how to delay redraw in gtk?

[atai ece ucsd edu (Andy Tai)]

Hi, in gtk, is there any way to disable the redraw of widgets for a short
period of time?   When a program is doing a lengthy change to
widgets, it would be good to delay the redraw until all changes are done.
For example, the "scrolled window" in testgtk will redraw after every button is
added or deleted. When you close the window, you can see that each button
disappears one by one, which is not an ideal behavior.

In short, I am looking for something like 

void QWidget::setUpdatesEnabled ( bool enable)

in Qt.

Thanks for any information.