[Stoves] Women's empowerment

[Nikhil Desai]

Samer:

First, the Atlantic piece is an ad for DeLoitte Consulting. As such, a
cheap academic blather that I don't care a hoot for.

As for the rest, I agree with you, "I think the piece challenges us take
into critical consideration the aspirational messages that hold cookstoves
to be a universal solution to issues poor women face. Even if they are
effective in one context or intervention, benefits are rarely universal.
Here I don't speak about tangible health impacts such as reduced burns and
exposure to smoke when stoves fit the contexts of their use, or money saved
by enabling households to use less fuel,"

and have doubts about your speaking of "*the more generic apolitical
rhetoric of empowerment.*"

Empowerment is inherently a political struggle. What seems to have happened
is that the academic rhetoric of technologists have created uni-dimensional
caricature of women.

This is ironic. The rhetoric of empowerment has shorn women of all
"feminine" occupations and their contexts. (If there is a female equivalent
of emasculate or castrate, that is what I would like to apply.) That
rhetoric is indeed meant to be a political appeal - e.g., the use of Julia
Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Gina McCarthy and before that even
Condi Rice. Women's bodies became tools for making money and advancing
careers.

I began a systematic tracking of cooking and women's lives when I read
Ellen Swallow Richards' career and the origins of "Home Economics" (which
in turn because Consumer Economics, one of the three pillars of Economics,
the other two being business economics and beginning in the 20th Century,
macroeconomics).

It was Richards who designed a "Model Kitchen" for the Chicago World Fair
of 1900 and was in turn inspired by the thermodynamicist Count Thompson
(US, England, Bohemia).

I think stove scientists fussing over "energy efficiency" and PM2.5
emission rates should think about the context of Count Thompson and his
ideas about cooking, food and nutrition, and public works programs.

Back to the future. Ignore the red herring of DALYs. Women have struggled
for centuries to free themselves of the burden of cooking. Just as
contraception allowed them to choose family size and the time spent in
pregnancy versus time spent in raising infants, improved cookstoves that
allow them to limit the time spent on cooking and instead spend it on their
infants, may appeal to women of a certain age.


Nikhil

PS: BTW, my impression from travels everywhere is that young women these
days appreciate one aspirational message - "Eat out!" One way for some of
them to do that is cook for sale and work in food establishments. Kirk
Smith's first epiphany came when he discovered "Cooking like gas". He
falsely assumed this had to do only with smoke; it had also to do with
controls, modernity, and the enjoyment of cooking when they had to cook at
home.

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On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 4:59 PM, Samer Abdelnour <samer.abdelnour at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks Ron and Nikhil,
>
> Indeed, the piece cautions generic claims of empowerment based on the
> dissemination of some form of techno-solution -- be it chickens or
> cookstoves -- and as I read the piece I drew so many parallels with the
> generic rhetoric spewed by cookstove-gender enthusiasts. Hence, I am a bit
> surprised the link to how cookstoves are promoted as an empowerment tool is
> not more evident.
>
> I think the piece challenges us take into critical consideration the
> aspirational messages that hold cookstoves to be a universal solution to
> issues poor women face. Even if they are effective in one context or
> intervention, benefits are rarely universal. Here I don't speak about
> tangible health impacts such as reduced burns and exposure to smoke when
> stoves fit the contexts of their use, or money saved by enabling households
> to use less fuel, but the more generic apolitical rhetoric of empowerment.
> As Nikhil reminds us, the origins of the empowerment discourse is indeed
> more complicated and perhaps impacts may be conceived of in more basic
> terms, of which cooks should decide for themselves, and not by advocates or
> NGOs passing around free stoves.
>
> Here is another piece that you may or may not see a link:
>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/deloitte-shifts/
> women-energy-and-economic-empowerment/261/
>
> It more appropriately look as the structural issue of energy access, but
> still, fails to get away from the 'aspirational' rhetoric associated with
> technology/entrepreneurship that in my opinion distracts us from looking at
> real impacts. Like the work I have done deconstructing the rape-stove myth,
> these aspirational memes can become so powerful they are taken as 'fact'
> and uncritically reproduced even without supporting evidence.
>
> Best to you,
> SA
>
>
>>
>>
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