The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  The cumulative impact of decades of revelations, education, debates, scandals, controversies, and high-profile trials raised women’s gender consciousness, which in turn eventually showed up in a long-awaited political “gender gap.” In 1871, Susan B. Anthony had prematurely predicted that once women got the right to vote, they would vote as a bloc. A gender gap did not appear until 1980, when more men than women voted for Ronald Reagan, whose opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion may have moved some women into the Democratic column. More important was Reagan’s pledge to dismantle the welfare state, which nudged even more women toward the Democrats, the party more likely (theoretically) to preserve the safety net. Eventually, the gender gap would cause at least a temporary realignment of national politics. In 1996, 16 percent more women than men voted for Bill Clinton for president. Some political analysts now believed that women were voting their interests as workers, family caregivers, or as single or divorced mothers.23

  Gender gap or not, the rightward tilt of American politics led to the demonization of poor women and their children. As some middle-class women captured meaningful and well-paid work, ever more women slid into poverty and homelessness, which, on balance, the women’s movement did too little, too late, to change. On the other hand, the lives of many ordinary working women, who had not become impoverished, improved in dramatic ways. In 1992, a Newsweek article described how twenty years of the women’s movement had changed Appleton, Wisconsin (the hometown of Joseph McCarthy and the headquarters since 1989 of the John Birch Society). Women, the magazine reported, had taken on significant roles in local politics. In addition, the article observed,

  There are women cops and women firefighters, and there are women in managerial jobs in local business and government. There is firm community consensus, and generous funding with local tax dollars, for Harbor House, a shelter for battered women. And there is an active effort, in the Appleton public schools, to eliminate the invidious stereotyping that keeps young women in the velvet straitjacket of traditional gender roles.24

  GLOBAL FEMINISM

  As ideas from the Western women’s movement traveled across the Atlantic, American feminists learned more than they taught. On October 25, 1985, President Vigdis Finnbogadottir of Iceland joined tens of thousands of women who had walked off the job in a twenty-four-hour protest against male privilege on the island. She also refused to sign a bill that would have ordered striking flight attendants back to work. Iceland’s telephone system collapsed, travel came to a halt, and groups of men crowded into hotels for the breakfast their wives refused to cook for them.25

  As feminism began spreading beyond industrialized nations, American feminists also encountered new definitions of “women’s issues.” Sometimes “freedom” meant better access to fuel and water, toppling a ruthless dictator, or ending a genocidal civil war. The gradual emergence of global women’s networks made such encounters and confrontations inevitable.

  Many of these networks grew out of the United Nation’s 1975 International Women’s Year. At the first World Conference on Women in Mexico, delegates urged the UN to proclaim the years between 1975 and 1985 “The Decade for Women.” At each subsequent UN conference, there were two parallel meetings—one for delegates who represented their governments and another for women who participated in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) meetings. The numbers of NGO participants mushroomed. Six thousand women participated in the second conference, held in 1980 at Copenhagen; fourteen thousand attended the third in 1985 in Nairobi; and a startling thirty thousand arrived in Huairou, China, for the fourth in 1995.

  What President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women had done for American women activists, the UN’s World Conferences now did at a global level. Proximity bred intimacy and spread knowledge. The thousands of women rubbing shoulders or debating in Mexico, Denmark, Kenya, or China were learning from and teaching each other about their lives. Aside from their differences, they were also discovering the ubiquity of certain kinds of shared oppression—violence and poverty that had once seemed local, rather than global. And, in the process, they were nurturing and legitimating a global feminism, which was quite literally being born at UN conferences as they watched.

  That didn’t mean that women everywhere interpreted the information newly available to them in the same way. From the start, the NGO forum meetings witnessed serious clashes between “First” and “Third” World women, and between women whose nations were at war. Over time, the atmosphere began to improve. Western feminists began to listen, rather than lecture, and women from developing countries, who had formerly viewed Western concerns over clitoridectomies, dowry deaths, wife-beatings, and arranged marriages as so many instances of cultural imperialism—the urge of developed countries to impose their values and customs on underdeveloped nations—began the painful process of redefining their own customs as crimes.

  Here was the essence of global feminism—addressing the world’s problems as if women mattered. Human rights organizations, for instance, had traditionally focused exclusively on state-sanctioned violence against political activists. But most women encountered violence not in prison or at protests, but in their homes and communities. Viewed as customs rather than crimes, wife-beating, rape, genital excision, dowry deaths, and arranged marriages had never been certified as violations of women’s human rights.

