by Nurul Kabir

What we do in the world reflects what we know about it, and what we know depends on how we go about knowing, or in other words when thinking about change we should start by thinking about thinking.
   — Bawden R and R Macadam
   
   While writing his ‘Subjection of Women’, one of the most famous treatises ever written advocating democracy for women, John Stuart Mill observed happily in 1869 that the ‘actual treatment’ of women by men was better than the ‘legal position’ of the women in the English society of the day. ‘…because men in general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which man is legally invested were acted on…’.
   Almost the reverse is the situation of women in contemporary Bangladesh: The ‘legal’ situation of the Bangladeshi women is far better than the actual situation. Legally, women are not to be discriminated against in any sphere of familial, social, political, economic and cultural life, and specific legal provisions are in place to deal with any infringement of the equal rights of women. Still, women are subjugated and discriminated against by men in almost all the spheres of human activity in Bangladesh, which is projected by the political elite as a democracy.
   The problem lies in the paradigm of democracy that Bangladesh’s political elite, spread across the political divide, is committed to. The paradigm is plagued with patriarchal, and therefore, male-chauvinistic components.
   Patriarchy, which pre-supposes the natural superiority of male over female, shamelessly upholds woman’s dependence on, and subordination to, man in all spheres of life. Consequently, all the power and authority within the family, the society and the state remain entirely in the hands of men.
   
   The presence of patriarchal components in the discourses of democracy could well be traced back even to the golden days of the classical democratic revolutions taking place in eighteenth century Europe and America.
   Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), one of the greatest prophets of classical democracy, asserted in his ‘Social Contract’ the ‘inalienability of human liberty’, and proposed the structure of a democratic state, vis-à-vis monarchy, to be politically realised by way of forging a ‘social contract’ by the people, which is to be based on their ‘general will’, while the clauses of the social contract are to be ‘everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly admitted and recognised…The clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one — the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community.’ It was, therefore, not surprising that the prime political slogan of the French Revolution was ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ of, and among, the people.
   The revolution took place, but the successive regimes of democracy refused to consider women to be equal to men, and therefore denied women liberty, while the concept of ‘fraternity’ among men and women of the newly emerged body politic, which was formed in 1789 on the basis of the historic ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, remained absolutely missing.
   This is what forced a female revolutionary like Olympe de Gouges to write, and announce, the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen’ in 1791, ‘directly challenging the inferiority presumed of women by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’.
   In the declaration, she asserted rightly that like man, ‘woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights’ and that the ‘purpose of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man’, and the rights include ‘liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression’, and that the ‘principle of all sovereignty rests essentially with the nation, which is nothing but the union of woman and man’, and ‘no body and no individual can exercise any authority which does not come expressly from it (the nation)’, and that ‘liberty and justice consist of restoring all that belongs to others; thus, the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of woman are perpetual male tyranny’, while ‘these limits are to be reformed by the laws of nature and reason’, etc.
   Clearly, Olympe de Gouges was for forming a ‘social contract’ between Man and Woman, without which democracy is bound to remain an affair of only half of the world population. But Olympe was forced to walk to the guillotine two years after composing the declaration. She was executed, in 1793, however, on a different plea.
   The protagonists of the democratic emancipation of women were, in a way, destined to embrace such a fate, particularly because the champions of the mainstream discourses of democracy, Rousseau and the like, who had prepared the philosophical and cultural environ for a democratic revolution to happen in France, were inherently incapable of visualising the idea of woman being an equal partner in life —whether social, political, economic or cultural.
   A great revolutionary thinker like Rousseau, who championed the cause of individual liberty in a democratic dispensation, failed to be democratic when it came to the liberty of the women. ‘Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of manmade laws; this inequality is not of man’s making, or at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason. She to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children must hold herself responsible for them to their father,’ Rousseau argues in his ‘Emile’.
   His patriarchal mindset finds crude expression when he says that ‘the man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; the one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance…Woman is specially made for man’s delight’, or when he argues that ‘…assertions as to the equality of the sexes and similarity of their duties are only empty words’, because ‘nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of man’s judgment’, etc.
   Clearly, Rousseau advocates a social division of labour between men and women, which is absolutely patriarchal and therefore undemocratic.
   However, the historic revolution of the United States of America that laid its foundation stone in 1776 by declaring that ‘all men are created equal’ was equally patriarchal when it came to the ‘equal rights’ of the women.
   Against the backdrop of the indomitable political resistance against the white perception of democracy, the erstwhile political elite of the United States accepted the country’s black population as ‘citizens’ and granted them ‘equal protection of law’, by way of adopting the 14th Amendment to the US constitution in July 1868. Then, the term ‘citizen’ did not imply the women — black or white.
   A historical episode may help us to understand the situation. Susan B Anthony (1820-1906), one of the great American women’s rights activists of her time, her three sisters, and fifteen other Rochester women registered to vote, on November 1, 1872, after persuading the election inspectors that the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution, adopted in 1868, gave them that right. Four days later they cast their votes (in the presidential election). But on November 18, Anthony was arrested for illegal voting. She was tried in Canandaigua the following June. A hostile judge refused to allow her to testify, dismissed the jury, found her guilty, and fined her $100.
   Susan B Anthony and two of her comrades, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, also wrote a ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Women of the United States’ and wanted to read it out at an official function, arranged on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the ‘Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia’ on July 4, 1876. But their request to present it was turned down officially.
   The situation in Britain was hardly different until the twentieth century. There was the ‘World Anti-Slavery Convention’ held in London in June 1840, and two famous women, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were there in the American delegation. But they were not allowed to take active part even within the ranks of a reform movement. After an extended debate of four hours, the convention ruled that only male delegates could be seated. The women were to sit ‘silently behind a curtain’!
   Stuart Mill rightly pointed out in his ‘Subjection of Women’ that ‘…the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal (female). Were it not for that, I think that almost everyone, in the existing state of opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the injustice of excluding half of the human race from the greater number of lucrative occupations, and from almost all high social functions; ordaining from their birth, either that they are not, and cannot by any possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to the stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that however fit they may be, those employments shall be interdicted to them, in order to be persevered for the exclusive benefit of males’.
   
   The original Western perceptions of classical democracy have undergone a sea change, for the better, over the centuries — albeit in the face of ceaseless struggles by the oppressed classes, particularly the black and the women. Bangladesh, which has accepted democracy as a way of life, needs to realise that the country should not have to undergo the same painful, as well as suicidal, process of suppressing women in the political course of our development — social, political and economic.
   But the Bangladeshi elite’s discourse on democracy, as noted earlier, is devoid of many things, particularly the understanding that modern democracy envisages equal rights of both the male and female citizens of a country, and by that token, the females’ equal, and effective as well, participation in every sphere of life — familial, social, political and economic. The consequence is obvious: a pervasive patriarchy remains the order of the day, despite the fact that Bangladesh has at its disposal an adequate number of instruments, legal and constitutional, to uphold the equality of women in all spheres of life.
   Political naïfs often wonder as to why Bangladesh’s society and state is dominated by the males, especially when the machine of the state is being led, for about a decade and a half now, by two women — Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. The answer is simple: Khaledas and Hasinas are the spontaneous product of a patriarchal political culture that produces and reproduces, in many forms, a belief system, the prisoners of which, male or female, can, and usually do, sincerely believe in the natural supremacy of man over woman. The truly democratic forces of the day, having an egalitarian approach to modern democracy, have to intervene forcefully in the patriarchal political culture in question.
   While effecting the intervention, there is an important point for the democratic forces to remember, a point that Kate Millett pointed out in her ‘Sexual Politics’: As the relationship between the races is a political one, which involves the ‘general control of one collectivity, defined by birth, over another collectivity, also defined by birth’, the relationship between the two sexes is also a political one, having obvious social and economic implications in terms of one group exercising power over the other.
   Monarchy, or the idea of ruling a country by birthright (the Lord’s anointed), generally appears an absurd proposition in modern political systems across the world today, but millions of men and women throughout the globe hardly notice, let alone question, the fact that the men govern dozens of nations primarily by birthright, and that too in the name of democracy — thanks to the patriarchal world outlook perpetually produced, and reproduced, throughout the world by the male-chauvinist political establishments and the global intelligentsia embedded in those establishments.
   Understandably, for a ‘democracy’ to be genuinely democratic, the patriarchal political relationship between men and women has to be dismantled; and the interventions have to be made, therefore, at both the political and cultural levels. Patriarchy and genuine democracy simply cannot co-exist. Real democracy has to base itself on the equality of man and woman in all spheres of life — familial, social, political and economic.
   Nurul Kabir is editor, New Age

