Women in a Globalizing World: Equality, Development, Peace and Diversity

INTRODUCTION
by Angela Miles

If … survival … is now the most pressing problem in the world, and if women are the crucial human links in that survival, then the empowerment of women is essential if new, creative and cooperative solutions to the crisis are to emerge…. This is why we … affirm that feminism allows for the broadest and deepest development of society and human beings free of all systems of domination…. Equality, peace and development by and for the poor and oppressed are inextricably interlinked with equality, peace and development by and for women.
—Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)

Feminism is necessarily an internationalist politics, for the systems of exploitation and control we resist are global. Many in North America have long understood that to win our full freedom and not merely ameliorate some women’s conditions we will have to transform global as well as national and local structures of power. The ascendance of neo-liberalism since the 1980s and growing relationships with feminists from the economic south have deepened this awareness in the economic north and increased both the necessity and possibility of global resistance and transformation. The exciting rise of Indigenous women’s activism we are seeing today offers new hope for this struggle.

The articles in this volume have been selected because all their varying critical and/or visionary approaches are informed by and open the way to feminist politics deep enough to sustain global solidarity. They are presented in the context of the developing global women’s movement that their analyses are shaped by and contribute to.

Women have worked together across boundaries of nation, class, race, and culture for a century and a half—against slavery and war and for women’s rights. Early international organizing was predominantly among European, Scandinavian, North American, Anzac, and Latin American women. International conferences and networks supported women’s struggles in significant ways in each of their home nations while providing a powerful international voice and presence for women (Steinstra).

By the mid-1980s, international links among a new wave of feminists had grown into a more truly “global” movement than in the earlier period (Antrobus; Miles 1996). Feminists, today, are cooperating internationally to develop analyses and strategies, and to support local and international action through newsletters, conferences, workshops, courses, and joint lobbying efforts at the United Nations (un) and other international venues. They are creating new forms of ongoing dialogue and are organizing in loose, decentralized networks very different from women’s earlier international associations which tended to bring together official national representatives. Now, feminists from any region, nation or locality/ies may initiate international actions when a need is felt. Current initiatives are more numerous and flexible with generally closer ties to local activism and more opportunity for direct mutual learning among women in very different situations and struggles. Unlike the earlier period, leadership tends to come from the economic South where women have been more intensely and longer aware of international systems of power and the need for global understanding.

All over the world women have for decades been engaged in environmental, economic, health, shelter, food security, social-justice, human rights, land rights, peace, anti-debt, anti-globalization, pro-democracy, anti-violence, and anti-fundamentalist struggles of major proportions (Basu; Davies 1983, 1986; Marx-Feree and Tripp; Morgan; Naples and Desai; Ricciutelli, Miles and McFadden; Rowbotham and Linkogles).

Vibrant international identity-defined, issue-based and regional feminist networks and gatherings have grown from this local activism. From these networks a myriad of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), funding networks, member organizations, campaigns and projects have developed. All these forms of cooperation foster dialogue, research, theory building and activism across regions and across issues and are making major contributions to the development of broad and inclusive feminist politics.1

Feminists’ ability to act together at the global level is extremely important. However, it is only one facet of global feminist movement which is at heart a multitude of globally aware local feminisms. The “World March of Women” (wmw), with 5,000 member groups in 164 countries, inspired originally by Quebec feminists, is a vibrant example of direct grassroots to grassroots international links.2

All these forms of organized cooperation are accompanied by institutional and individual web sites, chat rooms, open and closed e-mail and Skype consultations, Twitter and Facebook communication. In fostering mutual learning and organizing among feminist individuals and groups all over the world, these newer forms of communication build on and supplement regional and international gatherings and campaigns and other actions.

Women, as individuals and as members of diverse groups, are located very differently, often in antagonistic relation to each other within their local communities and the world system and often with very different immediate needs, interests, and strategic priorities and very distorted views of each other. Global feminist interactions that link the many centres of multi-centred feminist practice offer challenging and vitally important spaces for educating each other and discovering women’s shared interests in change.

Four un World Women’s Congresses held in 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1995 (with growing numbers and diversity of women and ever increasing leadership from the “two thirds world’) have been central in this process. un conferences on Environment and Development (1992, 2002, 2012), Human Rights (1993), Population (1994), Social Development (1995), Food Security (1996), Racial Discrimination (2001), next year’s first World Congress of Indigenous Peoples and annual meetings of the un Commission on the Status of Women and the un Committee to Eliminate all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) have also been and continue to be crucial sites for the collective achievement of feminisms critical and visionary enough to sustain global solidarity.

