The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  The NGO-ization of international politics unloosed a thrilling feminist populism, with the worldwide web of NGOs imagined as a sort of Herland, the female utopia Charlotte Perkins Gilman described in her 1915 novel, a society where men were seldom seen. Enthusiasts hailed participants as something like the Amazons of a new world order. Yet the idea that NGOs could compensate for or win power, especially from despotic and corrupt regimes, had severe limitations. Emma Rothschild has pointed out that the dependence on NGOs, which are nonaccountable institutions and not democratic ones, can have the effect of excusing, in the eyes of powerful Western nations, the lack of strong state institutions that are citizens’ only lasting chance for political and economic security.16 The same, of course, is true for women.

  Still, in the last two decades of the century, as barriers to democracy, social well-being, and women’s rights were thrown up everywhere, NGOs were in many places the only footholds for feminist activity. Even Amadiume, as acerbic as she is about the Nigerian movement, notes that women’s organizations supported by international church groups made admirable strides in conducting business on democratic principles.17 Despite their considerable limitations and the superficial international sentiment that backed them, NGOs’ alliances, supports, and funding pushed approval for feminism’s projects deeper into conceptions of the common good. Operating with some reference to international norms, goals, and laws, NGOs were experiments in universalism, drawing on a cosmopolitan repertoire of feminist ideas to give direction and coherence to their work: “on the eve of the 21st century, the eruption of the voice of women.”18 The voice was faint or strong depending on whether the speakers could command a local audience, local personnel, and local alliances, as did the South Asian cooperatives. On the one hand, global feminist involvements were seldom efficacious if Western participants did not understand local contexts: Vociferous good intentions and certainties could swamp women’s needs in Western fantasies of helpfulness. On the other, global feminism provided resources for women to act for themselves when the odds were stacked against them.

  Intellectually, global feminism unleashed in the enclaves of international development work and the United Nations a spirit of exploration. Here, too, a vast unknown continent of women attracted the curious and intellectually intrepid. Recalling the excitement of the first feminist breakthroughs in universities in the 1970s, discoveries spread through policy circles as researchers focused for the first time on women as economic and social actors rather than as victims or ciphers. Thick studies and surveys came out of ECOSOC, UNIFEM, and the World Bank. It was women’s studies in the policy world, loosely allied with feminist academic work in economics, political science, law, medicine, sociology, public health, and anthropology. Just as historians discovered that half the population did not appear in the reigning scholarship, and literary scholars realized that virtually no women novelists or poets were taught in literature courses, researchers in policy and development studies exposed huge blank areas in international programs that treated half the world’s population as if they hardly existed.

  They dug up mines of data that created a quite different profile of the object of study. In development economics, the breakthrough book was Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970), by the distinguished Danish economist Ester Boserup. Boserup showed that far from being household dependents, women did more than 70 percent of the world’s agricultural labor and that in many parts of the world, including the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, they were the primary farmers. The book uncovered a hidden world of women—intricate trade-offs, negotiations, and obligations of labor and love threaded through kin and household groups. Boserup identified huge patterns of work and family that held across continents, and at the same time delved sympathetically into the intimate details of domestic economies: how hardworking Yoruba women in Nigeria, for instance, encouraged husbands to take second wives so they could get help with tiresome jobs.19 Portraying women as diligent, calculating, and intelligent, balancing their many obligations with forethought, Boserup discredited the common view of development experts that they were inert traditionalists mired in unproductive household work, impediments to modernization.

  The new object of aid came into view at a moment when modernization strategies had fizzled and the field opened to “pro-poor” approaches. Women, now highlighted as crucial household members, were treated as good risks for social investment. After the Mexico City conference, many agencies installed Women in Development programs that concentrated on female labor power. The programs ran into resistance from male colleagues. The derisive charge was that women-centered initiatives were trying to take Western feminism to African huts. At international conferences, though, the changed view triumphed: The 1980s image of a multitasking producer with multiple responsibilities replaced Mexico City’s passive, homebound, uneducated housewife with too many children, needy of the world’s largesse. The new wisdom was that busy, tireless, responsible women the world over were worthy citizens who held the future of the world in their hands. Foreign-aid programs began to treat them as central—as farmers in Africa and Asia, as breadwinners and mainstays of their households everywhere, and as incipient entrepreneurs in their roles as market women and petty producers.20

