index of 2005 conference papers

Women’s Rights in A Global Context

by Margaret A. McLaren, Rollins College

In the context of globalization, discussions of rights take on a new urgency. Rights are used as a standard for sanctioning certain countries through economic boycott, and as a criterion for entrance into the European Union. Thus, understanding rights discourse has not only theoretical applications, but also significant political and practical value. My paper will address the issue of rights in feminist theory with respect to women in the Global South. Feminists seem to take two contradictory views of rights. On the one hand, some feminists criticize the notion of rights as a highly individualistic, abstract Western idea. They argue that rights are a culture bound construct that does not do justice to more relational understandings of the self, or to communal cultures. Yet other feminists argue that rights are an important tool for securing women’s protection from violence, and promoting women’s equality. I argue that both of these views inadvertently neglect economic issues, and so long as this is the case, discussions of rights have only limited benefit for poor women in developing countries. I suggest that feminists concerned with global women’s issues prioritize economic and social rights, in addition to political and legal rights. I believe that women’s co-operatives may provide a new model for feminism that better addresses the circumstances of women in developing countries in the context of globalization.

Feminist Critiques of Rights

Feminist critiques of rights come from several different directions, here I shall briefly discuss three significant strands: care ethicists, communitarians, and postcolonial feminists. Beginning in the early 1980’s after the publication of Carol Gilligan’s influential book, In A Different Voice, a spate of literature appeared that developed some of the central ideas of her study of moral development. Gilligan claims that the privileging of rights in moral discourse reveals a male bias; her research demonstrates that when women’s voices are taken into account the focus of moral reasoning shifts to concerns of care, responsibility and not hurting others. She contrasts her view that moral considerations arise out of care and responsibility with the standard view that moral issues fall into the domain of rights and justice. Several other feminists have developed and applied Gilligan’s insights, arguing that the idea of rights found in the classical liberal political theory of John Locke and John Stuart Mill articulated unrealistic views of autonomy and rights. Feminists criticize this liberal conception of rights as individualistic, and abstracted from social context. One way that this conception is abstracted from social context is that it does not account for those who are dependent or vulnerable. And it does not recognize the role of the family in providing the context for the development and growth of children to adulthood, more specifically it ignores women’s role in nurturing and socializing children. The main issue for care ethicists, then, is the male bias of rights theory, both historically and in practice. This bias manifests itself by ignoring social context, by emphasizing individualism, and by privileging an abstract and rationalistic model for social and political interaction.

Communitarian feminist critiques echo some of these concerns, but focus more on the issues of identity and community and their significance in our lives. The primary claim is that liberal political theory may neglect important aspects of one’s identity, such as membership in a cultural group. The abstract individualism of liberalism is at odds with the possibility that one may so strongly identify with a group that one’s group identity supercedes one’s individual identity. Communitarian feminists claim that shared traditions, history and values play a central role in our political and moral lives. Thus, this criticism of liberalism again questions its assumed abstract individualism, but looks specifically at the role of community and tradition in both constituting the identity of the self and allowing for a notion of a communal or collective self. I shall argue later that the neglect of this idea of collectivity is a fundamental flaw in the liberal approach to rights.

Postcolonial feminism comprises the third strand of feminist critiques of rights. Postcolonial feminist criticisms center around the idea that rights are a fundamentally Western liberal notion and thus the application of rights to other contexts belies a Eurocentric, and biased view. One of the features of rights discourse is its claim to be universal, and it is precisely this claim that is challenged by postcolonial feminists. By not acknowledging the origin of rights within a particular social and historical context, and thus its specificity as a discourse, theorists who apply rights cross-culturally without attention to context, run the risk of Western cultural imperialism. Interestingly, this criticism of rights itself runs the risk of cultural imperialism by attributing the idea of rights to the European West without regard for indigenous struggles for rights in other contexts. The primary problem here is that the assumption that rights are universal masks the specific origins of rights and suggests that they can be applied without careful attention to social and historical context. Simply applying rights without addressing these concerns can actually serve to undermine feminist and other causes that rely on a different paradigm for political action and social change. However, many feminists claim that rights remain extremely useful in the international context.

