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Development theory: Who's Who Part 41
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Development theory: Who's Who Part 41
Maxine Molyneux (i 1948)
Gender interests, state and development
By Marianne Braig
That women's interests and gender interests are different categories is the discovery for which Maxine Molyneux is most frequently cited. Her focus is women's movements and her central question is how they and the state influence each other. Interests and law are the categories under which she examines the changeable and shapeable relationship of the gender order and the state. She wants to bring back the state and the political subject into the thinking on modernisation, democratisation and development.
I. Biographical outline
Maxine Molyneux was born in Karachi, Pakistan, on May 24, 1948. She read sociology at the University of Essex and is now Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Latin American Studies, the University of London. In her research and teaching she deals with such subjects as society and development, poverty and social inequality, and gender and politics in Latin America. She is also a consultant (mainly in Latin America) to several UN organisations, as well as to Oxfam and other NGOs. As co-founder in 1979 of the noted magazine Feminist Review and an editor of the magazine Economy and Society, she is involved in the further development of debates on theory.
Molyneux has been interested in socialist developing countries since her first research work. In 1981 she published The Ethiopian Revolution, and in 1982 in the International Labour Office series Women, Work and Development her empirical research on women workers in South Yemen, which was the first study on women in that country after its independence from Britain. Her curiosity about socialist developing societies and the question of how women there can bring themselves into politics also characterised her approach to Latin America and her getting to grips with socialist projects in Nicaragua and Cuba.
On the issue of the relationship between women's emancipation and the state (whether it be socialist, liberal or populist), Molyneux in her publications refers time and again to the relevance of the women's movements (in the plural) in the past as in the present. A number of her most important essays on the subject were published in 2001 in the book Women’s Movements in International Perspective.
In 2000, the research project 'Gender Justice, Development and Rights: Substantiating Rights in a Disabling Environment' initiated by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) proved very fruitful. This comparative research project headed by Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi examined how liberal rights were included in the agendas of the women's movements and the state, and how they were endangered by "neo-liberal projects" and globalisation processes.
II. Work and appraisal
Against blind economism
While Molyneux’s first monograph (1981) was a Marxist-oriented study aimed at elaborating the class character of the Ethiopian revolution, her later works deal in particular by means of analysis of different expressions of social inequality with gender hierarchies and the unequal power relationships that constitute them. At the same time, she distances herself from narrow conceptions of the economic predetermination of people's interests and actions.
In her historical-comparative research (above all of developing societies), Molyneux seeks to make women visible as political actors who articulate their interests, constitute themselves as persons in law and thereby influence state action. In that she is bound by the disciplines of political sociology and looks for the hidden history of the relationships between the state and the women, both in her empirical case studies and her analytical works. She is influenced by Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, but above all by feminist political theories (such as those of Ann Philipps and Carol Pateman). Molyneux's point of contact is their critical confrontation with the liberal political concept of a separation of the public and private sectors and the construction of a gender-neutral person in law. While Pateman emphasises the exclusion of women from the social contract and its logical complementing by a one-sided gender contract, the marriage contract, Molyneux builds on that and examines the consequences of separating the private and public sectors for different political projects in various developing societies, as well as the gender-specific expression of citizenship.
Her starting point is that transformations in business and society have a fundamental influence on the status of women and men. However, she sees this influence not solely in economic terms, but identifies design opportunities for state politics and the women's movements and in the relationship between the two. Molyneux is against the exclusion of the state, as is to be found not only in economic theory positions but also in countless feminist studies (above all on women's groups in the Third World), with their transfiguration of the autonomy of the women's movements. Instead, Molyneux insists on the importance of the state and the ability of the subjects to articulate themselves and change policies by means of societal movements. But precisely because the state needs women for the modernisation of society, she calls on it to incorporate and secure women's interests, and examines critically to what extent state policies mobilise or enable women to function.
Women's interests and gender interests
Maxine Molyneux gained a larger readership in 1985 with an article on the revolution in Nicaragua (Mobilisation without Emancipation?), which is still regarded as one of her most important publications. Its wide reception was due less to her analysis of the revolution and the Sandanista government's policies relevant to women than to her differentiation of women's interests and gender interests (others talk even of an 'interest paradigm').
Her research was aimed at showing the problems of the ways in which women's interests were articulated. She opposed not only positions which sought to deduce the existence of common women's interests from their biological sex, but also narrow materialistic derivations of interest from the class situation. She viewed women's interests as being determined by history and culture, as a reflection of specific social situations and the different priorities of various women's groups, although they could not be reduced to these. "They [the interests] were … seen as politically and discursively constructed. This allowed for the possibility of questioning the ways in which interests are formulated and the uses to which arguments about interests are put, both by women themselves and by those seeking to mobilise them” (2001 b: p.152).
In this research, Molyneux made a heuristic differentiation between women's interests and gender interests. Gender interests are those that are articulated for women and men out of the relationships between the sexes and their specific power constellations. To formulate this more precisely in analytical terms, she distinguished between two different forms of expression which were presented by women. Practical gender interests are those which address needs that women formulate on account of their gender-specific division of labour. Strategic gender interests are aimed at changing on a lasting basis the position of women in the social relationship of the sexes. Practical interests can be ascertained inductively, in direct reaction to concretely perceived problems due to the roles assigned to women and men by convention. By contrast, strategic gender interests are developed deductively from an analysis of the suppression of women, and are aimed at defeating the gender hierarchy.
