The Romani Women’s Movement

Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe

Angéla Kóczé, Violetta Zentai, Jelena Jovanović, Enikő Vincze, Angéla Kóczé, Violetta Zentai, Jelena Jovanović, Enikő Vincze

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138485099
• eBook ISBN: 9781351050371
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The lack of recognition of Romani gender politics in the wider Romani movement and the women's movements is accompanied by a scarcity of academic literature on Romani women's mobilization in wider social justice struggles and debates.

The Romani Women's Movement highlights the role that Romani women's politics plays in shaping equality related discourses, policies, and movements in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Presenting the diverse experiences and voices of Romani women activists, this volume reveals how they translate experiences of structural inequalities into political struggles by defining their own spaces of action; participating in formalized or less formal activist practices, and challenging the agendas and mechanisms of the established Romani and women's movements.

Moving discourses on and of Romani women from the periphery of scholarly exchanges to the mainstream, the volume invites scholars and activists from different disciplines and movements to critically reflect on their engagements with particular social justice agendas. It will appeal to students, researchers and practitioners interested in fields such as social movements, gender equality, and social and ethnic justice.

Part I

Social Categories and Agendas

Chapter 1

Missed Opportunity or Building Blocks of a Movement? History and Lessons from the Roma Women’s Initiative’s Efforts to Organize European Romani Women’s Activism

Debra Schultz and Nicoleta Bitu

Contexts

The Soviet Union’s fall, the transition to market economies, and democratic experiments in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s exacerbated hardships for Roma communities across the region. Long targets of discrimination in many countries across this vast, diverse region, Roma communities shared experiences of poverty, high unemployment rates, segregation and housing problems, discriminatory education, poor healthcare and health outcomes, as well as hostility and racist violence from their home countries.

Within this context, and inspired in part by Spanish Romani women’s activism, a few Central/Eastern European Romani women activists began to examine women’s experiences in the evolving Romani rights movement. They struggled to find their place in a movement that sought to end discrimination against Romani people while still preserving Romani culture and identities. Some of the tensions that arose from this effort led to increasing interest among Romani women activists to meet and start to define their own agendas.

This chapter documents and analyzes what happened when a core group of Romani women activists encountered the Open Society Institute (OSI)¹ Roma Initiatives in the 1990s, and particularly the Open Society Institute’s Network Women’s Program (NWP), founded in 1997. At that time, George Soros and his philanthropic network, the Open Society Institute, were among the main investors in developing the Romani rights movement, and particularly nurturing a cohort of young Roma leaders.

This chapter, written by Dr. Nicoleta Biţu, pioneering Romani women’s activist, and Dr. Debra Schultz, feminist historian and founding Director of Programs for the OSI Network Women’s Program, recounts and analyzes their collaboration in creating the Romani Women’s Initiative (RWI), an operational yet semi-autonomous project of the Network Women’s Program from 1999 to 2006. We posit the Roma Women’s Initiative as an unprecedented collaborative experiment in intersectional feminist practice that operated at local, national, and transnational levels.

The Romani Women’s Initiative articulated its mission as working to:

develop, link, and catalyze a core group of committed Romani women’s leaders – including many dynamic young women – in an effort to improve the human rights of Roma women in Central and Eastern Europe. The RWI connects Romani women from different countries and creates opportunities for them to map out the common challenges they face to begin resolving problems together. While respecting the role of Roma women as mediators between the demands of modern culture and traditional Romani values, the RWI asserts that Romani women’s rights are integral to a better future for all Romani people.

(Network Women’s Program 2005)

This mission statement articulates a set of finely-wrought Roma and feminist operating principles. One of the RWI’s core methods was to build Romani women’s leadership and to create opportunities for Roma women to define and pursue their own social change agendas. At the beginning of the RWI, there was no clearly defined social change agenda, but rather the need to create spaces and allow time for reflection on the position of Romani women activists and their potentials and roles to be played. After time for reflection, an agenda was shaped with a number of layers: the first layer was to capacitate and empower Romani women activists to address inequalities within both the Romani movement and feminist movements, and the second layer was to put questions related to Romani women’s needs on the political agendas at national and international levels. These layers were addressed while members of the network continued their work in Romani associations and communities at the local level.

For Debra Schultz, the principle of Romani women setting their own agendas arose from the US civil rights movement’s commitment to building grassroots African-American leadership. For Nicoleta Biţu and other Roma leaders, the concept of ‘nothing about us without us’, a slogan used at the beginning of the 1990s by the disability rights movement, and ‘Roma for Roma’, which appeared in the OSCE Action Plan for Roma and Sinti in 2003, were critical ideas. Another core operating principle was the collaboration of Romani and non-Romani women in supporting Romani women’s activism, always with the recognition that Romani women should lead. Fortunately, the Open Society Institute structured its network to value and prioritize local knowledge, though perhaps without realizing they were enacting feminist epistemology.