by Farida Akhter

One cannot find ‘women’ as a singular category in any country or community. Women belong to different classes, races, skin colours, castes, religions, geographical locations, tribes, etc. In the context of ‘work’ it is even harder to find any particular uniform group of ‘working women’. This is mainly because over the years, due to women’s movements, women’s development interventions and the so-called ‘globalisation’, the entire nature of and discourse on ‘work’ have been transformed. Now it is time to look critically at both ‘women’ as well as ‘work’. Whether we realise it or not, the new women’s movement will be primarily on the issues of working women, as the task of women’s movement to reclaim the positive transformative legacies of all toiling and marginal classes and communities. To remain focussed on our task we may be taking the risk of being simplistic for the sake of brevity, saying that what in the name of empowering ‘women’ has been emphasised both in the dominant mainstream women’s discourse and the feminism of the white elite bourgeois women of imperial countries is actually disempowering women of the working class. Nevertheless, despite historical and class limitations, feminism of elite women has also influenced the women of peripheral societies such as Bangladesh.
   Consequently, its later decadence is mostly due to its convergence with the aspirations of the newly formed class of elite women seeking upward mobility in our own societies coupled with the huge inflow of development funds for ‘gender’, ‘empowerment’, ‘micro-finance’, etc. Because of the overwhelming intervention from without, those involved in the women’s movement here could not put their act together and draw the line between the imperial task of producing ‘powerful women’ as their empowering projects and the task of the women’s movement to make ‘working women’ visible in society and enable them to become collective actors or subjects in transforming our society and polity. Drawing this demarcation line and reconstituting our struggle has already begun.
   Who are ‘working women’? In the feminist movement led by Northern or Western elites, women are called ‘working women’ only if they work outside their houses. Through this kind of definition or displacement of the notion of ‘women’s work’, the majority of women were left out of the feminist discourse. Working outside the house implies accepting the capitalist-patriarchal distinction between ‘house’ and ‘work-place’ despite the fact that social space outside the house is constructed as masculine space. Men do not work in the ‘house’, because housework is women’s duty. So empowering women meant enabling them to leave housework and work like men in masculine space. The idea of ‘work’ popularised by the elite women of imperial countries greatly attracted the aspiring middle-class women of Bangladesh to whom work is a genuine opportunity to work outside the house. Not surprisingly, some of them undertook research on women and accordingly defended the exploitative export-oriented garment industries as ‘genuine opportunities’ and justified the neo-liberal economic policies as ‘gender’ concern. Though for middle-class women it is an ‘opportunity’ to work outside the house, it cannot be equated with garment factory women who are the result of the destruction of all opportunities of rural livelihood to make their labour power ‘free’ for exploitation by global capital. They are not only exploited but regularly burnt or buried alive as we have seen in many accidents in horrendous work places. So, as women we need to understand ‘work’ in its various class dimensions and hierarchical contexts.
   Despite what we said about the feminism of the white elite bourgeois women and their counterparts in peripheral societies like Bangladesh, feminism should take into account the present necessity of self-conscious transformation historically and critically. In order to fulfil the revolutionary potential of feminist discourse, we must begin by consciously transforming its understanding past in the present critique feminist discourse and practice encompassing the lives and ideas of women on the margin. In her book ‘Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre’ (1984), Bell Hooks rightly said, ‘Attitudes towards work in much feminist writing reflect bourgeois class biases. Middle-class women shaping feminist thought assumed that the most pressing problem for women was the need to get outside the home and work — to cease being “just” housewives…Work outside the home, feminist activists declared, was the key to liberation. Work, they argued, would allow women to break the bonds and resist sexist domination.’
   Women never were or never are ‘just’ housewives. Inside the houses, they are working from dawn to midnight. It is true that the mainstream patriarchal economics and statistics do not see them and do not count them, therefore do not recognise them as working women. This is why, in South Asia, a very famous poster that the women’s movement has made is called ‘My Wife Does not Work’ with a picture of a woman with ten hands (like Durga) doing various household chores simultaneously. (Maybe, she will now have the ‘eleventh hand’ holding a mobile phone, as the advertisement shows how busy a woman can be, and how many multiple tasks she performs with one mobile phone of a particular company!) Whether household work is ‘work’ or not is not what one should debate. The debate is whether it is liberating for women ‘only’ if they work outside their houses. Such a debate is hardly feeble in feminist discourse and the conspicuous absence of such a debate is the characteristic sign of our time. On the contrary, working women are still facing the ‘double burden’, office work as well as household work.
   Bell Hooks pointed out that the emphasis on work as the key to women’s liberation led many white feminist activists to suggest that women who worked were ‘already liberated’. She argued, ‘If improving conditions in the work-place for women had been a central agenda for the feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women.’ She quoted from Barbara Ehrenreich and Karin Stallard’s essay ‘The Nouveau Poor’ (1982) which showed that while in the mid-seventies women who were young, educated, and enterprising beat a path into once closed careers like medicine, law, college teaching and middle management, underneath the upbeat images women as a class, young, old, black white, were steadily losing ground, with those who were doubly disadvantaged, black and Hispanic women, taking the heaviest losses.
   In Bangladesh, women’s movement has many positive achievements but is still dominated by the urban educated and middle-class. It has its radical moments but to integrate the politics of working women into the centre of the movement, systematic efforts at the practical level as well as questioning feminist discourse is necessary. The overwhelming presence of NGOs and dictation of international agencies through their counterparts has often marginalised the voices of Bangladeshi women. Usually middle-class and educated women lead the movement and are busy seeking justice against violence, unequal status in the society and discrimination. Of course, the UN Decades of Women was declared since 1975, so the guidelines are also coming from outside with money and advise-cum-consultancy. Bangladesh had only few middle- and upper-class women seeking jobs at the national and international organisations and therefore they became the ‘implementers’ of the suggestions made by foreign ‘gender consultants’. They are busy chanting the same old mantra concocted in the West: ‘Get out of your house, and you will be free.’ This is what they call ‘mainstreaming’ women. Vulgarisation of work as working outside the family and home fits very well into the neo-liberal policy of releasing cheap women labour for global capital. Previously women’s work was owned by her patriarchal husband, and now it is owned by capital. The family is a sphere where relations are personal and therefore oppression has a personal nature. In contrast, capitalists’ oppressive relations are omnipresent but impersonal.
   Women’s development programmes supported by multilateral agencies have always talked about liberating women by enabling them to work out of their houses. Development programmes, on the other hand, created enough conditions for the majority of the people to become so poor that they needed ‘women to work’ and earn ‘additional income’ for the family anyway. So women had no choice but to ‘go out of the houses and earn money’. In the villages women were already part of the agriculture work force, but modern agriculture based on chemicals, biocides and machines displaced women from their traditional roles in agriculture, and re-employed them in the rural road construction works. Just look at the history of Rural Works Programme and Food for Work Programme, which provided work to women outside their houses. But how many of them can be seen as ‘liberated’ women? There is no such statistics. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) recognises women as income earners representing 8-12 per cent of all households. This is an old statistics from the Household Expenditure Survey of 1989. Women’s reported income contribution is around 9 per cent in the rural areas and 14 per cent in the urban areas. The official labour force statistics did not initially recognise the vital role women play in national agricultural. The labour force survey of 1984-85 showed that only 8% of women (age 10 and above) were in the labour force compared to 78% of men. The number of females employed in agriculture (0.2 million) accounted for only about 1.2% of total agricultural employment. The definition of female economic activity changed in the labour force surveys conducted in 1985-86 to 1999-2000. Once they included livestock and poultry rearing as important economic activity, which had been so far seen as ‘household work’, the crude activity rate of women increased from 6.4% to 40.2% in 1989. However this rate decreased to 37.5% in the 1999-2000 labour force survey. The present number of women involved in economic activities is 22.8 million. There are about 28.1 million who are considered ‘housewives’.
   The Bangladesh situation of rural working women can only be found in the context of the displacements caused by modern agricultural policies, such as the Green Revolution. Let us take one example of rice-processing work done by women. If we remember the famous movie ‘Surja Dighal Bari’, we can see that women earning their livelihood from rice processing by Dheki were displaced by the introduction of rice mills. Such interventions were called ‘development’. In the rice mills women are given the hardest work with much less pay.
   On the other hand, in the mid-eighties the whole notion of work changed to the use of finance capital by women. The rural and urban poor women (not the poorest, of course) became micro-credit recipients. They are shown smiling while taking micro-credit from NGOs and then transferring the money to the male members of the family to help keep up corporate business in the rural areas. Women go out of their houses to receive credit which they will repay in instalments with high interest. Is it ‘work’ from feminist perspective? Is it ‘work’ for the female NGO staff? All they have to do is to go to the recipients’ houses and collect the instalments with interest. If they cannot do this, they do not get their salaries. Does it add any value to the economy? Of course, the micro-credit buildings rise higher, reflecting the success of very high interest rates. I am surprised to see that many women in Bangladesh are seeing micro-credit as ‘liberating’ or as Shamman (honour) for women, even though the money is used by the male members!
   Women came in huge numbers from villages to work in the readymade garment factories in Dhaka and Chittagong. They were recruited not because they could be liberated but because they could be exploited as cheap labour. Everyone knows what working in a garment factory means. The demand to raise the minimum wage has not been accepted by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers’ Association (BGMEA). The labour organisations demanded Tk 3,000 as minimum wage, but BGMEA proposes only Tk 1,300 per month. But it is not only that the wages are the lowest, they are not given to the workers at right time of the month. Moreover, the female workers are harassed and abused in different ways. The working conditions are terrible and dangerous, to say the least. A UBINIG study (2004) on the health conditions of the garment factory workers showed that if a woman works in the factory for a period of 10 to 15 years, she develops eye sight problems, back pains and urinary tract infections. Many workers lost their jobs not because they demanded higher wages, but because they were not fit to work for health reasons. The garment workers are treated like disposable workers. Use them for work as long as they are physically fit, otherwise throw them out of the factory! Unfortunately I have not seen the women’s organisations taking up the garment workers’ issue as a part of their movement. Even when there was uproar in the export processing zones, hardly any women’s organisation came forward in their support except those who are known as ‘women workers organisations’. Surprisingly, very few female garment workers participated in the movement. Perhaps because there was no feminist leadership in it. At the same time, women’s organisations were talking about the ‘National Policy of Women’s Development’, which was changed without consulting women’s organisations, and claiming that it is now going to ‘disempower’ women. So the agenda for the women’s organisations is to talk about empowerment —‘Khomotayan” — and not standing by the working women’s struggles. Women are trying to become ‘powerful’ or obtain power. It is not clear from such demands whether the power will come through money or collective strength.
   Let us now try to get a glimpse of the situation of powerful women. The Forbes.com has identified ‘The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women of 2006’ who, according to it, ‘are running corporations, non-profits and whole governments’. Except for a few ‘first ladies’ (I have no idea if they have been selected as powerful because they work or because they are the wives of ‘powerful’ presidents of some countries, such as Laura Bush), most are engaged in some kind of work. The criterion seems to be possession of the highest positions of governments, offices and decision-making bodies. This year the powerful women are in high positions in corporations mainly based in the US, including controversial corporations like PepsiCola, or in corporate media such as CNN. Over 65% of the powerful women are corporate chiefs. Out of 50 corporate chiefs, 30 are in US-based corporations, 6 in Europe and the rest in Asian countries such as Singapore, India, China and also in some Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia. There are 13 heads of government, among whom five are in Asia including Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh, three in Europe, four in Africa and one in Latin America. None are in the United States of America. There are 7 women who are in important ministries such as Secretary of State in US and Ministry of Defence in Israel. Besides being heads of government or ministers, there are women who are in important political positions such as Sonia Gandhi in India and Hillary Clinton in the US. There are only 7 women in other sectors such as health, human rights, law, et cetera, who are also listed as powerful women, mostly in the US, Europe and Asia. If we geographically divide the countries into North and South, over 70% the Forbes’ powerful women are in the North (US and Europe) and the rest are in the South. Except the heads of government, no woman from any poor country is listed as a ‘powerful woman’.
   This is a glaring example of the Northern elite women’s feminism in terms of being ‘liberated’ through ‘work’. How many working women who have been slaving away for 12 to 14 hours in globalised industries can ever become liberated? Will the powerful women of the world ever help the women in the working class, or will there be a new era in which working class women will have to fight against the ‘powerful’ women of the world?
   Farida Akhter of UBINIG is a leading women's rights activist

by Melissa Hussain

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.
   — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
   
