From International to Transnational Organizing A Century's Feminist Journey

INTERNATIONAL FEMINISM—AND feminist internationalism—have existed since at least the early 20th century, but forms of women's organizing and mobilizing have varied over the past 100 years.  Since the 1980s, a new transnational feminism—encompassing Third World countries as well as the core countries—has emerged which requires explanation.

Here I will discuss why this development occurred when it did, and tie it to changes in the global economy, the decline of the welfare state, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, along with the growth of a population of educated and employed women in developing countries.  All of this was occurring in the 1970s and 1980s—hence the formation of transnational feminist networks starting in the mid-1980s rather than earlier.

In the early 20th century, international feminism was exemplified by the suffrage movement and the socialist women's movement.  Key feminist organizations of the period included the International Women's Council, the International Alliance of Women, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Within the Second International, the women's organizations of France, Germany and Russia mobilized thousands of working-class as well as middle-class women for socialism and women's emancipation (Boxer and Quataert 1978), although they did not succeed in establishing a feminist socialism (Kennedy and Tilly 1987).

Demobilization within the revolutionary women's movement occurred following the collapse of the Second International, after women won the right to vote in many countries, and with Stalin's rise in the Soviet Union.  International women's groups continued to meet internationally, though these were no longer mass organizations.  Professional women's groups engaged with international organizations such as the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization to expand women's political rights and improve women's working conditions (Berkovitch 1999; Rupp 1998; Stienstra 1994).

Political and economic developments in subsequent decades—such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the rise of the welfare state—led movements and intellectuals to focus more on the problems of their own societies, economies and states.  In the United States, the climate of anti-communism deterred any large-scale radical movement with an internationalist orientation; the trade union movement had been thoroughly tamed; and America was enjoying a period of capitalist growth and prosperity.

When feminist groups met internationally during the early part of the UN's Decade for Women (1975-85), divisions and disagreements precluded any transnational unity.  In the same way that nationalist affiliations and preoccupations had undermined the unity of the Second International, international feminism was divided by East-West hostility, the Palestinian question, and differences over what constituted feminist priority issues.

Disputes arose at the first two UN conferences on women, which convened in Mexico City in 1975 and Copenhagen in 1980.  For liberal feminists from the First World, the key feminist issues were sexual rights, reproductive freedom, and equality before the law.

For many feminists from the Third World, as well as for socialist feminists, priorities were socio-economic and political: the end of hunger, poverty, neocolonialist domination and war—all of which had adverse affects on women's rights and well-being.

At the same time, capitalism was undergoing a global restructuring, and soon the world's women were faced with new economic, political and ideological challenges.  In response to these challenges, the international women's movement took on a transnational character, and feminist solidarity across borders became a key feature of the networks that formed.

A shift in the nature and orientation of international feminism occurred in the mid-1980s, during preparations for the third UN world conference on women, which was held in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985.  It was at this time that bridge-building and consensus-making across regional and ideological divides began to take place, and a women's organization of a new type—the transnational feminist network—emerged.

Three world-systemic developments triggered this change in the women's movement: (a) the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal economics, along with a new international division of labor that relied heavily on (cheap) female labor; (b) the decline of the welfarist and developmentalist state; and (c) the rise and spread of religious fundamentalist movements.

These developments led to new thinking and new forms of organizing on the part of activist women in developing and developed countries—such as the Latin American encuentros, or feminist gatherings—and the emergence of transnational feminist networks devoted to women's economic well-being and their human rights.

Neoliberal Capitalism, the State, and the Rise of Fundamentalism

In the 1980s, global restructuring took the form of Reaganism in the United States, Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, and structural adjustment policies and austerity measures in developing countries.  It continued in the 1990s in the form of the transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

One consequence of the post-Keynesian and post-communist transition to neoliberal capitalism was the feminization of poverty.  Meanwhile, cross-national research, including studies by those working in the field of women-in-development or women-and-development (WID/WAD), showed that an ever-growing proportion of the world's women were being incorporated as cheap labor into what was variously called the capitalist world-economy, the new international division of labor, or the global assembly line (e.g.  Elson and Pearson 1981).

