Women in Asia

Tradition, modernity and globalisation

Louise Edwards, Mina Roces

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000248357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women in Asia: Tradition, Modernity and Globalisation surveys the transformation in the status of women since 1970 in a diverse range of nations: Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, India, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Burma. Within these 13 national case studies the book presents new arguments about being women, being Asian and being modern in contemporary Asia.Recent social changes in women's place in society are untangled in recognition that not all change is 'progress' and that not all 'modernity' enhances women's status. The authors suggest that the improvements in women's status within the Asian region vary dramatically according to the manner in which women interact with the particular economic and ideological forces in each nation.Each contributor has focussed on a particular country in their area of expertise. They present innovative arguments relating to the problem of 'being women' in Asia during a period of dramatic social and political changes. Each national case study explores key social and economic markers of women's status such as employment rates, wage differentials, literacy rates and participation in politics or business. The effects of population control programs, legislation on domestic violence and female infanticide, and women's role in the family and the workforce are also discussed. The book poses questions as to how women have negotiated these shifts and in the process created a 'modern' Asian woman.Specialists from a variety of disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, demography, gender studies and psychology grapple with the complexities and ambivalences presented by the multiple faces of the modern Asian woman. Complete with a list of recommended readings and a web-site with links to electronic resources, the book will be of particular interest to undergraduate students of Asian studies and women's studies as well as scholars and postgraduate students interested in comparative women's studies.

1
Contesting gender narratives, 1970–2000

Mina Roces & Louise Edwards

University of New South Wales

Australian Catholic University

Modernisation is not gender neutral. In the modernisation process women are ‘developed’ differently, often inadvertently, from men. Similarly, women participate in development projects with objectives that often differ from those of men. By actively creating ‘modernity’ in this era of rapid globalisation, women in Asia are establishing dynamic new conceptions of contemporary cultural practice for their various nations, regions or communities. So diverse are the pictures and experiences of modernity that it is more fruitful to explore the multiple modernities of Asian women, or in Maila Stivens’ terms, their ‘divergent modernities’ (Stivens 1998, p. 10). The development project of the close of the twentieth century provided new opportunities for women in the Asian region, but it also posed new dangers. This volume addresses the manner in which the ‘woman question’ has interacted with the dominant national discourses of ‘development’, ‘globalisation’, and ‘modernisation’ in a range of country case-studies. Recent social changes in women’s place in society, often expressed as ‘progress towards modernity’, are untangled in recognition that not all change is ‘progress’ and not all ‘modernity’ enhances women’s status.

The three decades 1970–2000 have seen this development project increase in speed and intensity. Development has been the mantra for government decisions and international aid programs. The results in the Asian region are impressive, wealth has been produced and life has improved for millions of people. The chapters in this book explore the ways in which these programs changed the lives of women in the region and the manner in which women have mobilised development and globalisation for their own national feminist causes. In this sense, the divergent modernities we are speaking of are in many ways shaped by women themselves who as agents of change have harnessed the power of the development narrative for their own ends. How have women in Asia engaged with the development and modernisation projects to create a new, modern Asian woman? How have they negotiated for a diversification in the traits of the iconic modern woman so invoked in the nationalist discourse? How do women in Asia use the narratives of globalisation—development and modernity—to create new possibilities and expand their opportunities? What is the Asian counterpart of the modern woman at the end of the twentieth century?

Women have taken up the development narrative to promote women’s rights, status and value within the utopian vision of modernising the nation. The development of women, these activists have stressed, is crucial to the development of the nation. To harness the energies of all the people, women must also be developed—but, they argue, in ways that reflect the special needs of women. Engagement with the devil that is ‘development’ provides the opportunity for furthering women’s rights and improving women’s status. Part of this process involves exposing ‘development’ as a masculinist project, but it also allows scope for challenging the oppression of women by the equally masculinist traditional cultural practices. By employing the utopian vision of a modern state, women activists are able to dismantle aspects of the ‘traditional’ woman that maintained male dominance in the household and public life for centuries. Narratives of modernity provide the discursive tools for unravelling traditions and creating new national female identities.

