Research priorities in women's studies in Eastern Africa

Studies of women as a specific object of inquiry began to become popular in the mid-seventies in eastern Africa. This is related to growing concern among state and international agencies about women as a problem in production and reproduction. The economic crises has led to heightened concern about the political consequences of real declines in income, the high rates of malnutrition and infant and child mortality rates, and the deterioration of peasant agriculture combined with the breakdown of peasant family relations. Women became of pivotal concern in the effort to forestall revolution as well as to increase production of food and export crops, given their central role as food producers in the peasant sector, and as providers of nearly all other family needs in cash and in kind.Two opposing lines have emerged in Women's Studies. One, the integration line, is identified with bourgeois feminism which calls for equal participation in education, employment and other spheres of society while maintaining the status quo of society. Women-in-development (WID) research and actions falls into this category. The other line calls for transformation of society through revolutionary struggles organised and led by the progressive segment of the women masses in Africa. This category is far less defined, in part a reflection of the level of class consciousness and organisation in the region and the way in which women intellectuals are divorced from the masses.Analysis of the issues which have arisen in relevant research indicates the significance of class differentiation among women, and the need to distinguish different kinds of male-female relations both within and across the different classes in society. A critical analysis is needed of Women's Studies which is carefully periodized to take into account different stages in the capital accumulation process and different forms of capital accumulation as these relate to concrete struggles of different classes of women.