Women Around the World

Women: A World Report

Edited by Debbie Taylor

Oxford University Press; 376 pages.

NIGERIAN-BORN AUTHOR Buchi Emecheta welcomed her cosmopolitan sisters to the United Nation's conference on the Decade of Women in Nairobi last spring: "On behalf of mother Africa, 'welkome, dear sisters to the Modar' lan'. Afrika go treat you well, well. Welkome." Her welcome came as a genuine call for solidarity, reconciling differences within the international women's movement.

Editor Debbie Taylor admits in her preface to Women: A World Report that most of the world's women probably passed through "their" U.N.-designated Decade from 1975 to 1985 entirely ignorant of its significance. Still, her work insists upon the importance of women finally documenting their own history through personal, self-critical expression.

Published to coincide with the final U.N. conference on women in Nairobi, this cross-cultural document involved the efforts of literally hundreds of women from all over the world and provides multiple perspectives on the social and economic practices of gender-based oppression.

The 10 essays in Part II's "Women to Women" focus on ideological questions of family, education, work, politics, and sex as they relate to women's condition. Two women writers from contrasting ethnic and economic backgrounds exchange views, bearing witness to the other woman's experience from their respective sides of the First World/Third World fence. The gender question is not isolated but recognized as only part of the broader model of race, gender, and class.

The gap between First and Third World feminism becomes most apparent in looking at how each group relates to the power of the pen. For example, Jill Tweedle's investigation of Indonesia's massive contraceptive campaign points out that increasing female literacy does not necessarily grant women more control over their reproductive status. Ironically, the government's indoctrinating methods impose even further restrictions on a woman's freedom of choice.

Indonesian schoolchildren recite at the end of their prayers to Allah, "two children are enough / Good for family planning body and soul / It's good for you, body and soul / It'll keep you well preserved." Women once doomed to uncontrolled fertility are now coerced into contraception. The explosion of reproductive technologies in the modern age, such as sperm banks and test tube babies, is a mixed blessing at best for women, changing perhaps the means but not necessarily the forces of (re)production.

One essay criticizes American feminism's white, middle-class complexion, "Do you then blame us for being careful in following the white woman's footsteps?" Her historically-based critique points out that minority women are often held in a status of double- and even triple-faceted oppression that prioritizes issues of race and economic class over those of gender. She challenges the assumption that mainstream women's groups speak for or even recognize the plural demands presented by minority women's groups.

Author Angela Davis, professor of Black Philosophy at San Francisco State University, expresses wariness of "the white women's burden," as she labels the chauvinistic tendencies of Western feminists. Caught up in the question of gender, they can be colorblind to the crucial ethnic and cultural differences among women, succumbing to imperialist logic in the domain of female sexuality.

On the one hand, Davis points out the popular tendency among Western intellectuals who fetishize the mystique of the veiled woman in Middle Eastern culture. On the other hand, the report itself conspicuously fails to include the voices and experiences of East Asian women. In playing up the First versus Thirld World polarity, the collection of essays crucially neglects to account for women in non-Western industrialized societies such as Japan, Taiwan, and Korea whose conditions mediate, in some regards, the two extremes. Another important and fertile area of women's studies left untouched is the effect of Maoism upon Confucianism's patriarchal repression of women.

Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska's observation that "aborigines and immigrants and poorer Australians don't have much to do with the sexy, healthy, multi-orgasmic highly successful Australian woman who jog, drink cocktails and relax in their bathtubs" points out that the sexual revolution has been primarily a bourgeois one for Western audiences who can afford to dwell upon appeasing libidos instead of hunger. Emecheta claims that Western women have, in fact, undervalued themselves by staying within the capitalist framework and focusing on the need to "relearn how to be a woman." Her claim echoes other Third World feminists who call for a return to a socio-economic basis for feminism; most important, this claim points out the viability of a movement grounded in marginality as a strategy of reform.