Feminism

by Margaret Walters

  ‘diversity’; that was a crude kind of pluralism, they argued, as often as not implying acceptance of inequality, not allowing true

  ‘recognition or legitimation of others and their experience’.

  But international conferences could highlight differences and resentments as well as connections. At a world conference in 1980, some women complained that discussions on veiling, and on female Feminists across th genital surgery, never consulted those women most concerned. At another conference on population and development held in Cairo in 1994, Third World women complained that the agenda had been hijacked by European and American women who were only e w

  interested in contraception and abortion; and that when they did orl

  tackle ‘Third World’ issues, they sounded both patronizing and d

  racist. Even at Beijing in 1995, there were complaints that endless discussion by Westerners of reproductive rights and sexual orientation meant that the urgent concerns of women from less developed nations were ignored. As one woman remarked, applying Western feminism to the concerns of, say, South America, ‘is not unlike trying to cure severe stomach ache with a pill meant for headaches’.

  The problem of cross-cultural misunderstanding is a persistent one.

  In 1915 an English suffragist called Grace Ellison visited Turkey and wrote a book called An English Woman in a Turkish Harem. She displays real understanding of how reforms were affecting women’s lives, and how even men seemed to favour some degree of female emancipation. She was deeply interested, too, in the ongoing debate about the wearing of traditional dress. But like many feminist 123

  16. Anti-female circumcision poster, Sudan.

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  Africa

  The problems of Africa are particularly complex. ‘African women have always defined and carried out their own struggles . . . [it] dates far back in our collective past’, argues Amina Mama. Different women are oppressed differently: feminism must acknowledge ‘differences of race, class and culture’. Feminism in Africa is heterosexual, pronatal, and concerned with ‘bread, butter and power’ issues. Genital mutilation, as a way of suppressing unruly female sexuality, is still carried out in some African countries. It is not an inherently Muslim practice, but has become part of the anti-woman stance adopted by certain fundamentalists.

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  In Nigeria in 2000, a 30-year-old Muslim, Amina Lawal, was condemned by a sharia court to be stoned to death after she had a baby outside marriage – she had apparently been e w

  raped. The issue received worldwide coverage because, iron-orl

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  ically, the Miss World beauty contest was to be held in Nigeria. Various contestants protested: a few flatly refused to participate; others claimed that they at least intended to speak out against the ruling. A fashion writer’s comment that the Prophet Mohammed might well have chosen one of the contestants as his wife led to riots; militant Islamic groups described the contest as a ‘parade of nudity’ which would promote promiscuity and Aids. But many local women found the courage to demonstrate in angry protest.

  theorists since her day, she tended to romanticize traditional customs and the veil, and more than half-regretted the growing number of women wearing Western clothes, at least at home. But when her Turkish friend, a woman called Zegreb Hamun, visited 125

  17. Women protest against the death sentence of the Nigerian Amina Lawal, 2003.

  her in England, the tables were neatly, and comically, turned on Ellison. Hamun also published a book of her letters to Ellison, called A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions. She dismissed a London Ladies’ Club as dull and apathetic, lacking the ‘mystery and charm’ of the harem. But a visit to the Houses of Parliament left her sharply critical:

  But my dear, why have you never told me that the Ladies’ Gallery is a harem? A harem with its latticed windows! The harem of the Government! . . . You send your women out unprotected all over the world, and here in the workshop where your laws are made, you cover them with a symbol of protection!

  Some recent Western academic feminists theorize endlessly and not very helpfully about the veil and the harem; they seem to Feminists across th

  deconstruct in order to glamorize, and indulge in their own curious version of ‘orientalizing’ fantasy. Veiling has certainly been, and remains, an important, and occasionally controversial, issue in some Muslim societies. In 1923, Hudu Sha’rawi, the wife of a welle w

  known Egyptian politician, had caused a sensation when she orl

  returned from a trip abroad and publicly removed her veil, though d

  she kept her head covered. But much more importantly, she went on to set up women’s groups that fought for better education, the right to vote and run for office, and for reforms concerning the family. Like women since, whether in Egypt or other Muslim countries, she was trying to establish a specifically Islamic feminism.

  Five years later, a Lebanese woman, Naxira Zain as Din, published a book arguing that the ‘veil is an insult to men and women’, and arguing that the oppression of women could not be justified by appeals to Islam. (Religious scholars incited demonstrations against her book.) On the other hand, many women have argued that the veil can be liberating; that it allows them to observe, rather than be observed, not only freeing them from the vagaries of fashion but helping them avoid sexual harassment. It is, of course, 127

  18. A Sundanese Muslim girl displays her inked finger, proof of having voted. Sundanese women were enfranchised in 1964.

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  impossible to lump all Islamic nations together; moreover, in most Muslim countries (contemporary Egypt is a good example) there are considerable and very visible differences between classes, but also between those women who live in the country and those in the great cities like Cairo and Alexandria. Many Muslim women, especially in big cities, are comfortable unveiled. On the other hand, some Turkish women, for example, have argued that it is in fact the veil that makes it possible for them to enter public life, that gives them the freedom to work, confidently, as teachers or doctors.

