New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy

Shirin Rai, Georgina Waylen, Shirin M. Rai, Georgina Waylen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134649204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume brings together the work of outstanding feminist scholars who reflect on the achievements of feminist political economy and the challenges it faces in the 21st century.

The volume develops further some key areas of research in feminist political economy – understanding economies as gendered structures and economic crises as crises in social reproduction, as well as in finance and production; assessing economic policies through the lens of women's rights; analysing global transformations in women's work; making visible the unpaid economy in which care is provided for family and communities, and critiquing the ways in which policy makers are addressing ( or failing to address) this unpaid economy.

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FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY

Looking back, looking forward

Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen

Introduction

This volume reflects on the achievements of feminist political economy scholarship and the challenges it faces in the twenty-first century. The current crisis exposes yet again the inadequacies of the dominant models. Since 2008, unemployment has remained high, national budget deficits are unprecedented, capital continues to become more concentrated in both the manufacturing and financial sectors, and there is no clear sense of how long the crisis might last. Of course, the impact of the crisis is not uniformly felt – there are those who suffer more from the downturn than others; indeed the crisis has created opportunities for restructuring and diminishing social protection in the name of fiscal responsibility. The most vulnerable in society are being hardest hit. In 1989 Cynthia Enloe asked a question about international politics that remains relevant today: ‘It is always worth asking, “where are the women?”, answering this question reveals the dependence of most political and economic systems not just on women, but on certain kinds of relations between women and men’ (p. 133). The chapters in this volume seek to do this by reflecting upon important aspects of political economy in order to deconstruct the dominant narratives about economics and development – both as discipline and practice.

This volume outlines important insights of feminist economics, feminist political economy, and gendered analyses of development, which although interrelated have remained somewhat separate. It also charts the evolution of the key debates in these areas by reflecting on and celebrating the work of two feminist scholars, Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, whose joint and singular interventions have shaped these fields. Their scholarship, both separately and together, demonstrates how these three different approaches can be productively and critically brought together to better understand the global economic crisis and the attendant challenges of development in the twenty-first century. In this introductory chapter we will first reflect upon the ways in which the evolution of the debates mirrors their intellectual and political development as activists and public intellectuals. Second, we will outline four key areas of feminist scholarship to show the importance of the feminist contribution to debates on political economy. Third, we will provide a summary of the arguments presented by various chapters in the volume; and finally, we will conclude by reflecting on the continuing challenges which remain to be met by feminist scholarship and political engagement.

Feminist journeys: from the gender analysis of development to feminist political economy

The extensive body of work by Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson that this volume is celebrating mirrors and replicates many of the trends that we are outlining in this introduction. First, Elson and Pearson’s intellectual development both echoes and makes a significant contribution to the evolution of the field more generally – from its early roots in socialist feminism through to the emergence of gender analysis of development as an important subfield of development studies. And now we have the ascendance of feminist political economy and feminist economics as recognized subfields – at the same time as many of the key themes of gender and development have been more comprehensively integrated into other important and related areas such as the study of global care chains, migration and social policy that we see at the moment. This evolution also mirrors and of course in part derives from changes in the real world. Globalization has accelerated over the last few decades and has long been recognized as an important phenomenon by academics, policymakers and politicians. As a result, we can no longer isolate the gender analysis of development with that focus on the global south – we also need to include the global north in our analyses in more comprehensive ways. As such, it is now more necessary than ever to talk about a global political economy rather than development studies. Second, Ruth Pearson and Diane Elson have exemplified in both their scholarship and their activism the longstanding links between feminism as expressed in scholarship and intellectual endeavour, and feminism as political practice in the real world – feminist scholarship has always been critical scholarship.

To illustrate these arguments, it is useful to discuss both aspects in some more detail. Both Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson trained as economists in the early 1970s. And both emerged from a strong socialist feminist, if not Marxist feminist, background that was a significant force within UK feminism at that time. Their socialist roots are apparent. Both were active in the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE), Ruth was a member of the ‘Sex and Class’ group, and Diane Elson, for example, has written on Marxist economic theory such as the labour theory of value (Elson 1979). But as socialist feminists, they were also part of the flourishing of socialist feminist scholarship that critiqued the gender blind nature of much Marxist theorizing and political practice, highlighting its blindness to the important role played by domestic labour and making clear that the emancipation of women would not automatically result from the overthrow of capitalism (Molyneux 1979; Barrett 1981; Hartmann 1981).

