Women especially in Africa are portrayed as excluded and oppressed in relation to access and control over resources by the operation of patriarchal system. Man takes good care while the women do all the hard work. A girl child was trained by a woman how to live in society. Girls are doing the housework while the boys either play or read.
The workload of women is heavy, despite those frequently repeated stereotypes that women are a weaker sex or plain lazy. An exhaustive workload is not confined to rural women. In cities and towns, women who work outside the home, however well paid or esteemed their positions may be, often arrive home and start cooking for their family while their husbands relax and watch. The double work burden of the women — who go out to paid jobs in the workforce and return home at night to start a round of household chores - is often referred to as "secondshift". Although there are men who do help in the homes, the situation is similar everywhere. One study in America found that in 11% of homes do husband and wife divide the household equally. In fact, the only thing that has really changed is that men think they do more house work, in reality they don’t. Why does this situation exist? First there is a traditional view of the family and the men are the breadwinners who earn the money while the women look after the house. In fact, many women hold jobs or earn money through informal trading and thus contribute to the upkeep of the family. However, many people think that men simply cannot work in the homes and that the fact that they were born men erases any chance that they might wash dishes or cook.
Women are not born knowing how to wash up, do the laundry and iron the clothes. Instead girls everywhere are taught that work in the house is "women work", and they can look forward to a lifetime of it. For women the expectations that they will do all the housework reduces their opportunities for education and jobs, and interestingly enough, despite the hours of work and the experience of having and raising children, women live longer than men in every country in the world.
What are doubly harmful are not only the workload, but also the fact that it is undervalued and made to be invisible. Often the work that the women do is not appreciated or seen as a contribution, both to the family and to national development by allowing the men to go out in the "real world" and earn money. In some countries there is a move by women’s organisation to have women paid for the work they do in the homes, at least as recognition of the contribution they made. It is estimated that if women’s unpaid work was counted as productive in national accounts, measures of global output would increase. Think of all the women in the world if they recorded the hours they have worked in the home, dating back to the time they got married, and charge the amount paid to the house worker.
Yet this time and the effort in labour is not recognised in any statistics. The assumption is that women are economically unproductive. In fact they are over employed. Yet how often do we hear people say, " she does not work, she is a house wife"?
The additional pressure on women workers of home and family responsibilities, including childcare and care of the elderly, can often result in them sacrificing their own job opportunities. Employers are reluctant to employ mothers with young children simply because they think it will be disruptive and adversely affect their workplaces. In Africa the majority of women work in the informal sector where they work very hard and earn very little. They also lack security. Some parts of Africa still have the attitude of educating the boy child not the girl child, as the boy will be the carrier of the family name and the future providers for their own families. This has far reaching consequence for the experiences of women. The less educated women depend on their husbands.
It is important to note that colonialism did not bring gender inequality, it simply promoted it. When the need arouse to keep women working on the farms, and the desire of the state or churches to challenge what was considered repugnant in terms of African patriarchal rule, African patriarchal power over women was upheld in the interest of colonial profits. For example, women were limited to domestic work and prostitution. This is still the case in some parts of Africa. It is generally agreed that women everywhere in the world are exploited. Women’s experiences are diversified in terms of race, class, politics etc. For example in Africa white women experience a combination of race, class and gender oppression. Women in southern Africa suffer a lot of racial discrimination. Violence is used to sustain the patriarchal system in Africa. It takes many forms, which include wife battery, rape, sexual harassment, emotional and economical deprivation, inheritance laws and sexual slavery.
The man’s dependence on women begins in his earliest years a male child is born, grows and finds his relation with his body and to the bodies of his parents, chiefly his mother. However, whether "instinctively" or not, the maternal role originates in the fact that only the women are necessarily present at birth. Only the women has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child - a tie on which the society can rely. No matter how "equal" the functions of child bearing are distributed, the man will always know that the women’s role with children is more important, more organically indispensable. There is no way the man can share the euphoria that many women feel along with the pains when pregnant, for it is a sensation of separateness and independent fulfilment. There is no way that men can share in the "mothering hormone" that many authorities believe the women’s secretes in child birth. There is no way the man with the bottle will experience the sence of sexual affirmation and sensual fulfilment felt by the woman, with a child at her breast.
