The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  But globalization didn’t just cause casualties. It also created global feminist networks that helped spread the idea that “women’s rights are human rights,” words formally articulated and embraced at the U.N. Conference on Women at the 1995 meeting at Beijing.

  Since the 1990s, growing numbers of women and human rights activists around the globe had used the language of human rights to fight against all forms of violence against women and girls, to improve their labor conditions, and to win greater participation in the economic and political world in which they lived. In 2001, an international court—for the first time in history—indicted soldiers for war crimes because they had raped women. In 2005, women in Colombia used the language of women’s rights when they fought to make abortion legal. In the same year, fifteen African nations agreed upon a comprehensive protocol on women as part of their African human rights charter. True, such conventions, protocols, and treaties were often ignored. But they did create a moral compass by which behavior toward women could be evaluated.

  A shrinking planet also promoted ideas about women’s right to health care and reproductive choice. As satellite television broadcast images of small and prosperous Western families, growing numbers of educated and working women began to seek out and use contraception. As the infant mortality rate fell, they became more confident that their babies would survive. In 2002, demographic experts began to notice that both rural and urban women in many developing countries, including Brazil, Egypt, India, and Mexico, were having fewer babies. “Whether they live in villages or high-rises,” explained Cythnia Steel, at the International Women’s Health Coalition in New York, “women have always known what’s best for them and their families. Now we’re seeing the result of their own choice to have fewer children.” As it turned out, there was no great mystery about how to control the world’s population. The problem was that the solution—ensuring women’s access to education and reproductive choice—was rejected not only by the United States, but by many local communities as well.69

  For three decades, American feminism had greatly influenced global women’s rights movements. Challenging and transforming women’s health care had arguably been one of the most significant achievements of the American movement. In 2005, the National Women’s Health Network celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. For three decades, it had acted as women’s domestic and global watchdog, cautiously warning women to take control of their own health and carefully scrutinizing drugs that might harm their bodies or babies. One of the American movement’s classic books, Our Bodies, Ourselves, published by Boston health activists in the 1970s, had long educated American women about reproduction, contraception, exercise, nutrition, and sexuality. By 2005, it was published in eighteen nations, in seventeen languages, and in Braille, and had become a basic health text across the globe, addressing the specific health problems of women in different societies.

  The United States, however, was no longer in the forefront of improving women’s lives. In 2004, Harvard University’s “Project on Global Working Families,” found that the United States’s family policies lagged behind most developed and developing nations. As early as 1983, Australia had required a “gender budget statement” or “gender audit” that analyzed mainstream public policy—including legislation that dealt with regulations, allocations, taxation, and social projects—in order to increase gender equality. By 2006, both Chile and England floated proposals for giving those who cared for families credit toward future pensions. In the same year, more than fifty nations conducted some kind of “gender audit,” sometimes with the help of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The United States was not among them.70

  Growing numbers of countries also began to recruit women into the political process. Some African nations, for example, not only used affirmative action, but even mandated quotas to ensure greater female political participation. By 2006, the Rwandan parliament was 49 percent female and one-third of the parliament members in Mozambique, South Africa, Burundi, and Tanzania were women.71 In 2005 and 2006, countries on three continents—Germany, Liberia, and Chile—elected their first female heads of states.

  Most important, nearly all industrialized nations offered the kind of universal health and child care and paid parental leaves that American feminists had dreamed about for more than thirty years, but never achieved. Eighty-four other nations capped the working week, so that parents could care for their children. Thirty-seven other nations guaranteed parents some kind of paid leave for when their children were ill. The United States, by contrast, did not limit mandatory overtime; nor did it offer lengthy paid leave to parents.72

  Around the world, women activists increasingly viewed the American government’s rightward political turn as a major obstacle to the advancement of women’s rights. At the 2005 U.N. Beijing Plus Ten conference, members once again reaffirmed the expansive 1995 Beijing Platform of Action, but they also argued that President Bush’s conservative global policies prevented them from improving women’s education and reproductive health. They nevertheless vowed to insert and mainstream gender into all global policies, including those that affected development, trade, macroeconomics, and environmentalism.

  Although the Bush administration attacked women’s rights at home, the president opportunistically deployed the rhetoric of women’s rights to advance his foreign policy goals. After the 9/11 attacks, the language of women’s human rights suddenly slipped into the lexicon of American foreign diplomacy. The Taliban’s brutal treatment of women became one of the justifications for toppling the government in Afghanistan. “The rights of women of Afghanistan will not be negotiable,” said Secretary of State Colin Powell. First Lady Laura Bush then used the weekly presidential radio address to promote the rights of Afghan women in shaping a post-Taliban society. A few days later, the president’s advisors pressured the Afghan delegation to include women in the councils that would create a new government.