Both were key members of the famous ‘Subordination of Women’ (SOW) collective, which was sponsored by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex in 1976–78, and participated in the SOW conference that took place at IDS in 1978, developing an interdisciplinary socialist feminist approach to examine development and social change (Young, et al. 1981). Its debates on gender, development, production and reproduction are now legendary and are still as relevant today as they were then. This proved a key moment in the development of feminist political economy as the result of applying a gender lens to the analysis of development theory, policy and practice. It preceded the subsequent emergence of a ‘gender and development’ (GAD) approach that critiqued liberal development theory as well as its more liberal feminist incarnation Women in Development (WID) that had flourished after the publication of Boserup’s groundbreaking work in 1970 – arguing that it was not that women missed out on ‘development’ but were incorporated into the spread of global capitalism in gender specific and often exploitative ways (Beneria and Sen 1981; Kabeer 1994).

It was in the context of the work of the SOW collective that Elson and Pearson developed the arguments that were expounded in their ‘Nimble Fingers’ thesis, which was first published as an IDS Discussion Paper (No. 150 1980), as well as in their contribution to the path-breaking volume that emerged from the workshop and in Feminist Review (Elson and Pearson 1980, 1981a, 1981b). They argued that export led development, at that time often based in factories in ‘export processing zones’, relied far more than had been acknowledged in the contemporary scholarship on women’s cheap labour. Employing an interdisciplinary gendered analysis that focused on both actors and the structures in which they operate, they argued that global capital, particularly in the form of multinational companies operating in low income third world economies, built upon existing gender norms that constructed women as docile workers. The employment of women in export factories could lead to an intensification or the decomposing of some existing gender norms (such as the control of fathers over the marriages of daughters) and/or the recomposition of those norms in new ways.

Since then the evolution of the work of both of these scholars displays some obvious continuities with these early interventions, but also demonstrates how the overall field – that can now be labelled feminist political economy – has expanded in various directions. Both Elson and Pearson made important contributions to the gender analysis of development by extending the ways that we analyse development in general and the field of gender and development in particular. This is demonstrated in more general terms in their landmark edited collections Male Bias in the Development Process (Elson 1995a) edited by Diane Elson and Feminist Visions of Development that Ruth Pearson edited with Cecile Jackson in 1998 (Jackson and Pearson 1998). Both volumes reassessed recent developments (for example Pearson’s 1998 ‘Nimble fingers revisited’), encapsulated the state of the field at that time and moved the debates on significantly in areas such as our understanding of the household, poverty and the key theoretical debates around the meaning of gender.

Diane Elson is also renowned for her work on macroeconomic policy in general as well as her pioneering analyses of structural adjustment and Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) (Elson 1989, 1991, 1992). She produced some of the first analyses of the ways in which the SAPs introduced in many third world countries in the 1990s were, despite their gender neutral language, highly gendered, having very different effects on men and women in both their productive and reproductive roles, and outlining how they relied on the assumed elasticity of women’s labour and women’s capacity to make ends meet within the household, in the face of austerity and economic crisis (Elson 1994, 1995b, 1995c). She also went on to play an important intellectual role in the development of gender budgeting as a set of tools for critique of budgets and for improvement of tax and expenditure policies, which, as we will see below, has been widely taken up (Elson 1998a, 2006a; Elson and Sharp 2010).

Ruth Pearson took a related but different direction in her subsequent scholarship, focusing more centrally on different aspects of women’s work and the links between production and reproduction in different contexts. This ranged widely from sectors, such as the IT industry or manufacturing in particular locations like the Mexican border industries (Pearson 1985, 1993, 1995, 2004a, 2007a, 2010); to social reproduction and its links to social policy as well as the ‘reproductive bargain’ (Pearson 1997, 2000b; Razavi et al. 2004). More recently she has examined the gendered nature of migration, for example examining Burmese migrant women factory workers in Thailand (Kusakabe and Pearson 2010; Pearson and Kusakabe 2012a and 2012b). She also made a significant contribution to the creation and widespread dissemination of the issues around codes of conduct and corporate responsibility for multinationals, in particular labour standards and employment conditions (Pearson and Seyfang 2001; Jenkins, Pearson and Seyfang 2002; Pearson 2007b). The subsequent debates around corporate social responsibility have had resonance all around the globe. She has also conducted innovative work examining race, class and gender in women’s activism by comparing two important industrial disputes at Grunwick in the late 1970s and Gate Gourmet in the UK in the early twenty-first century, jointly authoring a series of related articles with her research team, displaying the collegiate approach which has characterized her academic work throughout her career (see Anitha et al. 2012).