Feminist Defenses of Rights

For the last 3 decades, women from all over the world have gathered together to discuss how to improve the quality of women’s lives in their respective countries, and globally, beginning in Mexico City in 1975 at the first United Nations Conference on Women. One of the primary strategies for improving women’s lives has been via improving women’s status legally and politically. This strategy can be realized through holding individual countries accountable to international standards, and can be monitored through changes in the law, and women’s right to political representation and access to public life. At the international level, women’s rights agendas that focus on civil and political rights, such as equal opportunity in education, employment, housing, credit, and health care and protection from rape and domestic violence, have sometimes been viewed as a “special interests agenda” and hence been marginalized in favor of mainstream human rights issues. (Peters and Wolper, 2) While the traditional conception of human rights can certainly also serve to protect women from state sanctioned violence and abuse, it does not generally address the private sphere where most violations of women’s rights take place. As Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper point out in the introduction to Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives,

Feminists such as Wolper and Peters and Charlotte Bunch are less interested in critiquing rights than extending them to include women, and broadening them to encompass the private sphere as well as the public sphere. For many years well-established international human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have had some success in documenting and bringing to international attention human rights abuses. Often, (but not often enough) this publicity, media attention and pressure from the international community, including governmental sanctions against offending countries, have resulted in changes. With evidence of this success in mind, it is no wonder many feminists advocate a strategy that includes women and gender issues in the scope of human rights rather than criticizes rights as a framework for change. Within the international arena women’s rights are getting more attention—every 5 years since 1975, there has been a United Nations Conference on Women, preceded by a Non-Governmental Organizations Forum on Women. In 1990 the Human Rights Watch established their Women’s Rights Project (the group itself was founded in 1978 in Helsinki ). The inclusion of gender issues and women’s issues in international politics and policies represents an important achievement of various women’s struggles and the international impact of feminism. Yet these advances usually ignore economic issues, especially in light of globalization.

Feminism and Economic Issues

Of the 1.3 billion people in the world who are recognized as the “absolute poor” (living on less than $1 a day), over 900 million are women. Interlocking problems of illiteracy, inequitable wages, and poor health, bolstered by patriarchal systems and social customs make it difficult for women to break free from a life of poverty. Yet according to a recent Population and Development report from the United Nations, “promoting the status, education, and health of women is an essential human rights goal, and also holds the key to social development in all societies, improving lives and strengthening families and communities” (Population and Development in the 21 st Century, PCI, 6)

Promoting the status of women and girls is an uphill struggle no matter where one lives, but when resources are scarce, the devaluation of women and girls can result in real harm.

My research took me to India , the second most populated country in the world, and the largest democracy, but still a country in which there is widespread poverty. According to statistics gathered in the 1990’s, in India an estimated 48% percent of adults are illiterate, 53% of all children are underweight and undernourished, and 53% of the population live on less than $1 a day. Moreover, 19% lack access to safe water, and 71% don’t have access to proper sanitation (IDEX website). Poverty and lack of resources obviously affect men and boys as well as women and girls, but societal and cultural gender bias means that poverty disproportionately affects girls and women

In her article, “Violence Against Women: The Indian Perspective,” Indira Jaising states: “The persistence in India of cultural practices that discriminate against girls and women means not only the abuse of but finally, the deaths of countless women….one study showed that 7,997 of 8,000 fetuses aborted were female…If a girl is lucky enough to be born, she experiences discrimination in her infancy. Girl children are fed less and for shorter periods and are not given foods like butter or milk, which are reserved, for boys. …Access to education, too, is affected by gender discrimination. Only about 50% of girls are enrolled in primary school, compared to 80% of boys” (51).

Providing women with opportunities to earn a living wage and contribute to the support of her family can serve to increase their status within the family and allow them to exercise more control over the resources of the family. The majority of the women that I interviewed were using part of their earnings to send their daughters to school past the eighth grade, which was the average level of education for the women that I interviewed. In contrast the average level of education for boys in this group (poor, and originally rural, but now living in and around Mumbai) was 10-12 th grade.