  In a nutshell, studies on women as workers found that they represented half of the world’s adult population and one third of the official labor force; they performed nearly two thirds of all working hours; yet they received only one tenth of the world’s income and owned less than 1 percent of property. In no country were they treated as well as men: Men went to school more, were far more likely to be literate, were paid more, better nourished, subjected to less violence, and lived longer. Women’s sexuality was exponentially more likely than men’s to have injurious consequences: in pregnancies (with high childbirth mortality in poor countries) and children to care for, in social ostracism for nonmarital sex, and (in worst-case scenarios) in retributive violence and death (as in honor killings of sexually active or raped daughters). In sum, they did so much, yet they benefited so little. “All too often women are not treated as ends in their own right, persons with a dignity that deserves respect from law and institutions,” Martha Nussbaum reflected gravely in 1998. “Women in much of the world lose out by being women.” Judgments like this, based in the grim facts of the world situation, deepened the sense of the liabilities of being the second sex.21

  Over time, evidence accumulated for another revelation: Income that went directly to women, which they continued to control, raised the standard of living of the entire household, including children’s education. The insight had a history. During World War I, the British government paid soldiers’ allowances for their dependents directly to the wives of men at the front. In working-class neighborhoods, British social workers (many of them female) observed that this income notably improved the care of children and raised the entire family’s standard of living. But over the years, the record the world over showed that the same was not true for men. A women’s microfinance bank in India observed that “if a woman earns 100 rupees, 90 rupees goes into mouths and medicine and schoolbooks for children; with a man only 40 rupees comes back.” Policy makers everywhere rediscovered this simple social fact. In Brazil, for instance, children who lived with employed mothers had a twenty times greater chance of surviving childhood than those who lived with an employed father and an economically dependent mother.22

  In their newly acquired role in development thought as providers, poor women were critical to theories of neoliberal “shock therapy” administered to debt-ridden poor nations. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed structural adjustment programs on poor nations, tying loans to requirements that aimed to jolt nations into economic growth by imposing strict debt repayment provisions, lowering trade barriers, and opening them to foreign investment. Experts agreed there would be short-term hardship, since giving priority to debt repayment necessitated slashing social welfare programs. In what planners c
alled “crossing the desert,” women’s work caring for others in the face of plummeting incomes and loss of social services was supposed to cushion the blows. Their Herculean capacities for work and their patience for unpaid, low-status work—that is, child care, tending the old and the sick, and domestic labor—figured in these schemes as a way to reconcile populations to poverty while at the same time urging them forward into education, entrepreneurship, and labor migration. When the fund for school uniforms was slashed, theorists assumed, women would scrounge and save and cut back on expenditures to find secondhand uniforms or make them. When the program to bring a water line into the village crumbled, well, women and girls could be counted on to make the trek to the spring. When food was scarce, mothers would compensate by spreading their share around (a phenomenon that, taken to the extreme, is recognized by nutritionists as maternal “autostarvation”).23

  In the 1990s, attention shifted to women’s abilities to generate cash income. One wing of policy makers believed that the key to poverty reduction lay in maximizing the cash value of women’s labor. They warned against march-across-the-desert programs that stressed women’s unpaid labor at the expense of earning income. From this emphasis on women’s access to markets came the vogue for microfinance, which began in the 1990s, funding banks that would give minute loans to impoverished borrowers to support cash-producing ventures—small businesses, workshops, farms—on the strength of guarantees given by NGOs and women’s cooperatives. “Women don’t need charity, they need access,” firmly stated Nancy Barry, a graduate of Harvard Business School and former World Bank executive who joined the newly founded Women’s World Bank in 1990. It was an attractive proposition to Americans, raised to believe that hard work counted and individuals could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Global feminism amplified the significance: Microfinance was not only going to enhance the well-being of households, but provide a floor for democracy and development. “There can be no democracy or development without women,” maintained an executive from a microfinance fund in 1993. “We’re showing how strengthening the condition of women is a strategic investment.”24

  At its best, microfinance brought development policies down to tangible needs, putting money in the hands of local women who had concrete goals and giving them flexibility in using it, small as the amounts were. By the mid-1990s, the disastrous results of top-down structural adjustment policies were becoming clear. A paper from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands, a leader in development, bluntly declared in 1991, “Economic and political development processes have in general had no beneficial effect on the position of women.” Widespread acknowledgment of neoliberalism’s failures to reduce poverty resulted in strategies designed from the vantage point of poor women, rather than the agencies that sought to exploit or harness their labor. Feminist advocates insisted that poor women step forward in these poverty reduction schemes. When asked what they needed, women in Africa or Asia were likely to put forward realistic, sensible schemes—a village water tap, sewing machines, schools for girls, sturdy market stalls.25

