Human rights language broadened feminism’s abilities to think beyond the Western situation, filling up universal claims with concrete details, such as what a reliable supply of sanitary napkins could mean. Feminists in international health campaigns moved from contraception and abortion to a concern with the health and sexuality of both sexes, as HIV/AIDS, initially seen as an epidemic among gay men, widened into a pandemic. In the 1990s, the number of affected women skyrocketed: By 2000 they constituted more than 50 percent of cases in sub-Saharan Africa. The feminization of the epidemic demanded a reorientation of treatment and prevention programs to women, children, and adolescents. Health professionals and advocacy groups pressed knowledge about the gender-specific patterns of AIDS on experts and a public who were slow to grasp the changing realities. They changed prevention and treatment programs by calling attention to the practices of sexual subordination that made women so vulnerable: for instance, men’s assumptions that having sex without condoms was a marital right. In Brazil, a great success story of the 1990s, women’s groups and gay rights organizations influenced the government to provide free drugs and universal treatment, cutting the infection rate in half.65
In short, this was a feminism that learned to speak about men as subjects and beneficiaries and about women in relation to men. Like women in development work, feminists in the reproductive rights movement found that a model that assumed a unity of interests between men and women was useless, but so was one that assumed their total separation or violent antagonism.66 Policy makers could not improve the general welfare without improving the lives of women, the argument went, but women’s needs could not be addressed as separate, either, from those of men and children. The uses of body politics were elastic, connecting women to AIDS sufferers, husbands, sons, and lovers—rather than cordoning them off as an interest group of victims, women-without-men. A special issue of a journal about reproductive health worldwide tackled the subject of men, but not with the usual litany of accusations and dark revelations about violence. There were a few articles on domestic abuse, but others showed an inquisitive spirit: essays from Sweden on fatherhood, Nigeria on men’s and women’s perceptions of reproductive disease, China on improving condom use, Kenya on improving vasectomy services, and “Making Space for Young Men in Family Planning Clinics.”67
The broad understanding of women’s reproductive health made headway in powerful circles. A turning point was the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, where feminist delegates from around the world managed to convince demographers, population control experts, and environmentalists to change their goals from lowering birthrates by any means to providing a full range of health services—including maternity care as well as contraception—for women, men, and adolescents. At Cairo, principles of women’s bodily integrity conjoined with pro-poor development strategies to sideline the Malthusian goal of population reduction as the cure-all for the developing world’s ills. Women’s advocates at Cairo pushed not the sturdy American mantra of a woman’s right to choose, but rather a view of body politics as a basis for all human engagements. “Health, wellness and sexual pleasure” were present “not as individualistic concerns, but as inseparable from women’s full and equal participation in all aspects of social life.” The sexual pleasure angle was remarkable, given the fact that the main body of delegates were men from development agencies such as the World Bank and environmentalists concerned about overpopulation. “Reproductive and sexual rights are inseparable from a broader framework of enabling conditions,” explained Rhonda Copelon and Rosalind Petchesky, long active in the American reproductive rights movement, describing the results of the Cairo meeting.68
The program worked out at Cairo was far from ideal—while pleased, feminist participants noted the tendency of population planners simply to make feminist principles an instrument to achieve population reduction more effectively. As for the latter, they muttered about “extremist feminist groups” hijacking the proceedings.69 The idea of aiming for human well-being was strange and, for some, off-putting. The headway that feminists made in the preliminary sessions alarmed the Vatican. Before the meeting, Pope John Paul II personally wrote heads of state, including a reproachful message to President Clinton suggesting that the United States was trying to impose abortion and individualistic, antifamily, materialistic ethics onto the world’s poor. Clinton stood his ground. The threat of a worldwide movement for legal abortion moved the Holy See to look to Islamic regimes, reaching out to Libya and Iran. Sudan and Saudi Arabia withdrew from the proceedings, with Sudan claiming the conference was a front for the West to limit population growth in the Muslim world. Among those who remained, the Holy See led a successful effort to block a clear statement about women’s right to abortion.70
In the end, the Vatican could not muster a solid bloc of Catholic states to stand behind it at Cairo—Mexico, Brazil, and even conservative Poland held back.71 The coalition with the Islamic right, while shaky at first, resurfaced in Beijing, where the Vatican marched into the conference determined to roll back the merger of women’s reproductive health with the needs of the poor. It was a purely opportunist alliance of strange bedfellows, since in general suppressing birth control was not on the agenda of Islamic states. While fundamentalist parties and regimes were intent on their own campaigns to suppress women, most did not oppose contraception and abortion; indeed, Iran, with a large population to support and an economy weakened by the Iran-Iraq War, had instituted a family planning program. At the Beijing conference, supporters of reproductive health partially outmaneuvered the Vatican’s alliance with Iran, Sudan, Libya, Egypt, and Kuwait, by winning support from some Catholic countries and adding strong voices from Africa. The conference platform affirmed the importance of bodily integrity to all the world’s women. It was the best of body politics, writ large.72
In the 1990s, veterans of global feminist meetings believed that feminists had arrived as players on the world stage. Substantively in the case of the reproductive health lobby, dubiously in that of the violence-against-women movement, writers and activists saw women’s involvement in world affairs as growing and efficacious. Reports from that decade are packed with celebrations of resolutions passed and new agencies created. The acronyms swarm, as bureaucracies and NGOs for women reproduced. Yet we can ask, did it matter? And how much?
