Women’s work in the context of closing civic space
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Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
A Journal on African Women’s Experiences
Abstract
The contemporary closing of civic space and the attendant impact
on social justice movements is impacting the world of women’s
work in ways that ought to be understood against the backdrop
of shifts in labour relations, increasing unemployment, expansion
of the informal economic sector, low minimum wages,
de-unionisation, the growth and waste of the financial sector,
deregulation, and changing regimes in taxation, among other
factors. This article highlights the nature of social organising
among labouring women, drawing on historical contexts to highlight
the complexities that emerge in the contemporary period,
which are attached both to the nature of the neoliberal state and
civil society. Focusing on the legislative and punitive state, the
paper examines contradictions that confound the demand for
rights where the state is both guarantor of rights and mediator
of capital and draws some preliminary conclusions in this regard.
For many labouring women in Africa, the modes of struggle
and social organising that have historically defined their world
have characteristically emanated from below and in relation to
their lived contexts and realities. Such struggles have articulated
social and economic questions that also critically articulate political
questions of autonomy, freedom and equality. In precolonial African
kinship systems, the flexibility of gender in the political and cultural
system favoured the presence of women in the highest elite core
of society, whether in the status acquired through titles, or in the
position of the kinship itself. Power and authority emerged out
of the reproductive and productive roles that women played in
society, and women’s political power emerged out of those roles
articulated to daily struggles for survival (Lebeuf, 1963; Amadiume,
1987; Santoru, 1996; Oyewumi, 1997; Ossome, 2018).
Description
Keywords
Women’s work, Context, Civic space
Citation
Ossome, L. (2018). Women’s work in the context of closing civic space. THE FUTURE OF WOMEN’S WORK IN AFRICA, 18. A Journal on African Women’s Experiences