Feminism (17 page)

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 117

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.

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But the lives of women in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia
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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, 118

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
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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.)

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Nevertheless, feminism has a long and fascinating history in some
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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 119

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 Liberacion 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
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was finally granted there in 1936; and most Latin American
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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 120

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 São 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
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was founded by women in the
sertão
, 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
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United Nations women’s conference in Beijing in 1995.

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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.

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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,
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for example, women’s groups put pressure on the government to
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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 122

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
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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
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interested in contraception and abortion; and that when they did
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tackle ‘Third World’ issues, they sounded both patronizing and
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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