by Kevin Reilly
Scientific ways of thinking and their technological applications represented a worldview—in some ways a new religion—that appealed to many people around the world. Such ideas bore the prestige of modernity and were widely assumed to lay behind the extraordinary success of European, American, and Japanese development. Antibiotics, high-yielding seeds, nuclear energy, the Internet, and advanced industrial techniques all became highly sought after everywhere, losing almost completely their identification with the places where they originated. International scientific meetings and publications proliferated, creating a world culture whose highly skilled practitioners viewed the world in quite similar ways, even if their political commitments differed sharply. All these people had to confront the relationship between their traditional cultures and religions and this newer scientific understanding of the world. Some African doctors, for example, sought to find common ground with traditional “medicine men,” while others fiercely battled the “tyranny of superstition” that they found in the continent’s “witch doctors.”
Nor was cultural globalization always a one-way street. Islam came to have a place in black American culture and continued to grow rapidly in Africa, often in competition with Christianity. Buddhist meditation practices and retreat centers appealed to growing numbers of people in the West who were seeking a spiritual practice that they found lacking in mainstream Christian or Jewish culture. Restaurants featuring menus from Mexico, Thailand, India, China, and Ethiopia appeared around the world. West African rhythms found a place in American and British popular music and from there became an important element of world music. Widespread immigration from North Africa to France, from South Asia and the West Indies to Britain, and from Asia and Latin America to the United States enriched the cultures of the Western world even while generating new tensions.
Global Feminism
Among the most remarkable cultural developments of the past century were dramatic changes in the lives and the consciousness of women and in thinking about the role of women. Many millions of women all around the world joined the paid workforce; became literate; took part in communist revolutions, anticolonial movements, and democratic politics; achieved a new level of awareness about women’s long subordination to men; and determined to do something about it. These changes, although highly uneven, incomplete, and frequently challenged, represent one of the most genuinely revolutionary dimensions of contemporary world history. They derived from a number of sources. Modern means of communication disseminated both Western and communist ideas about gender relations and the roles of women. So too did mass migration—from Europe to the Americas and from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to Europe and the United States more recently. Economic development and war drew women into new productive roles, such as working in munitions factories, and the spread of education afforded new opportunities and ideas to many. Novel and more widely available means of contraception—especially the birth control pill—opened new possibilities for sexual expression and separated it from reproduction, particularly for women in the West. The stimulus of other liberation movements—civil rights, antiwar, nationalist, and socialist—prompted women to act on their own issues. These deliberate efforts to address ancient inequalities between the sexes occurred on a far wider scale than the modest feminist movements of nineteenth-century Europe and America. The message of women’s liberation, offered in many and conflicting variations, touched both on public life and on the most intimate private relationships of human society.
Communism and Women . It may surprise some to learn that the communists were actually in the forefront of the women’s liberation movement of the past century. The Soviet Bolsheviks thought of women in terms of a few core ideas drawn from Marxist socialism: marriage should be a “free union” between consenting adults, woman attained freedom through work, housework should be socialized, and the family was an oppressive institution that would wither away. No sooner had the communists come to power in Russia than they issued a series of laws and decrees attempting to realize some of these goals. Women were to be equal to men in every legal way. They could vote and run for office. Women could marry and divorce at will. If married, they did not have to take the name of their husband. Abortion was legalized. More important, women were to be educated and drawn into the military and industrial workforce along with men.
But the idealism of the early years darkened under the shadow of civil war and economic collapse. Faced with declining population and social unrest, Stalin reset the country’s priorities in the 1930s. A New Economic Policy returned some elements of capitalism. The state again favored the patriarch in property and alimony disputes. The marriage law of 1936 reversed some of the provisions of the earlier laws of 1918 and 1926. Divorce became more difficult. Abortion was no longer legal. Women were expected to maintain the home and raise children without the support of their husbands or state social agencies.
The Chinese communist effort to emancipate women paralleled the Soviet. But with a Confucian patriarchal culture to overcome, the Chinese experiment is more astonishing. Marriage reform was one of the first priorities of the Chinese communists when they came to power in 1949. The Marriage Law of 1950 ended a number of what the communists saw as abuses of patriarchal society. Among these abuses were concubinage (by which men took secondary wives), child marriage, prohibited widow remarriage, and the unequal treatment of women regarding property and divorce. From 1950, women were to be equal to men legally and politically. After all, Mao Zedong said, “women hold up half the sky.”
