Showing papers in "Frontiers-a Journal of Women Studies in 1988"

Leaving the Ivory Tower: Factors Contributing to Women's Voluntary Resignation from Academia

Abstract: Over the past decades, women have entered nontraditional fields, have received advanced degrees in ever increasing numbers, and have been appointed to university positions, despite the biases in the hiring, tenure, and promotion of female faculty on which the feminist literature has focused.1 Yet significant proportions of women are choosing to leave academic positions before reappointment and tenure decisions. I would like to explore the reasons for that choice. A significant percentage of the women among my fellow graduate students entered academic positions and then left several years later. I noticed the same phenomenon among female colleagues at universities, and now I am beginning to see my own female graduate students consider leaving academia almost as soon as they are hired in faculty positions. Reasons for leaving (or thinking about leaving) vary. One woman was the token woman in an all-male department. Another felt that she could not perform the discrepant roles of researcher, teacher, and administrator at the high level she desired. As the only black woman in an all-white department, she was asked to serve on too many committees and was needed by too many students. A number of women said that they did not feel appreciated by their colleagues and received little support and encouragement. Many indicated that research and teaching on women's issues were devalued by their colleagues as not serious, "hard-core," or related to their discipline. And one woman explained that her greatest fear was that she was learning how to play the academic game only too well; she needed to leave academia before she lost her personal sense of integrity. At least one study has taken note of this phenomenon. A 1983 Smith College report on gender ratios in tenure appointments indicated that equal numbers of men and women were hired at the junior faculty level, yet more men than women came up for tenure.2 The major factor accounting for this imbalance was the high rate of voluntary resignations on the part of female faculty. Specifically, 9 percent of the women, but only 2.5 percent of the men, resigned voluntarily before the first reappointment, and an additional 10 percent of the women and 5 percent of the men resigned voluntarily after at least one reappointment. In contrast, the gender ratio of involuntary departures (terminations) was equal. The women who left Smith College reported the following reasons: (1) barriers to conducting research, including high student contact, unrealistic departmental expectations, unsupportive environment, and unsympathetic colleagues; (2) heavy teaching demands, including the need to serve as role models for female students, lack of support for women's studies courses, heavy advising loads, and lack of feedback on teaching; (3) psychological factors, such as stress generated by pressures on junior faculty members, perception of lack of control and lack of information, and anxiety about evaluation by others; and (4) social and family life concerns, such as social isolation and competing demands from spouses and children. Interestingly, male and female faculty did not differ in their levels of scholarly activity (number of publications and presentations), even though women often felt that they were not as productive as they would like to be. Because Smith is a small, all-female college, its findings may not apply to other academic

"Bluebeard" and "The Bloody Chamber": The Grotesque of Self-Parody and Self-Assertion

Abstract: Like many fairy tale motifs, the Bluebeard legend is grotesque in essence. This tale of the wealthy, seemingly chivalrous aristocrat who murders seven young brides and inters them in his cellar brings together violence and love, perversion and innocence, death and marriage in an unsettling combination. The intermingling of seemingly incongruous elements and the juxtaposition of opposites challenge audience expectation and habits of thinking in a manner typical of the grotesque as defined by theorists as varied as Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin. 1

Object Relations Theory and Feminism: Strange Bedfellows

Abstract: In the past decade, there has been a marked increase in feminist social, psychological, and cultural analyses grounded in psychoanalytic theory. Prominent feminists such as Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Carol Gilligan have all offered analyses of contemporary gender relations and cognitive styles based, in part at least, on object relations theory, whose foundations are rooted in psychoanalysis. 1 It is a curious note that psychoanalysis, which in the sixties and seventies drew the wrath of feminists for its reductionist approach to gender ("anatomy is destiny") and its misogynist notions of penis-envy, the vaginal orgasm, and "mother blame," has now become such a ripe source of feminist theorizing. Another common feminist criticism of psychoanalytic theory was that it traced all aspects of social functioning back to the psychodynamics of the nuclear family and to the individual psyche. In opposition to this psychoanalytic stance, the feminist cry that "the personal is political" attempted to locate the roots of female oppression both in the individual lives of women and within the broader context of society and social institutions. Individual personality was viewed as inseparable from a larger social fabric.

