirmative action, the latter would urge ambitious women to lead the revolution that mounts a challenge to unjust norms and values underpinning ‘patriarchy.’ Radical feminism also urges women against the concession of being incorporated or co-opted into unjust conditions as subordinate groups, junior partners in the public space. Such a strategy, they insist, coexists with the problem rather than confronting it at the root, which means that patriarchal traits of domination and destruction are retained. Even more problematic, writes one of this region’s feminist bloggers, the women thus co-opted become “party to their own oppression,” because “like any system with oppressive tendencies, patriarchy would not thrive this long if there wasn’t some complicity (intended and unintended) on the part of women.” It follows, therefore, that power in the public space, whether it is exercised by men or women, remains patriarchal in nature, with the way problems are conceptualised, the decision-making, and decisions processed through masculine lenses. In her regular column in The East African, Elsie Eyakuze, the self-declared feminist, argues for matriarchy because what we have been doing is: “Replacing men with women and keeping the system intact, [which] would just be patriarchy in high heels.” In the end we are all losers. First, the patriarchal female is no different from a patriarchal male, as Eyakuze states. But she could be even worse. That is because her success is pegged against ascribing onto herself some of the worst qualities man possesses: control, abuse, intimidation, etc. Moreover, she may even acquire dubious traits. Just like any copycat work, it often lacks genuine personality, is likely to be worse than the original it attempts to imitate. Second, and most importantly, a patriarchal woman is by definition not free. She is free but everywhere in chains – the social straitjacket. Consequently, she is likely to project the abuse and hostility that is in her present condition towards fellow women in a rat race to the bottom. Therefore, the reproduction of women in the image of men should not be what we wish for as a society. What is needed is the opportunity to discover how women would have experienced life were it not for the constraining parameters placed upon them, and for them to contribute their wisdom, unmolested, to the progress of humankind.

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Public space remains slippery for women