  Distracted by the Iraq war, Bush never provided sufficient funds for women’s education or health or for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Still, the language of women’s human rights had entered American foreign policy discourse. Once such words are uttered, they can take on a life of their own. “Consider it a window of opportunity,” said Kavita Ramdas, the CEO of the Global Fund for Women, a San Francisco nonprofit grant-making foundation that seeds small women’s organizations ultimate groups all over the world.73

  At the 2005 U.N. International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Secretary-General Kofi Annan felt compelled to declare, in words that pleased many human rights activists:

  Violence against women remains pervasive worldwide. It is the most atrocious manifestation of the systemic discrimination and inequality women continue to face—in law and in their everyday lives—around the world. It occurs in every region, country, and culture, regardless of income, class, race, or ethnicity. Gender-based violence is also damaging to society as a whole. It can prevent women from engaging in productive employment, and girls from attending school. It makes women more vulnerable to forced and unprotected sex, which plays a key role in the spread of HIV/AIDS. It takes a deep and enduring toll on the entire family, including and especially the next generation.74

  Violence against women, of course, did not stop because the Secretary General condemned its practice. Yet he did publicize how violence threatened women’s health, even their survival, and helped change the terms of global debate about the obstacles that kept women from attaining gender equality.

  DARING TO DREAM, IF WOMEN REALLY MATTERED . . .

  Even as American feminists struggled to defend the accomplishments they had achieved during the last three decades, they also dared to dream of a different future.

  Decades earlier, at the highly publicized 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality march down New York’s Fifth Avenue, an event that turned women’s liberation into a household word, women activists had settled on three core goals to improve their lives: the right to abortion, equal
pay for equal work, and universal child care.

  A generation later, women activists knew how far they were from achieving these goals. The stalled revolution had not transformed the workplace or the family. Abortion was under serious attack; one-third of American women no longer had access to an abortion provider in the county in which they lived. Equal pay for equal work did not address the fact that women still worked in different sectors of the economy; a female college graduate employed as an elementary school teacher, for example, earned half as much as a male high school graduate who labored in a unionized construction job. Even women who did the same full-time work earned less than men.75 And child care, for all practical purposes, had largely disappeared from the national political agenda.

  Goals proposed in 1970, in any event, were no longer sufficient for the new century. And so, even during these bleak, politically conservative years, many women activists were already plotting and planning for a brighter future.

  If women really mattered, they asked, how would we change public policy and our society? Or, as the author of one “stay-at-home mom” article put it, “So what would the brave new world look like if women could press reboot and rewrite all the rules?”76

  First, American women would have to vote in their own interest. Ironically, President Bush’s conservative policies had, in fact, mobilized several generations of women to protect their reproductive rights—a feat not matched by feminists for more than thirty years.77 But he had not changed their electoral choices. Although more women than men voted for John Kerry in 2004, they did not repeat their astonishing role in helping to elect Bill Clinton in 1996. The gender gap shrank to only 7 percent, partly because of widespread fears of terrorism and concern for national security and partly as a result of a “marriage gap.” Seventy-one percent of married women, whom Republican political analyst Kellyanne Conway described as concerned with “marriage, munchkins, mortgages, and mutual funds,” went to the polls and tended to vote Republican. In contrast, only 59 percent of “women on their own”—those who were unmarried, divorced, and widowed—bothered to vote at all. Yet these women, because of their economic insecurity, traditionally tended to vote for Democratic candidates.78

  Some activists and scholars argued that all political candidates should be pressured to describe the policies they would promote in order to achieve greater gender equality. Charlotte Bunch, president of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, went further and argued that a feminist redefinition of “national security” would have to address the health and welfare of all Americans.79

  In 2006, Joan Blades, cofounder of the online progressive organization MoveOn.org and her coauthor Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, published The Motherhood Manifesto, with the goal of vaulting family policies to the top of the political agenda. Many other activists and scholars described a similar wish list and argued that universal health care, paid parental leaves, high-quality, subsidized, and accessible child care, a higher minimum wage, as well as a real living wage, job training and education, flexible work hours, greater part-time work opportunities, investment in affordable housing and mass transit, and the reinstatement of a progressive tax structure, would go a long way to help support working mothers and their families.80

  And how would this wish list be funded? Activists still dreamed of a time when the United States would use its military only for defensive or humanitarian ends, reduce military expenditures for unnecessary space-based weapons and the vast network of American military bases that circled the globe, end resource wars for oil, and instead invest heavily in new sustainable energy sources. They also dreamed of a government that would eliminate tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, reinstate the estate tax and the progressive tax structure that had created a broad and prosperous middle class in the middle of the twentieth century. Together, these savings could fund a great deal of their wish list.