  At a 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, women from all over the globe movingly testified to the various forms of violence that had devastated their lives. Feminists successfully made their case; the conference passed a resolution that recognized violence against women and girls as a violation of their human rights. One immediate consequence of this historic redefinition of human rights was that Western nations could now grant political asylum to women fleeing certain violence or death from husbands or other relatives.26

  Two years later, at a 1995 UN Conference on Development and Population in Cairo, feminists criticized accepted development policies that promoted massive industrial or hydroelectric projects as the way to improve the standard of living of developing nations. Such projects, they argued, irreversibly damaged the human and natural ecology, provided work for indigenous men, but not for women, and undermined women’s traditional economic role and social authority. Instead, they advocated small-scale cottage industries, through which women could earn money for their education.27 They also attacked those population experts who took it, as an article of faith, that population growth automatically declined when industrial development lifted people out of poverty. Citing the failure of such policies, feminists countered that educating women and giving them control over their reproductive decisions was a far more effective way of controlling population growth. As one reporter wrote, “The deceptively simple idea of a woman making a decision about her future is one of the cornerstones of the emerging debate on global population policy.”28

  The “Platform for Action,” the document that emerged from the Bejing conference in 1995, asked the nations of the world to see social and economic development through the eyes of women. Although the “Platform” recognized the differences that separated women, it also emphasized the universal poverty and violence that crippled the lives of so many of the world’s women. In addition to affirming women’s rights as human rights, the conference also declared three preconditions for women’s advancement: equality, development, and peace. To many participants, the event seemed like a miracle, a moment existing out of time, when the world’s women imagined a different kind of future, even if they had little power to implement it.

  By publicizing even more gender consciousness, the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women probably encouraged greater numbers of the world’s women to challenge traditional forms of patriarchal authority. In the years following the conference, feminist activists and scholars began the process of redefining rape (when it occurred during a military conflict) as a war crime, publicizing the particular plight of refugees (most of whom were wo
men), and rethinking the role women might play in reconstructing societies ravaged by war.29

  At the same time, women in both developed and developing nations began debating the impact of feminism itself on global culture and economics. Was feminism yoked only to concepts of individual rights? Was it simply an inevitable by-product of Western consumer capitalism, whose effects would rupture the ties that bound families and communities together—and to the land? Or could feminism help protect the rights of women as they left family and land behind and entered the global wage economy? Could women’s rights, redefined as human rights, provide a powerful new stance from which to oppose totalitarian societies of both the Right and the Left? Many theories proliferated, heated debates took place, but the answers—even many of the questions—lay in the future.30

  There is no end to this story. Over a hundred years ago, the suffragist Matilda Gage turned her gaze toward the future. The work of her generation of activists, she wrote, was not for them alone,

  nor alone for the present generation, but for all women of all time. The hopes of posterity were in their hands, and they were determined to place on record for the daughters of 1976, the fact that their mothers of 1876 had thus asserted their equality of rights, and thus impeached the government of today for its injustice towards women.31

  Nearly a century later, veteran feminist Robin Morgan, along with thousands of other twentieth-century “daughters,” took up the unfinished agenda left by the suffrage movement. Morgan, too, realized that she struggled for future daughters and worried that her generation might squander precious opportunities.

  I fear for the women’s movement falling into precisely the same trap as did our foremothers, the suffragists: creating a bourgeois feminist movement that never quite dared enough, never questioned enough, never really reached out beyond its own class and race.32

  As women in developing countries become educated and enter the marketplace as wage-earners, they will invariably intensify existing cultural conflicts between religious and secular groups, and between those sectors of society living under preindustrial conditions and those who connect through cyberspace in a postmodern global society. Like small brushfires, these cultural wars may circle the globe, igniting a wild and frightening firestorm. Inevitably, some women will feel defeated as they encounter wave after wave of backlash. But in the darkness of their despair, they should remember that resistance is not a sign of defeat, but rather evidence that women are challenging a worldview that now belongs to an earlier era of human history.

  Each generation of women activists leaves an unfinished agenda for the next generation. First Wave suffragists fought for women’s citizenship, created international organizations dedicated to universal disarmament, but left many customs and beliefs unchallenged. Second Wave feminists questioned nearly everything, transformed much of American culture, expanded the idea of democracy by insisting that equality had to include the realities of its women citizens, and catapulted women’s issues onto a global stage. Their greatest accomplishment was to change the terms of debate, so that women mattered. But they left much unfinished as well. They were unable to change most institutions, to gain greater economic justice for poor women, or to convince society that child care is the responsibility of the whole society. As a result, American women won the right to “have it all,” but only if they “did it all.”