There was an unfortunate conjuncture of feminist claims to influence in world affairs with the shattering of the postwar international order. In the global arena, feminists gained power and prestige in some parts of the United Nations as overall the power and prestige of many of its agencies—and certainly the General Assembly—slumped and, after 2000, the administration of George W. Bush did its best to marginalize it.73 Women made it into human rights declarations at a time when atrocities, genocide, torture, and mass anguish dominated world events. The Bush administration wreaked havoc on reproductive health worldwide when the president, in one of his first acts in office, restored the global gag rule, which had been rescinded by President Clinton in 1993. It made U.S. family planning funds for programs abroad contingent on refraining from providing or discussing abortions.74
Although feminist institutions were ubiquitous, their rise coincided with the spread of failed and authoritarian states: through corruption, the devastations of war, and economic disaster. Throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, states were increasingly less willing and able to guarantee security and social resources to their citizens. “Private time and money are constantly filling in for government refusals to protect its citizens from ill health or poverty or old age,” observed Ann Snitow, an American whose commitments took her to women’s groups in Eastern Europe.75 Small, weak NGOs tried to compensate for and ameliorate the confusion and anguish generated by crashing state structures.
Feminist NGOs abroad could sometimes respond to local women’s needs in the absence of government services, but they could also be driven by the preoccupations of donor nations
—for example, sexual violence. High-profile issues such as trafficking in women drew money and support, but issues that were chronic, mundane, and low-intervention (for instance, the dearth of sanitary napkins and toilets, or the need for running water) had a much harder time getting donors’ attention. The vogue for microfinance obscured the fact that women’s access to lenders and aid could not substitute for state-sponsored health care, electrification, sewage programs, and irrigation. Women might get microfinance loans to sell food at local markets, but if roads were washed out or bandits patrolled them, they could not get there. Snitow’s colleagues in Poland and Hungary asked why it was so easy to get money for antiprostitution and antitrafficking work but so difficult to drum up outrage in the West about the unregulated flows of capital and labor, in which “women make choices under terrible new economic pressures.”76
The limitations of global feminism were evident in the months after 9/11, when the United States invaded Afghanistan. The country harbored training camps for Al Qaeda, and terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was rumored to be there, but the broader U.S. goal was to oust the Taliban regime that harbored him. Afghanistan was a place of tragedy, a battleground for a Soviet-American proxy war for twenty-five years, riven by warlord factions ever since and inundated with arms. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were in exile, including most of the professional middle class. Before 1979, the year the Soviets invaded and the war began, Afghanistan was a multiethnic society divided between city dwellers and highly local peasants. The elite was tiny and the number of employed women minuscule—in 1979 only about 150,000 women in a country of 20 million had jobs. Nonetheless, in Kabul, a city that was a historic crossroads of trade and migration, women wore miniskirts in the streets and the country had one of the highest proportions of women physicians in the Middle East.77
After the Afghans drove out the Soviet invaders in 1989, warlords plunged into a fierce struggle for power. The Taliban was one faction, backed by the United States because it was anti-Iranian as well as anti-Soviet. The Taliban were religious extremists tied to a fanatical interpretation of Islam that made the suppression of women’s liberties the central pillar of the program. Heavily composed of young men from the rural south who had grown up in exile in Pakistan attending all-male religious schools, the Taliban despised the cities for moral laxity and rampant infidelism, summed up in the liberties taken by the women who lived in them. In 1996 they welcomed back bin Laden, who had a long association with militant extremists in the rugged border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
When the Taliban marched into Kabul in 1996 and took power, they cracked down brutally on women’s employment, dress, and freedoms. Edicts forbade women from wearing Western clothes or veiling lightly with headscarves. The burqah, the dress of conservative rural women, was mandatory.78 A kind of shroud with a slit covered by latticework for the eyes, the burqah caused headaches and dizziness and made women vulnerable to traffic accidents because they lost peripheral vision. Children could not recognize their mothers if they got separated from them on the streets. The Taliban proscribed female work outside the home, closed girls’ schools, and shut down public baths for women. Morals squads roamed the streets with whips, ready to set upon women for wearing sandals or violating the prohibition against appearing in public without a male family member—a terrible burden for the legion of war widows who could not set foot outside their households to search for food or work because they had no male relative nearby.