   When I arrived in Bangladesh three months ago my first introduction to political life in this country was to witness first-hand a garment workers’ uprising. I watched workers from a garment factory in Mirpur pour out into the street to protest their poor working conditions, low wages, unstable employment, harassment, and lack of benefits, to name just a few of their grievances. And over the last three months the workers have continued to air their grievances by protesting in the streets, setting garment factories on fire, and destroying merchandise. To state the obvious: most of the garment workers are women. Who is to blame for their working conditions and poor treatment? Certainly local factory owners and managers play a role. But I think it is very important to place the relatively local politics of the exploitation of garment workers in the larger context of global capitalism if we want to fully explain who is to blame.
   Many mainstream economists today talk about global capitalism or globalisation as a wonderful thing: they praise the “free” market and the concept of the world as a “global village.” Certainly there are those who benefit from global capitalism. In the US (where I am from), I could walk into Wal-Mart and buy a very nice shirt that was made in a Third World country for $5. Yet I know that the worker who actually made the shirt was paid only a few cents for it. Wal-Mart, then, gets most of the $5. And it is highly likely that the shirt has been made in Bangladesh. As we know from a recent New Age article (August 17), Bangladesh has recently become the third largest supplier of garments to the US, yet it remains the seventh earner.
   What does all of this mean? How free is the market for the poor people, especially women, who supply cheap commodities for the multinational corporations like Wal-Mart? It is important to understand that multinational corporations grow rich precisely because they are able to exploit labourers who are paid so little and treated so poorly for their hard work. And multinational corporations would not have the free range to exploit workers in the way that they do, if they were not backed by imperialism, particularly US imperialism.
   I will try to explain these connections between globalised capitalism, the exploitation of women’s labour, and US imperialism. Today global capitalism is exploiting women’s labour all over the world, especially the labour of poor women from Third World countries like Bangladesh. At the same time, most of the women in the world have little access to the power structure that exploits them. Let me cite a few statistics to make my point. Global Exchange, for instance, points out that women make up half the world but hold less than 5 percent of positions of power in determining global economic policy, and own an estimated 1 percent of global property. And the Sisterhood is Global Institute has observed that women produce 80 percent of the food on the planet, but receive less than 10 percent of the agricultural assistance. Even an NGO like Oxfam cannot hide the fact that women make up 45 percent of the world’s workforce, yet account for 70 percent of the world’s population living in poverty. The list goes on. Of course, the statistics change slightly from year to year. And the resources I have drawn on come from various approaches and means of research. But they all have produced similar statistics that directly point to the unequal gendered division of labour on an international scale. In other words, the system of global capitalism—backed by US imperialism—most brutally exploits the labour-power of poor women, especially from Third-World countries.
   I could cite many more statistics. But the general findings are clear: global capitalism depends on the extreme exploitation of women’s labour-power, particularly the labour-power of poor women from Third-World countries. Now, how is this related to capitalism and US imperialism? I argue that the vastly unequal and exploitative international division of labour is itself a product of US capitalism and imperialism. Today poor women from the Third World remain the major labour-force for capitalism and imperialism. Imperialism, in fact, can be defined by the classed-raced-gendered international division of labour. For instance, imperialism can be currently characterized by the global assembly line, the mass migration of labour, the consolidation of wealth among the few, the creation of free trade agreements and free trade zones to exploit the cheaper labour-power of workers in the Third World, and the increasing impoverishment of people of colour all over the world.
   Ironically, even the President of the United States will admit to this problem to a certain degree. In his infamous 23 September 2003 Address before the United Nations, after stubbornly refusing to apologize for the post-9-11 US imperialist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq — which drove many poor women in those countries to desperation while even brutally killing many of them—US President George W. Bush said the following about the labour of Third-World women:
   “There is another humanitarian crisis, spreading and yet hidden from view. Each year, an estimated eight to nine hundred thousand human beings are bought, sold, or forced across the world’s borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade. This commerce in human life generates billions of dollars each year, much of what is used to finance organized crime. There is a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable. The victims of sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life, an underworld of brutality and lonely fear. Those who create these victims, and profit from their suffering, must be severely punished. Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.”
   What is, of course, flagrantly hypocritical about Bush’s statement is that while he is trying to place the blame for this problem on poor Third-World countries, the United States is the major supporter of the sex-industry and of the slave labour of poor Third-World women. The United States itself not only “tolerates this trade” but also creates and supports it. Thus, it is a huge irony that the President of the United States can stand up in front of the UN and proclaim his deep sympathy for Third-World women slave labourers. Indeed, the United States—in its position as the world’s largest and most brutal capitalist-imperialist force—needs the labour of poor Third-World women in order to continue making massive profit and accumulating wealth. Bush can easily blame the Third-World countries in which the trafficking of women is a huge problem. But accusing those countries—whose governments are, often, corrupted and literally bought by US interests—does not get to the source of the problem.
   I argue that US imperialist capitalism—through the vehicles of such financial institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization—is the source of the problem of the gendered-racialised international division of labour. The economic system of capitalism together with US imperialism—systems of production-relations and power-relations which are interlinked and interdependent in this age of so-called “globalization”—push many women in Third-World countries to desperation so that slave labour is their only option for survival. An American political analyst, Stephen Zunes, provides a similar argument in response to the above statement by Bush. Zunes writes: “Most development organizations and advocates for Third World women recognize that the sex trade and other human trafficking has grown most dramatically in countries where traditional economies have collapsed as a result of neo-liberal economic policies imposed by US-backed international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. The selling of one’s daughter or oneself becomes a matter of survival.”
   I agree with Zunes’s analysis that the trafficking of women is mostly due to US capitalist-imperialist interventions in Third-World countries. Zunes goes on to say: “Shifting to a development policy that emphasizes sustainable development and grassroots economic initiatives (such as micro-lending programs) will do far more to lessen this human tragedy than relying on law enforcement alone.” Here I must disagree with Zunes. The solution that he offers—development policies created by development organizations—is not only inadequate but also runs the risk of getting pressed into the service of imperialism itself. The kinds of organizations he speaks of are mostly, if not completely, based in the “first world.” Such developmental models only reproduce capitalism’s unequal power-relations and production-relations so that Third-World countries remain at the mercy of first-world “charity.” And this charity is really an ameliorating cover-up for US imperialist capitalism that essentially makes poverty more bearable for women in Third-World countries, rather than changing the economic structure itself to build a more equitable global economy.
   The Egyptian political economist Samir Amin, in Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, explains the problem of relying on NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) as a means for changing the crisis of the unequal and exploitative international division of labour. He writes: “Criticisms have been formulated by what are known as NGOs of an extremely diverse nature. The concept of capitalism is unknown to many of them, and as a consequence their criticisms are strictly moral. The policies are accused of fostering poverty, as if the logic of the system had nothing to do with it. Poverty is thus seen as the product of ‘errors’ which could be ‘corrected.’”
   I have noticed this kind of trend in many studies of the problem of the unequal and exploitative international division of labour. Many organizations such as NGOs, as well as the UN and other bodies of power that do the research on women’s labour tend to not see labour in terms of the global political economy of capitalism. Rather, the international division of labour becomes localized to a specific country as a “problem” the country needs to fix, or such a division of labour gets reduced to an issue of “underdevelopment” versus “development.” For instance, Sara Jewitt argues in Environment, Knowledge and Gender: Local development in India’s Jharkhand that “local people have succeeded in finding a way out of their own development ‘impasse’ by determining locally-based development strategies that reflect their main priorities” In other words, Jewitt sees the international division of labour and the First World/Third World unequal power/production relations as “impasses” that can be overcome through finding new strategies for the development of Third-World countries—in this case, India. In a related yet different vein, the UN’s 1980 “International Development Strategy for the Third United Nations Development Decade” argued for countries to “adopt effective measures to enhance the involvement of women in the development process.” Of course, this approach to the question of the gendered division of labour completely fails to address the fact that underdevelopment of the Third World is an inherent product of capitalism and imperialism and that patriarchy in so-called “underdeveloped” countries is necessarily upheld and intensified by first-world capitalist-imperialist macrologics and operations.
   Instead of a “developmentalist” model for change, then, I propose an anti-imperialist feminist political economic analysis of the global division of labour. Such an analysis provides an economic framework for understanding the racist-patriarchal international division of labour as rooted—at least in part—in the very foundations of the capitalist system itself. Capitalism relies on the unequal exchange between the worker and the capitalist so that the capitalist gains profit through the unpaid surplus labour of the worker. Thus, the more the worker’s labour is exploited, and the fewer wage she is paid, the more profit the capitalist makes. But I do not argue here for a mechanical Marxist—or for that matter, pseudo-Marxist—approach which fails to take into account imperialism, racism and patriarchy as fundamental to the unequal exchange between the first world—primarily the US—and the Third World. In fact, as women have become the centre of the labour force throughout most of the Third World in this age of so-called “globalization,” Western mechanical “Marxist” political economic paradigms continue to fail to theorize or account for this fact. Thus I find it necessary to use and stretch Marxist analysis in order to account for the woman question that generally remains profoundly unaddressed and ignored. To put it another way: capitalism and imperialism—interrelated and interconnected as they remain—are simultaneously gendered, racialised, and classed. So when we talk about the devastating effects of US capitalism and imperialism on the global economy we must talk about the labour of poor Third-World women who suffer most brutally under US capitalism and imperialism.
   Also, we must recognize that the issue of women’s exploitation and oppression is not confined to the Third World. Contrary to the opinion of President Bush and his chamcha pundits—who are always ready to point to women’s suffering and the problems of patriarchy in Third-World countries—things aren’t any better here in the United States. After all, there is irony in the fact that the US President is often ready to criticize the “backward” patriarchy of a Third-World country without ever spelling out that the capitalist system—more than 500 years old now—is the most backward and anachronistic one. As far as the US is concerned, while a small percentage of white, upper class women enjoy certain privileges and freedoms and are able to escape their prescribed gender-roles as housewives and mothers, they are able to do so because they can freely exploit and depend on domestic Third-World women workers or poor women of colour within the United States to clean their houses, care for their children, and make their food. And those women who “make it” into the capitalist political or business world, more often than not, sell out to the conservative capitalist-patriarchal system and ideology so that they end up not changing the system at all. Rather, they become the “tokenized” women who continue to keep the system in its place and preserve the status quo.
   And, of course, for the majority of women in the capitalist-imperialist United States, the system of patriarchy—along with racism, white supremacy, heterosexism, and classism, among other systems of inequality—continues to do violence to their very existence. There is a huge inequality between white women and women of colour in the US, between upper class and poor women. While George W. Bush tries to present an image of the United States to the world as a country that has “fixed” its gender problem, this is far from the truth. For instance, in their article “How the US Economy Creates Poverty and Inequality,” Mary Huff Stevenson and Elaine Donovan point to the continually growing gendered and racialised inequality in the United States created by the capitalist economy. They write: “Any capitalist economy creates winners and losers, and the United States is no exception. What is noteworthy about the US economy in the 1990s is that the gap between the winners and the losers is larger than it has been in the past 50 years, and that the United States is now generating more inequality than any other advanced capitalist nation.”
   And Stevenson and Donovan cite statistics from the US Department of Labour to explain that the “losers” in the US are women and people of colour. They point to the huge wage gap between men and women, the lowest on the wage scale being black women. For instance, the median earning for white men who finished high school but did not attend college in 1994 was $26,572 while white women in the same category made $18,772 and black women made $15,808. And more recent statistics from The Ultimate Field Guide to the US Economy by James Heintz and Nancy Folbre show that things have not improved much if at all since 1994. For instance, Heintz and Folbre point to the fact that in 1998 white women made about 75% of what white men made, working the exact same jobs, while Latino and African-American women also working the same jobs made considerably less than that. So, the problems of patriarchy and racism have not dissipated in the US but have unprecedentedly increased, particularly in the post-September-11 world. And the unequal gendered-racialised division of labour is as much a problem in the US as it is globally.
   It is clear, then, that US capitalism and imperialism have reached a crisis stage on a global scale where poor women of colour within the US and poor Third-World women remain the most brutally exploited. But what, then, is to be done with this knowledge? Theorizing about this massive global capitalist-imperialist crisis is utterly insufficient. I think that there is no alternative to organizing. And we must imagine different possibilities for our society. Joyce Jacobsen writes in The Economics of Gender that truly cooperative societies “might be expected to display more gender equality” than the current system. I would even go so far as to say that any cooperative society must necessarily display more gender equality—as well as racial and class equality—than our current society. Of course, it would be naïve to expect another economic system to do away with patriarchy, racism, and classism automatically. But it is the struggle that only continues.
   Melissa Hussain is visiting faculty at North South University

