September 2001, Volume 4, Issue 1
PATRIARCHY: PART II
THE ETHIOPIAN WOMEN'S CHALLENGE
The realm of spirituality is no exception. The world’s religions have tended to treat womanhood and feminine experiences with suspicion, distrust and even fear. Menstruation has been condemned as unclean, menopause as disastrous, female sexuality as something dangerous and any female involvement in it as a dirty, sinful thing that seriously needs to be suppressed. Women’s reproductive ability has been ridiculously translated into weakness, needing male intervention to control and manage it.
My earlier quest for a meaningful spiritual life, which was inevitably found in the Christian faith, required a complete change of behavior on my part. I learned the virtues of humility and humbleness, chastity and purity; selflessness and generosity, kindness and compassion; endurance of hardships. An important element of my faith was the sense of belonging to a family of ‘those of the household of Faith’. I found out that the work calls for the highest standards of living from ‘the Faithful’. In this I was able to oblige. And then, I found out that a special pecking order existed in ‘the household of Faith’, men came first and then women followed; women were expected to play behind-the-scene roles, supporting the brothers. A few sisters in the ‘household of faith’ were able to emerge and take the front row a few times, but almost always we stayed a few ‘respectful’ paces behind our brothers, always letting them take the lead. This was a source of secret frustration for me. I wanted a piece of the action, but I did not dare to become ‘too forward’ and risk being misunderstood. It soon became obviously clear to me that it was ‘disadvantageous’ to be a woman. A woman has to conform in order to fit within the confines of organized religions, which are overwhelmingly male-oriented.
The culture that I grew up in was a simple extension of the larger Ethiopian patriarchal system. It was a reinforcement of the subordination and subjugation of women. In order to be a decent ‘woman’ one has to fit into the mold. There is no room for questioning that would be perceived as disobedience of the ‘culture’. It glorified subservience of a woman to man, willing to be led and ready to endure whatever hardships came her way, with thanksgiving.
In our culture men are expected to be better than women; to be more powerful, more successful, more authoritative, more aggressive than women. Men are expected to be better than women; indeed, this is a source of pride. They are the providers, protectors, and controllers of the home. These are the men who are perceived to be “true men”. Many of us grew up knowing and accepting that women and men have different roles.
Many of us firmly believe that men and women have different roles to play in society. Many of us perform our part without question. Although a lot of women respect the principle of equality in principle and support the work some of us are doing, they have qualms about what some of us do. They believe that it may not be a good idea ‘to rock the boat’ by agitating for equality between men and women.
As far as some women are concerned, women should be more independent than they currently are, but they are quite apprehensive about what will happen when changes occur. Some of my friends, like many conservative Ethiopian women, are a bit skeptical of the so-called ‘women’s movement’.
“What do we want to achieve anyways: The men to go to the kitchen or start changing the babies’ diaper?” A friend of mine told me she would never subject her man to that. She has nothing to gain by ‘demeaning’ him in this way and would hate to see him lose face by having to do such menial tasks ‘meant for women’. Besides, what would people say about her if they got to know that she makes him do such things?
When we look at the gender role in the larger portion of our society, the peasant setting, both men and women would work on land, tilling and preparing the grounds for planting. The actual planting of seed, and thereafter removing weeds from the farm, was mostly done by womenfolk. The women also took care of the home, keeping the house and its environs clean and tidy, doing the washing, fetching water from the nearby rivers, for home consumption, collecting firewood or hewing wood, cooking, taking care of the domestic animals and caring for the children. The younger boys joined the women in doing these chores, but the much older boys stuck to male roles which includes felling trees or pulling out tree stumps, tilling virgin land, building new structures in the homestead and other exerting, manual jobs. Taking care of the general welfare of the home is the duty of the family patriarchs. They have the authority to decide what happens to whom, where and when.
The life of the rural women consists of almost the same routine day after day. The women are the first to get up in the morning within the homestead to start the daily chores; milking the cattle and proceeding to draw water and fetching firewood, cooking, feeding the children, taking lunch for the family members working on the field, helping on the field, gathering the animals into the pens for the night, etc. Later in the evening, the men would freshen up, may be change into their better apparel and take an evening stroll as they waited for the women to carry out the evening chores. One does not have to go through this routine to understand what this life entails. There is practically no leisure for women in the home. I found it a drag and grossly unfair.
I wanted to know how the women feel about it. I got a chance to talk to a woman who passed through this routine. She did not see this life as burdensome. It was simply the way things were and she accepted it. She accepts her role as a woman without complaint and cannot understand why some women (like me) think that we should get more out of life. “More of what?” She asks. As a young girl she was her mother’s understudy. Her mother always succumbed to her father’s will, even when she thought that his decisions were far from wise or even unfair. It was not a woman’s place to question her husband’s intentions, or keep second-guessing his decisions. She saw all this and learnt well.
