The success of feminism and the success of antifeminism were antipathetic, bitter companions. Posing as reluctant political actors thrust out of the haven of the family by the urgent demands of the times, conservative women cast themselves as the saviors of motherhood and family, taking back the initiative from feckless, ungrateful, irresponsible daughters, whose heads had been turned by sex and wild ideas. While antifeminists did not succeed in some of their grander aims, they succeeded in many of their more modest ones, including radically limiting access to abortion and turning “feminist” into an epithet that few young women, whatever their aspirations, wanted to embrace. What was to be done?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GLOBAL FEMINISM
The Age of Reagan and Beyond
RONALD REAGAN’S PRESIDENCY gave the conservative movement an unprecedented power to redirect the nation. With the rightward turn affecting states and municipalities as well, feminist legislative and policy initiatives collapsed. Who truly spoke for the masses of women? Antifeminists now insisted they did, and many believed them.
One response was to retreat to those sanctuaries of art and culture that harbored feminist aims. Another was to reorient political ambitions to women’s movements abroad. Stymied at home, American feminists projected themselves onto a global stage. A flourishing international women’s movement seemed a venue that could use American energies and ideas. This expansion—both the spread of women’s rights ideology and American women’s faith that they could lend a hand throughout the world—was one result of institutional structures laid down by four great United Nations World Conferences on Women: meetings in Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985, and Beijing in 1995. The meetings brought together thousands and created international networks of reformers. By 1990, global feminism, heavily sponsored and underwritten by U.S. feminists and foundations, was from the American point of view a triumph in an otherwise vexed and clouded period. Americans, endowed with goodwill and strong convictions about the nature of women’s rights and wrongs, played a leading role in bringing this international lobby into being.
The idea of a cosmopolitan body of women whose loyalties to the sex transcended their national identities dated back to the International Woman Suffrage Association in the early twentieth century. That organization, though, was almost exclusively European and American before World War I. When it regrouped in the 1920s, scattered women from outside the West joined and energy rippled through the organization. Although little about the quality of international dealings can be gleaned from the cheerleading reports, it is clear that despite the infusions of heterogeneity, the Europeans and Americans remained firmly in command.1
The next time around in the 1980s, Americans were more aware of the pitfalls of Western domination. The changed demographics of the American movement helped, since feminists in international work could be African-American, Hispanic-American, or heir to any number of American immigrant identities—Korean, Mexican, Chinese, South Asian, or Caribbean. Americans strained to distance themselves from the older model of themselves as mothers and older sisters to the world’s women. A zealous adherence to cultural relativism took hold, with a concomitant reluctance to judge, assess, or criticize non-Western beliefs, including political ideologies. “Difference” was the watchword—described as cultural, racial, class, and/or ethnic (at this point, seldom did religious differences figure in feminist contemplations of the world situation).2
Difference was one way to grapple with the erosion of a universal project in the United States. As the women’s movement splintered along lines of race, sexuality, ethnicity, generation, and political priorities, Americans disavowed the unifying paradigms that came from faith in sisterhood. Metaphors of assortment reigned: Feminism was a patchwork quilt, a gumbo, a mosaic. Yet a yearning for universal Woman was secreted inside the ethic of difference. If the proper stance could be struck, if enough differences could be acknowledged, if merit could be found in enough points of view, then surely some sort of sisterhood, however tenuous, would emerge. The international conferences, gathered under the banner of the extravagant likeness of all women, furthered the hope.
Global feminism was a creature of globalization, a shorthand for the acceleration of capital and labor flows and neoliberal economic policies around the world, beginning in the 1980s. Investments, markets, and labor recruitment penetrated remote rural areas in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa, pulling poor people the world over into volatile markets. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 opened up Eastern Bloc countries and Central Asia to aggressive investment, creating jagged vectors of winners and losers and sending migrants across the world searching for work. Neoliberal economic policies issued by international banking and lending organizations restructured the economies of the Third World—promising rising levels of income for the masses, entrepreneurial opportunity, capital accumulation for local elites, and a steady decline in poverty in return for conditions favorable to foreign investors and stringency in government expenditures, including social services. Travel, immigration, Hollywood movies, brand names, and (once the Internet and cellphones arrived) a communications revolution increased the pace and frequency of interactions among people around the world.3
The term “global feminism” was coined in the age of Reagan, appearing in the title of a 1983 workshop in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on international “sexual slavery.”4 At the moment, sisterhood could not be found at home in the United States with women of the New Right. Nor, more troubling, could it always be found among the postfeminist young who in the 1980s began to publish articles criticizing their feminist predecessors as frumpy, sour has-beens. The perennial daughters of 1960s women’s liberation found themselves ignominiously pushed into the role of pleasure-denying mothers as they reached middle age, accused by the self-appointed spokeswomen for a new generation of being censorious about men, overcautious about sexual danger, negative and self-defeating about their prospects in the workplace, and lamentably closed to the joys of domestic life. “They tend to see women as a homogeneous sisterhood with the same political opinions and values, men as misogynistic predators, sexuality as a weakness, and real freedom as problematic,” wrote one of the carping daughters, Karen Lehrman, in The Lipstick Proviso (1997). One after another, a postfeminist pundit of the moment magnetized media attention with her neofeminine manifesto, extolling the ease with which she and her friends planned to have it all: meteroric success in the work world combined with domestic bliss, men’s devotedness, and great sex.5
But while relations on the home front were vexed, it was possible to project cherished ideas and goodwill on women farther afield, those whose travails seemingly made them receptive to a message of revolution inherited from the 1960s. Global feminism implicitly required participation from women of the Third World—or “the global South,” a new term. A meeting with Americans, Germans, and Dutch didn’t quite count as global unless delegates from, say, the Philippines or South Africa or Nicaragua were there. Global feminist optimism bounded around the world, in part sponsored by American universities, foundations, and church groups, who provided major funding for conferences, collaborations, university fellowships, student internships and exchanges, and visiting lecturers. Thus public health workers in Thailand read about their Ugandan and Brazilian colleagues’ successes fighting HIV transmission; reports on the horrors of sex trafficking traveled through circles of women from the United States to the Netherlands to Southeast Asia and back again; African lawyers took a year in England or America on a university fellowship reserved for a feminist from abroad; American filmmakers made documentaries about Filipino women’s groups. These contacts and the relationships that grew from them occurred within a feminist frame of connecting differences, which at heart was a hope that differences could be overridden.
