Buying for her family as well as for herself gives a woman a key position in the market-place. This section looks at the role of women as consumers and sees how development and feminist concerns also fit into the shopping basket.

'People reminded us that only fools rush in where angels fear to tread,' recalls Leela Jog, speaking of the time in 1966 when nine women in Bombay started what is now the Consumer Guidance Society of India. Some of those women were social workers and doctors, some journalists and teachers — but they had no connections with officialdom and no political clout. What they did have was a natural affinity with the vast stream of Bombay's housewives harassed as never before in the days following the war with Pakistan. 'There were shortages, black marketing and adulteration of food,' explains Mrs Jog. What was needed was a voice of protest against such malpractices.¹

Women were similarly involved in the founding of other consumer groups, for example in Canada and Japan, and the names of some of today's organisations on the membership list of the International Organization of Consumers Unions (IOCU) bear witness to their origins: the Korean Women's Association, the Housewives' Association of Trinidad and Tobago, or the National Council of Women of Thailand.

Often the spur for their activities came from marketplace concerns about poor quality goods, rising prices, short measure or adulterated food. Bad services also came under the scrutiny of such groups: in Japan as early as in the 1950s when women were still expected to be seen but not heard, they organised to protest over the unhygienic public baths.²

But why single out women as consumers? After all, men are often confronted with the same problems, be it a faulty TV or the effects of a chemical wastes dump near their home. And surely consumer protection measures automatically benefit women? 'Well, yes and no,' comments Foo Gaik Sim, head of information at IOCU's Asia and Pacific Regional Office,³ giving the example of Malaysia where prices of basic goods such as rice and sugar are controlled by law. 'Yet village stores sometimes sell them at higher prices, and poor publicity does not help village women to be alert against unscrupulous traders.' Gaik Sim goes on, explaining that the situation is made worse by the women's subordinate position in society which discourages them from being assertive.

As the major purchasers for their family, women are dual consumers — once for themselves and again for their children, husbands or other relatives. This second role is often the dominant one. The fact that a woman does the shopping does not necessarily mean she uses what is bought. Many women for instance buy what suit their husbands and their children, rather than themselves.⁴

And through their responsibilities in the management of the household, buying the food, childcare and so on, women may be more exposed to dubious selling methods and cheating than men. Poorly-made cooking stoves in India, for example, claim the lives of many women each year or disfigure others permanently. Salespeople may tour remote villages persuading low income consumers — often women — to spend their little money on goods that at worst may be harmful and at best are of doubtful value. One advertising agency is even sending a travelling theatre show around the villages of Papua New Guinea's highlands to promote toothpaste — hardly an urgent necessity for the natives.⁵

The principal rights of the consumer — access to essential goods and services, choice, safety, information, representation, redress, consumer education and a healthy environment — are least attainable by the poor. And since in any group of poor people, women will be the poorest, any strategy to make things better for poor consumers must embrace women's particular needs.⁶

IOCU has advocated this for some time. In 1975, International Women's Year, the Organization formally recognised 'the key role women play as consumers',⁷ and ten years later IOCU's representative to the United Nations, Esther Peterson, stressed the need for women to play an active part in promoting consumer protection by joining national and local groups.⁸

Many of the earliest consumer protection measures were attempts to prevent cheating in the market-place. Biblical laws around 1400 BC, for example, stated that people 'shall use just balances, just weights, a just epoh (a measure) and a just hin (about one gallon). '⁹

Today, fighting for justice in the market-place is still high on the agenda of consumer organisations. But in the modern 'market-place' consumers are no longer simply purchasers of goods but also users of services. A hospital patient is a consumer of health services, a bus passenger a consumer of transport facilities. So we 'buy' a range of 'products'. There are private goods like cooking stoves; environmental goods like air and water; public services such as health and defence and government services in law-making, tax-gathering and administration. Consumers derive their power to influence the way a product is made or sold, or a service rendered by deciding to purchase/use or not purchase/use (boycott) it.'¹⁰

Seeing 'market-place' issues in this broader sense gives women as consumers a wider brief, and it is here that women's groups can most effectively work alongside existing consumer organisations. You don't have to look hard to find the common ground between the two movements. For every women's group is a consumer group in some sense. Women protesting about unfair marriage laws, land rights or unequal pay are protesting as consumers of legislation. Women complaining about lack of transport or childcare facilities are complaining as consumers of amenities and services. Seen in this light, women consumers objecting to high prices for vegetables or millet become part of the same picture.

Feminist organisations and consumer groups from across continents have already joined forces on several occasions. Depo-Provera, the injectable contraceptive, is an example. In 1978 it was deemed unsafe for general use in the United States, but the manufacturer continued to promote it in the Third World.

