a liberal perspective of gender-blindness – women ‘suffer’ more than men. The
question is whether it is valid to reduce culture to patriarchy.
4.Western(ised) womenOkin contrasts the imperfect, but basically sound, attitude
to gender among the liberal mainstream with the deeply patriarchal attitude to
women in most non-Western societies. However, it could be argued that this
rests on – to use a hackneyed term – ethnocentrism. Women’s advantages among
the liberal majority are defined in terms of legal rights. These are important, but
an emphasis on rights ignores the background culture of Western societies,
which is based on commodification and exchange: is being a culturally sexualised
object of the male gaze a liberating experience? The argument might be that at
least Western(ised) women have a choice: they are free to dress how they like,
marry whom they like and choose to have children or not. Furthermore, violent
husbands can be prosecuted without appeal to a cultural defence, or the victimised
wife being cast out of her community. This may be true, but then it undermines
part of Okin’s critique of non-Western cultures, namely, that we should see them
as the transmitters of patriarchal attitudes. If we are going to take a ‘whole
culture’ view of non-Western cultures – that is, study their informal as well as
their formal practices – then the same standards should apply to Western culture.
Parekh observes that Muslim girls in France and the Netherlands choose to wear
the hijabin part to reassure their conservative parents that they will not be
corrupted by the liberal culture of secular schools, and partly to indicate to both
Muslim and non-Muslim boys that they are not available.
5.ExperienceOkin makes some rather patronising remarks about older women.
She argues – quite rightly – that cultural recognition gives power to certain people,
usually older men, and that intercultural communication should involve asking
women what they think, but she then says that it should be ‘younger women’
because ‘older women often are co-opted into reinforcing gender inequality’
(Okin, 1999: 24). This raises big questions about who has the right to speak,
and whether an individual is always the best judge of her own interests. Okin
seems to be following in the Marxist tradition of attributing false consciousness
to women, but this contradicts one of the major components of the feminist
movement: namely, to ask women what they want. Furthermore, feminists stress
that white, Western, middle-class women should not assume that their voice is
identical to that of, say, black, working-class, non-Western women.
Despite these criticisms Okin is quite right to argue that minority cultures focus
their self-defence very strongly on the private, domestic sphere. For example, the
cultural defence that Islam prohibits the charging of interest on money is never used
when somebody is in court for failure to pay off his credit card. The fact is that
the domestic sphere is conservative in all societies, but what makes minority cultures
appear especially conservative is that they are cut off from the wider structure of
social institutions.Conclusion: head scarves and women’s rights
We have presented a number of theories of multiculturalism: considering how the
insights from these theories – and the reactions to those theories – might be applied352 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies