From: tittle@alexandre-dumas.ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle Moore)
Subject: Re: Preventing Female Children - in India
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Date: 28 Aug 92 21:40:01 GMT

In <1992Aug27.213954.21933@zip.eecs.umich.edu> bhattach@dip.eecs.umich.EDU (sayan bhattacharyya) writes:

>In article <2A9D2E41.13106@ics.uci.edu> tittle@alexandre-dumas.ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle Moore) writes:
[Economics is why women have such rotten status in India]

>>I *don't* think the problem is *just* economic.  I think it is
>>symptomatic of the continual dismissal of the value of the work
>>that women do, which is true here as well as there.

>Recognition of the the work that women do , or creating an
>environment congenial to working women, is I think ineluctably
>related to the economic situation of the society.

I didn't (and don't) contest this.  Reread what I said...

>I think a big flaw in the feminist debate is that feminists
>implicitly assume (as an article of faith) that the problems
>women face (and the causes of these problems) are exactly the same
>everywhere in the world.

Neither did I say this.  I think there are certainly parallels, but
parallels do not equal identicality.

>Note how Cindy says that she *doesn't*
>think that the problem is *just* economic without furnishing
>any reason as to *why* she doesn't think so.

Simply because I didn't doesn't mean that it's an unchallengeable
starting point.  I'll tell you what my unchallengeable starting point
is: there is never only one reason behind any complex social situation
that one wants to change; therefore addressing that one reason will
NOT solve that complex social situation.

>In other words,
>the sameness of the woman's condition everywhere in the world
>is an unchallengeable starting point for her which cannot be
>quetioned or subjected to scrutiny.

You certainly inferred quite a bit from my sentence above, didn't you?

>I believe that there is a big difference in the problems that
>women in the affluent West are confronted with on one hand, and
>impoverished women in the third world countries are confronted
>with , on the other.
[...]
>I strongly suspect that Western feminists are so casually dismissive
>of economic reasons for the women's problems in third world
>countries  because in many instances it is exploitation by the West
>itself that is responsible for the continued impoverishment of
>these countries and hence indirectly responsible for the continued
>wretchedness of women in these countries.

>Western feminists are westerners as well as feminists. By pretending
>that the misery of third world women is entirely caused by 'society',
>i.e. the relevant third world societies, these feminists are probably
>trying to evade the responsibility of the West for the glaring
>economic disparities among the world's countries. This of course is
>an old game .

I wouldn't argue with much of this at all.  And many feminists and
Westerners fall into these sorts of traps.  But I think you're REALLY
reading a lot more into what I said than what I put there.  I think
there are parallels.  I think there certainly is more going on than
"simple economics."  But this doesn't mean that I think the situations
are the same for US women and Indian women.  I am suspicious of ANY
explaination that puts its faith into one problem (and hence one
solution) as your original post did.

--Cindy

--
        Feminism is: "...a socialist, anti-family political movement
        that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their
        children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and
        become lesbians."                           --Pat Robertson