The Pronouns of Gomorrha: A Lesbian Prose Tradition

Abstract: Around the turn of the century, when the literary world was still dangerously dark for the lesbian "I" and the lover's pronoun "she," lesbian modernists began a subtle subversion of the literary grammar, in an often amused, often pained enterprise that has become a continuous tradition in lesbian prose art. Beginning with Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, the great lesbian modernists challenged the old division of persons into gender pronouns, and so too the old division of prose into separate literary forms or prose genres. Instead of accepting the antique grammar of "he" and "she" and the always gendered "I," instead of accepting the distinct and still venerable forms of "play" and "novel" and "biography," lesbian modernists mixed pronouns in new, unstable gender categories and combined genres in odd ways, often without precedent in literary history and without counterpart in other modernist art. The concept of genre, the notion of distinct sets of literary forms all tidily tagged and defined, has always been ambiguous and notoriously unstable. Whether one takes the critic's view of genre as an ivoried prescription from the academy, or the writer's view of genre as an inherited blueprint for new constructions, it is clear that Western literature constitutes a history of genre transformations. Since before Aristotle, genres have alternated between slow petrifaction and radical rebirth in the work of a younger generation (the Pl6iade, the Romantics, the Surrealists) that demands inclusion of the more truly "real" or "natural."

The Valuation of Women's Work: Gender and the Market in a Dairy Farming Community during the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Farm families form an interesting case for the study of the relationship between the gender system and capitalism. In contrast to artisans, who were reduced to proletarian status during capitalist expansion, farmers retained their ownership of productive property; throughout the nineteenth century they produced not only their own subsistence but also commodities for sale in distant markets. Household and workplace were not separate; kinship-based authority relations governed labor as well. This fusion of the familial and the economic makes farm families' historical experience of capitalist transformation especially illuminating, for it reveals the interaction of gender with capitalist relations in a direct and relatively unmediated fashion. The ways that farm women and men participated in productive and reproductive labor were shaped by their own traditions of organizing work, not by the demands of the capitalist labor market that controlled their workingclass contemporaries. The expansion of commodity production that took place during the nineteenth century affected working relationships among women and men, but did not fundamentally transform them; rather than reshaping gender relations within the family, capitalist expansion provided a field upon which the contradictory dynamics of gender relations within farm families were played out. The valuation of women's work reveals the intersection of

"Woman Is Born to Love": The Maiden Aunt as Maternal Figure in Ante-Bellum Literature

Abstract: The intensification of mothering is basic to our understanding of nineteenth-century American family life. Child rearing replaced child bearing as the locus of women's social role, as both the gender of parental authority and the mode of child rearing changed. Contributing to the public discourse on the social norms of mothering was a body of literature that identified the unmarried woman as a model nurturer. Old maid stories appearing in ladies' almanacs, popular periodicals, gift annuals, and collections of fiction from 1830 to the Civil War suggest that both old anxieties and new fears surrounded the new maternal norms.

Katharine Anthony: Feminist Biographer with the "Warmth of an Advocate"

