Time of war?

Here it is of interest to note that, on the report of a recent survey, Filipinas are among the top twenty in the world and the highest in Asia to express satisfaction with being a woman; even so, the war is on. To be a woman is to be the underdog, to lack any rights, to be battered by poverty, hunger, ill health, violence, fundamentalism, economic and domestic exploitation, illiteracy, and especially when she is married and a mother to boot, she will experience that she always is the last in the line. 

The Reader offers an anthology in 44 chapters, most of them epitomised from 21st-century publications that amply illustrate the above lamentation. It also highlights how women's fate hinges on the global economy and how international corporations are increasingly dictating the conditions of everybody's life. 
Of course, educated people will strive to free themselves from the shackles that keep them down, and the last twelve chapters of the Reader are devoted to how Third-World women organise, seek education, resist and mobilise. Even so, as Mohanty in her chapter on feminist solidarity through anti-capitalist struggles observes, "Global economic and political processes have become more brutal, exacerbating economic, racial and gender inequalities" (395). 

Current neoliberal policies shift macroeconomic burdens to the population at large as bailing out crashing banks and other pillars of 'the economy' depletes the exchequer, with the result that the state can no longer provide essential services, such as health care and public education. This tends to put increased demands on women for the (unpaid) care that keeps families and communities going, and even keeps girls from entering school.  

The gamut of contributions runs from the history of international development, with its theories and discourses on women and gender (15 chapters, 3-104), to the part on household, family and (unpaid female) work that also highlights that capitalist economic development plays into the hands of men and increases  the 'double burden' women usually carry (6 chapters, 107-194). Follows the part on women in the global economy with titles as 'the subordination of women', 'factory work', 'women's double exploitation', 'transnational care ', and the 'economic crisis' affecting women's work (6 chapters, 197-284). The fourth part is about international social transformation. Its nine chapters highlight the impact on women's lives of World Bank and IMF decisions, changing labour markets, global warming, HIV, fundamentalism, civil war, education, and socialist policies (287-379). Part Five focuses on the afore-mentioned organising and resisting (8 chapters, 383-438). 
Altogether, the Reader offers a formidable resource for the teaching of the relevant subjects, not at least because theorising them is well-balanced with description. The first Reader appeared in 1997, but because of the thorough updating of the material, only eight chapters—among them classics by Ester Boserup and Diana Wolf—made it to the present volume. The result of this ambitious effort of former and new contributors and of the four editors who wrote lucid introductions to the five Parts should be highly acclaimed. 

Even so, although the Reader contains an array of materials that at the hands of competent teachers will elucidate many of the aspects of how development and change affect women's lives and how new prejudices are created, certain hidden assumptions need to be brought out into the open and deserve a thorough discussion. As was the case with the collection edited by Rydstrøm, Gendered inequalities in Asia, too often the idea of equality is taken for granted, and although it is circumscribed as a matter of self-realisation—whatever that may mean in Third-World contexts—in practice it remains intangible.[ii][ii]  
The assumption in both the Reader and in said collection seems to be that individual people happily enjoy their own agency. Just the same, in a globalising environment, subjected to economic liberalisation, capitalism, feminism, atheism and 'free' sex, religion, tradition, and normative gender ideas have become the guardians of order. To add to this backlash, we also need to reflect on the symbolic burden with which women are saddled. In most of the countries in my part of the world, women somehow represent Mother Land or the Nation, vide Ibu Pertiwi (Indonesia), Inang Bayan (Philippines), Maeae Phra Thoranee (Thailand), Mother India, etc. This very representation demands female self-sacrifice and moral impeccability, and dovetails with the attraction of reactionary fundamentalisms. 
Apart from understanding the conservative potential of women's symbolic habitude, Whittaker, in her editorial Overview of Abortion in Asia: local dilemmas, global politics, calls for reflection on the idea that people, particularly women, would be the owner of their bodies. To this she observes the discrepancies between the high-flown intentions voiced in conferences on women and reproductive health, and down to earth culturally specific ideas of self and personhood. Whereas the first derive from western ideas on individual personality, in most places in this world the person is seen and self-experienced as enclosed in its group—hence, such groups (family, clan) are the basic units of society. Subsequently, she cautions that across Asia, the notion of reproductive rights vested in the idea of 'property of one's own person' is novel, as decisions involve the family members, and the ancestors, to boot.[iii][iii]  

The last assumption I am uncomfortable with is that women and men would somehow be interchangeable. In the 1960s and the 1970s when people and the world could be made, the question of genetic disposition was taboo, but ever since brain research has abundantly validated Darwin's insight that most of our qualities are inborn. Our gender identity has inescapably been imprinted in the womb, and gender ascriptive types of work are more deeply rooted than in socialisation, Elson and Pearson's protesting notwithstanding ("The subordination of women and the internationalisation of factory production" - 212-224). 
This is not to deny that much, yea, very much should be done to remedy the excessive exploitation and setting back of women, but it is of no use to strive for emancipation from a disposition one is born with. Whereas we share the same humanity, being whatever gender is a fact of life that calls for mutual respect and consideration. Subsequently, I love Joi Barrio's reaction to "man/poem's/world/world's/poem" as a call to fully realise her identity as a woman:[iv][iv] 

Another world

A different text

woman

I

Niels Mulder has retired to the southern slope of the mystically potent Mt. Banáhaw, Philippines, where he stays in touch through <niels_mulder201935@yahoo.com.ph>

[i][i] Barrios, Joi. 1990. Ang pagiging babae ay pamumuhay sa panahon ng digma. Maynila:Institute of Women's Studies, St. Scholastica's College.

[ii][ii] See "Equality is a word" on <www.newasiabooks.org>.

[iii][iii] See " Seesawing between poverty and ignorance, prejudice and self-righteousness" on <www.newasiabooks.org>.

[iv][iv] On Barrios' poetry, see Tadiar, Neferti X.M. 2009. Things Fall Away; Philippine historical experience and the makings of globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press (esp. 93-101)