The forward march of women halted? Fred Halliday5 - 5 - 2006
http://www.opendemocracy.net/themes/article.jsp?id=6&articleId=3510To what extent have the movements for women's emancipation thatemerged in the 1960s and 1970s achieved their ambitions? FredHalliday draws up a balance-sheet. Fred Halliday is Professor of International Relations at the LSE,and Visiting Professor at CIDOB, Barcelona. His books include Islamand the Myth of Confrontation (IB Tauris, 2003) and 100 Myths Aboutthe Middle East.In 1981, before the dissolution of democratic socialism in westernEurope and the collapse of communism in the east, the Marxisthistorian Eric Hobsbawm published a short study on the state of thesocialist movement entitled The Forward March of Labour Halted?Originally delivered as a lecture in 1978, Hobsbawm's perceptive andtimely text pointed to a major reversal of leftwing, and moregenerally emancipatory, optimism across the world. Hobsbawm, achronicler of working-class struggles, identified factors pointingto the stalling of a trend that had been in evidence since the early19th century. Events have confirmed Hobsbawm's judgement and forceda revision of history and perspective regarding the socialist cause.A similar rethink may now be in order regarding another great moderngoal: the emancipation of women. While important differences exist,there are similarities between the workers' and the women'smovements: in the ways in which a commitment to women's equality andfulfilment has eroded, in which strong opposition to this commitmenthas emerged, and in which the movement has lost the unity of purposeand vision, and the clarity of goal, that sustained it in earliertimes.If fewer people today, in politics or everyday life, callthemselves "socialist", it would appear that even fewer proclaim acommitment to "feminism". While never aspiring to the organisationalunity associated with socialism, feminism has suffered from a lackof formal, national or international, cohesion. At the same time theearlier association of feminism with a broader programme of socialemancipation and rationality has been eroded – by the collapse ofthe broader trend and through a diversion of much "third-wave"feminist theorising and debate into epistemological and politicalblind alleys.Still, there are many factors today which militate against such aconclusion. In politics, women have become more prominent in severalcountries, evidenced by the recent elections of presidents MichelleBachelet in Chile and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia. Bachelet, aformer political prisoner under the regime of General AugustoPinochet, was herself tortured, and her father died in prison. Whenshe took power, crowds took to the streets of Santiago shouting: "Yavan a ver, ya van a ver! Quando las mujeres tengan el poder! "("They will see, they will see! When women have the power!").In a range of countries across Europe – though not noticeably in thecurmudgeonly and unimaginative political arena of the UnitedKingdom – it has become widely accepted that there need to be quotasfor election candidates and ministerial appointments. In Spain, halfof all ministers are women. In Germany and the Scandinaviancountries, quotas are generally respected; in France (where they arenot), the major parties have been fined for not meeting thestipulations of the law. In Italy, even outgoing prime ministerSilvio Berlusconi has conceded the principle of 30% women in thecabinet. Germany has its own first woman prime minister, AngelaMerkel. And in Finland, where a woman, Tarja Halonen, was re-electedpresident in January 2006, schoolchildren are reportedly asking if,in their country, a man is allowed to run for head of state.The impact of three decades of feminist engagement with politics andthe law is also evident in a number of changes in public policyacross the world. For example:As a result of work by feminist international lawyers, rape has beenclassified, for the first time, as a war crime, categorised by theinternational tribunals on former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as a form oftortureSexual discrimination and maltreatment has been accepted by somecountries, among them Canada and Spain, as grounds for politicalasylumWhile, according to Amnesty International, thirty-six countries inthe world maintain laws that discriminate against women, genderdiscrimination in employment has been outlawed in many countries,and major overt discrimination within the same employment and payscale has markedly declined in some countriesOrganisations involved with aid to the third world, and developmentpolicy in general, have put gender concerns at the centre of theirdonation policies. In a related policy shift, the issue of worldpoverty – and associated questions such as mortality, education andHIV/Aids – have come to be formulated in gender terms, with a clearrealisation that it is women who bear a disproportionate share ofthe costs.To have achieved all this in the space of one generation is a majorachievement of the feminist movement which, emerging in the 1960sand 1970s, sought to develop an overall critique of the ways inwhich gender and sex continued to structure all areas of social,economic and political life. In the area of social science that Ispecialise in, international relations, a rich literature on issuesof war and peace, international law and development, peace andsecurity, rights and social movements has brought the question ofgender into even this most recalcitrant of academic disciplines.And yet, on the horizon, other trends can be observed. There is amarked turning away by many states from the formal commitments onwomen's emancipation made in the 1960s (covenants on social andeconomic rights), 1970s (the 1979 United Nations Convention onDiscrimination Against Women, or Cedaw), and 1990s (the 1995 BeijingInternational Women's Conference). The most dramatic non-event of2005 was an illustration of this: while the states and diplomats ofthe world rushed to hold review conferences for such issues asnuclear proliferation and the Barcelona Euro-Mediterranean process,no such meeting was held to mark the tenth anniversary of theBeijing conference, or of earlier such decennial events atCopenhagen (1975) and Nairobi (1985).This resiling from past commitments is most evident in the formercommunist countries, and in now marketised post-communistdictatorships, such as China and Cuba, where the earlier, albeitauthoritarian, interventions of the state in favour of women havebeen abandoned. Inequality in terms of employment and socialprovision is growing, and in a gesture to the Catholic church andwhat is an index of the anti-feminist new mood, the new Polishgovernment abolished the position of minister of women altogether.The British government has recently done almost as well, havingallocated the position to a little-known member of parliament whoreceives no additional compensation for the responsibility.This defection by states is matched by a shift in public mood. In arange of countries, and a variety of rhetorical registers, respectfor women and for the goals of decency and equality proposed byfeminism has declined. Arnold Schwarzenegger's rise to thegovernorship in California was marked by grotesque and vulgarstrutting, as well as by his sneering at opponents as "girlie-men".Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi makes much of hismacho activities, while President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistandismisses rape victims' protests by asserting that a claim of rape,for many women, was a way to get financial compensation and perhapsa visa to live abroad. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,meanwhile, entertains his audiences with sexist jibes at CondoleezzaRice, the US secretary of state.More serious and sustained, and reflecting a definite and organisedcommitment, is the spread of anti-feminist social movements andreligious groups across many countries. In the United States, the1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalised abortion, the case of Roevs Wade, is now under serious attack, and the abortion issue hasbecome a major dividing line in US politics.In Europe, the Catholic Church – now led by the conservative PopeBenedict XVI, following in the footsteps of John Paul II – is openlycalling for more church intervention in social and political lifeand a return to "traditional" values on marriage, sex, women andhomosexuality. The argument that church's policies – such as itsprohibition against the use of condoms – are responsible forendangering the lives of millions of people through Aids hasreceived relatively little attention. Instead, we see the emergencein Italian political life, and potentially elsewhere, ofa "theoconservative" political trend, bent on rolling back the clockon advances in social and gender equality.The situation in the Islamic world is, of course, even morecatastrophic. Here the spread of Islamism, as a social and politicalforce, is universally accompanied by an erosion of respect for womenand their rights and greater use of the law, and state power, toimpose a new authoritarian set of norms. Just as in the cold war,both communist and capitalist states combined their rivalry witheach other with the imposition of social and political controls athome; so now, in the "long war" between the west and politicisedIslam, a similar, mutually reinforcing, reconsolidation ofconservative values is taking place.At the same time, the conservatives states of east and west – Iran,Saudi Arabia and Qatar on one side; the US, Vatican City and almostcertainly a newly assertive Poland on the other – ally in UNconferences on the family and other issues to impose their agenda.These shifts in political and social attitude are compounded,however, by the endurance and, in the context of globalisation,reinforced inequalities of the workplace and life. Studies producedon the occasion of the most recent International Women's Day (8March 2006) showed that across developed countries, overalldiscrimination in work remained resilient although discriminationwithin any one profession may have declined. Poorer paid jobs arestill allocated to women, who suffer enduring discrimination acrosstheir working lives because of the interruptions of child care. InSpain, the overall pay gap is 40%. In Britain, many women areconfined to the sectors known as "five C's" – caring, cashiering,catering, cleaning and clerical work. In the United States, underthe pressures of combining parenthood and work, the percentage ofwomen in the labour force has declined in recent years.Much is made – in a tone that is both encouraging and profoundlymisleading – of the ability of women to "juggle" work and home; but,as anyone who has tried it for long knows, this "juggling" is oftenstressful and suffocating. It may be too early to draw up a balancesheet, but there are strong indications that globalisation, with itsincreased strains and demands (not least regarding hours worked andthe erosion of social services) is enhancing gender differencesacross both the developed and developing worlds.And there are other, far worse, trends: the terrible incidence ofviolence against women in many contemporary wars, such as theestimated 40,000 rapes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo inthe past six years; the incidence of violence against women indeveloped as well as developing countries (in the US, an estimated700,000 women are raped per year); the spread of female infanticidein India and China; the impunity of men engaged in "feminicide", orthe systematic killing of women. In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 4,500women have disappeared and hundreds have been found dead (and oftentortured) in recent years, with almost no police or state response.Above and beyond all of this, there are the gendered consequences ofthe dramatic times we live in, notably the "war on terror". Theresponse in many western societies, particularly the US, to Islamicextremist violence has been to reassert conservative and male – so-called "family" – values in the face of an alien culture and itsassociated threat. In the Muslim world, the sense of hostilitytowards the west is associated with a cultural nationalism thatdenies liberal or modern western concepts of women's equality andrights. The terror groups themselves play a role in this, vaunting amale form of violence and protest that allows no place for women. Intheir rhetoric and political objectives, as well as in the fear andviolence they spread, these groups also defy any culture oftolerance, democratic debate and openness – all preconditions forthe advancement of feminism.This contempt for, and rejection of, all that women's emancipationand its associate democratic norms entail, was brought home to me inone dramatic incident during the summer of 2004. Visiting Madrid tosee where the Islamist terrorist groups responsible for the 11 Marchbombings had been active, I went to the suburb of Leganés, adistrict of modern four- and five-storey apartment buildings, muchfavoured by young families. There, on a leafy street, was themangled wreckage of the block where seven Islamists had blownthemselves up. Looking around, I noticed that the streets all hadfeminist names: the Avenida Petra Kelly and Flora Tristan Street –named, respectively, for a German peace activist and founder of theGreens, and for a 19th-century French writer active in workers'struggles for social justice. Other streets carried the names ofSpanish and Latin American women writers.Evidently, the local authorities in Leganés were committed tofeminism and to the heroines and writers of that movement. But forthe terrorists this had meant nothing; had they known what thesenames represented, they probably would have hated it all the more,just as their accursed associates in Bali and Egypt attacked nightclubs and hotels where people relaxed. In this, and in all the fearand masculinist violence they have spread, they are representativeof a much wider, more ominous global trend. The forward march ofwomen may not have halted, but it is certainly having to engage, andwith varied fortunes, a much broader range of fronts.
courtesy- jivika