  Arguments occasionally arise in Muslim communities in the West.

  Schoolgirls in France protested bitterly when they were forbidden to wear headscarves. In England, one Muslim schoolgirl made newspaper headlines when she insisted on wearing, not simply a headscarf and long, loose trousers, but a robe reaching to the ground. But that seems to have been an isolated case; any morning Feminists across th

  on London streets a few girls heading for school can be seen wearing exactly that.

  Problems are more acute in the Muslim theocracies. Saudi Arabia is e w an extreme example, with its heavy and compulsory veiling of orl

  women, who cannot even walk on the street unless accompanied by d a male relative, and need male permission to travel and work. Iran, on the other hand, has a long history of women taking independent political action. Even in the 19th century, there were women who wrote eloquently about what they described as the pitiful state of many Iranian women; one issued a pamphlet titled The Shortcomings of Men. In the early 20th century, women as well as men demanded constitutional, as well as gender, rights; and women were among the strikers who sought sanctuary at the British embassy in 1906. But their activism was ignored, and in the new constitution of 1906, they were barred from politics and informed that ‘women’s education and training should be restricted to raising children, home economics and preserving the honour of the family’.

  But schools for girls were established, and women’s associations flourished; in 1911 a book by an Egyptian activist, Ghassem Amin’s Freedom of Women, was translated into Persian – and was bitterly 129

  attacked by the religious authorities. In 1931, women won the right to ask for divorce under certain conditions; in the next decade, a national education system was established, for girls as well as boys; and in 1936, the first women students attended Tehran University, and by 1978 women made up 33% of the workforce. In 1962, women finally won the
right to vote, and to stand for office. In Kuwait, women finally gained the vote and the right to stand for office in 2005.

  Iranian women were active during the Islamic Revolution of 1978, and various women’s organizations were formed. But since that time, official attitudes to women have hardened. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini insisted that Iranian women working for the government wear the veil, dismissed women judges, repealed a family protection law, in effect denying women the right to divorce, and banned contraception and abortion. Women could be flogged and fined if they refused to comply with a strict dress code; married women had to get their husband’s consent before taking a minism

  job. Custody laws were passed that denied mothers rights over Fe

  their children. But even in those dark days, women’s education was not very different to men’s; women could still vote, become members of parliament and hold political office, and work outside the home. In 1998, women made up 52% of Iranian university students.

  At the same time, many women found their lives more difficult after the Revolution; it was more difficult for women to initiate divorce or to obtain custody of their children; and the minimum age for marriage for girls was lowered first to 13, and then to 10. Women could only acquire a passport with the written consent of their fathers or husbands. Wearing the veil became obligatory; though some women still welcomed the veil as symbol of their rejection of a secular, Westernized lifestyle.

  Some secular feminists left the country; others demonstrated against the new order on International Women’s Day 1979; still 130

  others rejected the imposition of strict dress codes. Dissent was effective and widespread because it was often informal; spread through Xeroxed leaflets and pamphlets, wall newspapers, debates on the streets, women’s magazines. Though feminism was forced underground, by the mid-1990s upper- and middle-class women, at least, were again becoming more politically assertive.

  Recent women’s rights activists have bitterly criticized the fact it is still much more difficult for women to obtain a divorce, and the fact that a father has legal custody of his sons after the age of 2 and of his daughters after the age of 7. Moreover, stoning is still a legal punishment in Iran, and women argue that it is used against their sex much more often than against men. In 2000, a woman accused of adultery and of murdering her husband in collaboration with her Feminists across th lover was sentenced to death by stoning. Another woman, accused of acting in pornographic films and having sex outside marriage, was stoned to death in a Tehran prison. There are reports that prisoners are often raped, and even tortured.

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  Some feminists have argued that the present relationship between d

  the sexes in Iranian theocracy is in fact totally ‘un-Islamic’. Islam, they argue, has traditionally respected women, and allowed them dignity. Many Muslim women insist that the Qur’an has always allowed women, not simply personal dignity, but significant economic rights. It is subsequent interpretation that has often been biased in favour of men. Nor are the sharia, the laws ordained by Allah to guide human behaviour, in essence hostile to women. Some Muslim feminists cite the prophet’s wife, Khadija, who, tradition has it, was older than her husband, and an independent and forceful character who first employed him as her trade representative, then insisted that they marry.

  Other feminists have argued for separation of religion and the state.

  But rather than appealing to human rights, as most Western feminists have done, many groups within the region have struggled 131

  19. Protest by a women’s rights group in Jakarta, November 2000.

  to define a specifically Islamic feminism, one that is rooted in local minism

  cultures and traditions that, they argue, have always treated women Fe

  with respect. They have maintained their position in the face of considerable, and perhaps growing, opposition.

