The science of women and politics

Attreyee Roy Chowdhury, London School of Economics, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

Political science and feminism have a lot to learn from each other. Feminism has encouraged political science to pay greater and more careful attention to more than half of the world's population who are women and it can also contribute to a fuller understanding both of individual political systems and of politics itself. On the other hand, feminists can learn from political science about the importance, for women, of public politics and the state, and ways in which women and feminists can more effectively influence policy-making.

Up to the 1960s, at least, and the resurgence of feminism, political science had very little to say about women. One obvious reason being that the profession of political science was, as it still is, overwhelmingly male-dominated, whether the criterion is numbers, positions in the hierarchy or output.

When political scientists would discuss women, as feminist critics have pointed out, their interpretation was often sexist. Sexism in political science, as in other social sciences, has mainly taken the following forms: First, omission of women as subject matter, although they may be submitted under such generalities as "humanity", "mankind" or "man"; second, discussion of women, when they are mentioned, in terms of their significance for men rather than in their own right; and, finally, the assumption that the male and female nature differ and that the male nature is superior, or at least "normal".

A survey question may prompt a sexist reply, as in the notorious 1936 Gallup Poll question: "Would you vote for a woman for President if she was qualified in every other respect?" Or let us consider the following saying: "Politics is portrayed as a male-only world, by the use of the male gender, the pictures chosen and the limited and stereotyped choices of answers provided."

Indeed, there is a need for female involvement in conventional politics, as well as campaigns of protest. For ages, public policies have subordinated women's interests to those of men and the state, so long as feminists were unable to modify them. However, the latter have shown more endeavor through coordinated action to influence public policy.

It is not enough for more women to acquire political office since, as we have seen, female politicians are not necessarily feminist. For instance, the fact that Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India did not improve the position of women in the long run. The same is true of Pakistan and the election of Benazir Bhutto as that country's Prime Minister. Not that legislation, judicial decisions and administrative measures can on their own improve women's status. On the contrary, constant feminist pressure and vigilance is needed to ensure their effective implementation. Moreover, public politics is a tool, however imperfect, for modifying relationships within society, and feminists cannot afford to ignore it. Political science can help them put that tool to the best use.

Politics is recognized to be social; it has little meaning for the solitary inhabitant of a desert island. It has been seen as the process by which members of a community -- in the sense of a relatively self-sufficient group of people -- decide on matters deemed to be of common, or public concern. This public political sphere has been contrasted with a private realm, in which and about which, by definition, there is no politics. Most crucially for feminism, this private sphere centers upon family life which still defines and limits women's wider social role.

In fact, 19th-century feminists and many contemporary feminists have not really questioned the prevailing notion of politics. It is the radical feminists who have recognized it as an important issue for feminism and stimulated new thinking about it within the wider women's movement.

First, radical feminism rejects the definition of politics as an activity. The pioneer, in this respect, was Kate Millett. In Sexual Politics, she refers to politics as "power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another". (Millett, 1972.)

Radical feminists have attacked the notion of a distinctive political arena, and the public-private split that goes with it. Accordingly, they spoke not only of "political politics" but also of "sexual politics", "the politics of housework" and so on, challenging the orthodox assignment of these issues to the realm of private choice.

Influenced by radical feminists, many women political scientists have elaborated this critique of the public-private divide, condemning it on both ideological and factual grounds. JB Elshtain, for instance, traces the way in which it has been used in successive eras to legitimize women's exclusion from public politics. Thus Aristotle upheld the public political sphere as that in which the highest good was or should be realized. Since he believed that women, along with slaves and children, possessed only limited capacity for good reason, he concluded that they were unfit to participate in politics.

Much later, political thinkers came to contrast the immorality of the public political sphere with the purity of the private. But again, they insisted that this domestic haven of morality could only be preserved if women were protected from the corrupting world of public politics. Whether politics was viewed as moral or as immoral, an argument was always at hand to support women's confinement to a private world that kept them from it.

Indeed, feminism has shed new light on the relationship between women and politics both by pointing to the structural features of political life which have to exclude women from positions of power, and by recovering from oblivion a hidden history of women's involvement in political action.

Most important, feminism has helped us see that politics and policies have always, directly or indirectly, affected women's life options through, for instance, prohibitions on birth control, confirmation of fathers' and husbands' authority, or the absence of effective protection or redress for women against rape.