Abstract
Female Well-Being aims to identify the critical challenges faced by women across the world and the strides they made during the twentieth century toward overcoming them. The book consists of studies of 11 countries prepared by teams of local authors and six framing chapters by Mancini-Billson and Fluehr-Lobban. The country studies brim with statistics and charts documenting changes in mother-infant mortality, literacy and schooling, life expectancy, paid work in formal and informal sectors, family structure, and political participation, changes that indicate a general trend toward improved well-being for women across the globe.
The request to review this book intrigued us because we have been involved in discussions about well-being in the context of Sri Lanka, a country beset by decades of humanitarian crises and human rights abuses arising from localized political violence, state repression, and civil war. In this context, we have argued that conceptions of well-being must expand beyond narrow criteria of mental health to include psychological needs broadly construed, as well as access to material resources. Moreover, like Prilleltensky (2007), we believe that the well-being of individuals is grounded in their social lives; personal well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of relationships, communities, and the body politic. We were, therefore, taken aback to find that Female Well-Being is not concerned with psychological or psychosocial dimensions of well-being. This is not an oversight, but a deliberate choice that reflects the editors' disregard for and distrust of “subjective” indices of well-being. Indeed, of the 23 authors who contributed to the country studies, only one is a psychologist.
Female Well-Being focuses on macro-level indicators. An advantage of this emphasis is that it underscores the critical role of societal institutions in providing the conditions that enable women's advancement. These institutions include the state, with its power to institute legal and policy reforms, civil society (including local and international feminist movements), and the United Nations (UN). A disadvantage of this emphasis is that institutional equality is made to seem a sufficient condition for female well-being. Another disadvantage is that women's well-being is reduced to material advancement and improvements in social status. Indeed, the text uses the terms female well-being, gender equality, and women's rights interchangeably. But is female well-being coterminous with gender equality? Is well-being the inevitable result of a universal recognition of equal rights? We can readily imagine situations in which women are equal to men, but both are deprived or endangered.
We wished further that Mancini-Billson and Fleuhr-Lobban had responded to feminist critics who have found rights-based thinking inappropriate to their local culture. Nivedita Menon (2004), for example, has questioned the adequacy of the rights discourse to foster political change and social transformation in India. She has pointed out that, even after decades of legal reforms to address gender inequalities and improve women's social status, many women remain entrenched in norms and expectations that deny them access to the law. In addition, cultural norms may promote or necessitate women's decisions to engage in such practices as selective abortion of female fetuses, female genital surgery of their daughters, and child marriage.
The editors of Female Well-Being place considerable faith in UN conventions, notably the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), as mechanisms for promoting national-level legal and policy reforms. They extol the Millennium Development Goals without addressing the criticisms leveled against them by some feminists. In the editors' eyes, CEDAW is the “plateau” of the international human rights movement (p. 357). We have a less sanguine view. By now, nearly every nation in the world has ratified CEDAW, but how many have taken the requisite steps to “eliminate all forms of discrimination against women”? Moreover, in times of political instability, guarantees of even the most basic rights (such as safety, shelter, and food) fall by the wayside.
In keeping with their emphasis on governmental and intergovernmental institutions as instruments of change, the editors' model for achieving global female well-being involves three steps: penetrate the barriers keeping women out of power, normalize women's participation in the political arena, and consolidate women's gains through legislation. They offer a “new gendered theory of social change” comprising 34 principles (p. 374). These principles are a potpourri of admonitions, observations, and abstract claims. Some border on the prosaic: “The Industrial Revolution continues to be an engine of social change” (p. 375). “Women in leadership positions may not be motivated to or able to create positive social change for women” (p. 381). Others seem too abstract to guide theory development, research, or policy formation. For example, “Social change affecting females is rooted in power relations” (p. 389).
We question how useful a universal report card on female well-being can be. Is there a set of indicators of female well-being that are equally salient to (for example) subsistence farmers in Cambodia and stock traders on Wall Street? Are there universal meanings of well-being? In some cultures, for example, family well-being is more important than personal well-being. In rural Sri Lanka, for example, aspirations (for both sons and daughters) may focus less on individual advancement than on the survival, welfare, and honor of the extended family and future generations. We also wonder whether there can be principles of social change that are applicable to all locales, cultures, and historical moments. The effort to eliminate subjectivity from the assessment of well-being may inadvertently obliterate culture and sociopolitical context.
Our reservations notwithstanding, this book offers a valuable perspective for feminist psychologists. The realm of psychology rarely includes large-scale social forces, history, or locales outside the urban United States. Female Well-Being takes readers on a tour of 11 countries that are diverse in size, wealth, political and economic organization, and colonial history. It also affords a bird's-eye view of a century that was, as the editors put it, an “incubator” for changes in women's lives (p. 374). Reading it taught us much about the challenges women have taken on, the fruits of their activist efforts, and the distance yet remaining to travel.