The Global Women's Movement

Origins, Issues and Strategies

Peggy Antrobus

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781842770177
• eBook ISBN: 9781848136939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The spread and consolidation of the women's movement in North and South over the past thirty years looks set to shape the course of social progress over the next generation. Peggy Antrobus draws on her long experience of feminist activism to set women's movements in their changing national and global context.

1 | Introduction

A book about a global women’s movement is, inevitably, controversial. The adjective ‘global’ itself appears to minimize cultural and contextual differences that are valued by women’s movements in different cultures and contexts, and indeed to disregard profound differences among women even within national boundaries. Realities of class, race, nationality, ethnicity, geographical location, age, sexual orientation, physical capacity, religion and political affiliation often lead to sharp divisions.

As someone involved in many of the processes that have led to the construction of this worldwide movement, and a witness to the ways in which it has changed since the 1970s, largely through the influence of Third World feminists and women of colour in North America, I am amazed to find that its image remains one of a movement associated with white, middle-class women from North America and Europe. I welcome this opportunity, therefore, to write about the process through which the movement has been transformed over forty years from a rich diversity of local movements into an international women’s movement and finally into a trans-national or global movement.

Now more than ever, I affirm the need for such a movement as we search urgently for paths through ‘our fragmented yet globally interdependent world’¹ to find the solutions to the many threats to human survival, well-being and security. The primary question that this book attempts to answer is this: is there a global women’s movement, and what might it contribute, through the overarching social movement for global justice, to finding alternative paths that would make ‘another world’ possible?

To answer that question I consider the origins of a movement formed out of many movements shaped in local struggles and brought together in the context of global opportunities and challenges. I reflect on the trajectory of the emerging movement as women discover commonalities and come to a better understanding of how the social relations of gender are implicated in the systemic crises that have contributed to persistent poverty, social exclusion and alienation, environmental deterioration and the spread of violence that threatens the well-being and security of the majority of the world’s people and the planet itself.

One of the problems with a book of this nature is the need to simplify complex issues and to reach conclusions about those that are still the subject of debate. As I complete the task I am more acutely aware of this and have to remind myself that no amount of extra time, or rewriting, can circumvent this problem.

While other books in this series deal in greater detail with the major socio-economic and political events of the past forty years,² it is important to remember both the different ways in which these events have impacted on women and the specific contribution that women’s perspectives have made to shaping the debates and agendas. Women’s experiences are therefore located within the broader context of these global trends and challenges.

Zed Books has also recently published a number of other titles related to the subject of women’s movements. Special mention must be made of two, Common Ground or Mutual Exclusion? Women’s Movements and International Relations, a collection of papers presented at a symposium of the same name, held at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 30 June–2 July 2000, edited by Marianne Braig and Sonja Wolte, and Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture and Development edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya Kurian (2003). These titles touch on many themes in my book, while their differences make them complementary. As a single-authored book, mine carries the flaws, or advantages, of subjectivity. It is also less academic and more personal, having been written by one who has also been a participant in the shaping of the global movement. In that sense, it lacks the depth and breadth of the other books, and I urge those who wish to get a fuller sense of the strengths and limitations of women’s movements at various levels and in different spaces to read these and many other books on the subject. I found them challenging and inspiring and I have engaged some of the issues they raise.

At the start of the 21st century we are witnessing a consolidation of economic, political and social power on an unprecedented scale. The values, institutional processes and motivational imperatives around materialistic individualism accompanying the explosion and concentration of capital are a threat to the well-being of the majority of the world’s peoples and cultures and to the ecological integrity of our planet. The war in Iraq has highlighted the extreme danger posed when processes of power consolidation are embodied in a single ideology-driven superpower that evokes in response an equally virulent and violent form of religious fundamentalism. The resulting conjuncture of relentless neo-liberalism, virulent religious and ideological fundamentalism, aggressive militarism and resurgent racism poses particular dangers for women and for people of colour worldwide, and calls for a clearer integration, in the work of the emerging social movement for global justice, of an analysis of the sexism and racism underlying these processes and forces.

The evolution of geo-political events over the last century can be tracked by the pattern of social movements that emerged to challenge the most extreme forms of capitalist exploitation, militarism, dictatorship, sexism and racism. Nationalist and often regional in character, these movements were cognisant of both the global histories of their local circumstances and of the global causes manifest in their related struggles. They include movements against colonialism, imperialism, dictatorship and racism; on behalf of labour; and movements for women’s liberation.