For three decades, the U.N. conferences provided institutional coherence and durability. Six thousand participants met in Mexico City; the Nairob
i conference drew fifteen thousand; and the gargantuan meeting in Beijing capped off the series with some thirty thousand attending. Regional and topical meetings to assess progress punctuated the years between conferences: the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, in Cairo, for instance. The consequences were sweeping and pervasive. “Feminism is no longer viewed as relevant only to the industrialized nations of the North,” asserted Jo Freeman, an astute observer, after the meeting in Beijing. “In all but the most conservative of countries, the feminist message that women are people, not just wives and mothers, is taken seriously.” Feminism was not a unitary phenomenon, she hastened to add, but one riddled with differences: “not the same movement in every country” but rather coherent and sophisticated in some places, ragged and rudimentary in others.6
The Mexico City conference was staid, with official delegations dominating the proceedings, packed with wives of government officials. In contrast, the gatherings in Nairobi and Beijing were sprawling extravaganzas of nationalities, personalities, and nonofficial along with official groups. Outside the mammoth official sessions, there were discussions, soapbox oratory, socializing, and wandering through a bazaar of thousands of presentations. Delegates spoke of the exhilaration of working with so many women from so many places, the incredible learning, and the newfound understanding of commonalties. “A virtual city of female people,” exulted Robin Morgan about Beijing in Ms. magazine. She described a happy multicultural hodgepodge. “Turbans, caftans, sarongs, kente cloth, blue jeans. Workshops—on microcredit, caste, women’s studies, ‘comfort’ women, solar stoves, refugees, you name it. Round-the-clock networking.… First-timers, euphoric at the sheer numbers, finally feeling part of a vast global movement.”7
Two streams of women flowed into the meetings. One was an emerging class of experts, government officials, and bureaucrats devoted to pursuing and documenting women’s issues. After Mexico City, the U.N. began to require member states to file periodic reports on the status of women. Governments had to show a commitment to women’s affairs in health, employment, and education. These efforts varied widely in their success—sometimes they existed only on paper—but the government sector provided jobs and careers for a new group of female professionals. The demographics of international policy making changed, too, beginning with the United Nations, as contingents of women transformed parts of an institution notorious for its sexism, including sexual harassment and frankly discriminatory pay scales. The Decade of Women conferences bound U.N. agencies to furthering their goals, and programs that turned on women’s rights filtered through any number of bureaucracies in the vast, sprawling institution: the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Development Fund for Women
(UNIFEM), and the World Health Organization (WHO), for example. In 1977, two years after the Mexico City conference, the World Bank created an administrative section for development aid for women.8
There were many consequences, but one simple one was that for the first time, the world’s women were carefully counted. Comparative international statistics had always subsumed them under husbands’ or fathers’ households. But after 1975, international agencies began to count many things about women’s lives, including maternal mortality, life expectancy, fertility, years of education, agricultural productivity, literacy, employment, and marital status. It was these statistics, in fact, that allowed the economist Amartya Sen to uncover the astonishing fact that more than one hundred million women had gone missing. “These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women,” Sen concluded in 1990.9 Girls and women disappeared because of malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, childbed mortality, female infanticide, and, where sonograms were available, sex-selective abortion. It was a story that was not previously known.
The other stream that flowed into the international conferences came from proliferating women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): groups that worked for specific causes (seed cooperatives for women farmers, job training for ex-sex workers) or responded to dire situations (resettlement of refugees, medical treatment for rape victims of war). Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, NGOs gained in importance. In some places, they spurred civic activity where dictatorships and single-party rule had closed down dissent and social activism. In the many countries ruled by weak states or harsh regimes indifferent to the populace, they supplemented or substituted for government social functions by providing medical care, housing, schools, and road building.
