Poverty and Women

The Captivability Approach probably speaks to the issue of poverty and women more than most ways of thinking about human development. I have been thinking about the example that Maggie raised about the mother with ten children, that situation she was in, and how society and individuals within society judge her. We ask of course "why does that woman have ten children." This will come up again in our reading and our discussions, but many international approaches to poverty separate out women as a class and really focus on gender differences. This is because women are so much more likely to live in poverty than males, and are marginalized within a society, community, or neighborhood (even those that are already marginalized) than males. This is true in the United States as well - women are much more likely to live in poverty. And yet we don't really separate out women as their own group facing their own particular problems, really in a qualitatively different situation. Why is this? When we do separte out females in human development it is often to suggest some types of innate differences - that women use one part of their brain more than men - and it is usually during childhood. But we don't separate out women in terms of the capabilities society gives them in their own development, and how this leads to them so much more easily slipping into poverty (and because women almost always are taking care of children, how it relates to children slipping in to poverty.)

Let's think about this woman with the ten children again. It is almost automatic to consider her situation as the result of some type of deficit. How come she didn't know better? How could she let this happen to herself? Why doesn't she take better care of the children she has? You know what I almost never hear anyone talk about - why males have so many children. I think back to the Sen book and the way marginalized populations in the United States have so much lower mortality than even the most impoverished nations in the rest of the world To what extent does the capability of not being able to live and long and sustained life play in to the decisions of the woman. Consider a parent having a conversation with a fourteen year old daughter. The daughter asks whethere she should delay have sex. The parent says yes, but that even if you don't delay you must take precautions against getting pregnant (also STDs, but perhaps pregnancy is more of an issue in these conversations). The daughter asks why it is so important to avoid getting pregnant - as fourteen year olds sometimes do (and it makes sense. After all if biologically you can get pregnant what is the logic to not getting pregnant?). The parent says that because getting pregnant at a young age can drastically change the trajectory of your life, that you will not be able to do the things you want to do, you will not be able to accomplish the goals you want to accomplish. Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and there is time to have a child later. But now let us say you are having the same conversation with a fourteen year old girl from one of the poor neighborhoods that Sen talks about. She asks you why she shouldn't get pregnant. What are you going to say to her. Her life expectancy is one of the lowest in the world. The schooling gives her little if any chance for literacy, and even if it did she might not have the capability of going on with her education. She does not have a life of good food and good wine to look forward to because there aren't even decent restaurants in her neighborhood. She cannot present herself in public because the streets are too dangerous and she is fearful of being harassed if she does not have a protector. And she feels she has little if any impact on the world around her She has to stay inside her small apartment shut away from the world. She has almost no capabilities. What argument are you going to give this fourteen year old girl that she should go against her own strongest biological impulses and delay sex and/or pregnancy? It is the poverty of capabilities that leads to the later poverty we so easily judge her for.

This poverty of capabilities is not even speaking to the oppression she feels as a woman both within the larger society of the United States, within her neighborhood, and within her own family. She is labeled as a caretaker who has few rights and liberties almost from the beginning.

Okay, so now you are saying what could be done about this? How about if you started a small women's cooperative in a local neighborhood that offer micro loans and helps start up businesses right in the local ecology One woman opens up a successful green grocer, another opens a thriving Italian Ices stand, and yet a third open a coffee shop. A woman opens a twenty four hour childcare center. But what would it mean in terms of capabilities to do this. And what would it mean in terms of human development. Think about Bandura and the issue of self-efficacy.