In the first half of the 20th century, independence, democracy and socialism offered visions of alternatives to colonialism, authoritarianism and capitalism around the world. The decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw the first glimmers of hope for postcolonial peoples, formalized in the promises of the UN Development Decades, North–South Dialogues and calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). In the past thirty years, since the collapse of the socialist alternative, new social movements are again emerging to challenge the excesses of unregulated capitalism.

Emerging out of the demonstrations that took place in Seattle around the Second Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in November 1999, and facilitated by advances in information and communications technologies, a social movement, initially named the ‘anti-globalization’ movement,³ has been gathering strength. The spread of neo-liberalism as expressed through the operations of the WTO and the international financial institutions (IFIs) was challenged wherever representatives of these organizations and those of the eight most powerful governments (the G-8)⁴ met in the years following Seattle.⁵ Since that time these groups have begun to consolidate around the World Social Forum (WSF), initiated in January 2001 by Brazilian and European NGOs to counter the World Economic Forum (WEF) that had been meeting annually in Davos, Switzerland, for over thirty years. The WSF, meeting for the first time outside Brazil,⁶ seems destined to be the coming together of social movements of the first decade of this new century. It is not a single movement but a ‘movement of movements’, an unprecedented alliance that has been growing around a diversity of issues over the past twenty years.

Catalysed by the UN conferences of the 1980s and 1990s, environmentalists, feminists and human rights activists have been joined by reinvigorated movements from the 1950s and 1960s – trade unionists, activists from the civil rights and peace movements, anarchists and liberation theologians. Following the collapse of the Marxist parties of the former Soviet Union and its socialist allies, these movements, many of them originating in leftist politics, have found new meaning in struggles for social justice around issues related to the political economy of neo-liberalism and corporate-led globalization. Uniting this diversity of agendas, politics and strategies is a common resistance to the spread of neo-liberalism, which privileges the interests of capital over the needs and aspirations of people, and is managed through the operations of the IFIs, the WTO and the UN.

At the World Social Forum, 2003, tens of thousands of participants, from over 150 countries and 5,000 organizations,⁷ offered an analysis that linked the difficulties surrounding WTO negotiations, the recession following the widespread failure of technology stocks in 2001, the bankruptcy and corruption of the Enron corporation,⁸ and the collapse of Argentina’s economy early in 2002, to the failure of neo-liberalism’s promise of growth and prosperity for all. They also saw how this related to the US war in Afghanistan and the ‘war against terrorism’, the profits that the arms and energy corporations were poised to make from these wars, and the suffering they would inflict on poor people. At the 2002 Forum, a campaign against fundamentalisms – ‘all of them’, economic and political no less than religious – organized by Latin American women’s movements, highlighted the ways in which women’s lives and livelihoods are jeopardized by the convergences between the different social, economic, political and cultural processes unleashed or exacerbated by neo-liberalism.

Latin American women’s movements are part of a worldwide women’s movement that has been building over the past twenty-five years. Nurtured and energized by the processes of the UN Decade for Women (1975–85) and emerging in the context of the UN global conferences of the 1990s, representatives of women’s activist networks from around the world have begun shaping a recognizable global women’s movement. Their analyses, perspectives, methods of organizing and strategizing, bring new dimensions to the processes of international negotiation on issues of socio-economic development, environment, human rights, population, poverty, trade and governance. As members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as through their own organizations, women are a dynamic part of the global civil society that confronts the challenges of corporate-led globalization today. Moreover, given the gender division of labour, these challenges speak to issues of special concern to women.

This book affirms the global women’s movement, its agendas and strategies and its potential for bringing new perspectives to the current global struggles for peace and social justice. In Chapter 2, I attempt a definition, and identify and analyse its origins in local movements that have arisen from specific national struggles around issues of citizenship, rights and participation. While women’s international activism undoubtedly preceded the First World War, I have chosen to place this book in the context of the UN Decade for Women and the period following, up to the current time (2004). I have used this framework not only because I lived this history, but because the framework allows us to see clearly how such a movement took shape both in terms of its geographical spread and its evolving theory and practice around issues that have become increasingly global.