Abstract: In 1919, Katharine Anthony wrote her friend and patron Ethel Sturges Dummer that "there are many forms of social injustice that cry out for adjustment, but there is no form for which actually less is said and done than for the cause of feminism." And, she continued, "the things that need to be said and done primarily need women to say and do them."I Anthony, an early social welfare worker, suffragist, and writer, proudly identified as a feminist all her adult life, publishing the last of her feminist biographies in her early eighties. Yet from the late 1920s on, Anthony's strong feminist stance and approach gradually moderated, reflecting her public response to the growing conservative climate, the decline of a unified women's movement, and the social and political devaluation of women and women's relationships. Like many of her fellow activists in Greenwich Village in those years of disillusionment and political backlash, Anthony shifted her interests from political and social reform toward the new, inner-directed investigations of the psyche. Yet Anthony's compromises during a time when both her politics and her personal life would be labeled deviant must also be seen within the context of her struggle with financial insecurity, particularly after her lover's death left her with the responsibility for two small children. What did this moderation mean to Anthony and her circle of once active Greenwich Village suffragists and political rebels? And what did it mean-professionally and personally-for Anthony, a lesbian and an unaffiliated, free-lance scholar without personal or professional patriarchal connections? Now, in the media-characterized "postfeminist" 1980s, we may learn from Anthony, her time, and her choices, as we too face an unfriendly, reactionary political climate, a renewed focus on heterosexuality and pronatalism, and a public preoccupation with New Age spirituality and individual, as opposed to political, change. One of the second generation of college-educated, middleclass New Women, Anthony arrived in New York City in 1908, just over thirty years old, anxious to escape her assigned role as the dutiful, unmarried daughter and excited at the prospect of following up on her "urge to write."2 As a child in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Anthony had buried herself in books, becoming the first girl from Fort Smith to win a scholarship to the George Peabody Normal School in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1901, despite parental opposition, she traveled to Germany to study, accompanied by her first lover, a fellow teacher, described lovingly in her travel notebook as the "irresistible one." O her return, Anthony enrolled in summer sessions at the innovative University of Chicago (earning a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1905). There she was exposed to the theories of Veblen, Dewey, and other social philosophers of the Progressive Era, as well as to the female psychologists and sociologists engaged in questioning and even rejecting the traditional role assigned to women. Anthony then took a position at Wellesley College, where she taught rhetoric and composition from 1907 to 1908, and was further influenced by social welfare activist Edith Abbott, with whom she shared lodgings. A year later, turning from the career in academia to which she had seemed destined, Anthony moved to New York, a city still reeling from the effects of the Panic of 1907, which had closed factories and businesses, putting thousands of people out of work. As she threw herself into suffrage politics and social welfare work, the theories that Anthony had studied on the cause and prevention of poverty and class and sex inequities became realities. She began writing reports and doing research for the newly formed, socially conscious Russell Sage Foundation and by 1916 was submitting articles on strikes and the

Black Women on AFDC and the Struggle for Higher Education

Abstract: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is a welfare program that began as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) within the 1935 Social Security Act.1 Currently, its purpose is to provide food, clothing, shelter, fuel, utilities, personal care items, and household supplies to dependent children who are living in poverty either with parents and relatives, or in foster homes or private, nonprofit childcare institutions.2 In recent years and especially during the last decade support for AFDC recipients has decreased dramatically. Between 1970 and 1985 maximum AFDC benefits for a four-person family declined 33 percent in a typical state. In only three states-California, Maine, and Wisconsin-was the value of benefits maintained during this fifteen-year period.3 Although some of this loss can be attributed to the effects of inflation, still more is the result of the Reagan administration's dismantling of welfare programs. In particular, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 reduced expenditures on AFDC as well as on prenatal, maternal, and child health care; school allowances; and day care. Since 1980, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the food stamp program has been cut over $2 billion a year.4 AFDC was cut $1 billion a year, terminating 5,000,000 low income working mothers and their children. Largely as a result of these cutbacks, more people have dropped below the poverty line: from 30 million in 1980 to 34 million in 1986. The group hit hardest by the increase in poverty has been Black women and their children. Between 1959 and 1983 the

The Politics of Women's Music: A Conversation with Linda Tillery and Mary Watkins

Abstract: "Women's music" came into being in the early seventies, in response to a women's political movement that needed artistic expression. The political movement gave women musicians both an understanding of the ways in which they were shut out of the male-dominated music industry and the collective consciousness to organize. The results are women's recording and distribution companies, women's concert production companies, a women's music circuit whose audience is mainly women, and, to a certain extent, a distinctive "women's music" sound, characterized by accessibility, intimacy within musical groupings, woman-identified lyrical themes, musical eclecticism, and the musical integrity that comes from not trying to reach mass audiences. Linda Tillery and Mary Watkins have been part of the women's music circuit almost since its "official" beginning, the foundation of Olivia Record Company in 1973 in Washington, D.C. Both Tillery and Watkins have performed a variety of roles in the women's music industry, with Olivia based in Oakland, California, with Redwood Records (founded by Holly Near), and on their own labels. They have produced records for other musicians, provided musical support on the albums of other artists, and released solo albums featuring their own music. Both of them seem to be constantly on the road, and both of them continue to grow and change musically as they collaborate, not only with each other, but with different configurations of musicians whose styles and traditions confront and influence one another.