  Women in Russia and Eastern Europe are often dismissive of Western feminism, and certainly insist that their own history of activism owes little or nothing to the West. In Russia, for example, women have a long and distinctive tradition of activism. In the 1870s, a group of socialist students and workers, who called themselves the Tchaikowsky circle, included many women and argued that it was only when capitalist exploitation was at an end that women would escape the ‘double oppression’ of housework and factory work. Some women joined, or were active in, a terrorist group called ‘Narodnaya Volya’ that attacked Tsarist oppression. Many women who were active in a series of strikes in Moscow in 1875 were arrested; their trial received great publicity. As one journalist wrote, a shade sentimentally:

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  an astonished public could look upon the radiant faces of these young women, who with their sweet child-like smiles, were on their way to a place with no return, without hope . . . The people said to themselves, ‘we are back in the epoch of the early Christians’.

  After the 1905 Revolution, many women became involved in a struggle to win the right to vote in elections to the Duma, though historians have argued that this mass movement of women was soon split between those primarily concerned with class struggle, and the so-called ‘bourgeois’ feminists who were more interested in

  ‘gender oppression’. A Working Women’s Mutual Assistance Association was set up in 1907 (men were allowed to join); it tried to reach out to working-class women, and encourage them to join trade unions and the Social Democratic Party.

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  At an International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Stuttgart in 1907, Clara Zetkin put forward a resolution urging socialists to fight for universal suffrage, which she saw as a step towards ending class struggle. She remarked that, for working e w

  women, the right to vote is

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  a weapon in the battle which they must wage for humanity to overcome exploitation and class rule. It allows them a greater participation in the struggle for the conquest of political power on the part of the proletariat with the aim of going beyond the capitalist order and building the socialist order, the only one that allows for a radical solution to the women’s question.

  Activists organized meetings, and tried to encourage working-class women to participate in conferences and actions. On 19 March 1911, the first international women’s day had been held in Germany, with thousands of women joining in meetings and marches; in 1913, it was celebrated in Russia as well.

  It is sometimes claimed that it was a 1917 women’s day demonstration in St Petersburg – they were demanding ‘bread and 133

  peace’ – that touched off the Revolution. But some Russian feminists argue that the Bolshevik Revolution was little direct help to women; that too many men, and some women, insisted that women’s interests were identical with men’s, and the two must not be separated. After the Revolution, women had better access to education, and were expected to work at full-time jobs. Though cafeterias, laundries, and day care centres were opened in the cities, women still seem to have been expected to take on a heavy double burden. In the 1920s, Alexandra Kollontai emerged as one of the most thoughtful, eloquent, and lastingly interesting writers on women’s issues.

  After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, some women, at least, were glad to retreat back into the home; and, though women may have lost out during the transition to capitalism, some have welcomed the chance to become full-time mothers and housewives.

  Feminists have recently begun to recognize and explore the minism

  problems facing those women from the poorer and less developed Fe

  parts of the world who travel to the affluent Western countries to work. Women from Mexico and Latin America move to the United States; women from Russia and Eastern Europe look for jobs in Western Europe and in Britain. Algerians and Moroccans go to France; others travel from Sri Lanka. South East Asian girls often seek work in the Middle East – Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. Some are legal immigrants; those who are not ar
e particularly vulnerable. Many women work as au pairs, maids, nannies, cleaners, do unskilled jobs in old people’s homes and hospitals, or take low-waged work in restaurants; but many others, inevitably, drift into prostitution or are trapped in brothels. Filipina women have often been recruited as ‘mail-order’ brides, usually for men in the United States or Japan.

  Some Western women, having fought for women’s right to take jobs outside the home, and struggled to achieve their own ‘liberation’

  from domestic drudgery, look for not-too-expensive help with 134

  Alexandra Kollontai

  In 1909 the Russian Alexandra Kollontai published a book called The Social Basis of the Woman Question, arguing that feminism was not just a matter of political rights, or rights to education and equal pay; the real problem was the way the family was organized and imagined. In 1920 she published

  Towards a History of the Working Women’s Movement in

  Russia, which insisted that women must fight on two fronts.

  They should reject the growing number of Westernized middle-class women’s organizations, which either concentrated on legal equality and the franchise, or saw feminism as a matter of ‘free love’. Equally, they must resist the Russian Feminists across th

  labour movement and the social democrats, who ignored women’s specific problems and oppressions, dismissing feminism as inherently ‘bourgeois’ because it advanced women’s interests only within an inherently unjust capitalist e w

  society.

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  Primarily a theorist, Kollontai sometimes responded with real feeling to individuals: for example, to a woman who was desperately unhappy with a husband who drank heavily and forbade her to work. And in one oddly touching Utopian essay, she imagines life as it might be in 1970: a festival on what had once been Christmas Day, as a commune celebrates the fulfilling life they have managed to create together.

  domestic work. For some foreign women – the lucky ones –