Book Reviews 77
might be experiencing. In some cases governments have developed policies to
protect all women despite their colour.
Second, psychoanalysis is expensive, and if taken up would not be for
those people who most need the service.
Third, it is slowly becoming obvious that the systemic approach to
counselling, and engaging clients in brief therapy, leeds to the best results from
therapy.
However, having said this, non feminist therapists and non psychoanalysts
could still benefit from reading this book, if it is read with a view to gaining
a different perspective on therapy with women, despite their colour. As the book
is emotionally charged (dealing with the emotive issues of politics, race and
gender), those who want to benefit from it must remain objective.
Reviewed by Eunice R Muzenda, Executive Tutor, Family Counselling Unit,
Harare, Zimbabwe.
Women, Development and Survival in the Third World, Haleh Afshar (ed),
Longman Group UK Limited, London, ] 99].
This book might better have been titled Women, crisis and survival, as the
examples given show women reacting to forces which work against development
- repressive fundamentalism in Iran, the American destabilisation crisis in Nicaragua,
and the economic and political crises of Nigeria. Women are shown to be
affected as consumers, as workers and most seriously as the ones on whose
shoulders falls the increasingly heavy burden of maintaining the family unit. At
best, as in Mary Stead's Nicaraguan example, gendered needs and concerns such
as chiIdcare policies and contraCeption have been put on hold by the state because
they are seen as potentially divisive in the context of a national emergency; at
worst, as Carolyne Dennis shows in Nigeria, the social problems created by a
deteriorating economy are off-loaded from the state to women, who are forced to
"manage" the crisis at the household level.
The differential impact of national crises on women because of their
special role as household managers is not news. Where this volume is more
innovative, however, is in those contributions which discuss programmes and
policies that are more truly developmental, ie deliberately conceived and carried
out to advance the national good, rather than as a response to disaster. The most
interesting such discussion is Delia Davin's study of China, which describes the
impact of "development" of the sort being widely touted after the recent turmoils
78 Book Reviews
and reforms in the socialist world; namely, the promotion of the free market as the
prime mover of economic life and the withdrawal of the state from many fields.
Davin has the advantage of a historical perspective on this process as she examines
the decollectivisation of Chinese agriculture begun in 1978. As she relates it, the
replacement of the commune with household as the main productive unit in the
rural areas was meant to promote entrepreneurship and invigorate economic life.
Unfortunately for women, control of productive forces and of the social
environment of production was removed from the state-sponsored commune
leadership and reinvested in the traditional family head. Many rural women,
accustomed to personal recognition and remuneration for their labour as part of a
work team and to the camaraderie of collective work, now found the profit
generated by their labour was claimed by their father or husband, in the name of
the family.
This gave rise to the inaccurate perception that the only real economic
actors are men - a perception says Davin, which was reinforced by the tendency towards
sex discrimination in the new free market China on the grounds that
education and employment are for men, while home and family are for women.
This same perceptual problem is also found closer to home, according to
Anne Akeroyd's study of SADDC women farmers. She describes government
policies in. among other areas, Muscngezi and Mount Darwin. which seem to
assume that the only active peasant farmers arc men.
Despite official commitments to successful resettlement and the promotion
of household entrepreneurship in the peasant agricultural sector, women are
refused access to credit and denied land tenure under both governmental and
customary procedures. As in China, although the household unit as a whole may
seem to prosper. women's status within the household deteriorates as men are
tacitly encouraged to appropriate the fruits of women's labour. Akeroyd mentions
malnutrition, stress, isolation, the abuse of polygamy (in order to provide more
workers for one man) and the replacement of women's traditional subsistence
crops by "men's" cash crops as gendered resul ts of ill-designed rural development
schemes.
Similar patterns are observed by Cecelia Ng in Malaysia, where the state
has encouraged modernisation and mechanisation of agriculture. Control and
ownership of technical innovations has become a male preserve. and the development
of skills and training has been defined as male knowledge.