Chapters 3 and 4 review the debates about socio-economic development in the context of the UN’s First and Second Development Decades of the 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 3) and the UN Decade for Women (Chapter 4).

In Chapter 4, I discuss the ways in which the UN Decade for Women created spaces that brought together women of diverse backgrounds. Women from traditional women’s organizations and grassroots organizations of all kinds, feminist-oriented groups, researchers and women involved in policy formulation and programme implementation, created a movement that can be described as ‘international’. The chapter shows how the designation by the UN of 1975 as International Women’s Year (IWY) galvanized a decade characterized by debates on equity and participation; how it prepared women to respond to the crises of the decade of the 1980s, and to participate in the larger arenas of the global conferences of the 1990s.

Chapter 5 focuses on the decade of the 1980s, the Decade of Adjustment, described by many Latin Americans as the ‘lost decade’. The dedication of a whole chapter to this decade indicates its significance for women’s movements in many countries of the South, and ultimately for women’s movements and social movements everywhere. Feminist analyses of the impact of the IMF-inspired structural adjustment policies that provided the policy framework during this decade, as well as women’s responses to the socio-economic and political crises provoked by their introduction, led to new insights as to the ways in which assumptions about gender roles were embedded in public policies. This in turn opened the way to new forms of organizing and analysis that were to place women in a position to bring new perspectives to the global debates of the 1990s.

Chapter 6 examines the emergence of a trans-national or global women’s movement in the context of the global conferences of the 1990s around issues of environment, human rights, population and poverty. It shows how the articulation of an analysis drawn from the experiences of the most marginalized women facilitated a shift from ‘women’s issues’ to women’s perspectives on a range of issues of concern to everyone. In addition to the differences among women, the discussion will show how the positions advanced by women differed from those of their governments and of male-dominated NGOs and social movements. The chapter will identify the ways in which the participation of this global women’s movement changed the terms and outcomes of global debates.

Chapter 7 looks critically at the political strategies and dynamics of women’s organizations and feminist activism over the period covered by this book, and reflects on the lessons learned.

Chapter 8 considers the challenges and dilemmas facing the global women’s movement in the 21st century.

Chapter 9 considers the kind of leadership needed for moving forward. The issue is, how might a global women’s movement strengthen and renew itself in order to contribute to finding ways out of this troubling conjuncture of forces that poses particular threats to the security of women and people of colour.

An Epilogue reflects on the implications for women’s movements of the experiences of Iraq and Haiti. It places the US-led war against Iraq in the context of the enduring sexism and racism that underlie the current crisis in human security, while arguing that Haiti teaches us the limitations of a movement that focuses on gender identity without considering the ways in which differences of class, power and race create deep divisions among women.

This book is part of Zed Books’ Global Issues Series. The reader may refer to other titles on the prevailing global system that, in the words of their descriptive material, is ‘unsustainable in environmental terms; unstable and inequitable in economic terms; and biased against development prospects for countries in the South’. The inclusion of a book on the global women’s movement in this series points to Zed’s understanding of the significance of this movement within a large process that seeks to assist a new generation of activists in their search for alternatives that will lead to a better world for all.

2 | The global women’s movement: definitions and local origins

The authors of this Kenya case study describe a process which is common to many of us as we are called on to consider the question of whether there is a women’s movement. This chapter attempts to answer the questions: Is there a global women’s movement? How can we understand such a movement? How can it be defined, and what are its characteristics? My conclusion is that there is a global women’s movement. It is different from other social movements and can be defined by diversity, its feminist politics and perspectives, its global reach and its methods of organizing.

Definitions

In her book, commissioned ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• A Brave New Series
• About this series
• About the author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Acknowledgements and biographical note
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The global women’s movement: definitions and local origins
• 3 Global contexts for an emerging movement: the UN Development Decades, 1960s–1970s
• 4 A Decade for Women: UN conferences, 1975–85
• 5 The Lost Decade – the 1980s
• 6 It’s about justice: feminist leadership making a difference on the world stage
• 7 Political strategies and dynamics of women’s organizing and feminist activism
• 8 The new context: challenges and dilemmas for the future
• 9 Leadership for moving forward
• 10 Epilogue: is another world possible?
• Bibliography
• Selected women’s networks and websites
• Appendices:
• Index
• Notes