by Irum Shehreen Ali

In Bangladesh, patriarchal gender relations that place men in economically and socially higher positions generate and perpetuate further gender inequalities, and are ascribed within the social, cultural, historical, economic and religious context of society. This has seen the absence of women and their interests within institutions and contexts that shape their well-being and future. Of these, political institutions at national, regional and local levels are one of the most important, as they have long been areas where women’s participation and utilization of power is weak, or merely cosmetic. The last three decades have recorded the slow, but definite increase in women’s overall participation in public life, and more specifically in the political sphere. Traditional gender roles have changed in light of urban women’s involvement in the globalised capital economy; the opening up of rural women’s activity spaces and the vocalization of a women’s movement within the political and developmental sphere.
   Local government is widely acknowledged as the primary means by which democracy can be brought to the grassroots. It is the level of government that is most conducive to the regular interaction between elected representatives and their constituents and represents a decentralization of political and financial authority. An effective local government structure allows the growth of local political leadership; the participation of the polity in decisions that shape their future; the development of accountable local administration and the implementation of people-centred development initiatives. Bangladesh has a long history of local governance that pre-dates the colonial British era. Over time, the ideology, form and structure of this has changed with successive governments who have tried to engage in different modes of decentralization, mostly while still trying to preserve the centrality of state authority.
   Historically, the lack of presence and meaningful participation of women in local government has undermined its democratic rationale and hindered its efficacy and accountability. Theoretically, the very presence of local government and the decentralization of power problematizes gendered notions of hegemonic, centralised power. However, examining the articulation of women’s voice through their engagement both with and within local government over the last three decades, it is obvious that while there is legal provision for direct election, and also for the preferential treatment of women to ensure their participation through reservations, the continuing influence of patriarchal ideologies and social norms, as well as an unwillingness on the part of successive central governments to devolve power to the local level translate into barriers towards comprehensive political voice creation, despite large steps towards this. Significant measures have been taken to guarantee women’s membership and involvement in local government. Taking this opportunity, women have worked to change the political culture at the local level by attempting to make their presence a norm rather than an anomaly. To a significant degree, they have succeeded, with greater numbers of women aspiring to enter political life and to create change for their communities and themselves. However, women have yet to contest general seats in large numbers, with many preferring to stand for seats where they don’t have to compete with their male counterparts. In office, women have consistently struggled to gain political legitimacy within a system that regards their presence as tokenistic and lacking authenticity due to the provision of their positions by the government. Both the system and local political norms, while having changed considerably to accommodate women’s voices, still have to evolve significantly to allow women’s equal participation in local government.
   
   Local government: The historical, legal and institutional context
   The provision of women’s place in local government stems from the Constitutional guarantees provided for the equal treatment and advancement of women. The Constitution of Bangladesh does not allow discrimination against any citizen on the basis of religion, race, sex, case or place of birth (Article 28 [1]); it also guarantees women equal rights with men in all spheres of the State and public life (Article 28 [2]); entitles all citizens to equal protection of the law (Article 27) and endeavours to ensure participation of women in all spheres of national life (Article 10). In addition, it mandates that nothing shall prevent the State from making special provision in favour of women or for the advancement of any backward section of the population (Article 28 [4]). In relation to local government, the Constitution enshrines its presence in Articles 56 (Chapter III) and 60, stating that: “Local government in every administrative unit of the republic shall be entrusted to bodies, composed of persons elected in accordance with law” and “Parliament shall, by law, confer powers on local bodies to impose taxes for local purposes, to prepare budgets and to maintain funds”. Additionally, Article 9 of the Constitution also guarantees to encourage local government and provide special representation to marginalized groups, including women. (However, many women contest and oppose this classification that relegates them to a “marginalized” status.) Thus, the State is mandated to provide representative local government at all administrative levels. Local government usually possesses the following five attributes: its statutory status, its power to raise finance by taxation in the area under its jurisdiction, participation in the local community in decision-making and administration, the freedom to act independently of central control in specified areas and its purpose to serve the political and administrative needs of people within a specific geographic region.
   The ideology behind local government is the decentralization and devolution of centralized power. Decentralization involves fundamental changes in the way that decisions are made and resources allocated. According to political historian David Slater, it is “the transfer of a range of capacities and authorities away from the central government to lower levels within a structured territorial hierarchy of power”. In essence, it reverses the central concentration of administrative power and confers more powers on local representatives. Bangladesh, like many other post-colonial nations has historically possessed a centralized system of institutionalised dominance and power where local government has played a marginalized and largely ineffectual role. There have been six major attempts to reform local government under six different regimes. The purpose, at least at the level of rhetoric, has been to create participatory systems in which the polity can express their interests and exercise control over their own governance.1 For women, this has meant a gradual increase in participation, by means of standing for election and being elected to office. However, the actual exercise of power in order to create change and initiate development still remains grossly inadequate to the needs of a group who represent half the population.
   The history of local government reforms and decentralization: Directly after independence, the Awami League government dissolved all local government bodies, except the Divisional Council, and administrators took over their functions. In 1973, the government introduced a three-tier system with a directly elected Union Parishad (council of villages), a Thana Development Committee under the authority of a sub-divisional officer and a Zila Parishad under the control of a deputy commissioner. It also divided each union into three wards that would each have directly elected representatives to the UP. While UP elections were carried out in 1973 and newly elected office bearers took charge, the fact that the administrative bodies above the UP were centrally controlled prevented the devolution of any real power to the local level. The creation of a Presidential one-party state in 1975 under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution further undermined democracy at the local level, which was now under the purview of the district governor.
   The government of Major General Ziaur Rahman promulgated a Local Government Ordinance in 1976. In this system, there were to be three tiers of governance namely the Union Parishad (UP), the Thana Parishad (TP) and the Zila Parishad (ZP). The Ordinance also provided for the nomination of two women by the Sub-Divisional Officer from the women of the entire union. These women members could be removed from office on any ground charged against them after a suitable inquiry. While well-meaning, the lower tiers of the system were administratively subordinate to the higher tiers and the policies increased bureaucratic dominance, as well as created a patronage-based system that favoured local elites.
   Reforms enacted during the dictatorial government of H. M. Ershad as suggested by the Committee for Administrative Reorganization and Reform (CARR) included the upgrading of thanas into upazilas, with directly elected Chairmen. Village level governance was abolished, and the union parishad (UP) was once again empowered, complete with nominated women members. The reforms meant that for the first time in the history of the nation, an elected body was established higher than the union level. Administrative representatives such as the Upazila Nirbahi Officer were accountable to the upzila parishad, and this body was responsible for all development activities within its jurisdiction, far outreaching those of the previous thana. The upazila thus became the basic unit of administration. While Ershad’s reforms in principle could really empower the polity at the local level through the devolution of power, they faced opposition from mainstream political parties who saw this as a means for Ershad to gain rural political support that would counteract the urban opposition to his regime. Thus, upazila elections were postponed. Bureaucrats were unwilling to cede authority and decentralise actual power, and the system managed to co-opt local rural elites and further exacerbate inequalities, despite a significant theoretical step towards decentralization.
   The subsequent democratically elected governments of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party lead by Khaleda Zia (1991-1996) and Awami League lead by Sheikh Hasina (1996-2001) actively undertook legislation to curtail the power of local government units, further entrenching the system of central dominance. Their policies were mostly regressive and borne of political expediency rather than a sincere belief in the necessity of decentralization. The BNP immediately abolished the upazila system and replaced it with the thana system of old. A system where the Thana Development Co-ordination Committee would serve as the link between the UP and the zila was rendered powerless by severe bureaucratic control. Contrary to promises, the zila parishad never materialised, and UPs were subject to rigorous supervision by the bureaucracy. The Awami League government formed the Public Review Commissions (PARC) in 1997 who suggested that the upazila be the focal point of local administration. However, the administration did not enact the recommendation, preferring an incremental approach to decentralization. However, this government did make provision for the direct election of women members to the UPs in reserved seats for the first time in the nation’s history.
   Both governments altered the form and structure of local government as they feared the creation of strong support bases for the opposition party through the placements of politically biased local representatives. Their reforms were also caught in the international move away from State led governance to non-governmental development that was championed by international donors and multilateral agencies. Local government budgets suffered greatly from cutbacks in state expenditure, which further incapacitated them. There was an abject failure in the effective distribution of authority and resources to local levels. Local government for the most part remained politically controlled and insulated from the people’s demands and scrutiny.
   Current structure of local government: The current system of local government, as well as its finance and inspection is overseen by the Minister of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives (LGRD). At the rural level, local government have four tiers. The 64 Zila Parishads (ZP) are at the top. Then there are 469 Upazila Parishads, based on the old thana system, which is the lowest level at which the civil bureaucracy and line ministries operate. The upazila represents the police ad all ministerial offices, including tax, magistrate’s courts and officers dealing with all aspects of economic and social development. The fate of the Upazila Parishad is uncertain due to legislation passed in 1991 that abolished the direct election of Upazila Parishad Chairmen, and the Zila Parishads have essentially only existed on paper since Independence. Upazilas are the theoretical link between the district level and the local people, who are represented by the Union Parishad, of which there are approximately 4,488 in the nation. The UP is the local government body with the longest established history of functionality, since 1870. They are the crucial units of the rural local government system in Bangladesh. They are comprised of 13 members: a Chair, 9 general members and three women members from reserved seats. The fourth tier, which is not active, is gram sharker (village level governance, in size roughly one ward of a union). There are plans to create over 40,000 units of them. The current system has been approved by a range of legislation including the Gram Sarkar Bill (2003), the Local Government Ordinance (Union Parishad) 1983, Local Government Act, 1997, the Upazila Parishad Act 1998, the Zila Parishad Act 2000, etc.
   The two most important policy changes that have been brought about in the 1990s in regards to local government have been the streamlining of the representational bases of the UP by demarcating the union into 9 wards and having a member from each wards and the strengthening of female representation within the UP by the 1997 Act No. 20 which allows for the election of women to three reserved seats, each comprising three wards. In addition, there are 13 UP committees that undertake various development activities and women are to head one third of them and are further mandated to head the committee on women’s and children’s welfare, culture and sports. In addition, members and commissioners from reserved seats are to motivate people against the cruelty to women and children, and engage in awareness raising regarding gender-based issues and women’s development. One third of the members of these standing committees have to be from the reserved seats. The 1997 legislation, at least theoretically, guarantees the one-third representation of women at the electoral level, as well as the functional level, through their involvement in development committees and programmes.
   At the urban level, local government is simpler. The nation is comprised of six City Corporations, which are further divided into 223 Pourashavas. As per the Pourashava Ordinance 1977, which was amended in 1998 for municipalities and further in 1999 (Gazette Additional Copy for the City Corporation Ordinance) for City Corporations. The legislation stipulates that whatever the number of ward commissioners, depending on the area of the Pourashava and the City Corporation, there should be reserved seats for women equivalent to one third of the number of commissioners fixed by the government. These women will be directly elected. While there are no specific duties outlined for women ward commissioners, they have primarily been given responsibility for women’s issues.
   