Women in the rich world worked with those in developing countries to resist the Depo dump. 'We can fight against some problem here,' says Carol Downer of the Los Angeles Feminist Women's Health Center, 'only to see it exported to women overseas. But we're not going to sit by while a victory at home (the banning of Depo) turns into a tragedy abroad. We have a responsibility to women all over the world.'¹¹ In another case, the National Women's Health Network has been instrumental in locating and enabling Third World users of the Dalkon Shield, the intra-uterine device (IUD) withdrawn by the manufacturer in the US, to seek redress through the American courts.'¹²

Yes, change is needed. For the process of development in Third World countries has not always benefited the poor, and in many cases has made things worse for women.¹³

The belief that boosting the cash sector would benefit everyone was one assumption that often was misguided. While men moved over into growing cash crops, women had to continue their unpaid subsistence work to produce food and goods for the family as well as now labouring in their husbands' fields.

Another assumption was that development projects aimed at men would automatically bring advantages to women. Economist Marilyn Carr notes that such programmes 'have tended to offer credit, improved technologies and training only to men, enabling them to grow cash crops on land previously used by women for food. But the income (from the sale of cash crops) is controlled by men and doesn't trickle over to women.'¹⁴ In other words, expanding the cash sector means there is more money around but mostly in men's pockets. They tend to spend it not on necessities for the family but on liquor and radio-cassettes for themselves. But the idea still persists, perhaps in the consumer movement too, that establishing what men want will be sufficient to cover all the family's requirements.

Yet women haven't been altogether ignored. Along with the shift to a cash economy through development targetted at men came a third assumption: that a woman's place is in the home. Projects aimed at women have tended to reinforce their role as wives and mothers, concentrating on childcare and handicrafts. This overlooks the fact that women produce half the world's food¹⁵ and that an estimated one in three households in the world are headed by a woman.¹⁶

This home-making role catches women in a tender trap. Few women in the world have the choice to be fulltime homemakers. Even in the so-called developed countries, women are increasingly forced to seek paying jobs out of economic necessity. And while those who can stay at home may want to do the best for their families, they may not see home-making and care-giving as the sum of their lives. It is now widely accepted that women need to take part in the cash economy, either by earning a wage or by producing something that has a market value (some would include housework in this category). Only then will they be valued in the mainstream (money-based) community. Having her own income gives a woman economic independence from men. It allows her some freedom to take risks, such as setting up a business and to do what she wants, or at least a little bit of control over her own life.

But at home, where they are already working hard to provide food as well as services like cooking, cleaning, childcare and fetching water, women are mantled by the pressures of domesticity and the influence of the consumer society to perform to ever-higher standards. It seems they must wash their husbands' shirts in such-and-such a soap powder, buy vitamins and tonics to ensure their children's health and use skin lighteners¹⁷ to conform to 'desirable' images of beauty and social class.

There is no clear answer to this dilemma. But as women are increasingly bearing the double burden of waged and domestic work, they are beginning to demand that their load be lightened — and to ask why men cannot share in housework and childcare.

A woman's experience as a consumer is the basis for her further involvement in consumerism. She can focus a critical eye on available goods and services, and also question the lack of others. Women prepared to intervene with the market forces that affect them as consumers are also prepared to reckon with the business and political forces in their community.

How can consumerism, feminism and development meet? Feminists may have an image of consumer organisations as exclusively concerned with the price and quality of goods (mainly luxury ones) and with getting a bargain in the shops. And consumer groups may view feminists as narrowly focused on a few women's issues like reproductive rights and equal pay. Or they may even buy the stereotype so often presented in the media of feminists as 'man-hating' and 'family-destroying' women. Neither of these views is true.

It is women from the poorest families who are the most affected by the lack of adequate goods and services. They are the ones who often end up paying higher prices than the more affluent. They are most likely to suffer from practices such as dumping and marketing of unsafe drugs and other products. And they may choose to begin to fight injustice where it hurts them, in the market-place. From here it is not such a big step to tackling other injustices in their lives and society.

A similar process has gone on in the women's movement. The fight for adequate childcare, equal pay, and reproductive rights leads to action on basic needs for food, shelter and health services. Feminists — especially in the growing women's movement in developing countries — have come to realise that all issues from the debt crisis to appropriate technology are women's issues and that the oppression of women is intertwined with other injustices in society.

There is thus much that unites women in the consumer movement and the women's movement. And as united action by women in the movements has shown, the work of both can be strengthened when they join hands. Together women consumers and feminists can become agents for change.

