It is late afternoon in rural Bihar, in northeastern India. The girls of the village, goat-herds by day, are starting school. They come together in a shed, all ages, to attend the literacy program set up by Adithi, a dynamic nongovernmental organization run by Viji Srinivasan. Adithi is one of the most effective advocates for women’s education in this anarchic region. State government, demagogic and corrupt, fails to deliver essential services to the poor, so most education for the poor is pieced together in this way.
Viji and I sit on the ground to watch the class, which, like the one-room schoolhouses I read about as a child in stories of the American West, has about 15 students and covers all levels and subjects at once. Somehow, it all seems to work, through the resourcefulness and responsiveness of the teachers, themselves poor rural women who have been assisted by Adithi’s programs.
Viji, who has worked in women’s development for almost 40 years, began to run Adithi in 1988. It currently helps more than 25,000 women and children in Bihar. In addition to the education programs, there are programs to help female home-based workers -- from fisherwomen to the highly skilled quilters whose works, dramatizing scenes from women’s lives, have been exhibited in museums in Europe and North America.
After the math and the reading comes drama: The girls proudly present for Viji and me a play, which they have improvised and recently performed for their entire village, about a young man who refuses to demand a dowry when he marries. Dowry is a major cause of women’s poor life chances in India, both because it defines a girl as a drag on family resources and because it can later be used by husbands to make extortionate demands involving domestic violence and occasionally even murder. The role of the young man’s villainous father, greedy for dowry, is played by a big, tough girl of 6 feet -- her stature surprising evidence of good nutrition. This area of rural Bihar has a female-to-male ratio of 75-to-100, giving strong indication of unequal nutrition and health care; girls in school do better, because their families expect that they may bring in an income.
At last, young love and good sense triumph: The couple get married and go their own way, and no money changes hands. Even the groom’s parents approve of the outcome. The girls giggle with pleasure at the subversive entertainment they have cooked up. One little girl, too young for the play, sits by the window, her hair lit up by the setting sun. On her slate she draws a large and improbable flower. “Isn’t she wonderful?” Viji whispers.
Our world is becoming a single community, and that closeness highlights issues of inequality and cultural integrity. Bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have become targets of protest for their alleged failure to consider development in a broad, humanistic context, and for their correspondingly narrow focus on economic growth alone. While it is vital to insist that development is a normative concept, it’s equally critical to understand that human progress cannot be delivered simply through attention to economic growth.
As the late Mahbub ul Haq, a leading development economist and former director of the United Nations Development Programme, wrote in 1990 in the first of the U.N.D.P. Human Development Reports: “The real wealth of a nation is its people. And the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives. This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial wealth.”
The education of girls and women is key to development, but it runs the risk of being slighted by both “sides” in this debate -- the market-will-solve-all camp as well as those protesters of development who are fearful of cultural homogeneity. Development theorists who focus only on maximizing economic growth, assuming that growth alone will satisfy other fundamental human needs, are very likely to shortchange female education. In their comparative field studies of the Indian states (Oxford University Press, 1995/96), Amartya Sen and Jean Drze have shown that growth-oriented policies do not improve the quality of education, particularly female education, in the absence of additional, focused state action. States that do well in fostering economic growth often do quite poorly in providing basic education. In contrast, the Indian state of Kerala, whose economy has not grown well, can boast 99 percent literacy for both boys and girls in adolescence, against a background of 35-percent female and 65-percent male literacy for the nation as a whole. In Kerala, intelligent state action has delivered what nongovernmental organizations like Adithi currently try to provide in states, such as Bihar, where the public sector has neglected female education.
Protesters against a single-minded focus on growth come in many varieties. Some of them, like ul Haq and Sen, are ardent proponents of female education and, in general, of delivering to all citizens of the world -- female and male, rich and poor -- a basic menu of resources and opportunities. Those efforts to broaden economists’ world-views should win our support.
