24/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!
arise in difficult economic circumstances, patriarchal reflexes kick in
to restrict access by girls, young women and women to rights that are
essential for development and emancipation. Boys attend school
while girls help with the housework or go out to work to provide an
income supplement for the family. In India, 61 per cent of girls (above
the age of seven) and women are illiterate (UNDP, 1997, p. 55). In
Nepal, twice as many girls as boys go blind due to malnourishment.
In the Third World in general, more than half of all women suffer
from anaemia; in South Asia, anaemia affects 78 per cent of all
women (UNDP, 1997,p. 31). In the Zimbabwean capital Harare, the
number of women that die during childbirth doubled in the two years
following the implementation of a structural ad] ustment programme
which involved a 33 per cent cut in healthcare spending (UNDP,
1995, p. 44).
The capitalist system's tendency to reorganise the world economy
in its own interest has had direct repercussions on relations between
the sexes. An analysis of the methods used reveals that, on the one
hand, the capitalist system takes full advantage of a pre-existing form
of oppression: patriarchy. At the same time, it accentuates the
features of this oppression. Indeed, women's oppression is a weapon
that capitalists use to control the workforce taken as a whole, and
even to justify their policies by shifting the responsibility of social
welfare from the state and collective institutions to the 'privacy' of the
family.
Take the example of dowry in India. Many think that forms of
gender-based violence - dowry deaths and the abortion of female
foetuses - are somehow the 'remnants' of a 'backward' society. Yet
studies by Indian feminists prove that, on the contrary, it was the
development of capitalism in India that led to an increase and inten
sification of these forms of violence (Shah and Srinivasan, in Duggan
andDashner, 1994).
Based on current wage rates, the invisible non-monetary contri
bution of women is worth S11,000 billion. When one considers that
the total value of annual world production is S23.000 billion, it is
easy to understand women's contribution to humankind taken as a
whole (UNDP, 1995, p. 6). To top it off, this figure does not account
for persistent injustice in women's wage rates where their work is
indeed paid for.
Even considering those places where significant progress has been
made in this field, not a single country pays women at the same rate