Why Don′t Women Rule the World?

Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices

J. Cherie Strachan, Lori M. Poloni-Staudinger, Shannon L. Jenkins, Candice D. Ortbals

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781544317250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

"[ Why Don't Women Rule the World? ] is unlike other texts in its comparative approach and strong theoretical underpinnings. It has interesting pedagogical features that will resonate with comparative scholars, Americanists and those who integrate public policy analysis into the course."
—Rebecca E. Deen, University of Texas at Arlington Why don't women have more influence over the way the world is structured? Written by four leaders within the national and international academic caucuses on women and politics, Why Don?t Women Rule the World? helps students to understand how the underrepresentation of women manifests within politics, and the impact this has on policy. Grounded in theory with practical, job-related activities, the book offers a thorough introduction to the study of women and politics, and will bolster students' political interests, ambitions, and efficacy. Key Features:

• A comparative perspective expands students' awareness of their own intersectional identities and the varying effects of patriarchy on women worldwide.
• A variety of policy areas highlighted throughout the book illustrates how different theories are applied to real-world situations.
• Multiple political engagement activities keep students engaged with the content.

Chapter One Why Don’t Women Rule the World?

Why don’t women rule the world? In most cultures across the globe, the rise of civilization meant that women were confined to domestic roles and denied positions of authority in the public sphere—including leadership positions in religion, civil society, and the marketplace. Of particular interest and concern to political scientists is the way that women’s association with the household, children, and domestic responsibility has been used—not just in one culture, but in many—to exclude them not only from holding official positions of political authority but to deny them public voice and citizenship. Hence, this book explores the political status of women across the globe, with particular attention paid to women in the American context. It examines the tactics and strategies women use to insert themselves into the men-dominated arena of government and politics and also describes the way women currently participate in a wide array of political endeavors, ranging from protest politics and voting to running for elected office and serving as public officials. We also explore and address the gender gap, or the idea that women report less interest in participating in politics than men¹—discussed more later in the section, Plan of the Book. Finally, we examine the ways in which particular policies either influence women or are influenced by women in both the United States and comparative context.

Before launching into in-depth details of these activities, it is important to understand the deep roots of women’s subordination, which emerged along with the embrace of agriculture in the Neolithic age and spread across the globe as early agricultural-based civilizations flourished. Understanding this deep history is important for several reasons, not least is that it is difficult to dismantle a system of oppression without understanding why it was established in the first place. Moreover, understanding provides a response to those who use women’s shared fate across much of the globe to claim that a gendered division of labor, with women excluded from the public sphere so that they can focus on children and the household, as simply “natural”—either divinely inspired or biologically determined. Those who only know the recent written history of women’s subordinate status will be tempted to argue that cisgender women’s (or women whose assigned sex at birth and intrinsic gender identity are both female) reproductive capacity means that they are somehow naturally ill-suited for participation in politics and public life. In fact, an overview of the origins of civilization suggests that public spaces and political institutions were purposefully designed to exclude women rather than vice versa. Learning about the purposeful creation of patriarchies—or social systems where men’s dominance over women and children in the family is extended to men’s dominance over women in society in general²—makes it possible to consider explanations other than the natural order for women’s exclusion from public life.

Understanding the patriarchal roots of modern civilization also serves a broader social justice agenda. Early civilizations’ successful subordination of women inspired ongoing and more egregious versions of oppression. For example, successful efforts to control cisgender women’s bodies to benefit from their sexual and reproductive functions led to efforts to control others’ bodies as well, resulting in the adoption of caste systems, slavery, feudalism, and colonialism. Organizing society around a gendered division of labor—with clearly defined roles for men and women—also required patriarchal societies to enforce binary gender categories, or those of man/masculine and woman/feminine. Those who did not or could not comply by conforming to the masculine and feminine gender roles prescribed for their assigned sex at birth represented a threat to the society and were sanctioned, suppressed, and threatened. In short, understanding and uprooting social structures that exploit cisgender women should also help to understand and disrupt class inequality and oppression against racial and ethnic minorities, as well as discrimination against queer and transgender people who do not conform to patriarchy’s insistence on binary categories that conflate sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

Box 1.1: Policy Feature

Feminist Activism and Same-Sex Marriage

The legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States provides an example of the way overcoming one form of oppression can have an unintended domino-effect that helps others. Unlike other major civil rights achievements—including women’s suffrage or interracial marriage—public support for and legalization of same-sex marriage seemed to occur swiftly, taking mere decades instead of centuries.

Same-sex couples often found ways to cohabitate throughout American history.³ Yet, it seems no partner in a homosexual relationship fought to legally establish same-sex marriage prior to the 1970s. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal challenging the Minnesota high court’s decision that prohibiting same sex marriage was not a violation of the U.S. Constitution.⁴ In response, several states enacted bans on same-sex marriage in the late 1970s. In 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court, in Baehr v. Lewin,⁵ suggested such prohibitions could be unconstitutional, while another decade later, in 2004, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage in response to its own high court’s decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. ⁶ Both decisions resulted in spates of state laws and ballot initiatives—some legalizing same-sex marriage and some explicitly rejecting it—along with the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibited the federal government from recognizing, and allowed states the option of refusing to recognize, such unions. Laws opposing same-sex marriage were soon targeted in the courts by pro-gay-rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Lamda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, while gay rights advocates continued to press for changes through state policies. By 2012—when Maine, Maryland, and Washington became the first states to legalize same-sex marriage via legislation—same-sex marriage had become legal in 37 states and the District of Columbia, through a combination of court challenges, ballot initiatives, and state law. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed DOMA unconstitutional.⁷ In a 2015 decision rejecting marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, the Court essentially legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states and required states to recognize other states’ same-sex marriage licenses.⁸

As these legal battles were playing out, public opinion on same-sex marriage shifted dramatically. In 2001, 57% of the American electorate opposed same-sex marriage, while only 35% supported it. By 2017, 62% of Americans (along with 73% of self-identified Democrats and 85% of self-identified liberals) supported such unions, while only 32% opposed them (along with 40% of self-identified Republicans and 41% of self-identified conservatives).⁹

Unlike previous advances in civil rights, this stunning shift in public opinion preceded the Supreme Court’s decision to protect minority rights. According to historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,¹⁰ same-sex marriage was able to gain acceptance so quickly not only because of the dedicated efforts of gay rights activists but also because it is the logical conclusion of egalitarian marriages that emerged from hundreds of years of feminist activism.

In Western culture, the institution of marriage mimicked the hierarchical structure of feudalism, featuring men as heads of the household with almost absolute authority over their wives and children. Marriages were arranged for economic advantage until the late 1700s, when people began to marry for love and to choose their partners. Notably, such matches dismayed traditionalists, who feared that men’s ability to exercise authority over their wives would be diminished, and that an inevitable increase in divorced and unmarried single women would result in chaos. By the 1920s, more Americans considered sexual fulfilment an important part of marriage, and by the 1960s, married heterosexual couples gained the right to use contraception to avoid having children.¹¹ Even so, many second wave feminists and queer theorists alike saw the institution as a hopelessly patriarchal institution mired in binary gender roles and best avoided. Yet, reformers continued to advocate for women’s rights within the institution of marriage—changing norms and laws about property ownership, child custody, bodily autonomy, and sexual consent until most Americans viewed marriage as an egalitarian partnership based on affection, rather than as an economic necessity. “As marriage has become less gendered—with women becoming breadwinners and men doing more housework and child care—it became more difficult to explain why two men, or two women, couldn’t participate in the institution as well as a man and a woman could.”¹² Hence, the chain of events that early feminists set in motion when they tackled the task of reforming marriage, with the goal of improving the lives of cisgender women who had few options other than marriage, helped to make marriage a possibility for LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer [or Questioning], Intersex, Asexual, etc.) individuals hundreds of years later.¹³

The Creation of Patriarchy

Modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago. For most of this time, up until around 7,000 years ago, humans lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Contrary to popular caricatures of men cavemen dragging women around by the hair and dominating other men with their size and strength, hunter-gatherers’ societies were far more egalitarian than modern civilizations. Their social structures were not characterized by hierarchies where an elite ruling class makes all the decisions and demands loyalty and homage from lesser subjects. Even though men and women had different roles that grew out of their sex differences, these differences were not used to justify inequality. These prehistoric bands of hunter-gatherers—described by some scholars as matristic societies or as matricentries—often revolved around women’s ability to care for their children. While we think about this historically, this way of organizing societies can also be seen in contemporary societies (see Box 1.2). While both sexes helped care for children, men often contributed to food needs by participating in big game hunting, while women focused on small game hunting and gathering. Both means of procuring food were valued, but women’s activities were more reliable, and the majority of calories consumed often came from their efforts. One modern-day hunter-gathering tribe, the Hazda, provides an example of how people lived and survived prior to civilization. Among the Hazda, who have been hunter-gatherers in the same region of Tanzania for thousands of years, men’s big game hunting efforts are successful only 3.4% of the time. Food needed to sustain the community overwhelmingly comes from women’s collective efforts to gather tubers. While the growth of a woman’s first child is correlated with her ability to gather food, the survival of additional children after the first is correlated to their grandmother’s success in digging tubers. Among the Hazda, and likely among the many hunter-gather societies that at one time characterized human society, grandmothers have been more important to children’s survival than their fathers. These insights help to explain why human women live so long beyond their ability to reproduce, as well as why advanced social traits—like pointing, smiling, and laughing—emerge at such an early age among human babies and toddlers.¹⁴ Given women’s role in sustaining their communities, it is not surprising that despite gendered activities and despite distinct biological functions, these small, simple societies placed few restrictions on men and women based on sex differences.¹⁵ Indeed, some evolutionary biologists believe that early human men’s low levels of testosterone, in comparison to other male primates, provided humans with a distinct advantage. Human men, in comparison, for example, to chimpanzees, were less aggressive and more willing to cooperate with weaker men and with women. This dynamic allowed intelligence and innovation to drive group decision-making rather than brute force by an alpha male—and this cooperative feature was essential for much of our species’ success.¹⁶

Box 1.2: Comparative Feature

Complementarian and Matriarchal Practices in Other Countries

Some ethnic groups do not perceive of sex in a way that matches the patriarchal experiences of much of the rest of the world. Men do not control all social, political, religious, and economic institutions among these groups even though they may be dominant in given contexts. The Mosuo minority in China, along with Igbo and Aka of Africa, are examples of groups that consider women fit to have agency and to be leaders in some domains. The Mosuo, an ethnic minority of about 40,000, have lived in relative stability for hundreds of years in a region of southwest China near Lugu Lake. The Mosuo are matriarchal, with no marriage system, as well as no indigenous terms for husband or father. When a girl turns fourteen, she is considered an adult and is given an adult ceremony and her own room where she can host visits from a boyfriend. These relationships, which may be short term or long term, are called zuo hun, or walking marriages, because boyfriends are invited to spend the night with women, but then must wa...