   Women’s contestation in local government elections: outcomes, experience and enabling factors
   Prior to the passage of legislation that stipulated the reservation of 33% of seats at both the urban and rural level, women’s presence within local government was negligible. They were selected on the basis of kin relations, patronage systems and were entirely at the mercy of the bureaucrats who controlled the local bodies. The past decade has witnessed the large-scale entry of women into local government bodies. Looking at selected data from various local level elections, we see that the overall trend is one of increasing representation.
   Women and election outcomes: Kamal Siddiqui, in his book on local government, reports that in the 1992 UP elections, out of the 1115 women who contested for Chairmanship and 1135 who contested for membership, only 4 women candidates were elected overall. In contrast, the 1997 elections that followed the promulgation of reforms to the UP through reservation of seats for women showed hugely different results. In the 1997 elections were held in 4,298 UPs where a total of 23 women Chairpersons were elected, while 12,894 women were elected for the reserved seats. In 2003, elections held in 4,228 UPs saw 22 women elected as Chairmen (from 232 candidates), 85 women elected for the general seats (out of 617 female candidates) and 12,684 women elected for the reserved seats (from 39,423 candidates). So, while a large number of women have contested and been elected to the reserved seats, women’s contestation and election from general seats is not as widespread.
   In City Corporation elections, in 2002 in Dhaka, Rajshahi and Khulna, fewer than 3 women contested for the post of mayor, and on an average, 100 women contested for the reserved seats for commissioners which numbered between 10 and 30 depending on the size of the city corporation. Similar figures were reported for the City Corporation elections in Barisal and Sylhet in 2003. In the 2004 Pourashava elections, held in 150 Pourashavas, 3 women were elected as Chairmen, and 372 were elected commissioners in reserved seats. No female was directly elected as commissioner in the general wards. It is clear that the reserved seats for women have created a culture of women’s participation in local government, but women’s presence is still overwhelmingly restricted to those seats.
   The experience of candidacy: Studies show that the experience of candidacy has changed radically for women before and after the 1997 reforms for reservation. Research carried out in 1987 among UP members states that the experience of standing for UP election was humiliating and difficult one. Women candidates from elite families, higher income groups, more years of formal education and those who had family connections with the Chairmen were nominated for local office. Selected women members found it difficult to rally support from male UP members for their nominations as they were deemed unfit for public office. They themselves felt unprepared and untrained to serve the people and desired training regarding the rules and regulations of UP office. At the time, both male and female constituents themselves voiced reservations about the efficacy of women UP members in the face of traditional norms and long-standing systems of patronage.
   In contrast, surveys carried out all over the country in the wake of the 1997 elections show a different experience of candidacy. By and large, women candidates were able to compete for election in the reserved seats with little opposition from male counterparts, engaging in door to door campaigning and processions in public areas of the constituency. A women and local governance study by BRAC’s Research and Evaluation Division (RED) states that women in its study area were able to contest elections more or less free from disruption and censure. Research carried out in Kushtia district shows the most important factor in facilitating women’s campaigns for election was the support of their families. However, an important disabling factor in both rural and urban level local elections was the fact that women had to represent 3 wards, as compared to men who stood from one. This meant that women had to canvass a wider area and address the concerns of a far larger group of constituents on a smaller budget, which was the same as for male members from general wards.
   It is important to note that despite welcoming the provision for direct election and the chance to compete against men, the numbers of women contesting from for membership from the general wards is relatively low, as it is seen as risky strategy that might antagonise the traditional male elite. Due to the fact that the new legislation mandated a separate reservation for women alongside the direct election seats available to both men and women, which men assumed that they would control, male electoral hopefuls did not feel that women were “taking away” the seats meant for them.
   Enabling factors for women’s political participation: Important factors for women’s election to local government were family support, elite status within the village, relative income security, previous political experience and NGO involvement. Those women who had access to the financial resources of male members of their families (father, husband or brother) were found to be able to campaign more extensively. The BRAC RED study quoted above found that one-sixth of women UP members surveyed reported political involvement and/or backing, and that this involvement was highly correlated with better economic condition in terms of family income. Over 50% of elected UP officials also reported membership in an NGO. It is thought that NGOs working at the national and rural levels carried out massive mobilization campaigns in 1997, making their members aware of their rights as voters, as well as encouraging them to contest for office. The presence of NGO field operatives during UP elections also had a positive role in making women candidates feel secure.
   What was equally important as the above was the ability of women to make voters believe in their inherent abilities to perform effectively in positions of power. In a study carried out by the Community Development Library on national and local voting behaviour in 17 districts, it was found that voters considered the honesty, education and perception that the candidate would be committed in development activities as the most important considerations while voting and that candidates come to power primarily on their own qualifications. The same study found that less than 30% of voters considered the candidate’s political/party backing while making voting decisions.
   
   What have women been able to achieve and what were the constraints?
   While it may be arguable as to the level of development activities that women local government representatives have been able to initiate, their participation has genuinely changed the attitudes of a section of their constituents towards women’s issues. Women representatives in local government have also managed create greater awareness and resource allocation for health and social justice issues, often utilizing traditional roles and kin connections to their benefit in their working life.
   Norms being redefined: Research on women ward commissioners in Dhaka and Comilla reported that in some cases their constituents relied on them more than the male ward commissioners to advance local interests as women were considered to be more dedicated and less corruptible than the men. Women commissioners actively utilised public perception regarding women, as well as their kin connections to find resolutions to structural and administrative problems. Women in the same study report that they are actively engaged in raising awareness about and solving disputes regarding dowry, familial disputes, domestic violence, mother-child healthcare, income generation, adult education, women’s co-operatives, etc. They believe that they are allowing the voice of 50% of their constituent’s voices to be heard for the first time.
   Women have also been actively involved in changing social attitudes, health awareness and living standards for women within their constituency. In the case of UPs, women members in a 2004 study report that while less than 25% of women are involved in relief and rehabilitation committees or infrastructure and development committees, over 40% of member are dynamically engaged with issues of social justice, women and children’s development, shalish and arbitration and awareness raising regarding health and hygiene issues. Over 63% of the women surveyed reported great success in creating awareness and implementation of hygienic latrines, safe drinking water and family planning activities. A follow up study in the same area showed significant involvement of women UP members in various committees (46%) and social awareness activities like the plight of destitute women, dowry disputes, child marriage, etc (approximately 50%). The women were most involved in choosing beneficiaries for the governments vulnerable group development programmes (79%). The above surveys highlight that while women are able to participate strongly in areas that are now commonly considered to be “feminine”, as a result of many years of NGO activity in the rural areas, they are still not given access to the financial development areas under the UP’s and Pourashava’s discretion. This signifies that women are still structurally unable to access the financial sources of authority at the local level due to persistent perceptions that they are incapable of undertaking “men’s work”.
   With regard to efforts by women UP members and ward commissioner effectively discharging their duties, many surveys have mentioned the efficacy of training, capacity building and awareness programmes of local and national NGOs. Training has been provided in areas such as roles and responsibilities of commissioners, members and Chairmen; the union or ward budgetary allocations; responsibilities and functions of sectoral agencies; information on how to run meetings, read and write minutes and make motions; negotiating, problem solving, communication and decision making skills; as well as information on local governmental and NGO development programmes.
   Structures that Bind: The constraints faced by women that prevent them from effectively doing their jobs often far outweigh their successes in office. Studies done by the ADB, PRIP Trust, Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, BRAC, Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha, and a variety of independent scholars and organizations highlight the structural and attitudinal problems that prevent women performing to their full potential within their jobs. One of the major issues that has been highlighted over and over against is the lack of a clear, defined job description for female ward commissioners and UP members from reserved seats. The structural allocation of authority and financial power and the system of inclusion of women in UP is flawed. In addition to the woman representative, there is also a male representative from every ward within her constituency. This leads many constituents to consider the male ward commissioner or UP member as their “real” representative and the women as extraneous, leading to problems of jurisdiction as male members are territorial about their wards. In addition, they are competing with male members who have the same resources to serve a third of the area.
   There is a severe lack of implementation regarding the allocation of development schemes to female members, which serves to disempower them in regard to creating real infrastructural change within their areas. The majority of women members and ward commissioners do not even know that they are supposed to be allocated one third membership of various development committees and their male counterparts are content keep “financial matters” to themselves. There is a huge amount of discrimination in fund allocation of various projects in both urban and rural contexts, and male UP chairpersons and ward commissioners often avoid making committees in order to utilize personal power.
   Women representatives constantly face hostility and devaluation from male colleagues who consider the presence of women members as a “favour” provided by the government. As the women have not been directly elected from their constituencies, their male counterparts constantly belittle women representative in various ways. These include symbolically putting women members at the bottom of UP membership lists; declaring meetings quorate without women members’ presence; getting women to sign on empty forms; taking policy decisions at meetings that women were not informed of; verbal abuse by Chairmen and members against women at meetings, official functions and in public forums for their lack of political knowledge and experience; inviting women members’ husbands to official functions in their place, etc. Systematic sexual harassment of women representatives by colleagues has also been reported. Women’s own families also devalued their abilities and contributions, with husbands routinely telling wives that they had been elected due his own connections and qualities; rather than hers.
   Institutional Bias: So deep is the institutional, social and political bias against women, that discrimination exists in legalised form within the government. The Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives issued a circular on September 23, 2002 in which they declared that ward commissioners from reserved seats could not carry out the functions of providing certificates of nationality, character, successors, birth and death, as well as assisting the authorities during a census. The circular also states that directly elected members will be able to be Chairmen of the standing committees for law and order while members from reserved seats can only be advisors. Subsequently, a writ petition filed by 10 ward commissioners from reserved seat in Khulna lead the High Court to declare null and void the relevant clauses of the circular. The Court stated that once a person was elected as ward commissioner, from a general or a reserved seat, they had to be considered as equals.
   