In the words of NWP-RWI consultant Azbija Memedova (Macedonia):

RWI was created and coordinated by a few Roma women activists who emerged from the Roma movement and have designed the very first narrow path for the Roma women’s movement, a path that is growing up together with the personal growth of Roma women activists in all countries. As an informal network of Roma women activists, RWI is building the Roma movement from the start and step by step. NWP provides financial, operational, and strategic support without seeking to influence the agendas Roma women create for themselves. This is one of the main unique elements of RWI.

(Network Women’s Program 2005)

Personal introductions

Nicoleta Biţu

Not many people know that my first reflection on the condition of Romani women dates back to 1993, when I wrote an essay for my faculty on the roles of Romani women in post-conflict situations, making reference to the interethnic conflicts in Romania. Those conflicts and my mentoring by Nicolae Gheorghe – one of the founders and visionaries of the Romani movement as well as later on my late husband – shaped me as an activist since 1991. Just for the sake of clarity: I didn’t know what a feminist was but I have acted as one since I was a teenager.

In 1998, while already involved in the Romani movement in Romania and in Europe, I was invited by the Roma Participation Program – led in that period by Rudko Kawchynski – to attend a conference of Romani women. It was the first time I experienced a space organized mostly by men (Jud Nirenberg, István Forgács, Sejdo Jasarov, and Bernard Rorke), but the women had the floor; the men only served as translators. That is where I met other Romani women, particularly the ones with whom I established the Romani Women’s Initiative: Azbija Memedova, as well as our partner, Debra Schultz. I met Enisa Eminova a few years later. At that time, Azbija Memedova was a leader of the Roma Center of Skopje, a local non-profit organization that aimed to integrate the Roma community into Macedonian society, with a focus on Romani women and youth. Among the young women activists she worked with was Enisa Eminova. Azbija served as a consultant to the RWI for five years, as a board member of the European Roma Rights Center, and since 2005, has worked as the Macedonia representative for the Pestalozzi Children’s Foundation. Enisa Eminova also served as a regional consultant to the RWI for five years and then went on to work with vulnerable populations such as street children, refugees, and women and children living in slum-like conditions for over a decade.

I am wondering even now if my contribution to that meeting was a wise one. I questioned the preconceived idea of setting up an international Romani women’s organization without more discussion and debate. I was one of the critical thinking voices and proposed to work in an informal network, to foster a process first, and afterwards to establish an organization. Having already been involved in the European Romani mobilization (since 1993), as a passive participant rather than as a direct actor, I had witnessed the way the international Roma associations such as the International Romani Union and the Roma National Congress had functioned. For many years, even now, as I write this piece, I still see the organizations across our region centered on one leading figure and not on the process among the members. So, in these conditions, even at that time, I wanted to create a group of Romani women activists which, eventually, would take the responsibility together, equally, for establishing, if needed, an international organization.

But the main reason behind all this was that I didn’t envisage a separation of the Romani movement into men and women through organizations, my vision was to seek an equal place at decision-making tables across the Romani movement for women and other discriminated groups within, such as LGBT. Therefore, we decided to create a network and start working together to create resources to address also the multiple roles we played in our daily life.

I was invited, along with Lilyana Kovatcheva (of Bulgaria), by Debra Schultz to New York to visit the Network Women’s Program. It was my first encounter with feminists and with feminist books. After long discussions where I expressed my questions, fears, and confusions I received one of the gifts that changed my life: a box full of feminist books from Debra. Those books have somehow shed light, but not completely, on the situations I had lived or seen.

Until I discovered the book! The book that succeeded in pointing out the things I couldn’t explain in the case of Roma. This book was by bell hooks, her famous Ain’t I a Woman. It was the book that we (Nicolae and I) shared during one holiday we spent in Czarna Gora in Poland with Andrzej Mirga’s family. That was the key to understanding our history and the position of Romani women.

I came to discover and make friends with Azbija, Enisa, and Debra. As Roma women, Azbija’s and Enisa’s partnership has always positively challenged me. We related to each other in a feminist way, personal but also political. Our personal stories of racism and sexism created bonds across our ethnicities or citizenship, but always keeping up with the responsibility we had taken (which we were not invested with) to empower other Romani women. We created an open space for other women too – a space where we could share our problems but also work together.

The way Debra and her colleagues worked with us by respecting fully the roles we have played in our lives was a lesson for me, a lesson I have tried to apply with my women colleagues.

The sections that follow underline exactly the contribution the Romani Women’s Initiative made to the advancement of the Romani women’s agenda and leadership, but also to the role it played in connecting the feminist worlds and Romani worlds at the same time.

Debra Schultz

When I attended my first regional Roma women’s conference in 1998 at the dingy Hotel Astoria in Budapest’s former Jewish ghetto (now a hipster neighborhood), the Open Society Institute’s Network Women’s Program was barely a year old. As its Director of Programs, I worked collaboratively to create a regional women’s program dictated by the knowledge, needs, and priorities of women from the 28 post-Soviet countries in Central and Eastern Europe with which the Soros Foundation/Open Society Institute was then engaged. This was not an easy process, to say the least, but it was both challenging and exciting.

