Nash and Safa 76

Nash, June and Helen Icken Safa. Introduction and Chapter 1: "A Critique of Social Science Roles in Latin America". Pp. x- 24. In Sex and Class in Latin America. Praeger Publishers: New York, 1976.

In the introduction the editors acknowledge the conflicts that erupted in the 1975 UN sponsored conference in Mexico between women delegations from industrialized countries and from the "Third World": the first insisted in an agenda of exclusively women's issues, while the second refused to abandon issues of global unequal development and political issues for the analysis, arguing that in their contexts, class inequalities take priority over sexual inequality (xi). For instance, the fact that cheap and unprotected female labor is needed for First World production and consumption of goods.

In the first chapter, Nash seems to be in dialogue (and take issue) with dependency theory and Marxist analyses that have blatantly ignored women's activities or seen them acritically in the context of the patriarchal nuclear family. Nash takes issue especially with the faulty models of analysis in development research and dependency theory based on stereotypical understandings of gender roles, which see women linked to the domestic-unproductive realm and fail to acknowledge the economic activities of women.

Comments

  1. JonJuly 30, 2009 at 9:27 AM

    Does this mean that dependency theory and Marxism should be jettisoned, then, or that they can be adapted to take account of gender issues (as, it seems, Third World delegates to the 1975 conference suggested)? There have, after all, been plenty of attempts to link class and gender analyses.

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  2. Manuela Valle-CastroJuly 30, 2009 at 5:47 PM

    Nash and Safa are not making an argument for a Marxist framework to be jettisoned, in fact, they use it themselves to say that “the ideology of male dominance stems from a sexual division of labor in which there is unequal access to the means and rewards of production” (xi). Marxism and dependency theory are useful and necessary for them to understand the interconnections between uneven global development and exploitation by class and sex. They argue against linear, deterministic economic models that have rendered women's activities invisible or have been unable to give an account of the cultural and ideological aspects of their everyday life, which are omitted or frequently just stereotyped by researchers. These limited models —that can take the form of policies— focus on male (paid) work and are unable to address and acknowledge women's participation in circuits of production and labor. Nash also makes a methodological argument for the use of ethnography and case studies as opposed to sociological standardized research tools like questionnaires.

    However, there is something problematic about considering women as an economic class on itself that has become subordinate as a consequence of urbanization, industrialization and capitalism development; in sentences like “to maintain over half the population in subordination” (5) one cannot but to think of all the ways that women are involved and engaged, knowingly and unknowingly, in the exploitation of other women. In the context of the 1975 conference, feminists from the First World claimed that using this kind of analysis was a “diversionary tactic”. In turn, Third World women claimed that this agenda pursued formal equalities based in universal claims of oppression of women that did not challenge already sanctioned models of inequality. They claimed that relationships between women and between feminists are always framed in these global relations. And from my own perspective, Marxism and dependency theory are crucial today to look at the ways that women are involved in each other's exploitation if there is going to be any attempt to build some kind of solidarity in political practice. It is important then to incorporate in the analysis the international division of labor and wealth, and analyze the sexual division of labor within the household instead of taking these relations as given an natural.

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