Women are thus locked out of this particular form of development. and are
regarded largely as "housewives", a process which Ng calls "the masculinisation
of agriculture" (p 195). Interestingly, she reports that both men and women
Book Reviews 79
see lack of involvement in "modem" agriculture as an elevation of women's status,
and that as a family's wealth increases, female participation in crop production
decreases. Le Thi Nam Thuyet, from Vietnam, describes the opposite processmovement
away from the household as the main rural economic unit and towards
the collectivisation of agriculture - and associates it with benefits to women
ranging from increased age at marriage to the eradication of illiteracy. Unfortunately,
Thuyet's piece is uncritically adulatory of the Vietnamese government
which makes it difficult to objectively compare the experience of Vietnamese
women with that of their counterparts under different rural development models.
A more up-to date article, dealing with the impact of doi moi (new thinking), the
Vietnamese perestroika, would probably have been more interesting.
The book concludes with a collection of articles on India. These accounts
come closer to embodying the title of the book as they depict women actively trying
to create a good life for themselves and their families rather than as objects acted
on by ideological and economic forces. Contributions include pieces on women
in trade union struggles and on the efforts of the traditionally outcast devdasi
women, with the support of sympathetic civil servants, to create for themselves an
economic base other than prostitution. Of particular interest is Jana Everett and
Mina Savara' s discussion of the utilisation oflower-value credit by women smallcommodities
producers, with suggestions on how the delivery of credit could be
redesigned to improve women's economic autonomy, and help them avoid the
invisibility and impotence that plague their farmer sisters in the SAOCC and
elsewhere.
This volume is not without faults. The arrangement and selection of
articles is sometimes inscrutable - for example, a rather abstract discussion of
Western misconceptions about Third World women appears in the middle of the
book rather than at the beginning, where it might have provided a theoretical
framework. Some of the articles are only tangentially relevant to the theme of the
book, such as Bina Agarwal's very technical discussion' of mechanical wheat
cultivation in Punjab which devotes only three short descriptive paragraphs to the
impact on women. Similarly, Dennis's account suffers from an abundance of
information on recent Nigerian history and a relative dearth of non - impressionistic
information on the daily struggles of Yoruba women. Haleh Afshar's account
of nineteenth and early twentieth century Iranian fighters for women's
emancipation,while inspiring in its own right, contributes little to empirical
knowledge of the lives of women in Iran today.
Despite its shortcomings, this book is a useful contribution to the study
of gender and development, largely because it enables comparisons to be made
80 Book Reviews
and similarities to be observed between societies as disparate as Nigeria, Malaysia
and Nicaragua. I hope that the empirical data contained here can nourish some
future, more theoretical work which may produce some useful generalisations
about the
differential impact of both crises and development policies on Third World
women.
Reviewed by Amy Kaler, Chindunduma GHS, Shamva, Zimbabwe.
Women in the World Economy, United Nations International Research and
Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (lNSTRA W), prepared by
Susan Joekes, Oxford University Press, 1989 (161 pp, price not stated, ISBNO-10-
506315-5 pbk).
This ambitious book sets out to locate the position of women in the world economy
and to examine how changes in international relations over the past 40 years have
affected women in the developing world.
The book is divided into four parts, which examine women's position in
a changing world, as well as changes in trade patterns, financial market activities
and technology and their impact on women. It also looks at employment trends for
women in agriculture, industry and services.
Part four summarises the emerging trends in the international economy,
as they affect women. It incorporates an annex highlighting excerpts on women
in development from the International Development Strategy for the Third UN
Development Decade.
In a broad sense, international exchanges have been favourable to
women's economic position, the book contends. Particularly in industry, there has
been an increase in the gainful employment of women. Thus women have
advanced most, economically, in countries that have developed as successful exporters
of manufactured goods, mostly in East Asia.
But recent protectionist barriers in industrialised countries, deep international
recession and the debt crisis have brought economic devastation in some
areas of the developing world and now threaten the economic advances of women
over the past 40 years.
The book concludes that the present international economic climate is