Part 1
Chinese Communist Party Chairman, Mao Zedong once stated that “Women hold up half the sky.” This quote, which brought attention to the equal role played by women in the cultural revolution, has gained global recognition due to its inherent truth. The relevance of this is particularly recognised in women’s contributions towards the global economy through unpaid labour, without which the waged economy would be severely impacted. Unpaid care work is indispensable to the economy and the well-being of society but is primarily undertaken by women. While largely voluntary, care work occurs within the framework of poor public service, cultural beliefs surrounding the role of women in the home, and forces within the labour market itself. For women who are waged workers, the burden of care work contributes towards immense time poverty, impacting their ability to effectively grow or manage their participation in waged labour. For unwaged workers, care work can be all-encompassing, keeping them mired in poverty, and perpetuating gendered effects brought about by the colonization of work. This is particularly true for rural and Indigenous women who practise subsistence agriculture.
The framework of care work is regularly analysed as primarily related to unpaid labour surrounding housework, child and elder care. An aspect that is rarely directly linked together, however, is the contribution of subsistence labour and its relation to care work. Rural and Indigenous women in addition to providing childcare and household chores, also have diverse responsibilities from harvesting, fishing and agriculture to provide for their families and communities. While some women participate in subsistence agriculture and sell the surplus or plant-specific cash crops, for the large majority, this green work is unpaid and primarily used for the subsistence of their family. In Guyana, rural and Indigenous women account for a large percentage of persons involved in agriculture, with many doing this on an unpaid subsistence basis. As their work is not waged, the labour they undertake is largely invisibilised. The value attached to this care work has facilitated the belief that women perform care work out of their natural instincts, rather than gendered expectations.
As a formerly colonized nation, Guyana’s labour landscape has visible remnants of colonialism. This is due to the all-encompassing nature of unidirectional European colonial modernity that blocked any possibility of transference and integration of knowledge from people they saw as others. Alternative socio-material directions of development based on Indigenous technical and ecological knowledge systems were thus marginalised. This contributed towards the view that certain ways of living and labouring were primitive and in need of development. This move from “primitive to civilized” is articulated by colonial scholars such as W.W. Rostow, further solidifying the idea that post-colonial countries needed to develop along the path of the neocolonial West. This path towards unidirectional universalism contradicts the pluriverse, which values acknowledgement of the existing varying realities between people and the environment. In contesting the one-universe view, some academics have made an argument for de-development, aimed at transitioning wealthier countries towards less consumption patterns and habits. This theory, however, has not caught on outside of academic circles, with the majority of post-colonial countries primarily following the same path of European modernity. This has contributed towards immense harm for still subjugated people who struggle under the urban and capitalist relations that have become inseparable from their lives. The impacts of this can be seen within the unpaid subsistence labour of women, particularly those in rural and Indigenous communities and their relationships with the environment.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in Latin America and the Caribbean, a total of 59 million women live in rural areas, of which 20 million are included in the economically active population and 4.5 million are agricultural producers and earn 24% less than men. Despite the prevalence of women within the agricultural sector, there is a statistical invisibility of the labour done by rural women and their roles in production, community and care work, which represents a fundamental pillar of families’ survival. This heavy labour is not only invisibilized but also unpaid, with data from 10 Latin American countries showing that rural women spend more time on unpaid work. While aspects of eco-feminism contend that women have a spiritual, caring and nurturing connection with nature, several feminists link women’s supposed inherent relationship with the environment. This colonial eco-feminist view, however, has resulted in a feminization of green labour, creating gendered conditions that harm both women and the environment. This has resulted in exploitative responses towards it, poor working conditions inherent within the sector, and low wages for women who work in these sectors. This essentialist way of viewing women as being related to the environment has been rejected by many other feminists, instead calling for a decolonial approach towards eco-feminism which challenges this patriarchal-centred view. Decolonial feminism instead explores the material and practical requirements that require women to have a closer relationship with nature than men. Decolonising eco-feminism provides a framework to understand that while women are not inherently closer to nature, patriarchal-driven concepts of environmentalism and capitalism, coalesce to push women towards providing these nurturing and caring roles that are thought inherent to them, thus creating a self-fulfilling dilemma.
