Linking Gender and Water - Streams of Thought

Gender, Water and Ecofeminism

Attention to environmental degradation of developing countries from late 1970s brought attention to the impacts on women of the use of technology and fertilisers, of erosion and desertification, of landlessness. Irene Dankelman & Joan Davidson (1991: 3) talked about women as food producers:

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"Women have title to only 1% of the world's land. Yet they produce more than half of the world's food - and in countries of food scarcity the percentage is even higher. ...Women make up the majority of subsistence farmers. In most rural cultures, it is their work which provides a family with its basic diet and with any supplementary food that may be obtained from barter or selling surplus goods."

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It was noted that industrialised agriculture - farming that demands enormous economic and chemical inputs - indeed increased production from high yielding crops and built up food storages - but at the same time they also made crops susceptible to failure in short draught periods. These consequences of industrialised agriculture impinge upon the everyday lives of women attempting to glean food, fuel and water from their environment. Some of these effects are confined to women because of the gender-specific division of labour in rural agricultural societies, where women are responsible for food processing, fuel and water gathering. However, in transition to the new farming economy, specific tasks allocated by gender are renegotiated in response to changing conditions. These changes occur in ecological conditions, in social structures, and in economic relations, and have long term negative impacts on women.

Indeed many changes in womens' lives were accompanied by the transition from rural to industrial farming. Sontheimer's 'Reader' on 'women and the environment' (1991) quoted a rural woman from Zimbabwe as saying: 'My environment is the basis of my economy and my total survival. It is from the land that I get my food.' She also pointed out to the 'Double day' in discussing how women's subsistence agriculture suffers from neglect where large-scale agriculture absorbs labour, land and economic resources. She gave the example of Cameroon where men were given land, water, seeds and technical training to enable them to produce rice for sale, but women were expected to carry out their traditional agricultural tasks in cash-crop rice fields, as well as cultivating non-cash food crops for their families.

As we moved into the 'development decades' - the 1960s and '70s - the paradigm shifted from excessive stress on industrialisation to seeing development as a prerequisite for sustained economic growth. The main recognition was that it is not only capital but investments in human resources, equitable wealth and income distribution are essential for alleviating poverty. From 1976 onwards, there was a greater attention to the 'basic needs' approach. At the same time, there also emerged strong critiques of developmentalism: '...way of Western developed countries ... To manage and control, and in many ways, even create the Third World politically, economically, sociologically and culturally...' (Escobar, 1984). This was associated with a feminist critique of scientism and developmentalism which pointed out that gender-blind development drew attention to the displacement of women's ecological knowledges. Caroline merchant in 1980 highlights the problem as due to the exclusion and domination of women, nature and all 'others' from the dominant view of the subject, and stresses the depth of the crisis internal to western culture and civilisation themselves. She noted - 'in investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma and its connections to science, technology and economy, we must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that, by perceiving reality as machine, rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both women and nature'.

Women's knowledges - a tradition accumulated over generations of farming - began to be seen as adapted to the environment, flexible to natural changes, and sustainable in terms of its low impacts. They were also seen as providing security for themselves and to others, and was posed as a binary opposition to "scientific knowledge". Shiva (1985) showed that in tribal Indian villages, women were growing high-yielding, indigenous varieties of rice, but because the women were considered backward and not scientific enough, "modern" agriculture was introduced.

From Vicitimhood to Agency

Streams of Thought - Thinking about Gender

Gender Mainstreaming in IWRM (Integrated Water Resource Management)

Feminist Thoughts

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