Igbayilola
Local Expressions of Systemic Issues
While reading The Hidden Face of Eve by Nawal El Saadawi, I realised that many of what we describe as “women’s issues” are rarely isolated. They are often local expressions of a much larger system.
The forms differ across societies. In one context, inequality may appear as child marriage; in another, workplace discrimination, female genital mutilation, restrictions on reproductive autonomy, or unequal access to education. A thirteen year old girl in Nasarawa State, Nigeria, forced into marriage and a woman in corporate Britain expected to work twice as hard to be seen as equally competent seem to have nothing in common. Yet both are being told, in different ways, how far they are allowed to go. These problems are shaped by different histories and cultures, yet they frequently emerge from similar structures of power.
This does not mean that every woman experiences oppression in the same way, or that local histories and cultures are irrelevant. On the contrary, context is indispensable. Gender inequality is shaped not only by patriarchy but also by class, race, religion, colonial legacies, economic systems, politics, and, in some societies, caste and ethnicity. A wealthy woman in India may be shielded from some of the material consequences of patriarchal norms that a poorer woman cannot escape, even as both are held to the same expectations of deference and self sacrifice. Likewise, a woman in the United States navigating restrictions on reproductive autonomy may experience those restrictions differently depending on her race, income, or access to healthcare. Intersecting forces produce different experiences for different women while often reinforcing the same unequal distribution of power.
What connects these different manifestations is a common concern: control.
Reframing the Questions We Ask
This is one of the insights that struck me while reading Nawal El Saadawi. She refuses to treat practices such as female genital mutilation or child marriage as peculiar customs that can be understood in isolation. Instead, she situates them within wider political, economic, and patriarchal structures that seek to preserve unequal relations of power. Her insistence on looking beyond individual practices to the systems that sustain them changes the questions we ask. Rather than asking why one society has one particular tradition, we begin asking what purpose that tradition serves, who benefits from it, and why similar patterns emerge in different forms across the world.
The thirteen year old girl in Nasarawa State forced into marriage, the woman in Sudan subjected to female genital mutilation, the girl in Afghanistan denied an education, the woman in the United States confronting restrictions on reproductive autonomy, the woman in India navigating deeply entrenched patriarchal norms, and the woman in corporate Britain who must work twice as hard to be considered equally competent are not living the same lives. Their circumstances are shaped by different histories, institutions, and cultures. Yet each encounters systems that, in different ways, seek to determine what she can do, where she can belong, what she can become, and how much agency she is allowed over her own life. The methods differ. The language differs. The justifications differ. But the underlying logic is strikingly familiar.
That was perhaps the most important lesson I took away from reading Nawal El Saadawi. The challenge is not simply to recognise injustice where it appears, but to recognise it even when it changes its language, its customs, or its justifications. Until we learn to see the structures beneath the symptoms, we will continue mistaking different expressions of the same problem for entirely different problems.
Photo credit: Umar Faruq on Pexels