Turning to the Mothers: Mormon Women's Biographies of Their Female Forebears and the Mormon Church's Expectations for Women

Abstract: As the dissident voices of Mormon women themselves are lately making clear, female Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) are subject to a rigorous-and, many would say, unrealistic and limiting-set of expectations. They are assigned a clearly subservient role in their church (they may not hold most major church offices, for instance, and they are taught that they may not achieve the highest degree of glory in the afterlife [the "Celestial Kingdom"] unless they are sealed in marriage in the Temple through Temple Ordinances). Yet they are expected to be paragons of their faith, accepting without question the church's insistence that motherhood is the highest calling for a woman, that working outside the home is undesirable, and that "selfish" is the worst accusation that can be leveled against them. In quasi-Victorian language, church leaders exhort women to be spiritual guides for their families: "You provoke us to good works, and . . your encouragement and unwavering faith are often all we have to keep us in the path of right. . . . I can truly testify that your inspiration and faith become our buckler and shield. .... From Father Adam down through the ages, men have needed to be inspired by the steadying influence and purifying power of women."1 For some Mormon women, the church's demands that they be always selfless, always virtuous lead to serious disorders born of guilt, as recent studies of depression and drug abuse among Mormon women indicate.2 Others, though, obviously find healthier ways of coping with the burden of expectations that their church places on them. One of these ways, my research in Mormon culture and Mormon women's writings suggests, is that classic human strategy for dealing with pressure: Mormon women tell stories, "true stories," which shape the past in ways that help the tellers cope with the stress of the present, ways that challenge, in this case, what their church demands of them. Ironically enough, one of the main vehicles for "coping stories" that Mormon women apparently employ is that classic genre of orthodox Mormon vernacular literature, the laudatory ancestor biography. I first became aware in 1983 that something odd and perhaps subversive is going on in many ancestor biographies that twentieth-century Mormon women are writing when, with the assistance of a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, I collected an archive of "vernacular history" from Southeast Idaho-place histories, family histories, autobiographies, and biographies written by nonprofessional writers. Most of the works in the collection have not been published previously and were not written for the collection; they were written for friends and descendants and were in the possession of the writers or their relations when I sent calls for donations to every local paper, every television and radio station, every church (LDS and non-LDS), every old persons' home, and every historical society in Southeast Idaho (not quite such a huge task as it may seem, given the area's small population). In response to that request, some 775 documents were donated, totaling about 6,000 pages. Of the total, 158 are biographies of men, and 95 are biographies of women. The collection is now housed, in duplicate copies, in the archives of the Oboler Library at Idaho State University in Pocatello and the Idaho State Historical Society Library in Boise. As a non-Mormon, I was struck at first with the formulaic surface of the LDS ancestor biographies among the works in the collection (approximately two-thirds of the 253 biographies

Assessing Working Women's Status: Information, Ideology, and Resistance in Organizations

Abstract: "More room at the top" and other components of the "new working women" mythology provide more than an upbeat refrain to help the media brighten otherwise dreary news days. The mythology of the new working women also insulates many Americans from the less than pleasant reality of how one rapidly expanding segment of the workforce has fared during a "liberation" era. This article illustrates what can happen when a community confronts the mythology of its working women's status. As the authors of a local-government-sponsored examination of the "new" working women in a university community, we have experienced firsthand the conflict between generating counter-intuitive public information (including information that could be seen as embarrassing to a sponsoring public organization) and maintaining a more acceptable community mythology.

