Social Power And Influence Of Women

Liesa Stamm, Carol D Ryff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000311822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Using a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, the authors of this collection discuss women's power within the various sociocultural contexts in which women operate—such as the workplace, the family, and other interpersonal relationships—and the differential nature of women's power and influence over their life course. Personality characteristics associated with mastery and influence are examined, as are the limitations imposed by societal norms and expectations. Finally, the authors discuss the development of theories about women's power and suggest ways in which women's roles—and consequently, women's influence—are changing as new societal values evolve.

Part 1
Family Power and Influence: Beyond Formal Structures of Authority

1.
Differential Power of Women over the Life Course: A Case Study of Age-Roles as an Indicator of Power

Liesa Stamm

An image of women as active members of the social system who exercise control over their life options and life situations and exert influence within the community has been established in recent years largely through the research efforts of feminist scholars who were not content with the accepted wisdom that relegated women to a position of secondary or negligible importance in society. In order to counter the more standard viewpoint on women as the helpless or ineffective victims of oppressive social systems and cultural norms, feminist scholarship has emphasized the significance of analyzing the perspectives and the social contexts of women within the wider social system. The field research on which this study of women’s power in the Tunisian town of Ksar-Hellal is based was predicated on the assumption that the women of a society have different cultural perspectives from those of men. It was further hypothesized that these differing cultural perspectives have significant implications concerning the power relationships between men and women in a community. Following from these assumptions, this chapter examines the social contexts in which women in Ksar-Hellal operate as a means of analyzing the mechanisms of power available to them. As suggested in the introduction to this volume, women’s power is frequently defined informally rather than sanctioned through formal jural codes or cultural norms. The documentation and analysis of women’s power is facilitated, therefore, by the use of an interpretative perspective: an analytic approach which emphasizes the ability of individuals to differ from each other and to develop personal operational strategies within the broad context of cannon cultural norms and values.

The need for an interpretative approach for understanding women’s roles and particularly women’s power is emphasized increasingly by scholarship concerned with women’s issues and women’s perspectives. We have become aware that mainstream social scientific approaches which emphasize the analysis of normative social systems and formal institutional structures have resulted in an inaccurate and discriminatory representation of women. The documentation and analysis of social power and authority present a particularly good example of the bias resulting from a normative approach to the study of social behavior. When power and authority are described only at the institutional or systemic level rather than in terms of actual behavioral actions and decisions, women tend to be defined as powerless and of secondary status in most societies. Cronin (1977) warns against the duplications of this perspective. She stresses that if we fail to document the strategies of women for getting what they want despite apparently restrictive social systems, if we assume that women have no wishes, desires or needs of their own, “we will continue to see societies through the man’s eye, and we cannot then understand hew whole societies, systems or processes are structured and function (1977: 90).” Similar to many of the other studies in this volume, this analysis of the contexts of women’s power in Ksar-Hellal contributes to the growing body of data on women’s perspectives and women’s concerns with the view of ultimately providing a greater understanding of the social and psychological processes of the whole society.

Women’s power in Ksar-Hellal is not uniform over the life course, but varies according to the age-roles and the life stage of the individual. In analyzing the mechanisms and operation of women’s power in this community, therefore, age related changes are emphasized. The importance of a developmental perspective for understanding women’s power and influence is stressed in a number of other chapters in this volume. The analysis of the differential power available to Ksar-Hellal women based on their relative age-roles provides a complementary view to the studies of women’s power in the United States.

Research Setting and Methodology

This paper is based on fifteen months fieldwork in Ksar-Hellal during 1971–1972.^>1 At the time of the study, Ksar-Hellal, located in the Sahel region of Tunisia, had a population of approximately 20,000. Since Tunisian independence in 1956, residents of Ksar-Hellal have experienced a deliberate government-directed campaign to introduce social and cultural institutions modeled after those of Europe and the United States. Many traditional Islamic practices and conceptual frameworks have become secularized. Ksar-Hellal, as with other Tunisian communities, has experienced a marked increase in educational and occupational opportunities for both women and men.

Historically, Ksar-Hellal was a community of settled agriculturalists. Hand-woven textiles, however, became a major male occupation in the early 20th century. Following independence, the Tunisian government established several mechanized textile factories in the Ksar-Hellal region. By 1972 the hand-weaving industry co-existed with 14 modern textile factories employing about 2400 workers. Ksar-Hellal is also an important administrative and marketing center for the surrounding region. The variety of employment opportunities in Ksar-Hellal gives the town a very viable economic base. Unlike most communities in Tunisia which suffer from unemployment, Ksar-Hellal has attracted many new residents from other parts of Tunisia. Despite the diversity of economic options in Ksar-Hellal and the resulting discrepancy in individual income levels, a definite class structure has not developed. The style of life is similar for most residents of the town and there is little distinctive social differentiation based on economic or social position.

Data were collected through both participant-observation and survey methodologies. Through a household survey of 107 women in Ksar-Hellal information was obtained on household composition, occupational structure, marriage patterns, educational levels and fertility rates. An indepth knowledge of women’s routine events and typical patterns of social relationships was acquired through intensive informal involvement in the daily lives of a number of families in the community. These two methodologies complemented each other: the data collected through semi-structured interviews provided a basis for assessing the typicality of patterns observed through regular interaction in specific households.

The Contexts of Women’s Power in Ksar-Hellal

It is a major assumption of this volume that much social power operates outside of institutionalized positions of authority. Such personal, unassigned power can be defined as the ability to influence or control resources, actions and social relationships which are valued by the community or group. In contrast to assigned positional power which is sanctioned through formal ideological or jural rules, personal power is expressed through individual decision-making and sanctioned through the acceptance of these decisions by other members of the community or group.