In recognising the importance of women as consumers in this wider sense, IOCU has initiated and supported moves to get women's needs for consumer protection onto the UN agendas. In 1978, for instance, it successfully persuaded the UN Commission on the Status of Women to recommend that the range of protective measures for consumers be included in the revised world plan of action for the UN Decade for Women.¹⁸

One of the major points established by the Decade was that it is no longer good enough to assume that development aimed at making life better for the poorest 'people' will automatically benefit women: it doesn't. Women are the worst victims of the injustice that exists in the world. They grow around half the world's food but own hardly any land.¹⁹ In developing countries, two-thirds of women over 25 (and half the men) have never been to school.²⁰ They perform two-thirds of the world's work hours but earn only one-tenth of the world's income. Their unpaid labour in the household, if given economic value, would add an estimated one-third, or $4,000 billion* to the world annual economic product.²¹ They are discriminated against by laws limiting their access to land and credit.²² Where there is poverty, women are the poorest. As consumers of development, women have cause for complaint.

* The $ is, as in the rest of this book, the US dollar. A billion is a thousand millions.

But this book is not a doleful litany of women's oppression. For they are doing something about it. The following chapters look at a range of subjects from the angle of women consumers.

First comes housing: what do women have to say about their basic need for shelter and how it is designed? Still in the home base, we look next at food — for which women are primarily responsible. Then on to health care and the treatment of women. Chapter four considers women as consumers of technology, and the following on fuel and transport sees how women could do with some power to help lighten their load.

Hazardous products come next — this is an area where sadly women are especially vulnerable because they are more likely to be illiterate than men, have less access to information, and be working in areas which expose them to danger. Women's economic independence is a vital part of improving their standing, and chapter eight examines the difficulties women have in raising credit.

Each section also contains stories on action taken by women in that area. The last part of the book looks at where we go from here, how women can organise to become more effective consumers. In each of the areas covered in the book (and of course in many more that it does not touch on) women are coming together to fight for greater participation in the decisions that affect them, and for their concerns to be pushed to the top of the agenda. Victims they have been. Activists they are becoming.

Notes

1. Jog, L. 'Some Reminiscences', in Keemat, Consumer Guidance Society of India, Bombay, 1986, p.12.
2. Nakamura, K. 'Health and Safety Issues and the Development of the Consumer Movement in Japan', in Health, Safety and the Consumer: Proceedings of the IOCU Seminar, April 1983, Ranzan, Japan.
3. Foo, G.S. 'Women as Consumers', in IOCU Newsletter, no.156, September 1986.
4. Gonzales, S. 'Women as Consumers', in Consumers and the Economic Crisis, IOCU Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean, Montevideo, 1-4 October 1986.
5. The Australian, 5 January 1987.
6. Gonzales, S. op. cit.
7. Willner, D. Letter to the Secretary-General, IWY, on occasion of the 'Words in Action' NGO Conference, November 1975, New York, in International Consumer, vol.XVI, 1976, p. 14.
8. Peterson, E. 'Women as Consumers', speech made during the UN End-of-Decade for Women Conference, Nairobi, 1985.
9. The Holy Bible, Leviticus Ch.9, verse 35.
10. Giving a Voice to the World's Consumers. International Organization of Consumers Unions, The Hague, 1981, p.4.
11. Quoted in Ehrenreich, B., Dowie, M. and Minkin, S. 'The Charge: Gynocide', in Mother Jones, November 1979.
12. 'The Dalkon Shield', in Women's Global Network on Reproductive Rights, April-June 1986, p.15.
13. Report of the UN Mid-Decade for Women, Copenhagen, 1980.
14. Carr, M. 'Has Anything Changed for Women?', in Appropriate Technology, vol.9, no.3, December 1982, p.4.
15. Aronoff, J. and Crane, W.D. 'A Re-Examination of the Cross-Cultural Principles of Task Segregation and Sex Role Differentiation in the Family', in American Sociological Review, vol.40, 1975.
16. Newland, K. 'Women, Men and the Division of Labour', in Worldwatch Paper 37, Worldwatch Institute, Washington D.C., 1980, p. 14.
17. Vukani Makhosikazi Collective. South African Women on the Move. Zed Books, London, 1985, p.167.
18. 'Forward-Looking Strategies of Implementation for the Advancement of Women and Concrete Measures to Overcome Obstacles to the Achievement of the Goals and Objectives of the United Nations Decade for Women for the Period 1986 to the Year 2000: Equality, Development, Peace', in Report of the Commission on the Status of Women Acting as the Preparatory Body for the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women, UN, New York, 1985, annex III, paras 223-228, p.61.
19. The State of the World's Women 1985. Report of the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the UN Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, Nairobi, 1985.
20. Sivard, R. Women ... A World Survey. World Priorities, Washington, 1985, p.5.
21. ibid.
22. ibid.