Comparable Worth Versus the Free Market: A Case Study

Abstract: In principle, comparable worth means simply equal pay for work of comparable value.1 In practice, it has been used to argue that job categories filled predominantly by women should be paid the same as those filled mainly by men if their work is of equal value to the employer-and thus to challenge an underlying cultural assumption that women's work is worth less than men's. The devaluation of women's work has historically been tied to the sexual division of labor, which, under industrial capitalism, is maintained through the segregation of the labor force. The sex-segregated labor market "squeezes" women into relatively few, female-typed jobs, such as clerical work, nursing, and teaching, which are presumed to be ancillary to the "real" work performed by men. Women's lower wages are thereby justified by their secondary labor force status and by their occupying jobs with a presumably large supply of potential workers.2 Unlike affirmative action, comparable worth does not oppose occupational sex segregation itself; it seeks rather to correct the sex bias of wage hierarchies. In arguing that certain femaletyped jobs are just as valuable as comparable jobs held primarily by men, proponents of comparable worth are paradoxically both modest and radical. They are modest to the extent that they accept a hierarchal ordering of the worth of jobs, an ordering that actually maintains some male privilege. In Lemons v. the City and County of Denver,3 for example, publicly employed nurses argued not that they should be paid as much as doctors or that all hospital employees should be paid the same, but that they should be paid as much as other similar medical professionals in male-dominated fields. For example, at the time, laboratory technicians and environmental health officers (as well as tree-trimmers) were all earning more than the nurses. The more radical component of comparable worth is its challenge to the ideal of the free market. Neoclassical economists argue that wages are a function of both marginal productivity and the laws of supply and demand. A worker's marginal productivity, i.e., the value her labor adds to the productivity of the firm, is a function of the experience and education, i.e., "human capital"4 that she brings to the job. Theoretically, the more education or experience required for a job, the greater the value that the worker in that job adds to the productivity of the firm. If a particular job carries a high marginal productivity, the employer is presumably willing to pay a high salary to the laborer who fills it. However, if many laborers are competing for a particular type of job, then the employer can easily replace workers and thus can reduce the going wage. Conversely, if few workers are available, the employer will have to pay higher wages, but only up to the point that the wages still allow the employer a profit. Thus, the neoclassical argument contends, if women receive low wages, the reason is that, because of family obligations, they choose jobs that require relatively little human capital and for which there is an abundant supply of workers.5 The advocates of comparable worth reply that the marketplace does not operate exclusively according to these so-called free market principles, as if it were an element of an objective natural law, such as supply and demand. Rather, it has developed historically within the context of gender discrimination and male prerogative, which marketplace practices reflect and perpetuate.6 Furthermore, the free market principles of marginal productivity and supply and demand are contradicted by the facts of women's participation in the labor force. Nurses earn less than tree-trimmers not because their profession requires fewer skills and less education or because they are in

Providing Grassroots Social Services to Women and Children in Rural Southern Africa: A Roundtable Discussion

Abstract: The state of Lesotho, which became independent from Great Britain in 1966, is completely surrounded by South Africa, a geographic encapsulation that is reflected in its economic dependency. Nevertheless, Lesotho is not a South African "homeland"; it is an internationally recognized, independent country, and as such is eligible for international aid, like other countries in southern Africa such as Botswana and Swaziland. This eligibility, unfortunately, has not served to catalyze the country's economic development, and the government is becoming increasingly indebted to foreign donor agencies. Less than 15 percent of Lesotho's land is arable-all in the lowlands, which are overpopulated, not only with people1 but also with livestock. To produce wool and mohair for international markets, Lesotho's people, the Basotho, herd sheep and goats as well as cattle. Overgrazing, together with irregular rainfall, has contributed to increasing soil erosion. Lesotho has not been self-sufficient in agricultural production since the 1930s.

Should There Be a Legally Enforceable Right to Comparable Worth? A Reply to Paul Weiler's "NO"

