Introduction

A M R I TA B A S U

W omen’s movements are among the oldest, strongest, and most

globally interconnected social movements.1 They have engaged
in nationalist, democratic, and anti-authoritarian protests as well as au-
tonomous struggles against gender inequality. They have challenged
and changed dominant discourses, laws, political institutions, and fam-
ily structures through consciousness raising and direct action. They
have created and energized regional and global networks as well as na-
tional government agencies that promote women’s interests.
And yet, despite the strengths of women’s movements, gender in-
equality is systemic, severe and pervasive throughout the world. Many
feminist demands remain unfulfilled; many achievements have been
reversed.2 In recent years, the religious right and xenophobic national-
ists have increasingly opposed women’s rights and freedoms. Wars and
militarization have increased women’s vulnerability and weakened
women’s movements. The spread of neoliberalism, which transfers con-
trol over economic resources from the public to the private sector, has
deepened structural inequalities while decreasing states’ responsibili-
ties to address them.
This revised edition of Women’s Movements in the Global Era charts
the trajectories of women’s movements, with particular attention to the
more than two decades since the UN’s 1995 women’s conference in
Beijing. It tracks the roles of women’s movements, amidst the growth
of organized assaults on women’s rights, as well as popular struggles—
from Occupy to the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter. This edition
contains six new chapters by leading scholars of women and gender

1
2 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

studies, on individual countries and several major regions of the world,

to illuminate both national and supra-national patterns. There are
chapters on nine countries (Pakistan, China, India, South Africa, Pales-
tine, Iran, Brazil, Russia, and the United States) and four major regions
(Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Maghreb, which comprises
Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia).
As politically savvy, strategic actors, women’s movements thrive in
the most diverse and fraught political environments. At the same time,
the strength of women’s movements varies enormously across nations.
At one end of the spectrum is the Russian women’s movement, which,
Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom argues, barely exists. At the other end is the
Brazilian women’s movement, which Cecilia Sardenberg and Ana Alice
Costa describe as strong and flourishing. Capturing a theme that de-
scribes many other settings, Benita Roth, drawing on Jo Reger, de-
scribes US feminism as both everywhere and nowhere: while in recent
decades feminist ideas have become pervasive, many women’s move-
ments have apparently disappeared. What explains this? How should
we characterize the strengths and weaknesses of women’s movements,
and what explains differences in their cross-national character, size, and
power?
In the years since the publication of the first edition of Women’s
Movements in the Global Era and its predecessor, The Challenge of Local
Feminisms, many important works have appeared on women’s activism,
feminism and women’s movements. This revised edition of the book
makes several distinctive contributions. First, unlike many studies that
focus on transnational or global movements, this book examines women’s
movements primarily within their national and regional contexts.
Whereas the extent of global influences on national and regional wom-
en’s movements varies widely through time and space, national condi-
tions are always significant. Of particular importance are structures of
national power, what Raka Ray describes as political fields, which include
the state, political parties, and social movements (Ray, 1999).
Second, unlike studies that focus on a single issue across countries,
the chapters in this volume consider a range of issues that women’s
movements have addressed. To provide bases for comparison, the au-
thors were asked to explore whether and to what extent women’s move-
ments have addressed a core set of questions—sexual violence, political
representation, reproductive rights, and poverty and class inequality.
They also explore whether and how women’s movements have
 Introduction 3

addressed Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights be-

cause of the importance of this issue and the convergence of feminist
and LGBT struggles.3
Third, this volume analyzes women’s movements in diverse rather
than similar political, economic, and social settings.4 Women’s move-
ments have emerged and grown under divergent conditions, and it is
illuminating to compare the challenges that they confront in different
locales. In particular, the close examination of feminist struggles in the
global South emphatically challenges myths and misconceptions that
feminists are most active in the global North, that global flows of infor-
mation and ideas are primarily North to South, and that international
influences always have a positive impact on women’s movements in the
global South. As several chapters in this book demonstrate, the opposi-
tion that women’s movements encounter does not generally emanate
from “traditional” cultural and religious values but from organized po-
litical forces, some of which are transnational.
Fourth, the chapters in this volume address women’s movements
that span the scales of political life and work with diverse populations.
There has been extensive scholarship on state feminism, in which fem-
ocrats (feminist bureaucrats) play crucial roles. There is also a rich lit-
erature on community organizations and grassroots movements. This
book includes accounts of feminists who work within and outside the
state, nationally and locally, and among the poor, middle classes and
elites. Capturing the diversity in women’s identities and conditions
across multiple lines of stratification necessitates examining a range of
organizations that have challenged gender inequality and the multiple
forms that feminist struggles have assumed. How feminist activists have
negotiated the local, national, and transnational arenas is another key
theme of the book.
There are risks in adopting the approach I describe. One is to un-
duly privilege the state and national boundaries. To address this issue,
chapters on Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the Maghreb explore
cross-border activism and the cross-fertilization of ideas among women
in each region. Many of the chapters critically assess the relationship
between feminism and nationalism and weigh the costs and benefits for
women’s movements of working with and within the state. Islah Jad
describes the challenges that the Palestinian women’s movement faces
in working with a divided, quasi-state with limited authority that en-
dures continued subjection to the Israeli Occupation.
4 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