When she eventually got married herself, she always did what her husband wished. This is what made a good wife and that is what she wanted to be. In time, she told me, she learnt her man well enough to influence his decisions without threatening his position. Indeed, according to her, a wise woman learns the art of putting ideas into her husband’s head and letting him think it was his own idea. So long as your wishes are fulfilled, why does it matter whose idea it was originally? Obviously she does not see that this robs women of visibility as someone else gets to take the credit for their ingenious ideas. She did not evens think twice when her husband asked her to resign from her job. It was earlier on in the relationship and she figured that her husband’s demand that she resign stemmed from his need to establish some sort of authority over her from the very start. “Things are very testy at the beginning”, she says. “A man needs the assurance that you are not going to run for his ‘post’ in the family”. She, however, concedes that she is lucky that she ended up with a man who took good care of her and the children. Many other women are not usually so lucky.
Their husbands often use their financial power to punish or ‘tramline’ their ‘errant’ wives by withholding much-needed monetary support. Like the majority of Ethiopian, women who have learnt the art of survival in marriage, she has relied on her wit to suffuse crisis in her marriage. “Often, pretending to be much more foolish than you really are, is a ruse that men fall for over and over again”, she told me. Apparently most men feel secure when they think that their wives are too dumb to really do anything by themselves. Strange reasoning, but I am assured that it works. According to her, there is no way for the sexes to be equal. Say, for instance, the question of fidelity in marriage. While women are expected to be absolutely faithful in marriage, men have flagrant extra-marital affairs. A married woman, who is caught having a similar affair, has no hope for a pardon from her spouse; she is quickly gotten rid of. The man, with his superior earning power and capacity to provide for the family, indulges in such behavior in the comfort of knowing that there can be no significant reprieve against him. Many women simply suffer their errant husbands quietly and bear the pain.
In my view, most women know exactly what is going on. They appreciate the double standards applied to both sexes. Despite this fact, many women adapted to male whims, as did our mothers and grandmothers before us.
I feel that women are like undergrowth plants desperately trying to flourish and thrive on the forest floor, while the bigger, taller, gigantic trees block out almost the entire sky and sunlight from view. Most of these miserable plants will never reach the height of the big trees, unless all things remain equal. Indeed, most of the really puny and vulnerable ones are the first to be trampled upon and destroyed when hazards come. Some of the forest undergrowth does survive, of course, but at best it only gets to become sturdy bushes; never strong, tall, or gigantic trees comparable to the ‘dominant’ forest trees.
So long as women engage in the ‘survival tactics’, they shall continue to be the ‘forest undergrowth’. In my opinion this is not enough. It is too little. Women must acquire the same opportunity with men to grow, with enough space, sunlight and sky to thrive, even bloom and blossom!
By Muluken Teshome
ETHIOPIA THE PH.D. WHO CAN'T WORK WITH OTHERS
AND THE SOCIETAL IMPACT
In this day and age, Africa imports modern education, cars, computers, telephones, TVs, the Internet, fashion, books, and pretty much every thing. But it does not look like it imports modern "organization" education. This hold true for Ethiopia, there may be many reasons for that, but the fact is that we now have several generations of people "educated" without the faintest experience and knowledge about how to team with others, how to work, organize with others to solve old and unsolved huge problems or get together and build new institutions that last and achieve their goals.
One must be exposed to organized work, to being elected, to team-work success, to being rewarded for a good job. Since elementary school, these notions become second nature, instinctive to him or her. Organizations are a collective of human being grouped for a certain mission. They are social entities. My belief is that organizations are like scaffolding around buildings. It is in their womb that the new buildings grow. It is hard to imagine Noble Prize winners in medicine without the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Royal Medical Society and the like.
It is hard to imagine for instance a telecom industry flourishing in Ethiopia and de-regulation obtained without an Ethiopian trade association of IT related businesses, without an Internet users association, without an Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation's customers association, and telecom is an Ethiopia's window to the future in business, in education, in governance and many other areas.
Without an organization the individual, highly educated or not, is alone. His efforts are invisible and insignificant. He or she will be modern "handyman" who can only work on an as an employee to do a specific job in larger organizations belonging to those who were "organization" trained since their childhood.
In Ethiopia, perhaps in many African countries, when one goes to school he or she is expected to study the basics (math, reading, writing) and gets no education in how to team with others, in organizing and solving problems together. Perhaps one of the few places where one gets a crash course on how to "organize" and "lead" is the army.
I, for one, don't remember doing anything related to teaming with my school friends, or my neighbors to accomplish a community work during my whole student life. To make it short, we now have Ethiopian PhDs, MSS and BAs in chemistry, social science, in many other fields who are incapable of working together. And if they get together they will raise the most contentious issues political or otherwise, argue forever and split. If by miracle they get to form an organization they will measure its performance by how much it opposes someone else (people, institutions, government, etc.) and not by how much positive work it has done, how much result it has obtained, how many members it has produce, or how much recognition it has given to excellent work.
This is my view, a direct result of there not being "organization trained". This behavior perhaps explains why Ethiopians rarely team up to start business together here in the United States and else where.
Why our community misses opportunities to grow strong, wealthy and well established and why we grow relatively poor every day when compared to the other immigrant communities in the United States.