In fact, male resistance to women’s equality proved to be as tough in China as it was in the Soviet Union. Except for Mao’s wife, few women in China played any role in politics or government. As in the Soviet Union and much of the rest of the world, Chinese girls and women entered the workforce in vast numbers, but they were still expected to carry out housework and child rearing without the assistance of men.
Western Feminism . In contrast to the communist world, where the initiative for women’s liberation came from party or state authorities, in the Western industrialized countries it bubbled up from a growing popular movement. This “second wave” of Western feminism exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, stimulated in part by the tension between a growing number of women in the workforce and prevailing cultural values urging them to stay at home. The women’s movement found expression in many ways. Books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and widely read magazines such as Ms in the United States and Emma in Germany popularized feminist ideas. None were more influential than Betty Friedan’s best-selling The Feminine Mystique, which laid the emotional and intellectual foundation for modern feminism, at least in the United States. “The problem,” she wrote,
lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”19
Organizations devoted to women’s issues proliferated, ranging from local “consciousness-raising” groups to national bodies such as the National Organization for Women in the United States. Throughout North America and western Europe, feminists insistently raised issues about discrimination in employment and education, the legalization of abortion, violence against women, sexual harassment, lesbianism, equality in marriage, and much more. They also drew from and brought a feminist perspective to other social protests, such as civil rights, peace, and environmental movements.
Sometimes feminists operated within existing political parties and legislatures and at other times outside established channels in public demonstrations and street protests. In 1968, some American feminists provocatively challenged established values when they c
rowned a sheep as Miss America and disposed of bras, girdles, and false eyelashes in a “freedom trashcan.” A few years later, French feminists laid a wreath to the “unknown wife of an unknown soldier” at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris while observing that “one man out of every two is a woman.”20 Such actions triggered a sharp backlash among those who felt that traditional family values and gender roles—and perhaps civilization itself—were under attack. The defeat of efforts by American feminists to include an equal rights amendment in the Constitution reflected this backlash.
Despite this opposition and much debate and controversy within feminist circles, the women’s movement stimulated substantial change in Western life. Legislation to end harassment and discrimination on the basis of sex and to legalize abortion was enacted in many countries. Opportunities for women in higher education, the professions, and economic life generally broadened considerably. Shelters for abused women and rape crisis centers sprang up. Feminist perspectives penetrated academic life and scholarly research, and women’s studies curricula surfaced in many universities. In personal life, millions of couples negotiated their marriages and raised their children differently because of the women’s movement. Clearly sexual inequality persisted in the workplace, in political life, and in daily interactions among men and women. But a remarkable and quite widespread transformation of consciousness took place in the West during the past century, and the bundle of ideas that earlier defined women’s proper sphere as domestic and subordinate had been sharply challenged.
Women’s Movements in the Third World . Women’s movements took shape as well in developing countries. But there they often enjoyed neither the state support that pushed a feminist agenda in the communist nations nor the relatively widespread popular support that Western feminists experienced in the 1960s and after. Their movements were much smaller and more elitist than those in North America and Europe. Furthermore, Third World feminists had to confront the charge that their ideas were imported from the West and were therefore illegitimate or at least tainted by association with European or American imperialism. While Western feminists could focus sharply on matters of gender inequality, those in the developing world could hardly escape matters of class, poverty, and the inequities of the world economy, for these issues clearly and directly affected women’s lives. To some Third World feminists, Western concerns about nonsexist language, sexual freedom, and harassment at work seemed almost trivial compared to the daily struggles for survival endured by women in their countries.
Despite these obstacles, women in developing countries organized in various ways to address a wide range of concerns. Early in the century, it was issues of suffrage in Latin America and independence from colonial rule in Asia and Africa that drew women into political activism. Later, in many Third World countries, such as India, Nigeria, and Brazil, small groups of educated middle-class women in major cities organized marches, demonstrations, and conferences to highlight issues of violence against women, exploitation of female labor, health care, and education. In the early 1990s, such an organization in Morocco collected a million signatures on a petition to reform family law to ensure greater equality and protection for women. In Latin America and Africa, these groups were often associated with larger national movements pushing democratic reform. In Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere, mothers and grandmothers mobilized highly visible efforts to find relatives who had “disappeared” as a result of internal political repression. At the same time, local groups of lower-class women, sometimes rejecting any identification with feminism, organized around various practical economic issues, such as child care, high prices for food, wife beating, and union organizing.