Afghanistan, and especially Kabul, was ground zero for women, a place where fanaticism that was subject to restraint elsewhere took off unbridled. Nonetheless, until 1998 Washington supported the Taliban through its allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, because the Taliban was anti-Iranian, and (supposedly) anti-poppy and anti-opium. The journalist Ahmed Rashid covered the Taliban takeover and ruefully noted, “There was not a word of US criticism after the Taliban captured Herat in 1995 and threw out thousands of girls from school.”79
News leaked out slowly, largely through the efforts of courageous women inside the country smuggling information to exiles who then disseminated it. In 1999, Afghan women found a vociferous and energetic partner in the United States in the Feminist Majority Foundation. Led by Mavis Leno, a Hollywood liberal and wife of a television celebrity, studded with Hollywood stars, and augmented by a letter-writing campaign of some forty-five thousand women—the advice columnist Abigail Van Buren, “Dear Abby,” even got involved—the organization made the plight of Afghan women its cause. Leno and her associates took advantage of the Clinton administration’s cooling sentiments in the aftermath of Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya to work for a change in American policy toward the government that was hosting bin Laden’s group.80 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton contributed speeches. Democratic senator Barbara Boxer of California introduced a resolution calling for the United States to refuse recognition of the regime. Ms. magazine publicized the issue.81 The pressure helped bring about a change already in the works in the Clinton administration. It was a consequential intervention in international affairs, possibly the most consequential in feminism’s long history. “The U.S. rejection of the Taliban was largely because of the pressure exerted by the feminist movement at home,” wrote Rashid.82
But it was only in part a useful intervention. Western opprobrium rained down on the Taliban, who relaxed their iron rule only slightly. Terrible things took place. A man convicted of sodomy was executed by bulldozing a wall to bury him alive. The regime made executions in Kabul a spectator sport, with thousands watching a woman convicted of adultery stumble onto a field with a toddler in her arms. Guards removed the child and shot the woman in the head. A feminist with a video camera under her burqah filmed the episode and smuggled it out, to be distributed on the Internet by a group of women in exile.
For Americans, the impact of the campaign was to transform a ravaged country, one among many, into a site of focused concern. In the aftermath of 9/11, public awareness of the depredations the Taliban had inflicted on women in the 1990s allowed the Bush administration to define the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as having a moral aim entwined with the military mission to eliminate Al Qaeda. In Congress, liberal Democrats joined Republicans in condemning the Taliban’s gruesome violations of women’s human rights. Two weeks after the invasion of Afghanistan, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas Republican, introduced a bill with bipartisan backing from all the female senators to authorize educational and health care assistance to Afghan women and children. The bill tied humanitarian intervention to Bush’s vision of the new world order and even evoked a little global sisterhood in the Senate. “See, Mr. President, this is what the terrorists don’t understand,” proudly declared Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland. “They can’t stop us. We are the red, white, and blue party. If you look at Hutchison, Mikulski, and the other 11 women of the Senate, the Taliban can’t stop us from helping the women of the world.”83
The declarations framed the intervention in traditional terms, as a war to protect women, not to restore their rights.84 Yet regardless of the ruts in which the discussion ran, an expectation of restoring women’s freedom and securing a place for them in civil society hovered over the American public’s vision of Afghanistan’s future. The war was not only supposed to protect women and save mothers—traditional rationales for military force—but restore a society where women had previously gone to school, worked, and walked the streets freely. When the coalition forces took over Kabul, American papers featured photographs of female students walking together on the university campus, faces uncovered, burqahs thrown over their heads as makeshift hijabs, and women washing laundry in the river for the first time in four years. Hillary Clinton, now senator from New York, called for giving women a central role in political and social reconstruction.85
President George W. Bush was no feminist, and the main story of the invasion lay elsewhere, with the war on terror, the U.S. need to assert secure contr
ol over oil transport, and the need for a stable and U.S.-friendly neighbor to Iran. But the Bush administration’s hypocrisy should not distract us from an essential insight: Feminism arrived on the world stage in 2001, as a factor to be used and brokered in geopolitical considerations. The ideological mission of spreading democracy had never so assertively promoted the rights of women. The concerns of a tiny group of democratic radicals at the edges of the French Revolution had migrated to the center of calculations of the world’s most powerful nation.
As to support for the intervention, though, American feminists were quiet. Could there be a war with feminist aims? The question was almost unthinkable, impossible to voice. This was despite the fact that historically, women’s rights was not a pacifist tradition. Feminism was embroiled with the French Revolution; women’s rights advocates were staunch Unionists in the Civil War; British and American feminists heralded World War I (however embarrassing the fact is now); and women in anti-imperialist and independence wars in the twentieth century fought for their rights as part of nationalist struggles. But American feminists, appalled as they were by the Taliban, were so habituated to criticizing U.S. foreign policy and opposing armed force that they could barely bring themselves to ask if the invasion could bring about results they favored. The Bush administration’s mendacious, heedless rush to war in Iraq made the question all the more difficult to consider. Yet the situation in Afghanistan was catastrophic: Only 2 percent of children were in school, the childbed mortality rate was among the highest in the world, and Human Rights Watch, assessing the situation, found that “more than 70 percent of Afghan women suffered from major depression, nearly two-thirds were suicidal, and 16 percent had attempted suicide.”86
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