This enslavement is culturally instituted. Despite the obvious burden of maternity, woman’s bondage to man is only facilitated, not for-ordained, by her biology. Painfully, woman’s historic condition reflects a pool of oppression. Tradition has it that the Caribbean woman is a strong independent matriarch, they have the strength, the mind and the ability to cope. The reality however is complex. Although more woman head households in the Caribbean than in any other developing region, they face "key setbacks" in attaining equality with men, according to a ministerial regional conference on gender issues. The October meeting 1999 in Trinidad on gender issues, identified poverty and violence as major obstacles to women’s enjoyment of their rights. Estimates of women headed households reach 22 percent of all households in Belize. Many woman are defector households heads due to temporally male labour migration or because the woman is the chief provider. For some, independency is preferable to what is on offer. Many Caribbean men take multiple partners and father children, while refusing full responsibilities. "Young motherhood is accepted as a rite of passage in many communities" (Susanne Francis Brown, The Sunday News, December 5, 1999).
In Africa you find monogamous relationships, but the majority of the men will have extra marital affairs. The polygamous marry many wives to work for them. With children a woman has to find employment that fits with children and the needs to care for children and the responsibility of family and home. The whole question of the conflict women face is the same all over, the need to balance the caring responsibilities and home responsibility with a need for a decent income for the family, the whole question of job prospects and whether it is possible to take a more responsible job when the pressure of caring and family have to be dealt with, the question of family pressure and social pressure. Can a woman go out and work and still be what people call a good mother? What happens when a woman is pregnant and is employed?
According to UNAIDS 36.1 million people are living with HIV/AIDS and 26.3 million are in the SubSahara Africa. What is more alarming is the fact that AIDS has been spreading at frightening rates, with some of the countries having high rates of infection at about 30 percent among their adult population. HIV has now become the human tragedy in Africa. Its horrendous consequences affect the very social fabric of communities, population, human resource development, equal treatment and human rights, gender relations, conditions of work and occupational health and safety. HIV/AIDS is thus not just a health problem. It is also a development problem that threatens the social and economical growth of almost all SubSaharan African countries. In fact HIV/AIDS is now considered to be the single most important and daunting impediment to social progress to many countries in Africa.
There are four main ways of contracting HIV:
HIV/AIDS has increased the burden for women, as it is no longer the double burden because the burden is far worse than anything else. The virus is increasing in Africa and why? There are factors that lead to the spread of HIV:
The economic factors include poverty, unemployment, poor housing, ought, migrant work, sex for job, sex for money/ security/food, use of informal medicine.
| Gender factors | |
| Men | Women |
| Give orders | Obey orders |
| Have jobs | Often do not have jobs |
| Are social mobile | Often stay at home |
| Choose when to have sex | Respond to men's choice |
Cultural and religious factors
A study on the use of voluntary counselling testing in Zimbabwe (VCT) revelled that more people go for counselling and testing and the fact is that majority of those tested are negative. 33,178 people have visited the VCT and 78 percent are negative, 22 percent are positive. Out of those who are positive 56 percent are males and 44 percent are females, according to USAID.
Home based care
As so many people fall ill due to AIDS, homebased care is encouraged.
It’s not surprising that the home based care organisations are dominated by females as they are born to care for the children and the extended families in Africa. If both the husband and the wife were working, the woman would end up dropping out of work to go home and take care of the sick. This is taking us back to the cultural or traditional believes. More orphans are going to be in the streets in the near future as the breadwinners die and leave the old and the young. Young girls are taking over the responsibility of their parents.
There are very few health care centres in Zimbabwe and very few can afford to pay for their services, so all the terminally ill, especially those who are suffering due to HIV/AIDS, are being cared for at home. The care providers are the women and the girl child with very little knowledge of how to take care of the sick. What do we call this type of burden, can it be double or something else?
Lastly I would like to ask any woman: How would you respond if another woman was to say to you: "Your kids do not have a mother" which is to say that you are supposed to be staying at home taking care of the kids. Or if she says: "You should thank God for giving you an understanding husband" who stays at home with children when the wife travels for work.
Let’s all think about what we want to achieve. Men can make a difference.
Clementine Dehwe
Z.C.T.U.
Box 2287
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
Tel: +263-9-61737
Fax: +263-9-61737
E-mail:cmdehwe@acacia.mweb.co.zw