The Umoja Federation: Women's Cooptation into a Local Power Structure

Abstract

Ir EJH ESE two statements reflect differing perceptions of a government| initiated mobilization of women and suggest organizational problems that emerged in Umoja,' a women's federation of the late colonial era in western Kenya. Organizations adapt to the surrounding environment, a process which has significant effects on organizational goal transformation, leadership strategies, and leader-member relations. The process by which subordinate groups are drawn into local power structures and the terms on which they are integrated are likely to vary according to the composition and size of the group. While studies of such processes abound with regard to racial, ethnic, or neighborhood communities, we have little information about their application to the category of women. Sexual subordination is a unique form of subordination one that involves half or more of a community and cuts across regional, class, and occupational boundaries. The universal subordination of women to men though varied across and within societies is the result of disparities in access to material resources, norms denigrating women, and the relegation of women to the private rather than the public sphere.2 Developing external support may be difficult for women advancing their interests as women,3 particularly if female gains are seen as male losses or as a threat to social institutions such as the family. Recorded history is predisposed toward documenting organizations that survive, perhaps accounting for the seeming absence of many organizations advancing women's interests. Women's organizations, particularly those achieving a certain degree of power, may foster reactions which make survival problematic or improbable. In the classic interest-group pattern, persons who share common interests become aware of and act on those interests, an idea based on the assumption that people are rational beings who act in self-interested ways.4 This classic perspective does not address the inequitable distribution of resources to act on common interests; subordinate groups have less access to education, contacts, money, and other resources which facilitate successful political action.5 It also neglects how subordinate groups internalize values