[Stoves] Women's empowerment

[Nikhil Desai]

Sorry, Samer.  These "feminists from the Global South" did not care about
the drudgery of cooking in women's lives. The Fourth World Conference on
Women in 1995 - where Mrs. Clinton led the US delegation if I remember
correctly - had nothing to say about cooking.

Nor for that matter the World Development Report on Gender, circa 2007/8. I
am glad that even with Julia Roberts and Oprah Winfrey, GACC got the
feminists to talk about cookstoves.

Those women who understand "“empowerment” as the task of “transforming
gender subordination” and the breakdown of “other oppressive structures”
and collective “political mobilization.”" usually do not cook and have no
experience collecting, transporting and stacking wood.

Like "clean", women's empowerment is contextual. Take a survey of 15-year
old school-going girls among the "households using solid fuels" and ask how
many of them want to cook and how many still on open fires.

If the objective of "contextual design and promotion of clean biomass
stoves" is defined in terms of cook-friendly service standard - i.e, as
"pleasing the cook" - I assure you a pleased woman feels less powerless.

That is empowerment.

Nikhil



On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 10:40 AM, Samer Abdelnour <samer.abdelnour at gmail.com>
wrote:

> A great piece for those interested in cookstoves + social impact.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/the-myth-of-
> womens-empowerment.html
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20171005/ba41f48a/attachment.html>