But among those protesters who took to the streets in Washington and Seattle, there are some traditionalists, for whom any support of female education is suspect, as a “Western” idea and a challenge to long-established customs. Female education is indeed subversive. Once women can read, they can inform themselves about the world; they can participate more meaningfully and independently in politics; they can seek many more types of employment outside the home. They can form networks with other women to fight inequality, using the struggles of women elsewhere to inform their own efforts (for example, on issues such as domestic violence and rape). They can even form transnational organizations.
Women in the “informal sector” of the economy -- for example, hawkers and vendors, craft laborers, and so on -- have recently begun to organize internationally to demand basic improvements in their labor conditions and have convinced the previously indifferent International Labor Organization to issue a set of guidelines protecting the rights of such workers.
So it will come as no surprise if people who want things to stay as they were -- and at least some of the protesters have this nostalgic desire -- should resist the call for female education. Once women are empowered everywhere in the world, nothing will be the same again; and education is a major source of that empowerment.
What can we say to the free-marketers and traditionalists who might find an emphasis on female education suspect? How can we convince those camps that such a focus is worth some market interference and strong support by wealthy Western nations for local organizations like Adithi?
Well, we might point out that women who are literate can look for work outside the home, often improving the quality of life of their families. Literate women are more active and informed democratic citizens, frequently demanding from their communities a better deal for poor families. They can organize effectively to fight against pressing evils, from rape and domestic violence to ill-treatment at the hands of corrupt officials and greedy landowners. In a world economy in which jobs increasingly require at least rudimentary education, these women make their entire region and nation more economically productive.
In short, we might explain, education for girls and women can ease the transition from agrarian work to an industry-centered market economy, while making that new economy look less ominous to them. Education for girls and women can protect traditional sectors of a country’s populace and culture from being crushed by inhumane aspects of rapid economic transition.
As Sen demonstrated in “Fertility and Coercion,” an influential 1996 article in The University of Chicago Law Review, especially important is the role that female education has been shown to have in controlling population growth. No single factor has a larger impact on the birth rate. For as women learn to inform themselves about the world, they also increasingly take charge of decisions affecting their own lives. And as their bargaining position in the family improves through their marketable skills, their views are more likely to prevail.
In justifying education for girls and women from an economic point of view, however, let’s not fall prey to the same market tunnel vision that we accuse economists of having. After all, the cultivation of powers of thought and expression is not simply a means to an end. Such abilities are treasures in themselves -- treasures especially likely to be lost in lives given over to heavy physical wage labor, housework, and child care.
The girls in Bihar were learning useful skills; but they were also learning to value their own humanity. Their pride and confidence as they performed the play; their happy giggles as they told us how they first shocked, then influenced, their village -- all this shows us that what is at stake in literacy is no mere skill, but the social and political conditions that make it possible for people to live with dignity.
In her 1983 book, A Quiet Revolution, activist Martha A. Chen recalls that a young widow in an adult-literacy program in Bangladesh was questioned by the woman’s mother as to the value of the class. The woman replied:
“Ma, what valuable things there are in the books you will not understand because you cannot read and write. If somebody behaves badly with me, I go home and sit with the books. When I sit with the books my mind becomes better.”
Having one’s own inner place of mental concentration and cultivation is a feeling that can only be properly prized, perhaps, if one has never had it. There’s something in sitting with a book, this young woman was saying, that makes her feel more herself, less willing to be pushed around by others.
Female education is not the only important goal for a development agenda that pays ample heed to equality between the sexes. Legal reform, land rights, health care, employment opportunities, eliminating domestic violence -- all those matters are important, too. But none can be adequately addressed without first addressing education for girls and women, since only educated women can effectively carry on the struggle to rectify injustices in those other areas. And as I’ve said, education is an important good in itself.
Most women’s-literacy programs for the poor, in India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in the developing world, are run by local nongovernmental organizations like Adithi; the Self-Employed Women’s Association, in Gujarat, India; or the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and receive money from abroad. As governments, international economic agencies, and private donors think about how to allocate their resources, they might ask themselves: What goal could be more urgent or more valuable?
Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago and the author, most recently, of Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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