International Women’s Day

Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells]

My Lords and—dare I say?—noble sisters, I thank the noble Baroness for initiating this debate. Economic growth is an issue of justice and, of all the struggles in history, justice for women, whether legal, social or economic, remains the longest and most protracted.

Anyone speaking from these Benches needs to acknowledge that although its founder recognised the fullness of women’s citizenship from the beginning of the Jesus movement, women were gradually deprived of equality as the church ceased to be a house-based structure based on economics and adopted a hierarchical, patriarchal structure. If women are to be in the House of Bishops, I hope that they may help to take us back there.

A few years ago I had the privilege of being in Gaza on International Women’s Day. A group of us spent time with women committed to a programme of self-empowerment, striving to enhance their economic status in the face of the realities of sanctions and conflict. As we left that meeting, we were given flowers to symbolise the struggle. A couple of hours or so later, my Methodist woman colleague and I were faced by the barrier separating Gaza from Israel. Quite spontaneously, we walked towards the barrier and placed our flowers—one red, one white—in a small gap in the concrete. It was a gesture that the struggle for peace and justice, perhaps represented by the white flower, was at the cost of life, frequently snuffed out through poverty, oppression and hunger, represented by the red.

A recent report from the United Nations has found that the households of lone mothers with young children are especially vulnerable to poverty. Older women are more likely to be poor than older men in both developed and developing countries. In much of Africa and more than half of Asia, restrictions on women’s ownership of land and property, often as a consequence of formal or traditional laws, increase poverty. In developing countries, fewer women than men have cash income and many married women have no say in deciding how their cash earnings are spent. To speak of economic justice in such circumstances is to demand that women’s work is properly valued, and that they have property rights—especially in rural areas, where women produce 80 per cent of the food—and are enabled to take decisions about family finances. Economic justice means providing access to finance for income generation and investment for micro-enterprises. The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, made reference to issues in our own country and, in particular, to rural women, which is something that concerns me in the area in which I live, but I will not comment further on it in this debate.

Justice is the precarious dream that humanity can have. It is a vision akin to that of heaven. Many have heard of it, read about and longed for it but no one has seen it. The best we can say is that we have glimpsed it. I have been privileged through many years of my life both to visit and to work with women and men across the globe in the struggle for justice. Anglicans around the world are working to provide such economic justice for women. In Burundi, micro-finance schemes cater for women in rural areas. In Bangladesh, similar schemes provide support for women in the slums of Dhaka. In Zimbabwe, I have witnessed Anglicans helping some of the most vulnerable women, including those living with HIV and AIDS. Similarly, in Zambia I have seen how the Church is bringing together faith communities and justice services to reach out into the rural communities to make sure that women know their rights and can get access to justice.

However, these glimpses of economic justice are simply that—glimpses. If poor women who are subjects in their own lives, made in the imago dei—the image of God—with their own capabilities and rights to sustain their lives through their own efforts, abilities and the will to do so, they need access to the markets. This can come about only through a radical redistribution of resources. The task of justice is to work for more equal distribution and access to the distributive mechanisms.

Finally, the eradication of poverty is the task of Governments, international bodies, the Church and secular institutions alike, and it is a worthy dream. If poverty is ever to be history, support is needed for transformation in local civil society and community structures. This requires the practice of economic theory that starts where people are—at the bottom, not at the top. The road to justice is long and those of us who seek it must be prepared for the long haul. We must find hope in the glimpses but open our eyes to the vision of a world in which women in particular can enjoy just and equal sharing.