Women as political subjects
It is not by chance that Molyneux is interested in revolutionary transitions such as those in Yemen, Nicaragua and Cuba. Namely, on the question of the relationship between socialist revolution and women's emancipation it turns out that not only the most radical rhetoric but also the most far-reaching political reforms to achieve equality between the sexes are to be found here. But at the same time her focusing on the socialist revolutions serves as a burning glass for her examination of the fundamental question of what significance the gender order has for the formation and development of the state and, in reverse, what impact the formation of the state has on the relationship of the sexes. This was a perspective which transformation research largely ignored. From a historical-comparative perspective, Molyneux developed a characterisation of these relationships for the various stages of state formation and for the different political regimes.
Building on many studies of women's movements in Latin America, she made clear (2000) that from their coming into being at the end of the 19th century these movements had seen themselves as part of the modern era and were always present during the various stages of state formation, even if in different ways. In her reconstruction of the women's movements during these historical phases their diversity and inconsistency becomes clear. Basically, they fit into a long liberal and urban tradition of the forming of civil society organisations. Women in feminismo popular movements that have close links with marginalisation and poverty are ever more vocal. But other women's organisations which take conservative-clerical positions are also relevant for the mobilisation of women. But the main thing in the various waves of the women's movements is that they take the right to talk about rights where none prevails. Thus, from the beginning of the 20th century they contribute to the forming of public opinion and the rule of law, such as in the struggle for women's right to vote, for better access to education, and reform of family and marriage law. Divorce and abortion, or reproductive rights, are still contested political fields.
A special role is played by the fact that women's movements always function on the borderline between the public and private sectors, which opens up to them a specific access to the opportunities and limits of the law. Molyneux points out the special significance of 'motherliness' for the women's movements in Latin America. Falling back on this category, as relatives of the victims of authoritarian governments the women empower themselves to speak in public about their experiences of injustice. 'Motherliness' is still one of the few legitimised opportunities for women to express themselves on issues of power and abuse of power (such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires). But Molyneux at the same time warns against a possible misunderstanding: women do not appear in public in the name of their motherliness because this would correspond to their nature, but because this is often the only opportunity they have to make themselves heard on issues of abuse of power.
III. Impact
The influence on development concepts and policy stemming from feminist research is made most clear by the application of the differentiation between women's interests and gender interest developed by Molyneux (1985). However, she herself takes more a critical view of the entry of the so-called interest paradigm into the developmental debate (2001 b: p.152 ff.). She rejects the simple rewording of interests into needs (Moser 1993), which, as so often, are mechanistic and detached from the explorative context in guides to planning and political consultancy. "This is not to say that questions of interest have no pertinence for gender and development policy. The issue is one of the role they are designated in the planning process and by whom, and what relationship is established between the planning agency and the population with which it aims to work. This is as much an issue of good practice as of good theory“ (2001 b: p.153).
In her most recent studies on law and citizenship (2002, 2003), Molyneux seeks within the framework of the UNRISD to codetermine the research agenda. For her, it is not solely about "bringing the state back in", but about how social actors - in her case the women's movements - can change the political agenda and incorporate their interests in policies. Her concern to bring (again) the political aspect into the understanding of development offers opportunities for connecting with it not only for research into democratisation but also for good-governance approaches.
Publications by Maxine Molyneux
1981 (with Fred Halliday): The Ethiopian Revolution. London, Verso
1982: State Policies and the Position of Women Workers in the PDR of Yemen, 1969-77
(Women, Work and Development No.3). Geneva, International Labour Office
1985: Mobilisation without Emancipation? Women’s Interests, the State, and Revolution in
Nicaragua, in: Feminist Studies, Vol. II, No.2, pp.227-254
1996: State, Gender and Institutional Change in Cuba’s Special Period: The Federación de
Mujeres Cubanas. London, University of London Institute of Latin American Studies,
Research Papers
1998: Analysing Women's Movements, in: Development and Change, Vol. 29.2, pp.219-245
2000 (Ed., with Elizabeth Dore): The Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin
America. Durham, London, Duke University Press, 2000
2001 a: Women’s Movements in International Perspective. Latin America and Beyond.
London, New York, Palgrave
2001 b: Analysing Women's Movements, in her:
Women’s Movements …, pp. 140-162
2002: (with Nikki Craske): Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin
America. London New York, Palgrave
2003: (with Shahra Razavi): Gender Justice, Rights and Development. Oxford, Oxford
University Press
Further reading
Caroline Moser (1993): Gender Planning and Development. Theory, Practice and Training. London
Marianne Braig: Fraueninteressen in Entwicklungstheorie und -politik. [Women's Interests in Development Theory and Policy] from Women in Development to Mainstreaming Gender, in: R. E. Thiel (Ed.): Neue Ansätze zur Entwicklungstheorie [New Approaches to Development Theory]. Bonn 1999, pp.110-120
Dr. Marianne Braig is a professor at the Free University Berlin in the Institute of Latin America Studies and the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, with focus on Latin American politics.
mbraig@zedat.fu-berlin.de
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