Since women’s power is frequently established interactionally rather than through cultural norms, the specification of the mechanisms of women’s power is facilitated through the analysis of the social roles and social contexts within which women interact. A North African community such as Ksar-Hellal presents a particularly good case for the specification of women’s power since the social roles and interactional networks of women and men in this town were traditionally sharply differentiated. As in other communities in North Africa and the Middle East, women and men in Ksar-Hellal operate to a great extent separately both at a behavioral level, in terms of social roles, activities and relationships, and at an ideological and psychological level in terms of self-concepts and world views. Social scientists have frequently assumed that the extreme separation of women and men in such communities is correlated with social inequality along gender lines. The data from Ksar-Hellal, however, suggests that social segregation of women and men does not necessarily imply a restriction for women, but rather a differential set of concerns.

A Dialectical Model of Gender Relationships

The model of gender relationships which emerges from a social division of women and men such as that in Ksar-Hellal is dialectical in nature: social life consists of the contributions of both women and men. Although sharing a common set of sociocultural beliefs and practices, each gender has different areas of operation in the community and therefore different domains of power. The relationship of women and and men, in this dialectical view, is at the same time opposed and interdependent resulting in the construction of the social system and on-going processes of social life.

A dialectical perspective of gender relationships moves away from evaluating or judging the relative social importance of women and men. It suggests that if women and men provide different but valued contributions to the social process, relative social status of women and men may not be significant in the daily routines and activities of a community. Rather, women and men have different areas of knowledge and skill within the wider social system, and therefore, different standards of achievement and different rules of social operation.

The implications of a dialectical approach to gender relationships for a study of social power are significant. While positional power is accorded to an individual regardless of ability, the exercise of personal power depends to a large extent on the recognition of individual competence and knowledge. A social system such as that in Ksar-Hellal in which the activities, interactions, and areas of expertise of women and men are sharply differentiated and segregated facilitates the establishment of women’s and men’s social power and influence over different areas of social life because each gender possesses relatively exclusive areas of social knowledge and competence.

In Ksar-Hellal the domestic role defines the main contexts in which women operate and through which they exert power, despite recent changes in attitudes toward women’s access to activities outside the domestic role. Following Tunisian independence women were accorded equal legal rights to those of men and have been actively encouraged by the government to participate in the educational system and the public workforce. While education and jobs in the public workforce are accepted and valued for women, the domestic role remains women’s primary orientation. It is a major thesis of this chapter that the domestic role is valued by women because the activities and interactions associated with it represent significant contexts through which women can exert power and influence in the community.

The more or less universal association of women with the domestic role has been a major theme in the cross-cultural analysis of women’s roles. In assessing women’s domestic role, it has been assumed that there is a correlation between the degree of women’s involvement in the domestic sphere and their secondary social status. The work of Michelle Rosaldo (1974) is representative of this general argument. She concludes that all societies are divided into a “private” or domestic sphere and a “public” sphere, that women are confined at least to sane degree to the private sphere, and that the degree to which women have opportunities to participate in public activities corresponds to their relatively higher or lover evaluation by the society.

With the increased number of detailed case studies of women’s roles such as that conducted in Ksar-Hellal, the universal devaluation of the domestic role has been seriously questioned, as well as the appropriateness of the public/male: domestic/female dichotomy as a universal organizational model of gender relationships. More recent analyses have suggested that in many societies the domestic role is not restrictive to women but represents a central basis from which women exert influence and control over a variety of social and economic relationships in the community.

Some of the more insightful discussions of the public: domestic issues related to gender status cross-culturally have come from the work of Marxist-feminist scholars (see, for example, Leacock 1975; Caulfield 1981; Burja 1979). Both Burja (1979) and Caulfield (1981), for example, suggest that the devaluation of the domestic role is particularly associated with a capitalist mode of production and a class stratified society. They both emphasize the positive evaluation of the domestic role in societies in which economic and social activities are oriented around kinship groups. As Caulfield states: “Domestic or ‘family’ production in such a society is public production” (1981: 213). Rather than viewing domestic labor as restrictive, Burja (1979) indicates that:

one can, in fact, see domestic labor as entailing socially reproductive activity in three senses. First, it involves the day to day recreation of labor power, in activities such as cooking, servicing the domestic area, and the provision of sexual services. Second, it entails reproduction in an explicitly biological sense, the bearing of children and thereby the recreation of the next generation of labor power. Third, in the socialization of children, domestic labor is related to socio-ideological reproduction; in other words, to the recreation of the relations of production and their corresponding ideological forms (1979: 20).

This perspective on the domestic role is particularly useful for understanding the dynamics of women’s power in Ksar-Hellal. Although the socioeconomic organization of this community is embedded in a capitalist and stratified national structure, the strength of family ties remains extremely important for individual transactions and interactions.

In Ksar-Hellal, the family is a unit of major social importance. It corresponds to what Schlegel has termed a central institution: a social unit “that establishes priorities in the allocation of time, goods, and justification for action” (1977: 19). The family is of major importance in Ksar-Hellal because, similar to other North African communities, most economic, social and political transactions are conducted through personal connections.² Family ties represent a primary basis for establishing such connections. In this context family reputation is often of greater value than individual achievement.

The relative priority of the family in the social life of the community has significant duplications for women’s power. Because men’s activities in the household are restricted, women exert a great degree of de facto control over family affairs, despite the nominal authority of men. As Friedl has concluded:

If a careful analysis of the life of the community shows that, p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors and Authors
• Introduction: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Women’s Power and Influence
• Part 1. Family Power and Influence: Beyond Formal Structures of Authority
• Part 2. Mastery, Achievement, and Influence: Changes over the Life Course and Impact on Self-Esteem
• Part 3. Power in the Workplace: Constraints and Potentials
• Part 4. Commentary