In this volume, Canadian feminist analyses of neo-liberal globalization and possible alternatives are presented in the context of this exciting history of global feminist dialogue and activism. Together, the articles present a comprehensive critical feminist overview of the agenda and processes of neo-liberal globalization, women’s activist responses to the consequent environmental and social destruction, and visionary alternative feminist worldviews and values.

Decades of accessible cutting-edge articles in Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme (CWS/cf), many of them revised and updated, have been an inestimable resource in this project and have been supplemented by invited contributions on the most recent developments. We have drawn, for instance, on important journal issues focused on Environment, Development, Migration and Trafficking, Women’s Labour Rights and Women’s Human Rights. In addition, journal issues published in conjunction with the United Nations World Congresses of Women in Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995), and the Canadian women’s movement’s millennium celebration (2000) have enabled us to present this material in historical context. And, thus, to capture something of the dynamic of political challenge and discovery among women from all regions of the country and the world that has nurtured the transformative feminist perspectives that are traced and reflected in this volume.

Introduction: Feminist Analysis and Vision

Seven articles by First Nations, Canadian, Costa Rican, German, Indian and u.s. authors open this volume. All call for a deeply different world which sustains and honours life; not simply for a fair share of wealth and work in this divided and unequal world organized around production for profit for a few. Their varied visions of a world and worldviews honouring individual, community and ecological survival in a world of dignity, respect, and security for all, are core challenges to neo-liberal globalization.

Two political statements bookend this section: “Women’s Action Agenda 21 Preamble” reflects the political understandings and commitments reached by 1,500 women from 84 countries at the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet, and the closing “Position Paper for a Peaceful World” was circulated at the World Social Forum in hopes that other social movements would engage with transformative feminist perspectives. Between these two statements, Eva Johnson, Bear Clan Kahnawake Mohawk Nation, invokes just such an alternative worldview and set of values in her article on “Native culture and the environment”; Vandana Shiva calls for an “Earth Democracy,” rather than a share-holding democracy; Sylvia Federici speaks of “re-enchanting the world”; Alda Facio calls for “feminist spirituality as a strategy for action”; and Maria Mies writes of the new “moral economy” offered by a subsistence perspective.

All these writers bring holistic economic, social, cultural, spiritual, and environmental approaches to the whole world, not only to “women’s issues.” In varying ways and with differing emphases, they insist passionately on the central importance of the reproduction and sustenance of all of life—a concern marginalized, trivialized, and left largely women’s under-resourced responsibility in colonial capitalist patriarchy. They recognize the leading role Indigenous women and marginalized women play in all women’s struggle for another world.

Part One: Neo-liberal Restructuring: Social and Environmental Costs

Key to these transformative perspectives is an understanding that the unequal, competitive, individualistic, market relations that define this system were established historically through the conquest and control of nature, women, workers, and traditional cultures and communities in both “first” and “two-thirds world” (Mies). Dominant forms of “globalization” today continue to be shaped by these destructive processes (Miles 2001).

In the industrial nations of the economic north, we are taught on the contrary, that “modernization,” “development,” and “globalization” represent unambiguous and benign (if “complex”) progress for everyone. Since the Second World War, keeping national income accounts has been a requirement of un membership even for nations in which very little of people’s livelihood is supplied through the market. These national accounts measure a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that is, the value of goods and services that pass through the market. gdp measures leave all non-market value invisible (i.e., unpaid products and services, nature, personal safety, and health) and register all costly disasters and behaviours as positive growth. Nevertheless, gdp is used as the prime indicator of a nations’ wealth and well-being and gdp growth is read as an increase in general wealth and well-being. This sleight of hand legitimizes neo-liberal policies which maximize gdp growth and the opportunity for profit for a few over all other social and environmental priorities. Yet, as articles in Part One of this volume show, agendas to maximize economic growth, including privatization, deregulation, devaluation, cuts to social welfare, downsizing, wage reductions, enclosure and intensified commodification actually have huge costs for people everywhere and for the planet.

Two framing articles (Green; Armstrong and Armstrong) are followed by articles organized in three sections to critically examine, the logic, agenda and policies of neo-liberal globalization and its impact on women and their communities. The articles include reports of original survey, interview and case study research, political statements, policy analysis and personal accounts from across the country and abroad. They are written by rural and farm women, migrant women, women workers, trade unionists, lawyers, social service providers and clients as well as academics—most authors being more than one of these.