  But women’s emergence as stars of development concealed very real hazards. In many ways, it was their strengths as community members and household mainstays that were their undoing. Their sociability, their habits of altruism, their self-abnegation in the face of children’s needs: All these skills were hard-won and immensely admirable. But experts and reformers saw them as resources not because women themselves were worthy objects of aid but because they could be used in so many different ways. Women in developing countries became a target group who planners thought could make up for huge deficiencies in states’ abilities to deliver basic resources. Female farmers, for instance, hailed as the “missing link” in development policies, were to serve many ends: “The cure for Africa’s food crisis, child welfare, environmental degradation and failures of structural adjustment policies are all sought in women,” two economists drily remarked.26 Unsupported by legal changes in land rights, inheritance, and ownership, and lacking educational opportunities (scarce in any case, and typically reserved for sons), women remained stranded within drastically asymmetrical divisions of labor and societies that severely undervalued their humanity. No microfinance loan, no matter how successful, was going to address that problem. Americans, though, eager for the quick fix, leapt on incremental changes as auguring something much greater. The idea that investing in women was strategic was by 1993 unassailable.

  In truth, feminist principles of women’s well-being were not identical with notions of investment. Could women be an investment simply in themselves? For one, that would mean an international commitment to female education, and education was a longer-term institutional project that necessarily depended on governments and political will more than on NGOs and donors. Regardless of the fact that the correlation between women’s education and lowering birthrates had been known and repeatedly demonstrated since 1926, planners and population experts veered away from the insight that population planning required respect for women’s individual integrity and needs.27 Educating women seemed somehow less practical than deploying their enormous capacities for hard work and self-sacrifice. Thus the celebration of women’s savvy and hard work stopped short of supporting efforts to honor their dignity as individuals and nourish their minds.

  Celebrants of global feminism hoped that women were becoming the honest brokers of international politics and diplomacy, advisers and advocates who stood apart from national rivalries and interests. “I go to Nairobi committed to the necessity of global feminism and excited by the promise of learning more from other women because I believe that the greatest hope for life in the next century lies in the number of women’s voices that are being raised where once there was silence,” avowed Charlotte Bunch, a leader in international work in the United States. “Global feminism is not a luxury activity for the elite but a necessity for effective action.” The world conferences represented for many “the coming of age of the international women’s movement, with women playing key roles in the inter-governmental negotiations as delegates, advisors, and advocates.”28

  At their most callow, pronouncements about the potency of global feminism unknowingly echoed the views of another era that maternal character could solve the world’s problems. After World War I, the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance put forth women as the vanguard of a new order of international governance. Similarly, in the 1980s and ’90s, enthusiasts believed that global feminism created among women “lateral identifications with each other across national boundaries for the sake of human survival.” “It has to do with the grounding in the family,” a veteran of Beijing explained, a grounding that distinguished women from men. “It has nothing to do with whether we are better or worse. It has everything to do with the fact that we are different.”29

  The proposition that “sisterhood is global,” title of a popular 1984 compendium by veteran feminist Robin Morgan (published fourteen years after her landmark Sisterhood Is Powerful), appealed to converts to the international project. “SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL! INTERNATIONAL SISTERHOOD IS MORE POWERFUL!” exhorted Diane Russell the next year, calling the troops to battle.30 In the United States, global sisterhood became a rallying point for what was, by the time of the Beijing conference, a venture of moderate churchwomen, Marxists committed to anti-imperialist politics, and hard-line radical feminists. To socially concerned Protestants, global feminism was a matter of helping the less fortunate around the world; it called forth modern versions of the nineteenth-century impulse of Christian womanly protection. To feminists on the left, it promised the bygone satisfactions of socialist and anti-imperialist solidarity, all the more precious after 1989 when Communism crumbled and Third World revolutions ran aground. To radical feminists, the desperate straits of so many women worldwide seemed to vindicate their dire judgments of female oppression and men’s wrongdoing.

  Global feminism in the American lexicon was a general approach, focusing on no one place but on an
y and all places outside the West. Gone were the pragmatic solidarity groups with women in beleaguered socialist countries that dotted American left-wing feminism in the 1970s: Action for Women in Chile, for example, a New York–based feminist group that gave financial support to refugees fleeing Pinochet’s Chile and publicized the plight of prisoners and the disappeared.31 Solidarity work, rooted in Marxist internationalism, depended on thick knowledge of local conditions: prisoners’ situations, distinctions among political parties, the details of government repression. The new global feminism, unmoored from any particular place, slid around on a glaze of thin knowledge. In the United States, it called up habits of analogizing that American women had used since the antebellum years, when women first imagined themselves sisters to enslaved women. She—so different from me in most respects—is really like me in fundamental ways, because we are both women and we both contend with the power of men. “Am I not a woman and a sister?” The abolitionist slogan could be modernized to apply to the secretary in an office in Denver, propositioned by her boss, or to a village girl in a garment factory in Manila, propositioned by her boss.