Marketplace/SHARE : A cooperative organization

The organization Marketplace/SHARE is an umbrella organization for a group of 13 cooperatives providing training, programs, and a centralized structure for marketing goods. I discuss the organization at some length because I think that its model of economic and social empowerment could provide a model for feminists concerned with global issues. Simply advocating for legal and political rights is not enough when people are dying from malnutrition and poor health care. Furthermore, I think that the cooperative model incorporates not only feminist values, but also may provide an alternative to the unmitigated forces of global capitalism.

Cooperatives are owned and controlled by the workers:

Founded in India by two sisters in 1980 the non-profit SHARE, worked with low-income women to make handmade patchwork quilts. They chose to make quilts because the women knew how to sew by hand but not by machine. Additionally, they could neither afford sewing machines, nor did they have the space in their homes for one. It was also important that they be able to work at home because they all had small children and could not afford childcare. During this first year, only 3 women were involved in the group, in addition to the founders.

Since that time the organization has grown to include 13 cooperatives that employ over 500 members. They have also expanded their product line to include clothing and household items, and broadened their market to the United States and Australia . Five of the 13 cooperatives produce the handprinted fabric, while the other 8 cooperatives sew and hand embroider the products. The eight cooperatives that do the sewing and embroidery are all located either in Mumbai or a short train ride away. Every two weeks representatives from these cooperatives meet to share information and ideas and to discuss any problems with the production work. This collaboration enables the groups to share their experience and wisdom and to collectively problem-solve. This spirit of collaboration runs through every aspect of Marketplace/SHARE. The organization combines gainful employment for marginalized women with social programs that educate and empower them. Marketplace/SHARE provides the structure and resources for each group to participate in trainings about health, parenting, social issues, global issues, and promoting social change. While the organization provides some access to outside trainings, most programs are developed, modified and managed by the women themselves.

Marketplace/SHARE uses an empowerment model, rather than controlling the production and programs of the various coops they facilitate the interaction among the various groups and coordinate the marketing of their products. Because each piece of clothing or household item utilizes hand printed fabric and incorporates embroidery work, the items are considered wearable or usable art and the producers of items are called artisans. The artisans are involved in decision-making at every level, they help to design the products, and they are trained to check the quality of production at their respective units, as well as do quality control before the products are shipped overseas. The artisans also contribute photographs and stories to the catalogue. This involvement in the overall production process allows artisans to understand the entire production process, fosters a sense of empowerment, and leads to a sense of shared responsibility for the welfare of the whole organization.

The products produced by the artisans of Marketplace/SHARE are developed with attention to the needs and skills of the artisans. Some of the artisans choose to work at home, while tending to children, cooking and dealing with other household responsibilities so each article made includes some handwork, such as embroidery, crochet, or patchwork that can be done at home. Even the artisans involved in machine sewing the items enjoy somewhat flexible work schedules depending on their personal situation. Some women bring their children to work with them, or leave to make the big midday meal. The artisans’ needs are taken into account in other important ways as well. Although every item includes hand-stitching care is taken not to choose designs that cause eyestrain because they are so small or that older women cannot do because of arthritis. Members of the coops appreciate the fair working conditions and living wage that working with Marketplace/Share provide them. But their appreciation for their work went far beyond that, almost everyone I interviewed thought of their coop as a supportive community, almost like an extended family. And a significant number discussed dramatic changes in their level of self-confidence and in their ability to deal with problems in their personal lives and in the communities to which they belonged.