Statistical documentation came in the form of UN studies.  Research showed that in the 1970s, women began to gain an increasing share of many kinds of jobs, but the post-Keynesian shift was also characterized by growing unemployment, a decline in the social power of labor, an increase in temporary, part-time, casual and home-based work, and cutbacks in social services and subsidies.

In the 1980s, women began to be disproportionately involved in irregular forms of employment increasingly used to maximize profits; at the same time, they remained responsible for reproductive work.  Female labor incorporation did not entail a redistribution of domestic, household and childcare responsibilities, partly because the welfare services of the state were being cut back.  In addition, women remained disadvantaged in wages, training and occupational segregation in the new labor markets.

ILO economist Guy Standing (1989) termed this phenomenon the "feminization of labor."  He argued that the increasing globalization of production and the pursuit of flexible forms of labor to retain or increase competitiveness, as well as changing job structures in industrial enterprises, favored the feminization of employment in the dual sense of an increase in the numbers of women in the labor force and a deterioration of work conditions, labor standards, income and employment status.

As the function of the state shifted from managing social and economic development to providing a conducive environment for businesses and foreign investors in what was soon to be called the era of globalization, the economic well-being of women in developing countries became ever more precarious.

In response, a number of transnational feminist networks arose that criticized the new global economic policy environment, including Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), Women in Development Europe (WIDE), the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO).

The 1980s also saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Muslim countries and Hindu communalism in India, which compromised women's legal status and human rights.  These movements sought to recuperate traditional norms and codes, including patriarchal laws and family roles for women; they put pressure on states to enforce public morality, increase religious observance, and tighten controls over women—ostensibly to protect the nation or culture from alien influences and conspiracies (Moghadam 1994).

In some ways they were responses to the creeping homogenization of economic policies, political practices, cultural symbols, and ideology that are now associated with globalization.  But they were far from progressive responses.  Benjamin Barber has introduced the term jihad as shorthand for religious fundamentalism, disintegrative tribalism, ethnic nationalisms, and similar kinds of identity politics carried out by local peoples "to sustain solidarity and tradition against the nation-state's legalistic and pluralistic abstractions as well as against the new commercial imperialism of McWorld."  (Barber 2001: 232)

Jihad is in struggle against modernity and cultural imperialism alike, and "answers the complaints of those mired in poverty and despair as a result of unregulated global markets and of capitalism uprooted from the humanizing constraints of the democratic nation-state."  (Barber 2001: i)

This is an apt way of contextualizing Islamic fundamentalism.  In the Middle East and North Africa, Islamic fundamentalist movements emerged in the 1970s, expanded during the 1980s, and peaked in the early 1990s.  They reflected the contradictions of modernization, the difficult transition to modernity underway in the region, and the conflict between traditional and modern norms, relations and institutions.

Islamic fundamentalist movements emerged as the global economic policy environment shifted from Keynesian to neoliberal, as talks on a new international economic order collapsed, and as world communism went into decline.  Islamist movements also emerged as important cultural changes were taking place globally and within countries, including the internationalization of Western popular culture and changes in gender relations, the structure of the family, and the position of women.

The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, which produced the Islamic Republic of Iran, had a demonstration effect throughout the Muslim world.  It appeared to many dissidents that a project for the Islamization of state and society could prevail, and that this would be the solution to economic, political, and cultural crises.

It is a mistake, however, to view Islamist movements as pristine and spontaneous social movements.  During the 1970s and 1980s, many were encouraged and financed by external forces—such as the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and the United States—in order to undermine left-wing or communist movements.  (Hlie-Lucas 1994; Cooley 1999; Moghadam 2003, ch. 5)

The emergence of fundamentalist movements in the 1980s alarmed feminists in the developing countries where the movements originated, and they developed innovative strategies to address the problem.  One important strategy was to form a transnational solidarity network of anti-fundamentalist feminists, called Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), in 1984.