‘Sisterhood is powerful’ was one of the most popular feminist slogans in the 1960s and 1970s. But the phrase has been questioned, and sometimes contested, both at the time, and ever since. As the black American poet Audre Lorde argued in 1983, it glosses over
difference of race, sexuality, class and age… Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives.
Her concerns were echoed in 1995 by Ien Ang, an Australian of Chinese descent, who suggested that the inevitable moments of failure of communication between feminists
should be accepted as the starting point for a more modest feminism, one which is predicated on the fundamental limits to the very idea of sisterhood … we would gain more from acknowledging and confronting the stubborn solidity of ‘communication barriers’ than from rushing to break them down in the name of an idealised unity.
Both writers believe that white middle-class women often seem to be dictating a feminism that concentrates on gender discrimination, while tending to overlook, for example, the class differences and
racial discrimination that complicate ideas about gender. Brazilian women have argued that feminism is ‘eurocentric’, that it has nothing to say to them about urgent local problems: racial violence and health issues, as well as the difficulties black women may encounter when looking for work. Indeed, some Latin American women actually reject the word ‘feminism’.
There is also an increasing recognition that, whereas Western feminists have struggled against sexism, and against social and political inequalities, women in the ‘Third World’ have had to confront additional, and even more intractable, problems. They often have to combat sexism in the form of deep-rooted local beliefs and practices, to do with class, caste, religion, and ethnic biases. In some countries, their battle with these issues has been combined with, and sometimes complicated by, a struggle for the establishment of democratic government and for the most basic freedoms.
But the lives of women in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia and the Middle East have also been profoundly affected by colonialism and neocolonialism. ‘First World’ countries — beginning with Britain and the rest of Europe in the 17th century, followed by the United States from the 19th century onwards — brought vast swathes of the world under their direct control; subjugating local peoples politically and economically. And at the beginning of the 21st century, the United States, by reason of its military, economic, and cultural power, practises a ‘discursive colonization’ of much of the world.
The term ‘ Third World’ is widely used in contemporary feminist and postcolonial studies; but it is fraught with difficulties. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, for instance, defines it geographically: ‘the nation-states of Latin America, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and South-East Asia, China, South Africa, and Oceania’; she also includes black, Asian, Latino, and indigenous peoples living in the ‘West’. But the phrase is sometimes seen as a pejorative label,
implying ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘undemocratic’ when used by Westerners. Some references to ‘Third World women’ are, indeed, a ‘polite’ way of saying ‘women of colour’, implying a native ‘other’ in contrast to the ‘norm’ of Western feminism, and it is sometimes considered more ‘correct’ these days to talk of ‘postcolonial feminism’. But either term may serve as a useful reminder to Westerners of how little we know about the reality of these women’s lives, and the way they may be complicated by deep-rooted local beliefs, by practices arising out of class differences, caste, religion, ethnic origins; and also by the legacy of colonialism.
In Latin America, for example, Spanish and Portuguese occupation — as well as slavery — has left profound ethnic and class inequalities, and local feminists may have to struggle with the entrenched patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, in addition to the regionally specific male sexist attitudes termed ‘machismo’. (Their lives may be complicated further by the equally damaging female equivalent, ‘hembrismo’ — extreme female submission to male dominance.)
Nevertheless, feminism has a long and fascinating history in some Latin American countries. In Mexico, for example, the ‘first wave’ of feminism was born during the revolution against the hated dictatorship of President Porfirio Diaz, a bitter struggle that continued between 1910 and 1918. Women took an active part in the struggle. Solderas established camps, foraged for food, cooked, and looked after the wounded; but there were also female soldiers, who actively took up arms. Some, dressed in skirts and their best jewellery, followed the men into battle. Others were accused becoming masculine, ‘both inwardly and outwardly’, though it was admitted that a woman could ‘at the hour of combat prove with weapon in hand that she was no longer a soldera but a soldier’.
Women intellectuals also supported the revolution; the most influential was Hermila Galindo de Topete, who founded and edited the magazine Mujer Moderna [Modern Woman], which fought for
sex education in schools, women’s suffrage, and the right to divorce. She argued that the Catholic Church was a major obstacle to the advance to feminism in Mexico. Knowing she had no hope of being elected, but wanting to publicize the fact that women wanted and needed the vote, she became the first woman to run for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies. After a prolonged struggle for suffrage, equal civil rights were granted to women in 1927; but it was not until 1952 that they were finally allowed to vote. During the 1970s, the Movemento de Liberation de la Mujer emerged in Mexico as in so many other countries; its members concentrated on the need for legal abortion, increased sentencing for rapists, and help for battered women. And they held frank, and potentially explosive, sexual discussions, amongst other issues questioning the ‘tyranny’ of the vaginal orgasm.