Abstract: In objecting to comparable worth, conservative critics have argued that it subverts the basic principles of a free market economy, and radical critics have claimed that it is anti-working class. In a recent Harvard Law Review article, a new and politically intermediate criticism emerges from Paul Weiler, a professor at Harvard Law School. 1 Differing with conservatives, Weiler acknowledges in "The Wages of Sex" that some market regulation is compatible with free enterprise, and indeed is necessary to keep the market competitive (1763). Because the management of labor is not entirely constrained by the forces of supply and demand, the market can be inflected by gender and race discrimination (1762). Thus, comparable worth policy, which aims to counter "irrational" market forces, can actually serve to make the market more competitive, and should therefore be acceptable to defenders of capitalism. Moreover, because there are policy-capturing approaches to job evaluation that allow for decentralized wage setting, comparable worth need not involve extensive government intrusion in the market.2 Differing with radicals, Weiler holds that comparable worth offers working-class women some remedy for gender-based pay inequities. He advocates empowering women and implementing comparable worth through collective bargaining and by government incentives (1798, 1754). However, although Weiler grants that comparable worth does not contradict free market principles and that it offers a potential remedy for wage discrimination, he does not support establishing it in our legal system. Having argued that comparable worth is sound in principle, Weiler then aims to demonstrate that a comparable worth law would be ineffective and costly in practice. But these latter claims, I contend, are based on empirical error and logical confusion. A feminist response to Weiler is needed not only because his essay appeared in perhaps the single most influential legal journal in the country, but also because he represents a new line of attack from what might be called a "progressive liberal" perspective, one that feminists cannot afford to ignore. Though I agree with Weiler that comparable worth should be pursued both through positive incentives provided by executive order and through collective bargaining, I do not want to dismiss the possibility of implementing comparable worth through our legal institutions. Here is a brief summary of Weiler's argument. He maintains that "the difficulty with comparable worth consists not so much in its theory as in its implementation" (1778). He identifies two major difficulties in implementing comparable worth through the courts. The first is that "at present ... American judges do not have a body of reliable experience to draw upon in scrutinizing claims made by the parties and their hired experts in litigation undertaken to implement an enforceable legal right to comparable worth" (1770). The second is that "any court that orders a single firm to increase sharply the price that it pays for traditionally female jobs, without offering any relief in the other prices that it pays or receives, could seriously damage the firm's business, and hence its female employees, whose real wages are purportedly being improved" (1779). Thus, Weiler sees legally mandated comparable worth as impractical, both because of its reliance upon sophisticated statistical analyses that would likely overtax the institutional resources of the court and because of the decentralized nature

Lungfish, or Acts of Survival in Contemporary Female Writing

Abstract: Lungfish, I say, are also contemporary female writings: Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," Gloria Naylor's Women of Brewster Place, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine-all are works confirming the accuracy of Rule's metaphor, confirming the pull of life to move on when there is no way left to live, to seek breath in a new element. The new kind of survival these works initiate is a

The Minnesota Pay Equity Bills: Increasing Wages for Women Workers

Abstract: When I first discovered that the state of Minnesota had passed a pay equity bill, I was intrigued and inspired to learn more. I felt that the concept of pay equity, or comparable worth, had revolutionary implications, and I was amazed that even a "liberal" state like Minnesota would pass legislation mandating equal pay for comparable work for its female employees. I told my professors that I wanted to write a paper investigating the context in which such a radical bill had been passed. They warned me that I would find very little radical intent, and very little interest in fundamental questions about labor market discrimination, on the part of the Minnesota state legislature. They were, of course, right; as this paper attempts to show, the Minnesota debate over comparable worth did not signify great strides in the feminist movement or in economic theory. The concept of comparable worth does raise fundamental questions about the (capitalist) economic system in the United States and the role of gender oppression in that system, but the Minnesota debate avoided many of these questions. As a result, the Minnesota bill has made concrete and significant changes in the lives of many women, but has fallen far short of a radical measure challenging the devaluation of women's work and the accompanying low wages received by women in traditionally "female" jobs. Economists have identified and studied occupational segregation and the wage gap for many years, particularly since the increase in female labor supply (mostly white married women entering the labor market) after World War II. Politicians have become more concerned because of the increased significance of women as a political constituency. Public interest groups and the press have contributed to this attention to women with their recent focus on the gender gap and the feminization of poverty. It is possible and even common for a female head of household to work full time and still be below the poverty line. According to the 1984 U.S. census, 47 percent of femaleheaded households were below the poverty level. In more than 20 percent of these impoverished households, the woman worked full time. Pay equity legislation has been one way of responding to these concerns, since it aims to increase pay for women in female-dominated jobs. In 1982 the Minnesota state legislature passed a bill mandating pay equity for its own employees; in 1984 it passed a second bill mandating pay equity for local government employees. Thus, comparable worth is currently being implemented in state and local government, including counties, cities, and school districts. For the state bill, a centralized wage negotiation process and the involvement of a strong union have ensured a consistent implementation, with substantial gains for women in female-dominated job categories. On the local level, the absence of these elements has resulted in a less consistent, less advantageous implementation of a bill that was framed in vague terms to begin with, because of certain political constraints.