Women and Power: Education, Religion and Identity

Conclusion and Recommendations

Conclusion and Recommendations I said in class one day that there were some people less entrapped than others by Plato’s picture of the world. I said I thought we, after fifteen years of education, courtesy of the ruling class, might be more entrapped than others who had not received a start in life so close to the heart of the monster. My classmate, once a close friend, sister and colleague, has not spoken to me since then. I think the possibility that we were not the best spokespeople for all women made her fear for her selfworth and for her PhD (Reproduced in hooks 1984:13). This is a paragraph from an open letter that one white female graduate student, a former classmate of Bell Hooks (African American feminist scholar) in a graduate class on feminist theory, wrote to Bell Hooks (Gloria Watkins). She wrote the letter to acknowledge her anger (part of the collective anger that was directed at Hooks in that class because of the kinds of issues that she raised), and express regret for her attacks on Hooks. In this work, we have attempted to show how religion, socialization/informal learning/the hidden curriculum and tertiary education interface to construct women’s identity, and how the construction presents undemocratic and flawed gender relations which lack rational justification. However, the potential for challenging and reordering the status quo exists in the women who perceive themselves as different from who men would rather they are. Specifically, one of the conclusions reached in this book is that the identities of women (that is, the character of women), or more precisely, the identities that women favour, and or those that many men would rather women favour, represent a major factor in determining whether women have political power and whether women experience violence, and the actions that they are able to take when they experience violence. This is irrespective of the educational attainments of women. Allied to this, we also reached the conclusion that men would rather women favour identities that disempower and disable them because they have a need to preserve the power that dominates. Fortunately, from analysis of data, there are indications that formal education (and religion) will serve 184 Women and Power: Education, Religion and Identity women better in future if we pay attention to certain issues. Those issues are set forth in the paragraphs that follow. Democratizing the Domestic Sphere First, we need to democratize the domestic sphere - the private sphere of life. We cannot take the submission of women to the will of men in the private sphere as a given, while we are advocating the equitable involvement of women in the public sphere, and seeking to eradicate violence against women in the private and public spheres. Men who have been socialized to see women as their subordinates in the private sphere cannot then move to the public sphere and see women as equals. Such men must believe that women who assert equality with them in the public sphere must be suffering from ‘illusions of grandeur’. In the study reported in this book, very few men and women assumed the equality of men and women in the private and public spheres in the same breath. While a handful of men who have gone through sex-role socialization of different shades cannot see any rational justification for the process, and so genuinely work for equitable gender relations in the private and public spheres, most men who see women as equals in the public do so grudgingly. They will themselves to do it, thus causing some of them to become split personalities, who preach equality of women with men, and ‘accept’ women as equals in public, but oppress their wives and children at home. The point being made is that the concession that the female respondents in this book and women’s rights activists, who wish to reorder gender relations to end violence against women, and for a democratic public sphere, presently, overtly and covertly, grant to patriarchy is untenable. To be stark, the argument is that we might be wasting too many resources mounting all those campaigns for women’s political participation and for eliminating violence against women, when we concede that we should be submissive to men at home. I have often asked myself whether I walk this talk. I know that I have put up resistances, and there have been fallouts and pains as a result, but I am convinced that I have not failed...