Pathways
Negotiating Empowerment. IDS Bulletin 41.2
2009 - 2010
Lead Researchers: Andrea Cornwall , Jenny Edwards
Researchers: Hania Sholkamy , Mulki Al-Sharmani , Ana Alice Costa , Terezinha Gonçalves , Cecilia Sardenberg , Maheen Sultan , Sohela Nazneen , Samia Huq , Naila Kabeer , Lopita Huq , Samia Afroz Rahim , Aanmona Priyadarshani , Rosalind Eyben , Penny Johnson , Akosua Darkwah , Hussainatu J Abdullah , Aisha Fofana-Ibrahim , Jamesina King
This bulletin is devoted to exploring what empowerment means in the everyday lives of women in different situations and circumstances.
Resources For This Project
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Crossroads Of Empowerment: The Organisation Of Women Domestic Workers In Brazil (Article)
The organisation of women domestic workers in Brazil reveals a process of collective empowerment at work in a society where gender, race, and class inequalities intersect, giving rise to complex mosaics. Analysing processes of empowerment in these circumstances calls for abandoning universalizing visions of women and recognizing differences and inequalities beyond gender in multiracial and multicultural societies. Women domestic workers face class contradictions in establishing harmonious relationships with women bosses, who are also participants as workers in unions and other political spaces. This contradiction creates difficulties in constructing a common agenda for the advancement of domestic workers' labour rights. …
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Education: Pathway To Empowerment For Ghanaian Women?
Education has long been seen as crucial to women's empowerment. Increasingly, however, scholars such as Stromquist have questioned our faith in the power of education to empower women. Drawing on a survey of 600 women of three age groups in three regions of Ghana and 36 intergenerational interviews, this article makes the case that the benefits of education for women is context specific, for example when decent work in the public sector is available. This study shows that more than twice as many women aged 18–29 have had some form of education compared with those above 50. …
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Family, Households And Women's Empowerment In Bahia, Brazil, Through The Generations: Continuities Or Change?
This article identifies changes and continuities in gender relations in a working class neighbourhood in Salvador, Bahia, through the generations. Based on data collected over a period of nearly 20 years, it seeks to identify processes of women's empowerment. It confirms the relevance of women's economic independence to their participation in decision-making and in gaining autonomy; it gave them the power to assert control over their own lives. To this end, female solidarity has also played a special role, propitiating the exercise of power with to bring about the desired changes in one's lives. …
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Introduction: Negotiating Empowerment
This introductory article draws out some of the dimensions and dilemmas around women's empowerment that are highlighted in the articles in this IDS Bulletin: the choices, the negotiations, the narratives and above all, the context of women's lived experience. In doing so, we show that empowerment is a complex process that requires more than the quick and easy solutions often offered by development agencies. Much of the significant change happening in women's lives takes place outside of the range of these conventional interventions. In conclusion, we suggest that for development agencies to really support women's empowerment requires greater engagement with changing structures rather than accommodating women within the inequitable existing order, and a much deeper understanding of what makes change happen in their lives. …
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Legal Reform, Women's Empowerment And Social Change: The Case Of Egypt
In the last decade, new family laws have been passed in Egypt, with important ramifications for women. In this article, I argue that two issues diminish the transformative role that these reforms could play in strengthening Egyptian women's rights and achieving gender justice. First, despite the recently passed laws, the model of marriage that the state continues to uphold through its codes and courts is premised on gendered roles and rights for husbands and wives. This model, however, contradicts the realities of Egyptian marriages. …
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Negotiating Islam: Conservatism, Splintered Authority And Empowerment In Urban Bangladesh
Bangladesh has recently been seeing a rise in religiosity which has been treated as problematic, anti-secular and anti-progressive within the public sphere. Various writers describe this trend as having a disempowering effect on women and negating their self-expression. However, underlying these views is the assumption that the assertion of women's agency is not enough if it does not confront existing structures of relations. This article asks whether it is possible that in seeking changes in certain aspects of one's life, existing gender relations are not necessarily transformed, but indirectly challenged and reconfigured? The conclusion suggests that rather than a polarisation of the secular and religious ways of living most people are in fact in between, negotiating between the two camps, and borrowing ideas and ways from both. …
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No Path To Power: Civil Society, State Services, And The Poverty Of City Women
In focusing on Ain el-Sira, a low-income neighbourhood of Cairo, this article challenges development theorists' ideas that civil society as a development partner is best able to promote women's empowerment, community development and justice. This article contests that development can avoid the machinations of the state or ignore the power imbalances that litter the relationships between state, civil society, citizens and donors! In Egypt, where the state relegates its development duties to civil society, women in Ain el-Sira experience service initiatives which are duplicated, microcredit loans they often cannot afford to repay, and benefit criteria which are strict and limiting. Programmes remain unchanged for years and long-term plans to relieve the burdens of disempowerment and destitution are non-existent. To achieve real gendered justice which provides women with the assets and capabilities to make choices requires citizenship rights. …
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Quotas: A Pathway Of Political Empowerment?