   Conclusion
   While women members are slowly engaging in methods that will allow them greater participation within local government, the polity of these areas are not being able to demand accountability from their elected officials due to inherent structural flaws within the local government structure and its implementation. Local government bodies are still ostensibly controlled centrally as their staffing, finance, planning, development project approval, revenue collection, grant utilization, etc is subject to approval from the Ministry and its line agencies. Internal weaknesses such as lack of knowledge regarding responsibilities, lack of basic accountability procedures such as the maintenance of minutes, accounts, inadequate staff, lack of communication with Upazila and District Administrations, inability to raise revenue through taxation and toll collection leading to inadequate budgets mean that the people do not have a fully devolved local government system that can meet their needs adequately nor respond at the institutional level to local development requirements. In this scenario, the presence of accountable access of the public to elected officials is weak, as many people do not know what they can expect of their officials, and are often more likely to go to NGOs operating in the areas with complaints, as they are in close contact with field workers.
   The right of representation is merely the first step towards creating meaningful participation. The women who have been elected to the reserved seats in UPs and in Pourashavas in the urban areas both face and are themselves mired in patriarchal social norms that question a woman’s place in the public sphere. They are also bound by structural limitations within the reservation system that undermine women’s scope for meaningful participation. In addition, inherent flaws within the structure of local government institutions themselves make them subordinate to the central administrative authority, often disabling them financially or administratively from carrying out functions and project for the benefit of their constituents. The politicisation of local government bodies along party political lines, and the prevalence of systems of elite patronage have also hampered the ability of women representatives to engage in social development activities. The on-going lack of responsive accountability structures at the ground level means that local women (and men) are still unable to demand accountability by any other means than a change of vote.
   Irum Shehreen Ali is a sociologist at BRAC University. This article is excerpted from research carried out for the 'Pathways to Empowerment' Research Project at the Centre for Development Studies, BRAC University

by Shuchi Karim

You are such an amazing creation of God!
   It is impossible to take eyes away from what you have got.
   On top of that you are made-up in every given hue
   Your beauty cannot be contained within you!
   You find it difficult to cover your body in a five-yard sari
   Your bangles’ jingle constantly lures me…
   Five-feet body and five-yard sari,
   Still my woman fails to cover her body!
   My lover’s beauty is mine by right
   How can I guard her from the gaze of many others?
   What kind of a flower are you that so many bees hover around you?
   Look at yourself and ask your heart, and you will know!
   — Song ‘Sari’ by Hyder Husyn
   
   A couple of months back a few of us (all girls) were doing research on women’s bodily integrity (as a pathway to women’s empowerment), and as a part of our research we were digging into all possible sources and materials and were talking to people to hear their ideas and opinions. That is when the songs by Hyder Husyn came into our lives and helped us in many ways to understand the perception of ‘woman’s body’ and the severity of the matter. The above-mentioned song not only ‘objectifies’ the female body, but also claims ‘ownership’ of it, and at the same time expresses suspicion about female sexuality. It embodies all the concepts that we were dealing with in that research: social perceptions of woman’s bodies in terms of beauty, dress, behaviour, modesty, shame, honour, sexuality, control, etc in the context of Bangladesh. Thank you, Hyder Husyn, for composing a song that can be used as a perfect example of how female bodies are stereotypically perceived by the males of this land.
   Doing the background work for this research also gave us experiences that enriched our insight into many matters related to the topic, in many different ways. Firstly, we had many people (read mostly ‘men’) being very ‘amused’ at just hearing that women’s ‘bodies’ had anything to do with a concept of ‘empowerment’! (I didn’t lose my temper as I have seen worse: for example, I have had class-mates who burst into laughter to read the title of a book ‘Women and World Economic Crisis’, and asked me what did women have to do with world economic crisis in the first place! Moron!). For many (read mostly ‘men’ again), women’s bodies are visible to them only when these bodies are worth a ‘look’, (example: Ayswarya Rai), otherwise it really doesn’t matter. Secondly, we ourselves were debating over the age-old issue of whether women can ever rise above their biology, and how important the ‘body’ is after all! But we also rediscovered the socio-cultural boundaries and lines of control that restrict women irrespective of their class, location, age, education or financial background. And that is why it is extremely important for women to know whether or not we have ownership and control over our own bodies.
   One wonders why a woman’s body is such a problematic issue (and often a threat) for many of us. Why do women themselves feel uncomfortable dealing with it; why there are so many issues like shame, honour, chastity, etc attached to it; and of course why society and men persistently draw more and more boundaries for controlling women’s bodies. To understand the machinery of societal control of women’s bodies in the Bangladeshi context, it is important that we firstly examine how the perceptions of bodies are formed and then represented within Bengali/Bangladeshi culture; and secondly, understand the women’s experiences as ‘living-in-bodies’ as well as ‘living-as-bodies’. It is perhaps rather a difficult task to do, but being a Bangladeshi woman living within its cultural framework, it is not impossible for me (and my friends) to understand these lines of control. In other words, what does it mean to live as a woman? Or more specifically, what does it mean to live in a female body?
   Perception of women’s bodies start with exactly that: bodies as perceived by society and women’s bodies perceived as objects, so their bodies must be beautiful. I could get into the whole discourse on concepts of beauty (whether it is ‘Bonolata Sen’ or ‘fair and lovely’), the construction of body image or the rejection of dark-skinned or disabled bodies, etc. To cut a long story short, society teaches that a woman’s beauty is her ‘asset’, and it has to be taken care of very seriously: starting from applying raw turmeric, raw milk, papaya, banana, tomato, potato, egg, yogurt (and no, this is not a shopping list or even a list of ingredients of a wholesome recipe.) Women apply them all just to attain that extra degree of beauty. Akikkunesa Ahmed writes in 1953 in her ‘Adhunik Stree’ or ‘The Modern Wife’ that though physical beauty is a woman’s prime asset, beauty does not mean white/fair skin; instead good health is the key to a woman’s beauty. Physical youthfulness is what is important to a man, not the colour of the skin (if only she had to write the book in 2006!). She also put emphasis on efforts like spending time, money and using devices to enhance the beauty of specific body parts as women have every right to use devices to enhance there physical beauty, even if it requires deceptions like padded bras. She justifies this with the example of men using many such devices to cover up what they otherwise lack; for example, a one-armed man wearing two-armed suits with the empty sleeve tucked into the pocket, creating the illusion of a perfect body; or a blind man using stone-eyes; or older men trying hard to look younger by dyeing their hair black or by using dentures. She argues that if men can use such devices, then women can do so too.
   One might regard the female obsession with beautification as a manifestation of their vanity, but this obsession is just a reaction to the male obsession with beautiful wives/partners. Most women spend money, time and energy on beautification because they know ‘Prothome dorshondhari, tarpor gun bichari’ (first looks, then merit) is applied to women exclusively.
   If you thought beauty was an asset of the women, and they owned it themselves, you are wrong. So who really owns the female body? This ‘asset’ is destined for a different owner, in the form of a male sanctioned by the society, mostly in the name of ‘husband’. This ownership does not restrict itself to the physical beauty of her body, but also to ensuring the fact that her whole existence, including sexuality, is dedicated to this owner. A woman’s body, thus, is rarely separated from her individuality or spirituality. I will give you an example of this very popular (and over-used) dialogue from a Bangla film: ‘Chhere de shaitan, tui amar ei deho paabi kintu mon pabi na…!’ Why does this dialogue amuse me? For a couple of reasons: a) she is naïve (read ‘stupid’) because even in the face of adversity, she is hoping that he (the villain or the abductor) might be interested in her ‘mon’ or winning her heart (come on, sister, wake up! He wants your body only!); and b) she is trying to separate her sexuality from her body, and asserting her personhood that is above her sexual vulnerability. But, of course, each and every Bangla film has and will prove her assumptions false by either having the hero breaking through glass windows or brick walls to rescue her (if only she is the heroine), or by making her commit suicide after the act of physical violation (only if she happens to be a random female character like sister, neighbour, etc). The heroine’s physical ‘purity’ must be saved for the hero, for, like any other man, he deserves a virgin.
   Physical purity and ‘virginity’ are the ‘virtues’ that define a woman’s character and restrict her within the strict boundaries of social discipline. Woman’s purity is closely associated with the notions of ‘izzat’/honour’ and ‘lojja/shame’. Shame is the core quality of a female personhood and it epitomises the essence of womanhood in Bangladeshi culture, ‘Lojja narir bhushon’ (modesty is the attire of a woman). Lacking this ‘virtue’ (in its societal form and the form itself can be questioned) can promptly invite comments like ‘ki behaya, be-sharam meye-manush’ (what kind of a woman are you, with no sense of shame!). To be a perfect woman one should have a sense of shame and modesty. Izzat, for a woman, is as fragile as glass — one crack makes it redundant forever. A woman embodies the concept of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ in her, and should prove it through her conduct, dress and speech. She cannot do anything in any way that is not expected of a woman in this society. Disciplining has altogether a different meaning and dimension for girls/women. During a research project, schoolteachers were asked how they ‘disciplined’ girls in class, and many answered that the biggest punishment for a girl is to ‘put her in shame’!
   Women have to ensure the honour and prestige of their families (natal and in-laws), and this concept of izzat can be stretched very far. There are evidences of daughters of rape victims of 1971 being sent back home by their in-laws when their mothers’ unfortunate past was revealed. Daughters of divorced single women find it difficult to get married (in our society divorced women have to struggle really hard for respectability). The implication is that a woman is a commodity, a material that needs to be flawless, and if a flaw is found then this commodity can be thrown out or abandoned.
   In case of women, purity is basically understood as ‘sexual purity’. Virginity is an expected and crucial factor if a girl is to get married. Why? Is it only because the man wants to ‘own’ this female body in totality? Or is it because he wants to be sure of the ‘purity’ of his lineage? Or is it for the fear that if she has prior sexual knowledge and experience, then his ‘masculinity’ can be compared with that of others and his virility may be questioned? Whatever might be the reasons, a woman has to prove her sexual naivety as well as lack of knowledge just to show how ‘innocent’ and ‘pure’ she is physically and mentally. She has to demonstrate her ‘disinterest’ and ‘passivity’ in sex, otherwise once again her ‘character’ can be questioned and there is no cure for a suspicious mind (ask Othello!).
   In this culture sex is expected to be indulged in within the bonds of ‘marriage’ (who are we fooling? Definitely ourselves); and marriage, at least for Bangladeshi women, is believed to be ‘destiny’. ‘Shamir shangshar-i meyeder ashol thikana’ (the husband’s household is the real address of a woman), or ‘poti porom goti’ (the husband is the ultimate destiny), or even better ‘shamir payer niche stree-r beheshto’ (a woman’s heaven is located under the feet of her husband. God, what will happen to single women then?).
   Marriage the ultimate destination of a woman! Husband the ultimate guardian! Or she becomes an ‘obola nari’, a helpless damsel in distress. Being a single woman (of a particular unacceptable age for woman’s spinsterhood in Bangladesh), I have been told a thousand times the importance of marriage (on time) for women! 1) A woman needs a guardian, a male guardian who can ‘look after’ her, a ‘provider’; 2) a woman needs protection or ‘shohai’ as it is a ‘big, bad world’ out there for girls (with an assumption that no one will dare to disturb a married woman because of her protector husband); 3) procreation and ‘motherhood’: ‘mattrite-i narir purnota’ (woman’s fulfilment is in motherhood). I have also realised that a woman’s social acceptability as well as ‘respectability’ is greatly associated with her marital status, and no matter how much one tries to argue against all the reasons mentioned above by showing evidence of one’s financial independence, education, etc, it is like banging your head against concrete walls. People look at a matured single woman in two ways: with pity or with suspicion.
   As for women as marriageable/marketable products as perceived by our society, it is another sad story: fair, beautiful, smart, tall, young, decorous (‘porda-noshin’), home-loving, good lineage, polite, docile, etc, and the list goes one (trust me, I have seen ‘should look like Hindi film heroine’ as well in advertisements). It is almost as if there were shops from where one could buy brides (well, match-making shops are available now) or even custom-make them! Physical beauty and a good reputation are the basic sales-point for girls in the marriage market. On the other hand, for men, well, they can be anything of any age and of any appearance (shonar angti baka holeo shonar, meaning men are like gold rings, a little dent doesn’t matter), and that has never stopped men from demanding trophies to bring back home and show to friends and families.
   Men apparently love women, desire them, and want to keep them (there are exceptions, and we are talking about heterosexual relationships here), but still there is a sense of fear and distrust of female sexuality in our culture. The most obvious reason for this distrust can be traced to religious stories of Eve’s disobedience, seduction and the consequent fall of Adam. Woman is the ‘gateway to hell’, deceptive and personification of sexual traps of otherwise ‘innocent’, God-fearing man. Control of female sexuality is organised by attaching negative values to any discussion of sexuality, controlling mobility and friendships with members of the opposite sex, and discouraging access to relevant literature. Submission is stressed. Initiate a discussion of sexual life, and many women feel that talking about sex, even with their husbands, is ‘shameful’. And if they initiate a discussion on this topic, their husbands may consider them shameless and even suspect them of having pre- or extra-marital relationships. The expression of Bangladeshi female sexual desire is interesting. In a research by Khan and others in 2002, many women confessed that they also have sexual desires but it would be shameful for them to let their husbands know of it. Some claimed that the demand for sex by their husbands was always more frequent than their own desire, so they felt satisfied. However, if their husbands did not come to them for sex, the best thing was to wait and try to suppress or hide their sexual desire. The study also revealed that social change is occurring in Bangladesh and this change is influencing sexual relationships. The study shows that in contrast to the general expectation, at least 24 women (44%) said that occasionally they do express their sexual desire to their husbands. The second most common way women use to communicate their sexual desire is the use of other non-physical signals. These include being dressed up nicely, trying to make themselves look attractive, and increased eye-contact or use of certain facial expressions to express their sexual desire. In another study carried out by Naripokkho, questions were asked about women’s perception of their sex-drive. Women were asked whether they believed that women also have sex-drive: 63% said yes, 2% said it was equal to but different from a man’s sex-drive, 9% said that women’s sex-drive was less than men’s, 21% said that women did not have sex-drive, and 7% women said that they did not know whether women had a sex-drive. When asked whether women should express their sexual desire, only 8.6% said yes, 30% said that a woman should only express her sexual desire to her husband, and 55% said that woman should never express such desires. Interestingly intriguing, isn’t it?
   Cultural beliefs, norms and practices are continuously drawing lines of control over women’s bodies. Female conduct, speech, perceptions, and behaviour are regulated, or tried to be regulated, throughout her life-cycle in such restrictive manners that it often threatens her growth as a full-fledged human being. Don’t sit like this, don’t talk like that, don’t laugh aloud, keep your eyes down, be modest (rather seem to be modest), cover your body properly, don’t walk with your head held high, suppress your desire, demand less from life but give more, suffer and sacrifice in silence, as these are the signs of a virtuous woman. And the list goes on and on. Women find themselves under the control and power of a male-dominated society, but do they remain helpless? Don’t women find ways of winning some space and power to push the boundaries a little further? With the changing world, changing economy and challenged culture, women continuously re-invent their power, improvise strategies and assert themselves in wonderfully innovative ways. Women move forward when they internalise the fact that the brain is also part of the body, and utilising their grey matter wisely can only bring more control over their bodies and lives, and then women can be their own agency of empowerment.
   It is easy to draw lines of control over the body, but it is impossible to control and restrict the mind.
   Shuchi Karim teaches in the Women and Gender Studies Department, University of Dhaka. Many ideas and references used in this article are taken from the background paper on ‘Women’s bodily integrity’ prepared by Shuchi Karim and Lopita Haq