Restructuring/“Liberalization” critically explores the meaning and consequences of neo-liberal “restructuring” (often called “liberalization”) with attention to its constitutive policies under the headings: Free Trade, Privatization, Cutbacks. Following an overview of the current global crisis (Federici), articles deal with the implications of globalization for women (Cohen et al.); the impact of neo-liberal trade policies on garment workers (Ng); why privatization is a women’s issue (Stinson); the consequences of re-structuring for women workers in British Columbia health care (Cohen, Ritchie, Swenarchuk and Vosko); the impact of government cut-backs on women workers’ safety (Mosher and Evans); on occupational health (Baines); and for women in prison (Pate).

Enclosure, Commodification and Theft examines the processes of enclosure and commodification of common wealth for the benefit of a few that lie at the heart of capitalist economic growth and globalization. Measures of wealth that count only what passes through the market register private appropriation for profit as economic growth a presumed increase in general wealth. “Sustainable development” as generally understood is dedicated to sustaining this economic growth, not to sustaining communities and environment. Thus, its policies offer false “solutions” to the problems of poverty and ecological destruction caused by growth focused maldevelopment.

Articles critically analyze the politics of sustainable development at the un (Isla) and the centrality of land and the food question to globalization and resistance (Dalla Costa). They explore the commodification of women (Hartsock) and the significance of women’s unpaid work (Waring); the commodification of life itself through intellectual property rights (Shiva; Forsey); the brutal consequences of Canadian mining’s intensifying resource exploitation for women in Latin America (Isla) and of unchecked climate change for rural women, especially in the economic south (Milne).

Displacement, Migration and Violence examines the connection between this form of neo-liberal global development and the oppressive security and lucrative militarism required to enforce policies of impoverishment, to police increasing inter-communal tensions from resulting scarcity, and to manage and control migrating individuals and populations displaced by such violence and/or economic and environmental collapse.

Articles present the essential violence of neo-liberal globalization (Shiva); the oppressive legal regulation of cross-border movements globally (Kapur); migrant women’s vulnerability in Canadian and international law (Macklin); and migrant workers experience in Canada as live in care providers (Velasco) and farm workers (Preibisch); the growing trafficking in women for the sex industry as a central aspect of neo-liberal globalization (Poulin); and the connection between growing poverty and violence against women in Canada (Lakeman).

Part Two: Organizing for Another World

Following two introductory articles (Grant-Cummings; Green) three sections provide snap shots of feminist responses to globalization across a broad spectrum of issues in local as well as global contexts over the full period of neo-liberal emergence and continuing dominance.

un Decade for Women and Beyond collects personal accounts and political statements written by participants at the United Nations World Women’s Congresses in Nairobi and Beijing and the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet. These articles offer a rare window into the vibrant feminist global engagement of the 1980s and 1990s which forged the deep critiques and transformative perspectives that continue to ground transformative feminist action today.

Political statements are by the Third World feminist network DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) and the Indigenous Women’s Caucus at Nairobi, and by the International Indigenous Women’s Caucus, Women of the South Caucus, and the North American Regional Caucus at the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet. Personal accounts are written by women active at these conferences around the status of women (Wetzel), peace (Fulton), health (Tudiver), environment (Kettle), women’s human rights (Bunch, Dutt and Fried), alternative development (Christiansen-Ruffman), Indigenous rights (Sillett), sexual rights (Day), and food security and land rights (Pedersen).

In the second and third sections, articles exemplify the diversity and energy of more recent feminist practice in response to neo-liberal policy and its impacts on the ground. Rights and Reform focuses on feminist organizing for change in government policy, practice and perspectives that will move us closer to another world. Articles report on women’s global peace activism (Bunch); Canadian women’s constitutional activism (McPhedron); the failure of Gender Based Analysis (gba) as currently understood to provide a “culturally-affirming gender re-balancing framework” that honours First Nation worldviews (Stirbys); the ways a human rights approach can bring feminist environmental and reproductive rights struggles together (Cooper and Kelly); the realities of Black women’s experiences of hiv/aids (Tharao and Massaquoi); Canadian child care politics and activism (Friendly); and virtual activism in the pro-choice movement (McTavish).

Alternatives and Resistance gathers accounts of community and movement focused activity aimed at building new relations, economies and cultures while speaking truth to power. The section opens with an account of Aboriginal women’s peaceful and healing water walk and ceremony that was called in downtown Toronto to “bring attention to Idle No More and the fight against the changes to the Navigational Waters Protection Act Bill C45” (Nanibush).

