User:LFeurer/African Socialism

Women and African Socialism
African Socialism proved to have mixed results for participating women.

In Ghana, newfound independence did not create a restructuring of old gender roles. Households were the building blocks of agricultural production and were almost exclusively headed by male workers. Accrued resources were then disproportionately controlled by household heads, under the assumption that subordinate women did not have to do as much work.

However, economic crises in the 1980s saw the women of agricultural households adopt new strategies for reviving local welfare, such as replacing imported products with local goods and migrant male labor with their own. The increased presence of these women in the socialist workforce elevated their position in the community and granted them a say in rural production. Groups of working women began receiving their own plots of land from community leaders, and their contributions became recognized under the rural basis of Ghanaian socialism. Nonetheless, women who were not granted land often had to beg or receive permission from male landowners such as husbands or fathers. Without access to this land, local wives and daughters could not collect wild bush fruits or shea nuts, both crucial to financial welfare.

After the introduction of Ujamaa to Tanzanian life in the late 1960s, strict gender roles became commonplace and were celebrated as a pillar of nuclear family. Despite efforts of development policy to purge Tanzanian government of European influence, the reinforcement of nuclear family tradition and arrangement of women into the role of domestic house-maker reflected the practice of Christian colonizers before them.

This was likely because newfound independence saw a political focus on stability in the early developmental stages of Tanzania’s government. Urban, working-class men unsure of the new government were seen as the greatest threat to national stability, and were provided improved salaries and access to housing which bolstered their position as household heads, and pushed women further into reproductive labor roles. Many of the goals surrounding Tanzanian women’s rights movements were nonetheless met, including improvements in education, employment, and political opportunities. Regardless, the slow but sure subversion of women’s rights movements in Tanzania saw women pushed further back into households, and female governmental leaders deposed for a number of trivial offenses. Still, Tanzanian villagization is recalled positively by many Tanzanian women, as it often provided the opportunity to live closer to kin, and commit to more stable marriage practices. For many Tanzanians, the crux of detriment towards women’s rights came with the structural adjustment of Ujamaa economic policies in the 1980s.

Across nearly all socialist states in Africa, women’s participation in politics did not face much improvement. In Senegal, Policies such as the “Code de la Famille” promised improvements for women’s legal protections, but represented a set of laws that women were more subjects to than authors of. In many cases, such reforms were only introduced because of lobbying by wives of well placed politicians. Symbolic representation via educated “femmes phares”, or beacon women, was introduced with the one party system, and a set of quotas for women’s political participation in the 1980s. Still, both concessions were more a result of male political competition than progressive movements for women’s rights.

African conferences for national liberation and socialism saw great participation from feminist organizations, but very little attention given to feminist issues. Nonetheless, developments were made with the unity of eastern feminist groups, but discourse with their western counterparts. With socialism and anti-colonialism at the forefront of African feminist issues, the question of how male leaders would make economic development benefit all members of a household was paramount, but one that was not taken seriously in conferences.