Vacillations Around Women: The Overlapping Meanings of ‘Women’ in the Zimbabwean Context

Abstract

During Zimbabwe’s first twenty years, the term ‘women’ has been an equivocation, an ambiguity, and a vacillation – at least in high places. The new state promised power and esteem to women as ‘proletarians’ and ‘peasants,’ while making liberal claims of gender equality in a pluralist society, and doling out authoritarian punishments for women who ignored ZANU(PF) scripts. International and local development organizations brought programmes and projects to women, even as their representatives sometimes expressed ambivalence about ‘women’ as a site of development focus. There have also been old gender practices, such as brideprice and men’s once-exclusive rights to inheritance, intermingling with new venues in which average Zimbabweans shape their own rules, identities, behaviours, and destinies today.