by Dina M Siddiqi

Women’s organizations have long raised concerns about the extent of domestic violence in Bangladesh and the need for intervention in this arena.  Finally, a few months ago, the Law Commission presented a draft bill designed to combat domestic violence.
   In this backdrop, this article offers a reading of domestic violence in contemporary Bangladesh, and assesses the possibilities and limits of addressing the problem through legislation.
   Historically, violence against women has constituted a major locus of feminist activism.  Violent acts against individual women – Nurjahan, Shima, Yasmin, Simi Banu, Badhon and others – perpetrated in a multiplicity of contexts,  galvanized women of differing political and ideological persuasions to unite in demands for legal remedies and intervention.  Until recently, however, there has been relatively less focus on the home as a site of violence.  In part, this gap can be attributed to the ‘raw’ nature of public violence: acid attacks, fatwa related ‘disciplining’ of women, and overt sexual harassment are all dramatic and immediate in their effect on the individual.  They demand urgent action.  They also mobilize public support because such acts fall outside the accepted order of things, and as such, generate outrage ‘without ambivalence’ in the public imagination.
   When it comes to domestic violence, however, feminists face an uphill battle.  Dominant ideological constructions of the family as a sacred site, outside the orbit of public scrutiny, contribute to the social silence around violence in the home.   Equally important, everyday forms of domestic violence – unless they result in grievous injury or death – are usually tolerated or even expected by society.  Such violence is an acceptable feature of the normative order of social relations, of the taken for granted reality of social life. Cultural norms view women as property over which men have entitlements, including the entitlement or even duty to ‘discipline’ women when necessary.  However, patriarchy does not operate in a vacuum.  Patriarchal norms that naturalize domestic violence are not free-standing; they are embedded in a larger culture of discipline. Our normative social practices are deeply embedded in a disciplinary culture that condones or even encourages violence. Whether it is in relation to workers in factories, to household help, to children or junior relatives, violence has long been an acceptable form of disciplining subordinates and of establishing superiority. Social hierarchies are maintained through the implicit threat or actual practice of violence.
   
   Domestic violence – definitions & disputes
   In a recent encyclopedia entry, Malavika Karlekar includes a spectrum of violent acts across the life-cycle in her definition of domestic violence — from female foeticide and discrimination toward the girl child to violence within the conjugal home, including incest and abuse of the elderly (Karlekar 2003).  Undeniably, the domestic when taken to be a household unit usually includes more than a couple, and in a hierarchical society, its members are located in unequal positions which shift across the life-cycle.
   Here I focus specifically on partner or spousal violence within a domestic or conjugal unit.  I use the term domestic rather than family violence.  I have two main reasons for limiting the scope of the problem.  While infanticide, child sexual abuse, old age abuse, etc. may be the result of gendered inequalities within the domestic unit, such acts rarely have open cultural sanction.  My concern is with the particular logic underlying the power relationship between men and women who form conjugal units, a logic that underwrites, naturalizes and legitimates violence against female partners. The latter is based on culturally shared understandings of male entitlement to their partners as sexual and social property, whose mobility, sexuality and labor men have the right to regulate.  My other rationale for keeping the focus narrow is that the objectives and significance of legislation can be easily diluted if the law covers too broad a category of acts.
   By now it is widely recognized that domestic violence cuts across classes, castes and communities every where in the world.  Nor is violence against women a particularly South Asian cultural pathology. We are all familiar with the much quoted statistic from the US, where a woman is assaulted by an intimate partner every 17 seconds or so. However, the discourse on domestic violence in Bangladesh contains a curious displacement; it constructs such violence as part of the culture of the poor (“rickshawalla” or “bosti” culture), in contrast to bhadralok culture in which such things simply don’t happen. Locating violence in this way constructs and maintains class boundaries through the invocation of particular idealized gender relations. The imperative to maintain the façade of respectability, the fear of social stigma, then attaches to the denial of the existence of domestic violence among the so-called bhadralok.
   What cuts across classes, with somewhat different manifestations, is the right of a husband to ‘discipline’ his wife.  This right or entitlement is widely accepted even if the mode of disciplining varies or is hidden in the case of the middle classes, since the so-called private sphere of the middle and upper classes is protected from scrutiny to a much greater extent.
   Violence of all kinds may be more visible among poorer groups but domestic violence can still be unrecognized or unacknowledged as a violation of rights. Intimate violence may be visible but remain a hidden problem even when the violence itself is openly perpetrated.  The invisibility in this case has to do with a lack of recognition or willful misrecognition.
   