However, when I listened to the incredibly strong and clear women in the Hotel Astoria that day, I felt like I had come home. Things began to make sense and a burning sense of mission emerged.

As a well-educated, relatively privileged American whose country had until recently been the Cold War enemy of the post-Soviet women with whom we were trying to exchange feminist ideas and institutionalize women’s rights programs, there were many sensitivities. Organizations like the Network of East West Women (NEWW), founded in Dubrovnik in 1991, had already started the conversation, seeking to bridge these gaps. Although the feminists of NEWW were aware of and individually supportive of Roma rights and Roma women activists, there was no strategic discussion of Roma women’s issues. When I visited the Moscow Center for Gender Studies soon after its founding in 1990 (on my first trip to the region), I recognized the enormous cultural, political, and epistemological divides between western and post-Soviet women who may or may not have considered themselves feminists (Posadskaya 1994). Therefore it is not surprising that it took some time to develop the intersectional feminist thinking required to address Romani women’s issues in gender studies or strategic activist agendas.

After the OSI Network Women’s Program was founded, I observed that when I was with Roma women, I could just relax and be my multicultural feminist, Holocaust-obsessed American Jewish self. I did not have to contort myself intellectually, politically, or emotionally to make my key concept – anti-racist feminist intersectional analysis – central to my work.

I had already been deeply influenced in college by US Black feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, and in graduate school by Critical Race Theory and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. I had worked for six years as Assistant Director of the National Council for Research on Women, a consortium of 75 research centers on women around the US. Despite good intentions and the constant efforts of Black feminist scholar/institution-builder Beverly Guy-Sheftall of Spelman College, the organization was undeniably white. The inability of well-intentioned feminist institutions to grapple fully with racial inclusion bothered me so much that I left to get a doctorate and to explore my own relationship to race and history. That led to a dissertation that eventually became my book, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (Schultz 2001). These experiences and intellectual explorations were immediately relevant resources to draw upon when I first encountered Roma women activists and began to think as a feminist and funder about how to strategically support them.

I have written elsewhere about what an honor it was to be invited to be an observer/ally at that 1998 conference of Roma women, sponsored by OSI’s Roma Participation Program, sitting in a tightly-packed meeting room with 30 Roma women activists (Schultz 2012, 37–43). The diversity of those women from Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Croatia immediately communicated a message that precluded any impulse to ‘essentialize’ Romani women. They differed in so many ways: appearance, language, self-presentation, cultural commitments, political ideas, and priorities for the Roma rights movement and Roma women’s activism. What they had in common was abundant energy, enthusiasm, and excellent analyses. At that meeting, I met two of my three future co-conspirators in developing the Romani Women’s Initiative: Azbija Memedova of Macedonia and Nicoleta Biţu of Romania.

My collaboration with Nicoleta, Azbija, and Enisa was both congenial and quite productive. What made that possible? I am extremely skeptical of essentializing a term like ‘feminist sisterhood’ and attributing the successful collaboration of Roma and non-Roma women to it. There have been far too many instances of unsisterly feminist behavior to leave such a term unquestioned. However, the ideas of conscious feminist collaboration and cross-racial solidarity seem both more accurate and more self-reflexive. That is what we sought to practice.

Feminist anti-racist theory often discusses white privilege and the attendant responsibilities of allies. OSI at that time was a complex institution that both empowered and marginalized Roma activists and feminists. Sometimes I could use my privileged status as ‘an insider’ to advocate for Roma women and Roma women’s issues. At other times, we had to accept limits. In trying to calibrate my role, I drew inspiration from white women in the civil rights movement who said they learned when to step aside and, in the words of several of my interviewees, ‘when to shut up’. For them and for me, this was not about self-abnegation but about the shared goal of enabling a group of emerging activists to lead. Did this always work perfectly? Not at all, since I sometimes had to fulfill internal bureaucratic requirements without the input of my Roma women colleagues. Nonetheless, there was a remarkable level of honest communication among us that allowed us to move past these stumbling blocks.

A brief history of the Roma Women’s Initiative

Self-reflexivity is a hallmark of feminist theory and knowledge-creation. The fact that the co-authors of this article were actors and have a vested interest in the story that is about to be told of the RWI may suggest possible bias. However, we hope that this will be balanced by the intimate insights we have as participants and leaders in this complex endeavor. It is important to document and discuss what we genuinely feel was a strategic effort to lay the foundation for regional Romani women’s activism. We had many debates about language – should we call this feminist? Many Roma women would object, including one of our leaders at the time, Azbija Memedova. Are we t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Romani Feminist Critique and Gender Politics
• PART I: Social Categories and Agendas
• PART II: Linking the Personal and the Political
• PART III: Transnational Inspirations
• Index