In common with most women academics of their generation, both Elson and Pearson faced tough challenges within academia and both have been trailblazers for those feminist academics who have come afterwards – not the least in struggling to be recognized as economists within institutions – including the terms of the subject matter of their scholarship not being considered a part of the discipline, their embodiment as women within the academy and the discrimination that they faced. Economics as a discipline has been notoriously unwilling to recognize more heterodox visions of what constitutes legitimate economic analysis and theorizing. As part of this narrowness of scope, gender analysis has rarely been recognized as a legitimate focus of analysis despite the efforts of feminist economists – unless understood as mere sex disaggregation of variables such as wages or employment. In more practical terms, both Elson and Pearson, together with many feminist academics of their generation, initially struggled to get permanent jobs and the wider institutional recognition that they deserved. However, in 1986, Diane Elson was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Economics at the University of Manchester and was later promoted to Professor of Development Studies.

Ruth Pearson was appointed to a lectureship in Development Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1988, and was then Professor of Women and Development at the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, Netherlands from 1996–98. They both ended their careers in prestigious posts – Elson as Professor of Sociology and Human Rights at the University of Essex and Pearson as Professor of International Development at the University of Leeds. Both were also active in a number of professional organizations. In particular, both have been active in International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) – which was set up in 1992 to advance feminist thinking within economics – and its journal Feminist Economics, set up as a forum for feminist debate about economic perspectives, publishing its first issue in 1994. As leading feminist economists, Elson and Pearson have been at the forefront of these debates about economies as gendered structures and institutions, and the significance of social and economic rights (Elson 1998b, 1999, 2000, 2002a; Elson and Gideon 2004) as well as the key role played by social reproduction in all of its guises and its links to production (Pearson 2000a, 2000b; Pearson and Kusakabe 2012b).

But Elson and Pearson’s academic and intellectual achievements are of course intertwined with and inseparable from their lives as activists and public intellectuals, which has been central to their feminism. The praxis between their intellectual lives and their activism has taken many forms – and each has informed the other in very productive ways. Pearson and Elson each have played important roles in the organizations based near to where they have been living. Together with Angela Hale, Diane Elson was a founder member of Women Working Worldwide, a pioneering nongovernmental organization (NGO) that has campaigned around women’s employment rights and conditions primarily in the third world for 30 years, and is based in Manchester (www.women-ww.org/ ). Ruth Pearson, as well as researching women’s employment and credit, has also had a longstanding involvement with women’s employment initiatives with the establishment of micro-credit projects like Full Circle and Women’s Employment, Enterprise and Training Unit (WEETU) in Norwich, UK (http://www.linkedin.com/company/weetu), and with Home Workers Worldwide (www.homeworkersww.org.uk ), an organization based in Leeds and set up to campaign around the rights of home-based workers (who are primarily women) around the globe (Pearson 2001, 2004b).

While activists have translated gender responsive budgeting discussed above into worldwide initiatives from, for example, Canada to Mexico, the Philippines to South Africa, both Pearson and Elson have been active members of the UK Women’s Budget Group (WBG), an ‘independent organization bringing together individuals from academia, non-governmental organizations, and trades unions to promote gender equality through appropriate economic policy’. It asks ‘where do resources go, and what impact does resource allocation have on gender equality?’ and focuses on the impact that government expenditure and taxation can have on women’s everyday lives, especially women experiencing poverty. The WBG aims to not only encourage, but assist the government in using gender analysis to improve its economic policymaking (www.wbg.org.uk). And at the global level, both Elson and Pearson have worked with international organizations and NGOs. Elson spent two years working full-time with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in New York in the late 1990s, which culminated in the publication of the first edition of Progress of the World’s Women in 2000, as well as ensuring that UNIFEM subsequently worked on gender responsive budget initiatives. Elson is currently serving on the advisory board for Progress of the World’s Women 2014. Pearson (2004a) has worked extensively with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) on export orientated production and social policy (Razavi et al. 2004) and is currently Associate Editor of the Oxfam Gender and Development Journal. Both of them have undertaken a whole host of consultancies for a range of NGOs and international organizations, too many to mention here.

As we can see in the contributions to this volume, the key themes of gendered production and reproduction, ...