International agencies, looking to avoid the pitfalls of imposing their own agendas on clients or dealing with corrupt states, found NGOs useful in mediating between local needs and funding. In 1993, the World Bank channeled half its funds through NGOs and in 1995, the year of the Beijing conference, more than a third of the bank’s funds went to gender concerns. Better known NGOs were magnets for international interest and contributions from individuals, states, development agencies, and foundations. The effects were visible in the makeup of the international conferences. At the Mexico City conference, delegates generally came from the official women’s wings of ruling parties. But at Beijing, NGO women held their own separate conference and played a major role in the general sessions.10
Feminist impact on poor countries came mainly through NGOs. Women the world over had little power or status in governments and party systems—this was as true in the United States as it was true, say, in Tanzania, Peru, and Thailand—but they proved to be adept organizers of NGOs. “In an unequal world, civil society participation often offers the best, sometimes the only, means by which women can make their voice heard,” judged a British enthusiast.11 When they worked well, NGOs gave women a bit of social power by pooling their scarce resources into cooperatives, encouraging group solidarities in the face of obstructions (for example, male relatives’ reprisals for individuals’ assertions of independence), and helping them make demands on obdurate state institutions. A good deal of the success came from the single-sex structure; participants spoke of working together, not having to defer to men, and gaining respect and power as a group that would have been otherwise inconceivable. “Just seeing that the national government officials came to see not the men of the village, but the women—made women seem like powerful people who can do things,” remarked Martha Nussbaum of a visit she made to a women’s cooperative in India.12
Governments that in 1970 paid little attention to women by the 1990s had incorporated mazes of women’s departments, funds, bureaus, and offices, with official and quasi-official functions overlapping with NGOs. There was an explosion of organizing outside women’s traditional sectors of charities, religious associations, and auxiliaries of ruling parties. The women’s movement in South Asia was among the world’s most robust, with roots going back to the nineteenth century, but the economist Bina Agarwal’s description of its interlaced groupings captures the dense heterogeneity that existed more sparsely elsewhere:
autonomous women’s groups that were formed in the 1980s in larger cities, some (especially in India and Bangladesh) also with rural links; women’s fronts of political parties, women’s committees in mass-based mixed-sex organizations (including working-class and poor peasant organizations); groups implementing various types of projects for women (income-generating, educational, health, etc.)… women’s journalistic and publishing ventures; academic women’s associations; and the thousands of individual women struggling for gender equality in diverse ways in diverse areas.13
Agarwal found much to applaud in the intricate weave of NGOs and feminist-inspired development projects in her study of women’s land rights in South Asia. NGOs were able to give women farmers credit when traditional lenders bypassed them, pool resources to purchase seeds and fertilizers, and encourage group solidarities in the face of difficulties and obstructions. NGOs were also more flexible than programmatic, top-down development projects in encouraging women to press for goals beyond the economic—for health and education, for ex
ample, and freedom from violent attacks from landlords and male relatives. Agarwal attributed a good deal of the success to the fact that NGOs were participatory and that paid staff and managers were female. Another analyst of women’s movements in India lends support to the judgment: While international forces usually provided the funding and urban middle-class women sometimes dominated women’s organizations, “it has often been the case that some of the most radical and important issues have been brought forward by the movements of poor women.”14
India, however, is a stable democracy with a women’s movement that is deeply rooted in political culture. Its NGOs were typically strong and self-directed, with considerable abilities to use international funding and still chart their own course. Ifi Amadiume’s description of the Nigerian women’s movement gives a different picture of contending groups within a multilayered women’s movement in a notoriously corrupt and violent state, striated with divisions between rich women and impoverished ones; women allied with elites and elite women allied with labor and socialist movements; women who didn’t want to rock the boat and women who believed that making waves was the only way to move forward. In Nigeria, the lion’s share of government largesse in the 1990s went to the wives of two successive dictators, who established women’s programs that funneled funds and patronage into the ruling circle and its clients. Maryam Abacha, wife of the infamous Sani Abacha, de facto president from 1993 to 1998, effectively controlled the Nigerian delegation to the Beijing conference and used her position as head of a foreign donor-funded immunization program to extend her influence and extortion capabilities further into government ministries.15
Thus the field of activity was made up of starkly varied political contexts. It ranged from countries with decent institutions of civil society where NGOs actually wielded power, to those where NGOs masked the near absence of women’s rights in any meaningful sense, to failed states where NGOs by default supplied basic human services and substituted for civil society. Western feminists’ enthusiasm for NGOs, however, overrode these distinctions. In reality, to assess the integrity or importance of any particular venture required sophistication and knowledge about the politics, divisions, and needs of particular countries. The view from global feminism, however, picked out continents and regions, not nations; “Africa” blurred together, as did “Southeast Asia.” Certain places stood out: Nicaragua (because of the war) and South Africa, for example—but mostly it was a blur.
The Feminist Promise Page 45