Women in Ethiopia: The Struggle for Liberation and Development

BY JENNY HAMMOND

Ethiopia’s rich diversity of nationalities, languages, religions and cultures is reflected of course in the lives of Ethiopian women. The cultural and class differences between town and countryside are an additional factor making for diversity. This begs the question, in a country of over eighty linguistically distinct nationalities, of whether it is feasible to generalise at all about the conditions and problems that govern women’s lives.

My research area since the mid-eighties has been Tigray, and women in rural Tigray will be the main focus of this paper. Nevertheless, I have travelled widely in Ethiopia and in my view rural women throughout Ethiopia have common concerns. To some extent it is artificial to isolate women’s concerns from those of society. Women’s lives are embedded in their social, economic and religious context and solutions have to be found within that context. Thus many of the factors that disadvantage women are problems of poverty and underdevelopment, shared by their communities and the country as a whole. They can only be reversed ultimately by the conjunction of development and political will. Even small-scale solutions affecting women can imply a power shift within the family and the community which will not necessarily be welcomed by village or religious leaders, so solutions nearly always have a political dimension.

Yet the problems of poverty bear particularly hard on rural women throughout Ethiopia and the main indicator is the unacceptable burden of domestic work. The most common traditional stereotype of women in the countryside is the image of a woman bent at an angle of forty-five degrees, whether she is weeding a field or burdened by a child on her back, a huge bundle of firewood or a heavy water jar. The most intractable problems of domestic work have been associated with the laborious trio, grinding grain and fetching water and fuel. Fetching water can entail hours of walking, especially in the dry season; gathering fuel wood is a serious problem, especially in the north where either deforestation on the one hand or environmentally conscious edicts against tree cutting on the other make life difficult for women; grinding grain on primitive grindstones for several hours consumes both time and energy.

It is at this point that women’s problems can no longer be dismissed as a part of the social context. Problems of poverty are commonly compounded by cultural factors which consign women to a very low status in relation to men. In any case not all of the problems affecting women can be accounted for by poverty. In Wello in 1991 I was visiting a village which had a disused bore hole because of a defective water pump. The women had to walk a round-trip of six hours to find water. I attended a village meeting (all men) which once again decided that they could not afford collectively to buy the spare part to repair the pump. In the context of other community expenditure it was hard to avoid the conclusion that if it had been the men’s job to fetch the water the pump would have been repaired long before. Similar examples can be found all over Ethiopia.

This ‘double oppression’ is the hardest to eradicate because it has become entrenched as part of the culture, and even internalised as a sense of inferiority by women themselves. In Ethiopia this unequal status has denied village women rights of decision-making in their homes and in their communities. It has made them subject to parents before marriage and to husbands after marriage. It has confined their activities to the domestic sphere and, within that sphere, has reprioritised finding solutions to women’s problems.

The customs and practices associated with marriage have been a main focus of inequality for women. This inequality in relation to marriage holds good all over Ethiopia, although it can take different forms in different regions and the effects can be alleviated or minimised in particular cases by more enlightened families or individuals. In Tigray I have talked to many older women married as young as seven years old. The dowry system and poverty have combined to further disadvantage women in that poor families have looked to their sons’ marriages to increase their wealth, but have regarded girl babies ‘as a curse’, in the words of one woman, because they must provide a dowry when their daughters marry. In extreme cases, want of a dowry prevents girls from marrying altogether.

When I first began researching in Tigray in the mid-eighties, what caught my attention was the fact that village communities, encouraged by the TPLF, were trying to address both the issues of poverty and of women’s equality. Their concept of liberation was, it seemed to me, primarily non-military. The military objective to defeat and oust the Derg was the precondition for enabling liberation from poverty and underdevelopment for the people of Tigray initially, but ultimately for the whole of Ethiopia. The liberation movement aimed to mobilise people in the villages; it involved land redistribution to peasant farmers on an equitable basis; it encouraged local communities to organise in participatory democratic systems to solve their own problems; it consciously involved women in all these processes. I realised I was witnessing a society in the process of change through the exercise of human will and collective action. I had never seen anything like it in my own country.

Of course the war against Mengistu Haile Mariam and his brutal dictatorship provided the common enemy which was the catalyst for change. The war helped to accelerate that change by breaking entrenched attitudes to women’s roles and women’s subservience. Women fighters, who numbered eventually about a third of the forces, were a strong influence on both women and men for breaking the mould of the past. They dressed like men, carried guns and fought alongside men. One of the first women fighters told me that when they first went into the villages to mobilise the women, they had to bare their breasts to prove they were really women, so extraordinary did they first appear to village women. However women responded rapidly to the new influences and by the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties peasant women were flocking to the fighting forces themselves.

The TPLF forces were a hothouse for education and political consciousness, and not only for women. However the concept of ‘fighter’ was much wider than participation in combat. Although all fighters, including women, received military training and some women combat fighters rose to become respected commanders, a fighter was one dedicated to contributing to the struggle in the most useful way. As the civil struggle for democracy, women’s equality, health and education, was conducted in parallel with the armed struggle, many women were trained as administrators, health workers, technicians, carpenters, metalworkers, drivers and so on. But the most significant struggle for the majority of peasant women was the one carried by early women fighters into the villages to mobilise women to claim their rights to participate fully in society.

The most important changes for women to take place in Tigray villages between 1975 and 1991 were those associated with land and marriage. Encouraged by the TPLF, the local elected councils discussed and voted on bodies of village law, called ‘serit’. These included raising the minimum age of marriage to fifteen for women and twenty-two for men and linking the right to claim land to these ages, whether married or not. The right to land gave women a measure of economic independence and went some way to eroding the dowry culture. Daughters brought a share of land into the family, so that families had more to lose on her marriage and were in less of a hurry to lose her. Land itself became a dowry for poor women.

These rights were not won easily. All the articles in the ‘serit’, no matter whether encouraged by the TPLF or not, had to be discussed and voted on in village assemblies. Women hitherto had no rights to speak in public or in public affairs, but the incentives were great. Women organised in their own associations and turned up for the first time in large numbers to fight for these rights. The linking of new marriage laws to land rights was a crucial element in their acceptance by men. Women had found a voice.

There were two rights which became particularly sensational icons for women in their struggle for equality with men. One was the right for women to be fighters and the other the right to plough. Women’s right to plough is a particularly interesting issue. Agricultural activity, so important for survival, was yet fraught with taboos for women. Before this time ploughing was an activity reserved only for men. In fact in some areas women were thought to curse production if they touched the plough or approached the threshing floor at sensitive seasons. Training workshops were set up to teach women how to plough and the spectacle of women ploughing came to symbolise the real possibility of equality for women in the future, even among women who never had the temerity to plough themselves. A great deal of ‘political work’ was done with men to gain their acquiescence, particularly by the department of the TPLF that worked at politicising the villages.

Of course attitudes could not be changed overnight either in men or women and after the outbreak of famine in 1984 in the north, some priests declared it to be the result of God’s anger because women had dared to plough. However, except for a small minority, the reality for most women was that they were too burdened with domestic work anyway to take on additional labour usually carried out by men. In the 1988 Women’s Congress it was decided that tackling the problems of domestic labour was more relevant to working towards women’s equality than either encouraging women to be combat fighters or to plough. By that time, however, the important and ground-breaking point had been made. Women were capable of doing many jobs hitherto thought to be the prerogative of men and doing them well.

[This paper is part of a lecture given by Jenny Hammond at Middlesex University March 99'.]