  It is for a new generation to identify what they need in order to achieve greater equality. It may even be their solemn duty. In the words of nineteenth-century suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway:

  The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future.33

  The struggle for women’s human rights has just begun. As each generation shares its secrets, women learn to see the world through their own eyes, and discover, much to their surprise, that they are not the first, and that they are not alone. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Her answer: “The world would split open.” And so it has. A revolution is under way, and there is no end in sight.

  EPILOGUE TO THE 2007 EDITION: GENDER MATTERS IN THE NEW CENTURY

  Sometimes history seems to speed up. So much happens, we lose perspective about how our lives have been shaped and affected. When that happens, I try to imagine how a historian in 2075 might view the present. As she pores over electronically preserved archives, I see her face frozen in a frown. “How do I make sense of the tumultuous early years of the twenty-first century?” she asks herself. “I see endless stories about military conflicts, political campaigns, and environmental crises. But what about all the battles over gender matters? How did the cultural and economic tensions of the era affect women’s lives? And how did they shape this period of history?”

  Our future historian might first remind her readers that rapid economic globalization, like industrialization a century earlier, disoriented millions of people. Bewildered by new prosperity or deepening poverty, traumatized by unexpected transnational migrations, and suddenly assaulted by unfamiliar cultural ideas, social customs, and religious beliefs, they felt anxious, uncertain about the future, and resistant to changes that affected family life. At the same time, she would note that global communications spread ideas about equality and human rights across the planet, giving the exploited and dispossessed a powerful language in which to express their grievances.

  Even now, without the benefit of a future historian, we are already familiar with the dizzying effects of unimaginable rapid change. In a world made smaller by satellite television, the Internet, e-mail, and a global market in music, film, and pornography, many people have understandably resisted such cultural and social intrusions, resented their economic insecurity, and sought the comfort and continuity provided by ethnic loyalties, national identities, and religious fundamentalisms.

  Some people, of course, have enthusiastically welcomed global free trade because it improves their standard of living or enhances the profits of multinational corporations. Still others, aware that globalization is irreversible but creates great inequities, have seized upon the opportunity to promote “fair trade,” greater economic and social justice, environmental protections, and to expand workers’ and women’s human rights.

  By the start of the new century, growing numbers of women across the globe had joined the paid labor force and gained access to some education. In many developing nations, human rights advocates also launched campaigns to prevent violence against women, to achieve greater female economic and political participation, and to provide women with choices about their own reproduction and marriages.

  Not surprisingly, such challenges threatened the traditional hierarchical power once reserved for male religious leaders, as well as for fathers and husbands. Cultural battles erupted all over the planet as people fought bitterly over many economic, religious, and social issues. But one question—“What is the appropriate role of women in contemporary society?”—nearly always divided traditionalists, who included many religious fundamentalists, from modernists, who often embraced a more secular and pluralist view of society. Whatever their response to the sweeping changes brought about by globalization, nearly everyone agreed that women’s historic role has been to preserve and reproduce the traditional customs and values of their culture. Working for wages outside the home challenged centuries of tradition.

  To defend cherished values and customs, many men and women, within the United States as well as elsewhere, mobilized to prevent their women from turning into the iconic image of the emancipated Western woman—a sexually and economically independent person, seemingly unprotected by her family and unmoored from her community.

  This cultural storm—in which
women, gender relations, and sexuality became lightning rods in both national and global politics—profoundly shaped the early years of the twenty-first century.

  THE GENDER WARS IN THE UNITED STATES

  The backlash against the women’s movement reached a high point in the 1980s. By 2000, it had gained even greater momentum. Feminists had been stereotyped, scapegoated, and vilified as man-hating, hairy, anti-family misfits for so long that young women, with good reason, wanted to distance themselves from the “F” word. The televangelist and political power broker Reverend Pat Robertson, for example, called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”1

  Although candidate George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” in 2000, the extreme Religious Right, long hostile to the women’s movement, formed a significant part of his political base. After the Supreme Court halted a recount of votes in Florida, Bush lost the popular vote but won the election. The new president cast this controversial victory as a mandate for radical change. Fueled by a zealous faith in Market Fundamentalism—the belief that unregulated free markets solve all problems—and by his own religious fundamentalism, Bush sought to shrink the federal government, to enact huge tax cuts that mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans, to eliminate or privatize as many government services as possible, to transfer the costs of health care, retirement, and higher education onto families, and to repeal much of the legacy of the 1960s, including women’s rights.