Romani women

12 April 2000

Dimitrina Petrova

Romani women’s rights is an emerging area of interest: a result of a recent encounter between the Roma rights and the women’s movements. The terms of the discourse are still in flux and no beginner course exists.

Romani women’s rights are beginning to be approached from two different perspectives. Human rights researchers and advocates have started to identify a gender aspect to Roma rights: cases and patterns of human rights violations with regard to Romani women. Romani women activists have started to redefine diverse and changing needs of Romani women in terms of universal rights, thus mainstreaming Romani women’s concerns. Both approaches develop an agenda for improving the human rights status of Romani women.

Human rights are universal, but human rights violations are particular. This is why human rights advocates all over the world find themselves preoccupied with the problems of specific weak, or vulnerable groups. Generally, the weak groups are those who are to a larger degree the object of decision making. Children are typically a weak group. The weakest groups in a society would be those which are most affected by policies in the making of which they have not participated.

Are Romani women a weak group? I am very much inclined to say “yes”. But with Romani women, one stumbles on cases when what an outsider would perceive as humiliating and degrading treatment, may actually be desired by the women themselves. Several scholars, including Carol Silverman whose paper on Muslim Balkan Romani women is published in this issue, have warned that we have to tread carefully when approaching the issue of whether women are more oppressed and more abused than men in Romani communities. Analysing gender roles in everyday life, she demonstrates that women in some traditional communities have power over men in a number of important ways, including economic decision making. We see them as ‘victims’, but they are offended by our attitude. Who are we to interfere with their traditions?

Lalia was an exceptionally gifted Romani girl who worked in one human rights organisation. She became a very good human rights researcher. She had learned English well and was preparing to go to law school. She had a talent and a passion for Roma rights work. However, at one point she started to give up. She had applied and was accepted in a prestigious educational program in the US, and we were happy because we had, with our recommendations, helped her win a difficult competition. Then came the time when she had to leave and be away from her home for several months. And suddenly, she declared that she was not going anywhere. Her mother would not approve. The girl’s reputation, already tarnished by the fact that she was traveling in the area to do human rights fact-finding, would be completely destroyed and her marital chances would be worse ‘after America’. Close friends talked to her mother, to no effect. Finally, a year later, everyone said this was not the mother’s decision; Lalia actually chose for herself, and she chose on the basis of her real values…

I think that in traditional, pre-capitalist cultures, and thus in some contemporary Romani communities not yet atomised by modernity, underlying women’s power can almost always be discovered under the structures of patriarchy. It is through the women themselves and through their domestic power roles that patriarchy reproduces itself. Among non-Roma, too, how many of us have grown up in families in which dad decided everything, even though he had been subtly manipulated by mum to wish exactly what she wanted? But are women in traditional societies, with all the subterranean power they may exert, really free and equal?

Somewhere here lies the difference between women’s power and women’s rights. Without equal rights, women’s power is hardly real: it has to be navigated through the crooked labyrinths of existing social behaviours. And its flow will go only as far as the real masters (men) allow. And then, how does women’s cunning stop the hand of an abusive father or spouse? With the disintegration of traditional society, even this limited power of women is gone, because the social metabolism is not any longer so dependent on women’s roles. And once this happens, vindication of rights has become the new historic way in which women can reclaim their status. Lalia stood on the shaking border of traditional and modern patriarchy. How will her daughters make their life choices in the not too distant future? The discussions of this issue of Roma Rights, we hope, are a part of shaping the future roads for Romani women.