If indeed it is more accurate to speak of ‘divergent modernities’ and multiple modernities, can we argue then that we must also speak of multiple gender narratives within single Asian societies? Up until the first half of the twentieth century it was more common to have one official gender narrative that was clearly hegemonic in a specific Asian cultural context. In most cases women were seen to be wives and mothers’ or as ‘bearers of sons’. Although there may have been hidden pockets of resistance to the overarching narrative, they have never been able to seriously contest the official grand paradigm. In the last thirty years of the twentieth century however, new gender narratives have emerged which have begun to challenge the traditional one-dimensional definition of woman. Part of the legacy of modernisation, globalisation (including the globalisation of Western liberal feminism and of Third World feminisms), and ‘development’ has been the laying of foundations for negotiating new cultural constructions for women. But the new configurations have not merely replaced traditional discourses on gender. Instead, contesting gender narratives compete for supremacy. The ‘modern’ Asian woman embodies the complexities, contradictions and ambivalences that shaped Asian women in the last thirty years as they grappled with confronting multiple and divergent modernities. For example, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail is a political activist transformed into the voice of the reformasi movement (reform movement) in Malaysia. But she is also a traditional woman; a doctor of medicine who ceased practising medicine to fulfil her role as wife and mother. At the same time, she is clearly perceived to be the alter-ego of her husband Anwar Ibrahim (Prime Minister Mahathir’s political rival). Her identity is also expressed in the trope of the Islamic revivalist movement—she wears the veil. But because the veil is alien to traditional Malay culture (Ong 1990), it resonates a form of non-Western modernity while reinforcing women’s agency (Stivens this volume).

The tension between one official gender narrative and the other multiple gender narratives is one major theme that permeates the experiences of women between 1970–2000. In many instances the traditional patriarchal paradigm is being challenged by the ‘development narrative’ or by a feminist narrative. Such new paradigms come from the ‘outside’ as part of the globalised ideas of liberal feminism and human rights. Organisations such as the United Nations (UN) proposed international legislation regarding the promotion of women’s rights, gender equality and women’s empowerment—such as CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women: 1979) and DEV AW (Declaration on Violence Against Women: 1993). The formation of the Asian Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) group in 1989 has also resulted in specific initiatives relating to women and economic structural change. If we view a model of tension between one hegemonic gender narrative versus multiple narratives trying to offset or challenge it, is there a danger then that the developmental model (including Western liberal feminism in its globalised form) may become the official gender narrative? Would it be problematic for women in Asia if this narrative of development (which also has masculinist overtones plus Western ideas of liberal feminism) became the hegemonic narrative replacing the traditional Asian gender discourse?

There is no doubt that development has benefited women though the advantages have not been unambiguous. In fact, women in Asia have made strategic use of the narrative to help increase their status and make gains in terms of political empowerment, increase in wages, addressing issues of rape and domestic violence, etc. But, Western feminism has also been viewed as disruptive and alien, challenging ‘Asian values’. Asian women activists have been proactive in refocusing the arguments away from the perceived disjunction or foreign source of Western liberal feminism by stressing the ‘nationalist’ aspect of such feminist principles in liberating women for ‘development’. Those invoking the development narrative for women’s ends are mostly middle-class women rather than working class or poor women. It is middle-class women who have access to the institutional structures promoting modernisation. They eschew the confrontational approach for legislative reform. These are middle-class women working the ‘middle-ground’—created by the poles marked by radical activists and government hacks.

Nationalism provides a cover of respectability within this strategic use of the development narrative for women’s interests. Without the appeal to national development lobbying for equality in divorce rights, women’s refuges, legislation against violence against women (VAW) or equal pay would ring of a Westernised and disruptive feminism. The important function that women have performed over the centuries as icons of nationhood suggests that attempts to alter the perception of woman’s place in society would be fraught with fears about the fragmentation of ‘national identity’ (Edwards 2000). Western feminism, as enunciated in campaigns for ‘rights’, has become one of those feared attacks on the ‘national woman’. But, when framed within the nationalist rubric, the development of women becomes a patriotic act rather than an anti-male one. Nonetheless, even with this careful reconstruction of women’s activism, women’s rights activists face major challenges, and in some cases, considerable danger.

