Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues countries – modern or ancient – have been governed by women. Religion, politics, education, economy and society are all riddled with the gender discriminations created by patriarchy. Gender inequality is rooted in social and cultural attitudes. It is entrenched by discriminatory education practices, which disadvantage women in the labour market and render marriage the only sensible option for most women. Gender discrimination is further entrenched by defining low-paid jobs (domestic service, teaching, nursing, secretarial, clerical and data entry work) as ‘women’s work’ especially suitable for young women before they marry. Such jobs carry low pay, because they are not regarded as appropriate for men, especially married men with families to support. But even female professionals are often paid less than their male counterparts. In order to resist this ongoing inequality, the Zimbabwean Women’s Coalition drew up the Women’s Charter,13 which was adopted by a national conference on 12-13 October 2000. This charter is reproduced in full in Chapter 5. It ‘articulates women’s demands for formal legal equality’ and ‘challenges the roots of women’s subordination’. It rejects ‘male power and control manifested in [domestic] violence, bride payments and the control of female sexuality’, as well as marital rape. As the Women’s Coalition found, there are differences of social class as well as ideology concerning these issues. Criticising our own ‘culture’ is politically as well as culturally sensitive. But without such criticism, women are unlikely to achieve equality with men in our society. Social class and gender discrimination In Zimbabwe, there are wide disparities between the towns and the countryside. In general, rural folk are poorer than their urban relatives. Because the towns are seen as having better facilities (education, jobs, health, housing), ambitious people want to live and work there – at least they did before our economic collapse impoverished urbanites too. There is, then, a broad class difference between urban and rural Zimbabweans. Gender discrimination also varies between these urban and rural classes. In the countryside, the major discrimination against women arises from custom and customary law. Since early colonial times, men have been seen as ‘traditionally’ the ‘land-owners’. Women were thought to cultivate land on behalf of its male owners (their fathers, brothers, or husbands). At best, in some regions married women might claim gardens for themselves in which to grow food crops for their families. Today less than a quarter of all married women are reported to have such gardens. There are good reasons to query this colonial construction of ‘traditional’ landholding (see Cheater 1990). Here we simply note one. Pre-colonial travellers and hunters in what is today Zimbabwe recorded that, everywhere they went, they bought food from women, not men. It is unlikely, if women had no rights to the land, that they would have controlled the disposal of its products, even those produced by their own labour. And women did control the products of their own labour. They could invest what they earned from selling the vegetables and pottery they produced, and from midwifery and healing, in livestock inherited by their own children and siblings, not their husband’s family. However, during the colonial period, women’s control over the products of their ‘hands’ was inverted into the ideology that they were totally dependent on men. An expectation developed that the wages of employed women would be paid directly to their husbands. So rural women are today mostly severely discriminated against by not being allowed to control the means of agricultural production in the communal lands. Both colonial and independent governments have also chosen to by-pass women as potentially independent lessees on irrigation and resettlement schemes. Our State has recurrently treated women farmers as the dependants of men, not as farmers in their own right. This discrimination was institutionalised by colonial and neo-colonial patriarchy in the name of ‘custom’. Customary and family law (as noted earlier) remain beyond Constitutional regulation. Without personal control over land, rural women as producers are rendered dependent on men as landholders. Those who exploit unpaid female labour within family structures cannot be expected to 13 ZWLA Update November 2000, p. 3. Circulation of the Charter itself is still pending. 14