Editorial
Stabroek News
July 18, 2001

Last week on the BBC's Caribbean Report there was a news item and discussion on the progress with Women's Rights and Equality in the region. A Commonwealth Secretariat official in giving a progress report cited in particular the fact that there were now twenty women parliamentarians out of a total of sixty-five elected members in the Guyana Parliament. The official explained that under the constitutional revision it was necessary for each list of candidates to achieve at least a third of women candidates.

One may add that while there is apparently no requirement that the names of the candidates extracted from the party lists to sit in parliament should include a third of women candidates nevertheless this was the way in which it had come out. It should also be noted, to complete the picture, that one party, the GAP-WPA despite its leadership by two remarkable men, one being a distinguished and experienced parliamentarian, chose to be represented by two women candidates. It is likewise noteworthy that the youngest member of Parliament who is also the youngest minister of Government is a woman namely the Minister of Amerindian Affairs.

In a sense this development is the culmination of women's role in the political process which began with adult suffrage. The pioneering work of Janet Jagan and the late Winifred Gaskin and others is part of a familiar political heritage. Moreover, each of the major parties had women auxiliaries.

We have also grown accustomed to women holding the highest public offices including President of the Republic and, more recently, Chancellor of the Judiciary.

There should be particular satisfaction that Guyana is in the vanguard in this important area of parliamentary representation of women. For too long have we been regarded in the Caribbean as a trouble spot or as an occasion for derision or laughter. Now we have achieved a first not only in the Caribbean but perhaps in the world where several countries have shared similar aspirations.

Nevertheless such counting of heads and places is only a tiny beginning of the process in which women, usually more than half the population, are increasingly called upon to transform male-dominated institutions and the ideologies which support them so that these institutions may function in ways more responsive to human needs.

It is the case for example that measures of levels of development, in keeping with the conceptual but arbitrary separation of life into public and private spheres, capture only the indicators in the public sphere. The vital work of women within households is not counted in the calculation of National Income/Product. There is for instance much talk nowadays of the expansion of the human services sector but little account is taken of the dominant services sector namely the household. As a state seeks to mitigate the ravages of liberalisation and the market economy there is increasing development emphasis on health care and education, hospital and clinics and schools. But most human care is provided not in hospitals and health centres but by women in homes. The woman who must see off or accompany her child to school whether it be by minibus or canoe or on foot has special insights into such matters as the location of schools and school transport and what really happens in the classrooms but such insights which have nothing to do with ethnicity or party affiliation are not taken into account by planners.

When there are structural adjustments and budget cuts with consequent loss of jobs and food shortages and countless hardships it is the household and in particular women who must devise new ways of survival. As an IDB report once asserted in such times of difficulty it is women who must process low grade foodstuff not otherwise used into an acceptable level of nutrition. Taking account of the pervasive extent of poverty this is a vast project of food processing which escapes the attention of the statistician.

The male devised mechanisms of development plans of the public sphere pay little or no attention to such fundamental social processes.

Women groups must seek to change and bring new perspectives to such matters. It can be done. In related fields to politics namely International Relations feminist theory is already altering or destroying age old concepts. Feminist foreign policy analyses have challenged the exclusive use of such male originated concepts as power and aggression and anarchy in the description of the relations between states.

Feminist theory must likewise challenge the relevance of male dominated structures of state institutions.

So we come back to parliament with its heritage of adversarial politics as enshrined in its leader of government business and its leader of the opposition. Without any claims to exact history it is perhaps not fanciful to see the origins of such structure in the days when issues were settled by combat. Is it not the case that the most famous of constitutional documents, the Magna Carta was not the product of debate but of armed confrontation between the barons and the king in the fields of Runnymede.

In this time of democratic deepening and in the special circumstances of our own society with its new emphasis on dialogue there should be no room for adversaries. In this respect our twenty women parliamentarians should urgently consider the establishment of a permanent Inter-party Caucus which could fundamentally modify the adversarial structure by bringing to debates feminist solidarity and the special feminine perspectives of caring for others and for the resolution of conflict.