The articles that follow present the challenges and possibilities of women working together for peace in ethnically divided societies (Abseykara); the promise a guaranteed livable annual income offers for women’s equality and security and social development (Lakeman, Miles and Christiansen-Ruffman); the many “blossoming initiatives to create local, community … [that are] helping people survive the vicissitudes of world market fluctuation and … [are laying] the seeds for more fundamental economic transformation” (Perkins); the radical cultural and economic potential of an agriculture where ecologically grown food is a relationship rather than a commodity (McMahon); the ways organizing an lgbtq Community Safety Initiative in small town Nova Scotia revealed that “the rural sphere can be radical and … can even surprise those who call these communities home” (Marple and Latchmore); the central importance and challenges of Aboriginal women organizing against the racist and sexist violence they face (Harper); the experiences and reflections of women farm leaders working in the National Farmers Union and globally to defend rural communities and food sovereignty (Desmarais); the perspectives and practice that women of the economic North and South bring to struggles around energy, sustainability and climate change (Milne); the power and importance of diverse anti-patriarchal women’s voices for peace (Starhawk); a personal experience of vulnerability and courage in anti-globalization activism (Foster); and the influence and promise of feminist presence and principles in Occupy activism (Rebick; Boler).

Angela Miles is a Professor in the Adult Education and Community Development Program and co-founder of the International Women’s Human Rights Education Institute at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto; editorial board member of Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme; founding member of Toronto Women for a Just and Healthy Planet, The Feminist Party of Canada, and The Antigonish Women’s Association. Her publications include the book Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions (1996) and the co-edited collection Feminist Politics, Activism and Vision: Local and Global Challenges (2004).

1Formative issue-based networks include the Coalition Against Trafficking in women (cat-w); Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (dawn); Global Coalition on Women and aids; International Women and Health Network; Women’s Environment and Development Organization (wedo); Women Against Fundamentalism; Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (wgnrr); Women Human Rights Defenders International Coalition; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf). Regional networks include the Association of African Women on Research and Development (aaword); the Asian Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (apwld); the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (cafra); and the Latin American Feminist Encuentros. Examples of non-governmental organizations include African Women’s Development Fund; Association for Women’s Rights in Development (awid); Feminist International Radio Endeavour (fire); Global Fund for Women (gfw); International Feminist Network for a Gift Economy; International Women’s Rights Action Watch (iwraw); Peace Women Across the Globe; Women’s International News Gathering Service (wings).

2In 1995, at the Fourth World Women’s Congress in Beijing, Quebec feminists, inspired by the success of their march “Du pain et des roses” earlier that year, called on women’s groups around the world to organize coordinated local events related to these themes in their own countries beginning on March 8, 2000 (International Women’s Day), and ending on October 17, 2000, the final day to be marked with national marches in all the participating countries and an international march on the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund in New York City. This massive global initiative drew on women’s political strengths in 157 countries (August 2000 count), highlighting both the uniqueness and connections of each group, nation and region. Local groups organizing events as part of the 2000 and subsequent 2010 World Marches and other wmw campaigns experience themselves and are revealed to each other as unique centres of diverse practice in a multi-centred global movement in which any one of its many centres can invoke the power of global solidarity.

references

Antrobus, Peggy. The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies. London: Zed Books, 2004.

Basu, Amrita, ed. Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms. Boulder, co: Westview Press, 2010.

Davies, Miranda, ed. Third World, Second Sex: Women’s Struggles and National Liberation. Vol 1. London: Zed Books, 1983.

Davies, Miranda, ed. Third World, Second Sex: Women’s Struggles and National Liberation. Vol 2. London: Zed Books, 1986.

Development Alternatives for Women With a New Era (dawn). “Development Crisis and Alternative Views: Third World Women’s Perspectives.” Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 7.1,2 (1986): 31-33.

Marx-Ferree, Myra and Ali Mari Tripp, eds. Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books, 1986

Miles, Angela. Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions, 1960s-1990s. Routledge, 1996.

Miles, Angela. “Women’s Work, Nature and Colonial Exploitation: Feminist Struggles for Alternatives to Corporate Globalization.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 22 (2001): 855-878

Morgan, Robin, ed. Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. Garden City, ny: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984.

Naples, Nancy A. and Manisha Desai, eds. Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Ricciutelli, Luciana, Angela Miles and Margaret McFadden, eds. Feminist Politics, Activism and Vision: Local and Global Challenges. Toronto/London: Inanna Publications and Education and Zed Books, 2004.

Rowbotham, Sheila and Stephanie Linkogle, eds. Women Resist Globalization: Mobilizing for Livelihoods and Rights. London: Zed Books, 2001.

Stienstra, Deborah. Women’s Movements and International Organizations.Basingstoke, uk: Macmillan, 1994.

World March of Women (wmw). A Score for Women’s Voices: A March to Change the World. Prod. Les Productions Virage Inc., in coproduction with The National Film Board of Canada, Montréal, Québec, 2002.