In Puerto Rica, which had been invaded and occupied by the United States in 1898, a women’s movement worked for decades to improve education, as a first step towards other reforms. Universal suffrage was finally granted there in 1936; and most Latin American countries gave women the right to vote in the 1950s. It was a crucial step, but (as Western women had learned earlier) it did not immediately translate into significant changes in women’s status and circumstances. Latin Americans in the 1970s and 1980s still had to tackle a wide range of urgent problems. Women’s movements argued for full, equal legal and political rights for women, but they were equally concerned with the problem of widespread female illiteracy, and particularly with the miserable circumstances of thousands of women living in shanty towns and slums. Many country women had migrated to the cities, where they became part of a ‘sub-proletariat’, taking underpaid, temporary jobs as servants (maids, laundresses, cooks) or scraping a living by selling goods on the streets. But women living in the shanty towns often organized to improve their immediate situation: setting up residents’ associations and communal kitchens, as well as consumers’ organizations and human rights groups. Poverty, poor health care, and botched abortions contributed to a high maternal
death rate. (It has been estimated that in Bolivia, there are 390 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births; in Peru, 265.) In some Latin American countries, abortion is forbidden, even when it is necessary to save the mother’s life. But Peru, in spite of an authoritarian government, created a Ministry of Women and a Public Defender for women, and laws were passed against domestic violence.
From the 1970s onwards, in Sao Paulo for example, there was a new concentration on health issues; women were taught how to sterilize water, and how to identify and take preventive action against common childhood diseases. Contraceptive advice was made available; groups were formed to offer mutual support, to set up cooperative schemes within communities; and to campaign for better housing. In the 1980s, a Rural Women Workers Movement was founded by women in the sertao, the poor and semi-arid backlands in northeast Brazil. Working as agricultural labourers at half male pay, they fought to be included in drought relief programmes. And they managed to raise the funds to attend the United Nations women’s conference in Beijing in 1995.
The Brazilian constitution of 1988 is impressive on paper, amongst other things guaranteeing equal wages, giving women generous maternity leave, and setting minimum wages. But — because most women had little idea of how to obtain their rights — an organization called Themis was founded to educate women. They went on to set up a pilot project with a women’s police station that handled only cases of rape and violence, which was rapidly followed by similar centres. Also, since 1975, there has been a National Street Children’s Movement, as well as women’s groups, like Sempre Viva, that try to reach and offer medical, educational, and legal help to the millions of children living rough, who are vulnerable to sexual abuse, and are often mistreated by the police. Moreover, black women in Brazil have become more vocal about issues that bear particularly hard on them: racial violence of various kinds, public health policies, and discrimination in the labour market.
In 1975, the United Nations held an International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, which brought together feminists from all over the world. And since 1981, women from all over Latin America and the Caribbean have been meeting every three years at encuentros (encounters), ‘to build solidarity, devise innovative forms of political praxis, and elaborate discourses that challenge gender-based and sexual oppression’. Meetings have been held in a different country each year: Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, El Salvador, and Chile. The Left, some women felt, had tended to dismiss feminism as bourgeois and an imperialist import; while the Right and the Church had fought it as a threat to Christian family values. Debates at the encuentros were often heated. Like other Latin feminists, participants were interested in equal rights and economic redistribution. But they also discussed controversial issues which, they felt, were usually ignored: domestic violence, sexual harassment, marital rape. In fact, some Latin American feminists believe that their most important achievement is the passage of laws punishing violence against women. In Brazil, for example, women’s groups put pressure on the government to fund a Women’s Defence Council, which persuaded the Superior Court to overrule a male jury that acquitted a man of killing his wife on the grounds that ‘in such crimes what is defended is not honour, but self-adulation, arrogance, and the pride of a man who considers his wife to be his property’.
Over the years, encuentro organizers have struggled to involve grass-roots groups, to include as many women as possible (on the grounds that any woman who considered herself a feminist was a feminist). Through the early 1990s, they established links abroad, while feminists all over Latin America worked to bring women together for debate and discussion prior to the 1995 Beijing Global Conference on women. Like feminists in other countries, the Latin American organizers had to tackle problems about inclusion and exclusion; and had to accept that inequalities of class, race, and sexual orientation are central to — and complicate — any feminist analysis. Black women from 16 Latin American and Caribbean
countries met together to prepare a document for the Beijing Conference.
By the end of the century, younger women, some formerly student activists, others emerging from university feminist programmes, were increasingly attracted to the movement, and were often, perhaps naturally, critical of their elders. They attacked the formerly ground-breaking idea of acknowledging, even celebrating, ‘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 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 interested in contraception and abortion; and that when they did tackle ‘Third World’ issues, they sounded both patronizing and 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
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16. Anti-female circumcision poster, Sudan. |
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 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 well- known Egyptian politician, had caused a sensation when she returned from a trip abroad and publicly removed her veil, though 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,
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 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 an extreme example, with its heavy and compulsory veiling of women, who cannot even walk on the street unless accompanied by 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
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 job. Custody laws were passed that denied mothers rights over 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
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 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.
Some feminists have argued that the present relationship between 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
to define a specifically Islamic feminism, one that is rooted in local cultures and traditions that, they argue, have always treated women 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:
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.
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 women, the right to vote is
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
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 problems facing those women from the poorer and less developed 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 are 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
leave them isolated and unprotected in all kinds of ways. They often have no idea of what their rights might be — or how to demand them if they do. They rarely have any kind of support network, though in America some campaigning groups have sprung up to their defence. Their very existence poses Western feminists with a painful paradox; they challenge us to look more closely at how we may be conniving in the oppression of other women.