   The extent of the problem 
   The family is constructed as a sanctuary, a site of refuge.  Yet it is one of the most dangerous places for women.  Available data suggests that the prevalence of domestic violence is extremely high.  In a survey of all married women in six villages, carried out in 2002, 67% of women reported experience some form of domestic violence in their life-times.  32% reported experiencing minor domestic violence (slapped, pushed) and 17% major domestic violence (beaten, burned, kicked, assaulted with a weapon) in the past year.  One in six women reported experiencing some kind of violence during pregnancy (Islam et al. p. 3).  Women between the ages of 15 to 30 are most likely to suffer from domestic violence.  Not surprisingly this is the time during which ‘structures of acquiescence’ are sought to be built up.  In other words, the objective of the violence is to beat women into submission and obedience.
   Available studies, of which there are very few, generate contradictory information. One study shows that the lower the education level, the less women tolerate violence. More educated women tend to endure more suffering and continue in violent situations (Ameen).  In contrast, Islam and others found a widespread belief that education helps women avoid violence or seek recourse from it (Islam).  Education and exposure may contribute to women’s greater assertiveness and self-confidence. However, it may well be that among women from middle and upper classes, considerations of respectability and appropriate forms of femininity act as serious constraints on speaking out. Aside from official sources, most women’s and human rights organizations compile records based primarily on newspaper reports.  It’s worth remembering that such figures only take into account those cases that manage to get into the newspapers.  Presumably many cases, especially of domestic violence, do not merit the attention of local community members or of journalists. BNWLA reports that in 2004, 56% of media reports on domestic violence were of women who had been murdered by husbands or their extended family and occasionally by own family members.  Another 33% of media reports concerned women who committed suicide to escape physical or mental torture (BNWLA 2004: 11).  Not only do we not know what the line between suicide and murder was in these cases, we also have to keep in mind that those incidents which don’t lead to murder/suicide or don’t involve acid or fire burns are not included in these statistics. Combined with massive underreporting, it can be assumed that the actual figures are much, much higher.
   Moreover there are serious limits to reliance on the media for the production and classification of knowledge (Siddiqi: 2003).  Without sustained research, one risks succumbing to a circular logic of knowledge production and validation — of newspaper reports being taken up by activists and rights groups, and circulated back as legitimate evidence.
   Since the emergence and recognition of dowry as a serious problem, there has also been a tendency to conflate dowry violence with marital violence, or to trace most acts of domestic violence to dowry demands. While is undoubtedly the cause of widespread violence, there is a real danger in using it to explain all domestic violence, not least because wife beating and abuse existed long before dowry was a problem in the country.2 Such categorizations displace other causes of domestic violence. Paradoxically, part of the problem may be the absence of a specific law on domestic violence, which encourages lawyers to file cases under the Dowry Prevention Act.
   This is not merely an academic problem of classification. Effective intervention requires a comprehensive understanding of the roots of a problem.  Other causes of domestic violence include violating expectations of domesticity – violence is often justified culturally when women failed to conform to role expectations: neglecting household chores, going out without permission, inviting public speculation on their morality through their behavior etc (Islam et al. p. 7).
   
   Masculinity, political economy and domestic violence
   “Cross-cultural studies of wife abuse have found that nearly a fifth of peasant and small scale societies are essentially free of family violence.  The existence of such cultures proves that male violence against women is not the inevitable result of male biology or sexuality, but more a matter of how society views masculinity (UNFPA).”
   In many societies, dominant constructions of the ideal male include possessing a tolerance for violence and being able to exercise domination over others through violence. What does it mean to be a man in contemporary Bangladeshi society?
   A UNFPA study of male attitudes to violence against women (in Bangladesh) found that an overwhelming majority of men felt that 1) a wife was accountable to her husband for her actions and 2) violence was an acceptable form of disciplining wives.  Interestingly, many of the men did not equate the ‘disciplining’ of wives to inflicting harm. In addition, there is ever present pressure to be a ‘real’ man:  husbands may feel compelled to physically discipline wives for fear of not living up to social expectations or community norms.
   One of the classic ‘triggers’ of domestic violence appears to be class-specific: not having food ready on time, or not having the food hot. There’s an obvious but complex relationship between the husband as provider of food and his perceived entitlement to beat his wife around the issue of food preparation.  However, there is a more complex relationship between masculinity, political economy and domestic violence.  As one feminist theorist argues, it is important to understand domestic violence as part of the structural violence wrought by liberalization and structural adjustment policies.  “Liberalization has impoverished millions, and there are indications that structural adjustment policies have hit women the hardest, with some evidence that women in urban as well as rural areas are working multiple jobs and two to three shifts per day.  More work does not mean economic freedom—it means deepening subjection to already entrenched forms of male authority.  Just as many theorists are now arguing that economic rights should be considered human rights, so too should domestic violence be understood as part of the structural violence against women produced by the international economy.” (Visweswaran  p. 510.  Italics added).  This is a highly provocative line of argument that challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between paid work and women’s empowerment.
   
   Current legal options available to women who are in violent marital relations
   Although there are no specific laws on domestic violence, women can seek the protection of the courts under assault and battery provisions in penal law.  In practice, however, criminal law may be of little assistance to victims of domestic violence for a number of reasons.  The problem hinges to a great extent on the normative patriarchal framework used in the interpretation of laws by judges, by the police and even by a defendant’s lawyers.  If a man assaults his wife, the offence is interpreted quite differently than if he assaults a stranger. In other words, the same offence, when committed against a wife, carries a different valence.  The crimes are considered to be incommensurable, in entirely different realms: Entrenched perceptions of public/private domains come into play so that both judges and the police tend to tend to view criminal law as inappropriate in the context of intimate relationships.
   In her study, Ameen found that when a woman is assaulted by a stranger, lawyers will advise them to file a criminal case. But if she happens to be married to the perpetrator, she is encouraged to seek mediation rather than file charges against her husband.  Another important point to note here is that existing criminal provisions do not address violence or threats of violence that do not lead to grievous harm.  The law as it exists cannot accommodate the psychological brutalization that arises from persistent physical and mental abuse.
   Moreover, the very relationship between the victim and the victimizer complicates matters.  Most often, the subject of violence is economically and emotionally dependent on her husband.  Out of fear or out of a complex of other emotions, she may not be willing to bring criminal charges against her partner, especially if he is also the father of her children.
   
   Divorce: an (un)civil remedy?
   Women’s one recourse in the face of violence within a marriage is divorce or legal separation in some instances.  The Family Courts, established in 1985, are equipped to address matters of polygamy, allegations of adultery, non-maintenance, child marriages and divorce. Muslim women can seek a divorce under the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939 on the grounds of physical or mental cruelty.  However, the inability to apply the law effectively, due to procedural difficulties as well as patriarchal attitudes, especially regarding what constitutes cruelty, discourages the widespread or successful use of this provision by women.  Christian women also have the right to divorce on the grounds of cruelty.  Unfortunately, Hindu and Buddhist women are not afforded even that option. They can only apply to the Family Courts for the right to separate residence.
   
   A domestic violence prevention law: one more tool in a corrupt system?
   There is some disagreement over whether the passage of legislation criminalizing domestic violence is most effective way in which to combat the phenomenon. In an assessment on the wave of legislation introduced since the mid-eighties to protect women from violent crimes, Shahdeen Malik concluded that the new laws had not only failed to punish actual criminals, but also undermined the credibility of the legal system by encouraging its use as a means of settling scores.  Malik contends that new legislation facilitated further malpractice in the legal system, promoted corruption, wasted substantial and scare resources and punished innocent victims by placing them behind bars for months at an end.
   Ill-advised laws, introduced with haste and motivated by populist considerations have had, in his words “monstrous” consequences, including the promotion of a culture of violence in which death sentences can be handed out almost indiscriminately.  Shahdeen Malik goes on to argue that the laws in question, by focusing on women’s bodies, have failed to contextualize violent crimes against women in a broader socio-political framework.  He suggests that one effect of the women’s movement focus on the body of women has been to banish labor and economic rights from the discourse of women’s rights. This provocative line of argument requires refining.  It is not the case that feminists have neglected to address women’s economic and labor rights.  The problem is that the connections between the structural changes and inequalities in the economy and the exploitation of women’s bodies are rarely made.
   Undeniably, in some respects, laws meant to protect women from violent crimes, by their draconian nature, have proved to be counterproductive.  Reportedly, the association of Nari o Shishu Nirjaton Domon Ain with false cases is so strong that most judges are skeptical of even entertaining cases under lodged under it.  As a result, the merit and chance of success of genuine cases are undermined.
   In addition, the very success of the women’s movement in getting recognition for crimes such as rape as serious violations of women’s rights appears to have had a boomerang effect.3  Judges who are sensitized to women’s are reluctant to take the provisions of law leniently. Once a person is charged with a crime such as rape, it’s extremely difficult for him to extract himself from a protracted legal battle.
   Given the circumstances, is it wise or feasible to demand another law to protect women?  In the opinion of one lawyer, the main gap in current campaigns on domestic violence is the failure to look creatively at existing laws, in particularly at civil remedies.
   While these concerns are well taken, it is worth noting that laws possess symbolic power in society.  Domestic violence remains unrecognized as a violation of rights precisely because of its widespread acceptability.  Naming and criminalizing domestic violence is the first step in changing state and community norms.
   
   Conclusion
   Domestic violence must be located within a continuum of violence against women in public and private, and within the overall violence of contemporary Bangladeshi society.  Successfully challenging DV requires changing not only the mindset of individual men, (some of whom may be quite pathological) but also the ideological and material structures in society that enable and legitimize such behavior.  “Individuals are supported overtly through social institutions such as family and the community, and by the State, either through normative rules or by impunity toward acts of violent domination (Oxfam).” Laws, programs and policies can be easily undermined if they are not accepted and supported by the community. That means we do need to change community norms. This calls for, among other things, de-stigmatization and the acknowledgment of the existence of domestic violence among the middle and upper classes.
   A law criminalizing domestic violence provides a point of departure for this process. At the same time, the ramifications of introducing yet another law must be clearly thought out.  The women’s movement must reflect on how best to use the lessons learned from the Nari o Shishu Nirjaton Domon Ain and its weaknesses as it shapes a new domestic violence prevention law.
   With respect to DV, not just the individual but the entire community and the larger cultural context are implicated.  And in our larger context, the physical disciplining of social subordinates, including servants and children is considered normal. Contemporary forms of violence must be historicized.  “Violence has become a primary mode of conflict resolution in Bangladeshi society. A culture of violence seems to be socially entrenched. […] It would not be an exaggeration to say that violence has been routinized in every day social transactions (Siddiqi 2003:6)”
   Dr Dina M Siddiqi is a consultant on gender and human rights

by Mashida R Haider and Tahmina Shafique

In 1996, Sheema Chowdhury was raped and murdered in police custody. Sheema had gone to Chittagong with her boyfriend where she was picked up by the police officials of the Raozan Police Station. She was placed under ‘safe custody’. On September 9, Sheema was gang raped while in custody. The teenager was later murdered in Chittagong jail on February 7, 1997, it has been reported. On the basis of these allegations, her