This new found self-confidence is a result of the combination of the skills and abilities that they have achieved with relation to their work, and the information and skills they have developed as a result of the social programs they are involved with. Members of the coops not only make fabric, sew garments and do hand sewing, they run every aspect of the coop, from keeping accounts to traveling to pick up supplies. Many women had never traveled alone before, even on a local train or bus, most of the women had never had responsibility for large sums of money, some women knew only their local language, and not Hindi which is widely spoken, and at least one woman had never used a telephone before. Women who were members of all female cooperatives said that one of the benefits of being a member of an all women’s group was that tasks were not assigned by gender. The expectation was that women were capable of participating in every aspect of running a cooperative, and each new experience added to the women’s sense of themselves as capable in ways that they had not previously realized. This sense of capability of running a business and earning a living contributed to an increased self-confidence. This increased self-confidence, combined with their new found earning-power, in turn allows them to change some of the conditions of their lives.

One clear example of this capacity for social change is the social action program. The social action program involves each individual coop choosing an issue that is important to them and their local community and developing a strategy for change and implementing it. For instance, the Pushpanjali cooperative was concerned about the fact that there were no covers on the raw sewage ditches in their neighborhood. Not only was this dangerous for children playing in the neighborhood, and people walking. But it contributed to significant health problems, both in terms of hygiene and because disease carrying mosquitoes were breeding in the sewage water. Pushpanjali decided their social action project would be to get the city government to address this situation that had so far been consistently ignored. They met with and educated city officials about the problem, conducted a door-to-door campaign in their neighborhood to elicit widespread support and demonstrated. Within a year, the problem had been addressed the sewage ditches were covered. This change in infrastructure has positive ramifications for everyone in the community, in fact, after this the infant mortality rate went down in this community. No small feat for a group of women many of whom had never left the house or spoken in public before they started working in the coop. Another social action program involved stopping corruption in the distribution of government rations of rice and oil. The government of India provides rations of rice and oil for some of the poorest sector of society; however, those distributing it were purposefully shorting people on their allotment so that they could sell the extra. In order to curtail this corruption in the distribution of food, the women worked in teams, some going in to claim their food, some observing and some waiting outside with the police. In spite of this strategy, the practice of shortchanging the needy on their food was so widespread that in May 2000 the women conducted street demonstrations to bring widespread social and political attention to the situation. After the demonstrations the government intervened and improved the supervisory process of distributing rations. Finally, one coop choose community health as their priority and all members went through a training on preventative health, with an emphasis on inexpensive home remedies. After this coop went through the training, they put together a training themselves creating all the material such as posters, flip charts etc., and they trained the other coops. Through these social action programs the women learn that they have the power to create positive change not only in their own lives but also in the community. They learn the power of collective action and with each small success; they are encouraged to tackle larger issues.

Conclusion

The rights model because of its focus on political and legal rights, and its individualism, does not always serve feminists well in the context of global issues, particularly in light of the neo-liberal strategies of global capital. In order for feminist theory to be relevant it must address economic issues, including the issue of wage labor for women. Cooperatives represent an important alternative to both the exploitative conditions of factory work and the ever-increasing pattern of women’s migration of labor overseas to take up jobs as domestics. Cooperatives allow for control over the process of production, and for shared responsibility and benefits among the members of the coop. During my research I found that the women that I talked to were able to make positive changes in their own lives as a result of their economic independence—one women left her abusive husband and returned only when he promised to stop the abuse, all of the women were sending their daughters to school past the average educational level, and a widow who had contemplated suicide was able to support herself, her children and her mother. Their role as wage earners gave these women the power within their families to make decisions about financial matters and to exert more control within the family. But more importantly, their experience as part of a collective in which they were each given responsibility for decision making and were introduced to tasks and roles that went beyond traditional “women’s roles” facilitated a sense of empowerment that translated into a new found ability to create change both in their individual lives and collectively.

When I was talking to Suchira, a social worker who helps to coordinate the various programs of the coops she said, “we never use the term rights in our trainings, instead the trainings empower women to become agents of change in their community.” To me, this captured one of the important limitations of a rights model, rights are often individualistic, as it is the individual who possesses and exercises rights rather than the group or the collective. But large-scale systemic social change is a collective project that requires group effort.

References

Jaising, Indira. “Violence Against Women: The Indian Perspective,” in Peters and Wolper.

Peters, Julie and Andrea Wolper, Eds. Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (Routledge: New York, 1995)

index of 2005 conference papers