  On March 8, 2006, International Women’s Day, two Democratic members of the Progressive Caucus—Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), and Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), even proposed legislation to transfer $60 billion allocated for outdated Cold War-era weapons from the Pentagon’s bloated budget of $439 billion to schools, healthcare, and humanitarian aid. “It’s time we invest more in our people and less in our defense contracts,” said Woolsey at a press conference. They called their bill the Common Sense Budget Act.81

  Was this really so ridiculous? Not if the United States did a “gender audit” of its budget. Not if the American government, like other industrial societies, provided for the health and welfare of its citizens.

  Although Americans have famously rooted for the underdog and believed in “fairness,” they no longer seemed to feel compassion or empathy with the poor and the vulnerable or even with the struggling middle class. The conservative right wing had successfully persuaded many people that an activist government was the problem, rather than the solution, and that people should rely entirely on themselves. Americans had forgotten that taxes paid for what an individual cannot create or maintain: sewers, highways, public schools and hospitals, emergency preparedness, public health, social services for the aged, disabled, and unemployed, and the nation’s vast infrastructure they use every single day.

  Nor had the country embraced what sociologist Fred Block has called a Moral Economy, an economic system whose guiding principles—justice and fairness—have long been taught in kindergarten.82 This is where most Americans have been taught to share with others, to obey rules, to learn not to waste materials, to care for the kid who gets hurt, and to wait and take their turn. This is where they learned cooperation, reciprocity, sustainability, and the democratic regulation of greed.83

  Instead, at the beginning of the new century, growing numbers of American adults seemed absolutely besotted with the right to accumulate wealth and to avoid taxes as the dues they owed their society. Greed no longer seemed shameful; the idea of a common good seemed almost quaint.

  Ever since the early 1980s, right-wing social conservatives had persuaded Americans that they—and not liberals—were the ones who embodied and embraced morality and traditional values. But those who dared to dream knew that America’s most deeply cherished values had inspired progressive activists when they ended slavery, fought for women’s suffrage, passed social security for the aged and insurance for the unemployed, marched to end segregation, fought for the rights of women and gays and lesbians, and launched a campaign for environmental health and justice. This great progressive American tradition had expanded the nation’s democracy and reinforced the belief in a public good. But it failed to gain traction at a time when rampant individualism and the celebration of greed triumphed over movements for social and economic justice.

  Yet, as everyone knows, change is inevitable. Would the pendulum swing in a different direction? Would Americans once again root for the underdog and demand fairness from their government? Would the nation engage in endless cultural wars or try to close the widening gulf between the rich and the poor? Could activists renew a sense of a common good, publicize the care crisis, and change the family and workplace for the twenty-first century?

  No one knew.

  One thing was clear: globalization would certainly accelerate the worldwide gender revolution. The result? As growing numbers of the world’s women enter the paid labor force, they will inevitably challenge—and change—women’s place in traditional cultures and fundamentalist religions, igniting even more cultural wars, as well as a fiery backlash.

  They will also contribute to a global care crisis. Who will care for the world’s children, the disabled, and the elderly? Despite feminists’ best efforts, the United States certainly has not provided a solution to its own catastrophic Care Crisis. On the contrary, the modern women’s movement set in motion thirty years of cultural wars about women’s place in modern society.

  Observing the social and cultural backlash that accompanied this unfinished gender revolution, Vera Rubin, an astronomer celebrated f
or her early battles for women in science, sadly concluded, “Thirty years ago we thought the battle would be over soon, but equality is as elusive as dark matter.”84

  True, the world split open when women spoke the truth about their lives. Their revelations contributed to an irreversible but unfinished gender revolution that has upended millions of lives. Fortunately, there are still countless men and women everywhere struggling to put our world back together—this time, with equality and respect for women.

  NOTES

  See Archival Collections, page 401, for meaning of the abbreviations in these Notes.

  Chapter One: Dawn of Discontent

  1. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, eds. Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 339–400.

  2. Barbara Berg, The Crisis of the Working Mother: Resolving the Conflict between Family and Work (New York: Summit, 1986), 38.

  3. Tikkun (January/February 1988), 25.

  4. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 25. The term “popular front feminist” was coined by Daniel Horowitz to describe a woman of the Old Left who had always been interested in the problems working women faced.

  5. Gerda Lerner to Betty Friedan, February 6, 1963, Box 201, Folder 715, Betty Friedan Papers, SL; cited and quoted with permission by Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan,” American Quarterly (March 1996): 1–31. I thank Daniel Horowitz, author of Betty Friedan and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998), for giving me early drafts of his meticulous research on Friedan’s life and for drawing to my attention the changes in the ten drafts of her work.

  6. Reviews of The Feminine Mystique, Box 18, Folder 676, Betty Friedan Papers. Letter in response to The Feminine Mystique, Box 21, Folder 739, Betty Friedan Papers; McCall’s, 1963, 38.