Sisters under the Skin: Women and the Women's League in Zambia

Geisler, Gisela

doi:10.1017/s0022278x0000759x

Cited by 20 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…In some cases the regime has been involved in strategies of dividing the women's movement and exacerbating or creating tensions. Much of the emphasis of the state's efforts has been on form and image rather than on substantive change (Geisler, 1987;Wipper, 1975). The focus has been on top-down strategies that benefited only a small group of privileged urban elite women at the expense of the majority of rural and poor urban women, often leading to disenchantment with women's organizations (Geiger, 1982;Munachonga, 1989: 139).…”

Section: Women and State-affiliated Patronage Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead of taking up struggles for women's rights, parties tended to narrow the organizations' agendas so that, for example, the Women's League in Zambia had as one of its main functions the regulation of women's morality, as did the Union des Femmes du Niger in the 1960s. Moreover, in many countries women's activities were monitored and directed to ensure that they would support various party/regime campaigns and initiatives (Cooper, 1995;Geisler, 1987;Hirschmann, 1991). While some of these state-led movements did from time to time genuinely defend women's interests, the overall pattern with women's leagues was one of demobilization and depoliticization, especially when one contrasts their activities with those of independent organizations.…”

Section: Women and State-affiliated Patronage Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Women’s Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

Tripp

2001

Development and Change

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Women's movements in Africa represent one of the key societal forces challenging state clientelistic practices, the politicization of communal differences, and personalized rule. In the 1980s and 1990s we have witnessed not only the demise of patronage-based women's wings that were tied to ruling parties, but also the concurrent growth of independent women's organizations with more far-reaching agendas. The emergence of such autonomous organizations has been a consequence of the loss of state legitimacy, the opening-up of political space, economic crisis, and the shrinking of state resources. Drawing on examples from Africa, this article shows why independent women's organizations and movements have often been well situated to challenge clientelistic practices tied to the state. Gendered divisions of labour, gendered organizational modes and the general exclusion of women from both formal and informal political arenas have defined women's relationship to the state, to power, and to patronage. These characteristics have, on occasion, put women's movements in a position to challenge various state-linked patronage practices. The article explores some of the implications of these challenges.

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Section: Women and State-affiliated Patronage Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Women and State-affiliated Patronage Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women’s Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

Tripp

2001

Development and Change

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“…5. For an almost similar experience with that of Nigeria, see Campbell (1993), Geisler (1987 Shaheed (1993). 11.…”

Section: An Account By Pat Mahmoud (1990) Of the Stories Of Gjrls As mentioning

confidence: 96%

Engendering Nigeria's Third Republic

Shettima¹

1995

African Studies Review

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A corpus on transition to democracy in Africa has been developed. This body of work has different constitutive elements: conceptualization, institutional arrangements, conditions for consolidation and the reasons for its reemergence in the 1980s as an agenda for political change (Ake 1994; Hyden and Bratton 1992; Gibbon, Bangura, and Ofstad 1992). Nigeria's experience of the transition to democracy has received more attention than that of any other country in the continent (Ihonvbere 1994; Campbell 1994; Reno 1993; Agbese 1991; Diamond 1991). However, the current preoccupations and dominant discourses have largely concealed the agencies in the struggle for democracy, even though civil society has received some attention. Likewise, there are very few empirical works. Similarly, the discursive community on transition has also privileged a particular form of democracy, liberalism, without questioning its gender bias. While there is an emerging literature on African women in political transition (Tripp 1994; Abdullah 1993; Campbell 1993; Nzomo 1993; Pepera 1993; Seidman 1993; Beall, Hassim, and Todes, 1989), compared with the dominant literature on the subject, it is inconsequential. Further, much of the literature on African women in political transition has treated women in isolation from the gendered structures of power and society. Moreover, in most of this literature as well as the dominant literature on transition, there is silence on the relationship between political and economic processes despite the similarity in their basic doctrine, liberalism and the linkage of these two issues in the donor community and by African governments (Beckman 1992; Bangura 1992). This article hopes to fill in some of the gaps noted by including Nigerian women's conceptual challenge to democracy; the traditions from which women draw their discourses; the male-bias of the state; women's participation in democratic struggles both at the level of politics and economics; and the limitations of the women's movement.

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“…However, as a ruling party, UNIP no longer had the luxury of accommodating such incoherence and instead had to coordinate members’ energies into a workable plan for national development and governance (Larmer 2011). While the preindependence Women's Brigade comprised a disparate group of women, the postindependence Brigade became ever more socially conservative, dedicated to supporting the government and reinforcing rather than challenging the social gender hierarchy (Geisler 1987, 43). The result was to squeeze out more progressive members for those that towed the socially conservative party line (Schuster 1979, 22–23).…”

Section: The Case: the Unip Women‘s Brigade In Zambiamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Geisler (1987; 2004) has documented the process by which the Women's Brigade transitioned from a mass organization successfully mobilizing women for the independence movement to an organization that primarily reflected the ideology of older urban women who wholeheartedly supported UNIP's gendered vision of national development. She notes that women increasing dissociated from the League, as the issues it raised were “often irrelevant to the majority of women” (1987, 47).…”

Section: The Case: the Unip Women‘s Brigade In Zambiamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Trouble with Institutions: How Women's Policy Machineries Can Undermine Women's Mass Participation

Hern

2016

Pol & Gen

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It is no secret that men and women continue to have unequal access in democratic systems. In nearly every country for which data exist, women participate less in politics and hold fewer government positions than men (Beauregard 2014). In recent years, analysis of this ongoing problem has taken an institutional turn: feminist institutionalism examines how the formal and informal “rules of the game” create persistent bias against women in office and the advancement of feminist policy agendas (e.g., Krook and Mackay 2011). Such analysis is important and enlightening, but it illuminates only part of the story. An ongoing problem in most democracies is women's lower level of participation: women are less interested in politics, less likely to be active in campaigning, and less likely to contact officials. While women often vote at the same rate as men, their lower rates of political engagement and higher-intensity forms of participation remains to be explained (Coffe and Bolzendahl 2011; Verba, Burns, and Schlozman 1997).

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Sisters under the Skin: Women and the Women's League in Zambia

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

Women’s Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

Women’s Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

Engendering Nigeria's Third Republic

The Trouble with Institutions: How Women's Policy Machineries Can Undermine Women's Mass Participation

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