Women, Culture, and Ayn Rand
Via Ophelia Benson, I found a news article titled South Sudan: Women Perpetuate Culture of Submission, which is mostly self-explanatory but still very much worth reading. I am reminded of what Alex Tabarrok said about Ayn Rand:
it’s no accident that Hillary Clinton was once an avid Randian (recall her political career started with Barry Goldwater) because Rand is an important feminist. Rand’s portrayal of strong, independent, intelligent women is coming to be recognized as a landmark in fiction but in addition Rand’s attacks on self-sacrifice have special meaning in a culture that has long used the “caring ethic” to bind women to the service of others.
And also Shikha Dalmia:
Rand’s entire project involved liberating the individual from the yoke of collectivism and creating the social, moral, and political conditions in which he could live a fully actualized life. Each individual’s own happiness is his highest purpose, she said, and boldly declared selfishness to be a virtue—contrary to what various religious and non-religious (communist, fascist, communitarian) preachers of the ethics of self-sacrifice had been saying for ages.
For people like myself, laboring under the twin tyrannies of tradition and socialism when I first read Rand in my native India, this is heady, empowering stuff. It supplies you with the moral and intellectual ammunition to stand up to those claiming to own a piece of you—family, community, and state—and take control of your own destiny.
The point that both Dalmia and Tabarrok make is correct as far as it goes, but I think that viewing the “caring ethic” purely as a manifestation of altruism misses something important.
The article on Sudan states that “Women not only tolerate these situations, but regard them as parallel to norms and values of a good wife.”. But why have successive generations of women accepted such values? One possible answer is to say, essentially, that these women have been brainwashed by the patriarchy. While there is undoubtedly some truth to this, it fails to explain why the women in south Sudan have even more regressive views on gender roles than men do.
The article ends by quoting a woman who says “It’s my culture and my duty as a wife to submit to him. We have lived this way for many years, and I haven’t complained even once.”. I want to suggest that this should be read as a boast. The pursuit of virtue is motivated almost entirely by the desire to be well regarded by others — it is a rare person who will follow the dictates of abstract ethics when doing so causes them to be widely condemned by their peers. This particular set of values may look backwards to outsiders, but marrying a high-status man and being a “virtuous wife” is a highly effective way for Sudanese women to attain social status among other Sudanese men and women. Self-interest drives women to adopt the caring ethic.
Sadly, being a “virtuous wife” is also the only status competition available to most most Sudanese women. A major difficulty in opening new social paths for women is that doing so threatens the women who are successful in the established status competition. That is why people like Sabina Dario Lokolong are not embraced by women but instead receive vitriol from both genders.
Needless to say, these dynamics occur outside Sudan as well.
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