Because it can be labelled as ‘other’ or as ‘alien’, Western feminism that we identify as part of the developmental narrative, has had the effect of reinforcing some traditional patriarchal principles. The case of Singapore described by Jasmine Chan reveals the patriarchal state asserting the specificity of their ‘national woman’ by way of defining her against the perceived antagonistic, confrontational feminism of the West. Similar to the Asian values debate led by Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir, the invocation of the modern Asian woman’s difference from the Western feminist woman serves two functions. First, it reaffirms the distinctiveness of a particular national subjectivity from a putative hegemonic Westernising identity. Second, it undermines potentially disruptive claims by less compliant women to government funding and power by linking any such action as un-Asian and likely to be led by traitorous women who have ‘sold-out’ to the West. In China, prominent women’s studies scholars would also eschew assimilation with Western feminism, in the creation of a specific national women’s movement that remains distinct from Western hegemony (see Edwards, this volume). In Malaysia the use of the veil has also been seen as an attempt to embrace ‘modernity’ in non-Western terms (Stivens, this volume and Stivens, forthcoming).

There is a perception by some Asian societies and governments that the developmental narrative is emerging as a hegemonic paradigm that requires a direct challenge. Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase’s seminal chapter on India in this volume provides us with a unique insight about the tensions between the developmentalist paradigm and the other emerging gender narratives that object to its superimposition, undiluted, into Indian soil. Ganguly-Scrase shows that the ideals of liberal feminism face critique by religious groups. Religious communalism in India offers other gender narratives and some of these are problematic. As the discourse on women is drawn into the political contest for supremacy between Muslims and Hindus certain invocations of ‘woman’ may seem to be re-inventions of traditional views on women’s roles.

The Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) also offers a unique slant to the study of contesting gender narratives. Louise Edwards argues that since 1949 up until the mid-1980s the official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rhetoric was that ‘Gender equality has been achieved in the PRC’. No dissenting voices were permitted to challenge, dispute or even question this axiom. This slogan of gender equality became the CCP’s gender narrative. Since the mid-1980s however, transformations within the PRC stimulated the women’s movement including the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), formerly a mouthpiece of CCP directives. As China began to retreat from totalitarian socialism and began to implement economic liberalisation, the ACWF has become more proactive in speaking for Chinese women. Women academics researching on the history of women in China and the emergence of women’s studies in China may eventually undermine the totalising CCP narrative that presents the CCP as the liberators of Chinese women. China’s feminists now celebrate ‘difference’ as opposed to ‘whatever men can do, women can do’ and react against Communist androgyny. Today women themselves critique the gender equality myth arguing that such an equality narrative is only partial and incomplete.

The development narrative and globalisation

The impact of the ‘development narrative’ on women is monitored world-wide by such bodies as the United Nations who use international pressure to introduce legislation to protect women’s rights within the rubric of ‘human rights’. The United Nations played an important role in the establishment of benchmarks and protocols for women’s status in society. In 1946 the UN established its Commission on the Status of Women, within a year of the formation of the UN itself, and charged the Commission with monitoring and promoting women’s rights. In the 1970s the work of the Commission was made prominent at a global level with the observation of International Women’s Year (1975) and the International Decade for Women (1976–85). The general goal of the accompanying programs was to promote equality between men and women. Mid-way through the decade, on 18 December 1979, the UN’s General Assembly ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This document was then submitted to national governments for ratification by their respective legislatures. The process of debating ratification prompted discussion on women’s rights and gave credibility and respectability to women’s groups around the Asian region. Kathryn Robinson’s chapter on Indonesia, Catherine Tang et al.’s on Hong Kong and Sasha Hampson’s on Korea each demonstrate the weight of this UN benchmark in providing vital impetus to reform—particularly within those nations keen to promote their emerging civil, judicial and democratic institutions. Nonetheless, Radhika Coomarasswamy notes that while the Convention ‘enjoys the privilege of having this exceptionally large membership (121 members in 1996) CEDAW is also the human rights convention with the largest number of state reservations’. She argues that these restrictions reveal that ‘relative to other fields, women’s rights are more fragile, have weaker implementation procedures and suffer from inadequate financial support from the United Nations’ (Coomaraswamy 1996, p. 16). Subsequent UN initiatives have attempted to maintain the importance of women’s rights and the promotion of women’s status in the global arena. By 1993 the Commission on the Status of Women Declaration on Violence against Women (DEVAW) was established. In 1995 a special rapporteur on violence against women was appointed and by 1995 rape during times of war was recognised as a war-crime—giving victims the right to compensation.