Over the last 20 years, the problem of low levels of representation of women in political office has been mobilising women, and especially feminists, throughout the world. The adoption of quotas has become a much-used tool to address the challenge of increasing women's political representation, and as a route to enhancing women's political empowerment. In Latin America, many countries have adopted quota systems, but with widely varying effects. This article takes stock of Latin American experience and asks to what extent quota systems have served as a pathway of women into politics. …
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Reciprocity, Distancing, And Opportunistic Overtures: Women's Organisations Negotiating Legitimacy And Space In Bangladesh (Article)
By focusing on three different national level women's organisations in Bangladesh, this article looks at how the movements have used different strategies to become an effective voice for women's interests and empowerment at civil society and state levels. The importance of framing their issues in a non-contentious way, building alliances with like-minded groups and the strength of personal networks can be clearly seen. Reaching out to these diverse groups has meant the organisations at times making strategic choices, which allowed the groups to create space and legitimacy for their agenda. Relying on personal networks is shown to carry certain risks for sustainability and their ineffective engagement with political parties can reduce their influence, but ultimately their strategies for mobilising support and building constituencies has gained these organisations greater legitimacy and strength as advocates of women's issues. …
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Subversively Accommodating: Feminist Bureaucrats And Gender Mainstreaming
Is it possible to secure the desired policy action ‘infusing’ gender into existing ways of doing and organising things – and by so doing to incrementally secure real gains for women? Or will transformative policies for women's empowerment only be achieved through discursive and organisational transformation? But can the two be separated so neatly? Are there possibly unpredictable effects when feminist policy actors are on the one hand committed to changing discourse and power relations while on the other hand acting pragmatically to secure small instrumental changes? Taking international development organisations as the field of analysis, this article examines assumptions about policy change as a pathway of women's empowerment and goes on to explore a shift from a focus on institutional capability to one on actors and agency, and on strategies, tactics and manoeuvres. …
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The Power Of Relationships: Love And Solidarity In A Landless Women's Organisation In Rural Bangladesh
This article examines the significance of social relationships in women's lives and their relevance to processes of women's empowerment. In Bangladesh, traditional structures limit women's social interaction to their immediate family and maintain male responsibility over them. However, here we look at the example of Saptagram – a social mobilisation organisation particularly focused against gender injustice towards rural landless Bangladeshi women – and how by providing relationships beyond the private sphere it engendered bonds of friendship and loyalty amongst its beneficiaries. Difficulties with systems and its inability to recruit a new line of leadership led to its apparent failure at one point. …
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Unmarried In Palestine: Embodiment And (Dis)Empowerment In The Lives Of Single Palestinian Women (Article)
There are rising numbers of single women across the Arab world. While this is usually connected with delayed marriage, Palestine shows a unique pattern of early but not universal marriage. This article looks beneath the statistics to investigate the stories behind this trend. How do young unmarried women negotiate boundaries and understand and enact choice in the context of a society experiencing prolonged insecure and warlike conditions, political crisis and social fragmentation and where the high number of unmarried women can be an increasing locus of moral panic? In conducting focus groups with two generations of women, my research looks at the prevailing importance of education, civil society and security in negotiating space within women's lives and uncovers a long tradition of unmarried women leading full and significant lives which needs to be recovered from the past. …
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Women's Voices, Work And Bodily Integrity In Pre-Conflict, Conflict And Post-Conflict Reconstruction Processes In Sierra Leone (Article)
This article focuses on the historical trajectories of women's empowerment in Sierra Leone, taking three entry-points as a means of exploring the dynamics of change over the pre-conflict, conflict and post-conflict periods: voice and political participation; work and economic participation; and bodily integrity. Looking at pathways of empowerment in pre-conflict Sierra Leone, at experiences of women during the time of conflict over the course of a long and brutal civil war from 1991–2002, and at post-conflict possibilities, the article highlights some of the changes that have taken place in women's lives and the avenues that are opening up in Sierra Leone in a time of peace. It suggests that understanding women's pathways of empowerment in Sierra Leone calls for closer attention to be paid to the dynamics of conflict and post-conflict reconstruction, and to the significance of context in shaping constraints and opportunities. …
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Women Watching TV: Surfing Between Fantasy And Reality (Article)
Young women are increasingly experiencing greater visibility and mobility in Bangladeshi society. The new public spaces they occupy together with the more traditional private spaces are greatly mediated by the narratives beamed on television. This article looks at how Bangladeshi women engage with television and the meanings and choices they derive from it. It examines which elements the women choose to adopt and which they discard as being alien to their lifestyles. …