Feminism on a Global Scale . By the final quarter of the twentieth century, feminism or the women’s movement had clearly become an international phenomenon. A series of UNsponsored conferences in Mexico, Denmark, Kenya, Egypt, and China brought women officials and activists together from around the world. There, they confronted a series of contentious issues: controversies between Western and Third World feminists; debates about abortion, homosexuality, and reproductive rights between conservative Islamic or Catholic countries and representatives of more secular nations; and differences between official women’s groups and sometimes more radical nongovernmental organizations.
While dramatic or sweeping change in the condition of women’s lives occurred nowhere, these conferences registered a remarkable change in global values. Gender equality had become an international norm and one element of political legitimacy throughout the world. Furthermore, women’s perspectives came to inform other major international issues.21 Women’s rights, for example, were now viewed as human rights, making coercion, discrimination, and violence against women subject to international condemnation. Education and employment opportunities for women were now viewed as essential for population control, as they clearly induced lower birthrates. Development planning increasingly focused special attention on the needs of women, particularly in the rural areas, where they often controlled domestic food production.
All this created opposition, sometimes violent. Even governments committed to women’s rights were reluctant to make the sustained effort necessary to implement the agreements they signed. The Vatican led a coalition of conservative Catholic and Islamic governments to oppose international agreements on abortion, homosexuality, and reproductive rights, arguing that they threatened national and religious traditions. But like democracy and human rights generally, ideas about gender equality had lost some of their sharp identification with the West and became increasingly recognized as universal values.
Conclusion: Coming Together
and Growing Apart
Patterns of historical development always seem clearer in retrospect than they do to participants at the time. So it is especially difficult to sum up the past century, for so much of our understanding of the past depends on what happens next—which, of course, is unknowable. This is particularly the case when we confront what is perhaps the grand issue of the century, the one question that brings together the separate stories told in this chapter and the previous one. It is the tension between global connections and global fragmentation. Has the human community been coming together or pulling apart in the past century?
On the one hand, the multiple processes of globalization continued earlier patterns and led toward an ever more densely connected world and converging human societies. Major elements of Western culture have spread around the world, while aspects of Asian culture—such as Buddhist religious practice, Chinese restaurants, and martial arts—have penetrated Western life. The sovereign nationstate has become the almost universal form of human political organization and loyalty. Market economies have triumphed over command economies throughout the world. People everywhere have sought the benefits of industrialization and aspired toward greater social equality. The internationalization of capital, transportation, and communication networks, especially in the past half century, linked human societies together as never before. More and more people have come to understand the world as a single sphere where human and geographical divisions have ever less significance. This perception of global unity has taken strength from those remarkable pictures of a borderless Earth viewed from outer space and from the sure knowledge that pollution, global warming, epidemics, and nuclear war alike respect no boundaries and carry a profound threat to humankind as a whole.
But as the global network tightened, the past century witnessed the flourishing of new divisions, inequalities, and conflicts. The world wars, by far the most widespread and destructive conflicts in human experience, together with the Great Depression, demonstrated with a vengeance that steady progress toward an integrated world system was by no means inevitable. The disintegration of Europe’s global empires created more than 100 new nations and spawned enduring conflicts such as those between Israelis and Arabs and India and Pakistan. The deep rift between the communist world and major capitalist states, as well as the North-South divide of t
he rich and poor nations, have structured global conflict for much of the century. The cultural assertions articulated by various “fundamentalisms”—Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim—together with countless ethnic or separatist movements have divided the human community in new and more sharply defined ways. Murderous hatreds and genocidal regimes have punctuated and disfigured the century in the Ottoman Empire, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. The breakdown of government and reappearance of almost stateless societies in places like Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan have unleashed forces that threaten the stable and satisfied. The tension between these integrative and disintegrative dimensions of the modern world constitutes perhaps the most compelling issue of recent global history and the most pressing problem of the world to come.
For much of our human journey, we could go somewhere else. When conflicts arose or alternatives beckoned, our ancestors could pick up and start over. Fortunately, in their travels, they learned the value of learning from others. The advantages of cooperation, of living and working together, grew more obvious as they did it. Our journey has now taken us everywhere we can go. If we are to continue, we must do it together.