Within the Asian region the major impetus for measuring national ‘performance’ came at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. This venue enabled many Asian Non-Govemmental Organisations (NGO) to attend the adjunct conference at Huairou at far less cost than the previous European, African and Central American conferences. China saw this conference as a platform from which to demonstrate its success on women’s rights but the NGO forum also unleashed new voices of discontent. China’s ongoing problems with female infanticide and the abduction and sale of girls gained international attention as a result of the UN’s conference. Regional issues, such as the trafficking in women within Asia, were also widely canvassed because of the large numbers of Asian delegates attending the NGO forum.

The education of national leaders by the UN’s statutes has given weight to women’s groups within each country and made it useful for governments to address, even at a token level, the relationship between women’s status and development. Clearly, documents such as CEDAW and DEVAW can be signed and then ignored by governments—but the very process of signing in itself has served an educational function and provides support for women’s rights activists across the region. Moreover, the international pressure to appear ‘modern’, is a considerable incentive to change. Governments have been prompted to establish committees to create programs directed at women as a result of the UN’s support for women’s rights. The UN’s decade for women prompted changes in numerous government legislative practices.

APEC has also taken initiatives to promote the economic status of women within member countries. In its bid to integrate women into the mainstream of APEC activities, a Ministerial meeting was convened in Manila in 1998. The main concerns of this meeting were to promote equal opportunity for women and men, to encourage the implementation of gender sensitive development projects and to eliminate barriers to women’s full contribution to the economic life of member countries. To this end, APEC has produced a Guide on Gender Analysis to promote understanding among government officials and development project managers about the best methods for promoting women’s engagement with APEC policies.

The UN, CEDAW, DEVAW and APEC are outside forces. Yet through their enactment of legislation which has global implications, when they speak for all women (based on the premise that women’s rights are human rights), they introduce a new gender paradigm—that of liberal feminism. This may be in conflict with the gender narrative of a particular Asian country. In most cases the new global legislation for women’s rights and women’s equality has benefited women in Asia (as the chapters in this book illustrate). However, there is evidence to show that in some Asian countries the older gender narratives (described by some of our contributors as ‘traditional attitudes towards women’) try to subvert the newly won women’s rights. This attempt at subversion or ‘resistance’ is a strong theme particularly in Confucian based societies such as Japan, Taiwan and Korea. In Korea for example, Sasha Hampson points out that although many Korean women pursue higher education, they do so primarily with the aim of acquiring better husbands. Traditional constructions of women as ‘bearers of sons’ or as ‘wives and mothers’ permeate strongly and thus, modern institutions such as higher education for women are perceived in terms of how these new opportunities can be tapped to fulfil basically traditional cultural constructions of women.

Elise Tipton’s chapter shows that while international pressures have enforced changes in women’s lives, an examination of women’s roles in the workplace, politics and popular culture, can unmask the very clear inequalities existing in a society that still places women ‘primarily in nurturing, reproductive roles even outside the home’. Despi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Contesting gender narratives, 1970–2000
• 2. Becoming modern in Malaysia: women at the end of the twentieth century
• 3. The status of women in a patriarchal state: the case of Singapore
• 4. Women in the People’s Republic of China: new challenges to the grand gender narrative
• 5. Diversity and the status of women: the Indian experience
• 6. Negotiating modernities: Filipino women 1970–2000
• 7. Indonesian Women—from Orde Baru to Reformasi
• 8. Rhetoric or reality?: contesting definitions of women in Korea
• 9. Breaking the patriarchal paradigm: Chinese women in Hong Kong
• 10. Being women in Japan 1970–2000
• 11. Women in Taiwan: linking economic prosperity and women’s progress
• 12. Exploring women’s status in contemporary Thailand
• 13. Militarism, civil war and women’s status: a Burma case study
• 14. Re-gendering Vietnam: from militant to market socialism
• Index
• World Wide Web addresses on women in Asia