Female consciousness and feminism in Africa.

This article emphasizes the withdrawal of women from African politics due to their marginalization by male-dominated states that ignore women's social needs. Women's seeming withdrawal from politics has been explained by reference to the introduction of a public/private dichotomy in social relations that legitimizes the construction of politics as a male domain and relegates women to the domestic sphere. Women's organizations are seen as frequently dominated by elite women who follow the imperatives of male politicians. The gendered pattern of proletarianization exist in the state, in which men were generally proletarianized earlier and to a greater degree than women through forced or migrant labor. As a result, women remain concentrated in subsistence and petty commodity production and trading. The notion of women's political withdrawal is problematic in a number of respects. Methodologically, the infrequent occurrence of mass women's protests does not simply imply that they are politically negligible or that women's political behavior should be characterized by withdrawal. Such an assumption implies a unilinear relationship between the quantity or frequency of a political phenomenon and its qualitative effects. Moreover, it dichotomizes the norms and extremes of political consciousness and action.