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Happiness in gender equality movement
Feminists’ comments on gender issues can sometimes be bizarre
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eminists’ comments on gender issues can sometimes be bizarre. For example, when mothers scold their sons for crying “like girls”, do they really demean themselves?
Don’t mothers also reprimand their daughters for sitting with their legs wide open or for behaving roughly “like boys”? Recently, a male feminist said he would not offer his seat to a woman in a crowded bus because he did not wish to offend her.
Many feminists prefer to ignore that gender is not entirely socially constructed. As anthropologist Steven Goldberg (1999) argued, “the reason men can grow moustaches is not that we tell little girls that facial hair is unfeminine”. The view that the social will predominant and that an act of social will is believed to enable the hereditary to be overcome and will produce a non-patriarchal society ignores the fact that the limits of the social are a function of the hereditary and that this engenders different hierarchies of “motivation” in males and females.
The problem, of course, is that women are often disadvantaged in a society where men occupy upper positions in hierarchies, and hence they fight for gender equality. Women must have equal opportunities as men, but equal opportunities do not always lead to equal outcomes. Gender neutral policies do not necessarily produce the equality of outcomes.
Patriarchy is not going away. It is inevitable for the same reasons that it is universal. In Goldberg’s view, every hypothesis should specify things that won’t happen, as that is how one has any way of telling whether the hypothesis is likely to be correct.
Universality is crucial because it leaves open the possibility of inevitability (which an exception would preclude) and forces the assessment of the likelihood of inevitability on the cause of universality. The only explanation of universality that makes sense, therefore, is one that understands that the institutions are not inevitable because they are universal but because they are inevitable for the same reasons they are universal.
Patriarchy keeps changing in form — if women win, patriarchal forces will regroup and regain control over them in other ways. Demetriou (2001) introduced the notion of the “hegemonic masculine block” that suggests that a form of masculinity that is capable of reproducing patriarchy is in a constant process of negotiation, translation, hybridization and reconfiguration.
It is precisely through its hybrid and apparently contradictory content that hegemonic masculinity reproduces itself. Therefore, to understand hegemonic masculinity as hybridity is to avoid falling into the trap of believing that patriarchy has disappeared simply because heterosexual men have worn earrings.
While women lose their own individual patriarch, they do not lose their subordination to other patriarchal structures and practices, such as through welfare benefits by the patriarchal state and by the patriarchal labor market.
According to Carlson (2007), there are only two practical options: either the private patriarch (the conventional husband) or the public patriarch (the welfare state). While the first choice is compatible with health, happiness, wealth creation and political liberty, the second choice is a sure path to the servile state. He asked: which patriarchy will women choose?
Career women are to be lauded for showing that women are no less capable than men, but home-centered women deserve no less respect.
While outside employment often has useful education effects in terms of exposure to the world outside the household, education benefits may also be gained through other means, for example, by participating in periodic gatherings such as pengajian (study of the Koran) or arisan (members contribute and take turns lottery-style to win what is at stake), which also provide women with opportunities to promote various goods and services to each other, or by working in the informal sector. Invisible women, therefore, are not necessarily “victims”. Rather, many are strategic but unrecognized actors in the expansion of their own life prospects.
According to the World Bank, only 52 percent of Indonesian women have joined the work force, compared to 70 percent in other Asian countries. Is this because women lack the necessary skills or education? Is it because motherhood or child rearing keeps them at home?
A closer look at gender roles and relations among various ethnic groups across the Indonesian archipelago reveals more egalitarian practices than are widely assumed. While some are organized along matrilineal lines such as the Minangkabau ethnic group in Sumatra, and others largely practice strictly patriarchal traditions such as the Balinese, most cultures have in fact adopted bilateral gender orders, incorporating elements from both matrilineal and patrilineal systems. Among these are the Javanese and the Sundanese who together account for almost 60 percent of Indonesia’s population.
In the early days of the second wave feminism, a feminist canard stated that “feminists need happiness like a fish needs a bicycle”. In Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan devoted the whole first chapter of her book to “the problem that has no name”, which is the widespread unhappiness of women, thus underlining women’s desire in something more than just a husband, children and a home.
Now that equal opportunity and equal pay statutes apply, happiness has again eluded women. Indeed, women’s overall level of happiness in Western countries has dropped since 1972, both in comparison to where they were 40 years ago, and in comparison to men (Buckingham 2009). More than 1.3 million men and women have been surveyed in the US and other developed countries through six major studies of happiness, which all gave the same result: greater educational, political and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women, relative to men.
If the above conjecture implies that financially independent women are not necessarily happy, the inverse must also hold true; financially dependent women are not necessarily unhappy. What then, are the non-quantifiable components of their happiness, given that happiness is not about economic prosperity only?
It seems obvious that women do need happiness after all. Perhaps Indonesia’s home-centered women know a thing or two about happiness and perhaps domesticity deserve to be better understood in this “post-feminist” era.
The writer is program director at the Kapeta Foundation and a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of South Africa, Pretoria