Another risk is that description may overwhelm the theoretical anal-

ysis that can yield fruitful comparative insights. However, all of the
chapters address a core set of comparative themes concerning how
women’s movements achieve a productive balance between alliance
and autonomy in several spheres. This entails, first, attaining strong
foundations within the national context while forging productive links
with transnational forces. Secondly, as several chapters show, women’s
movements have been most successful when they have engaged the
state through contestation and collaboration, without abdicating their
own identities, constituencies, and concerns. Third, women’s move-
ments have been best served by joining other social movements and
groups within civil society while maintaining their own objectives and
identities.
This introductory chapter is organized in five sections. In the first
section I provide a definition of feminism and its relationship to wom-
en’s movements. The second, and longest, section, explores the differ-
ent forms that transnationalism has assumed, including the United
Nations (UN) international women’s conferences, transnational and
regional advocacy organizations, and internationally funded non-gov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs). It assesses the different implications
of transnational influences on women’s movements in the global North
and South and authoritarian and democratic settings. The third section
shifts attention from the international and regional to the national level
and discusses the domestic conditions under which women’s move-
ments emerge, emphasizing their connection to nationalist and demo-
cratic struggles. Section four describes women’s movements’
negotiations with the state, particularly around political representation
and economic justice in the neo-liberal era. Section five explores two
burning issues that women’s movements have addressed: violence
against women and sexual orientation. The conclusion reflects on the
challenges women’s movements confront going forward.

I. Feminism and Women’s Movements

Many women who engage in struggles to achieve gender equality do
not describe themselves as feminists. Often they are reacting to the
perceived roots of the term. In some settings, feminism is associated
with Westernization, as Nayereh Tohidi notes in the case of Iran. Wom-
en’s rights activists in Central and Eastern Europe, as Silke Roth
 Introduction 5

argues, had an ambivalent relationship to both socialist state feminism

as well as to Western feminism, which did not adequately address the
concerns of women in postsocialist societies. However, some gender
equality activists, as in Morocco and Tunisia, have long described them-
selves as feminists, and other activists who in the past avoided the fem-
inist label embrace it today. Such is the case in Russia, Sundstrom
suggests. Aili Mari Tripp comments that young African feminists have
increasingly redefined feminism in African terms. Wang Zheng states
that the younger generation of Chinese feminists has rejected the am-
biguous term nüxingzhuyi (feminine-ism) and openly embraced
nüquanzhuyi (women’s right/power-ism).
Not all feminist interventions take the form of self-identified wom-
en’s movements. I use the term women’s movement to describe orga-
nized social movements to challenge gender inequality and the term
feminism to describe struggles that have the same goals but need not be
organized women’s movements. Feminism, unlike women’s move-
ments, can occur in a variety of arenas and assume a variety of forms.
Feminism connotes both ideas and their enactments, but does not
specify who will enact these ideas or what forms these enactments will
take. It includes women’s ordinary day-to-day activities that defy pro-
scriptions of ruling clerics and transgress patriarchal norms and bound-
aries. For example, Tohidi notes that many Iranian women do not
describe themselves as feminists and lack ties to feminist networks, but
have strengthened women’s movements through their acts of defiance.
She speaks of the power of women’s presence as they challenge, resist,
and circumvent state repression in their daily lives. Feminist discourses
influence the character of speech, thought, and expression in the home
and the workplace, among individuals and groups, in everyday life, and,
episodically, in politics, culture, and the arts. Feminists have made cul-
tural interventions through magazines, bookstores, coffeehouses, clubs,
novels, poetry, plays, and performances. They have created new episte-
mologies and subjects of research.
These expressions of feminism have a cumulative impact on society,
the polity, and the economy that is powerful, if difficult to measure. But
the significance of feminism rests not solely on its impact on societal
structures and institutions, but also on the opportunities that it creates
for women’s self-expression. The performative dimensions of feminism
often draw on earlier repertoires of protest. For example, Tripp de-
scribes how in many parts of Africa, women used to strip in public to
6 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

curse and shame male abuse of authority. In the contemporary context,

women have organized collective naked protests in Kenya, Nigeria, and
Uganda. Embodied protest has far-reaching implications for women
and for society as a whole. Farida Shaheed argues that the most effec-
tive political actors in Pakistan, including the religious right and armed
extremists, have employed expressive means of occupying the public
sphere. She believes that the survival of the women’s movement de-
pends on including vibrant, expressive dimensions.
The authors in this book use the term women’s movements to de-
scribe movements of women that have sought to challenge gender in-
equality. However, to appreciate the diversity and dynamism of these
movements, they include in their definition not only autonomous wom-
en’s groups but also other social movements in which women have
made feminist demands. Women have been active in many social
movements that are neither wholly composed of women nor primarily
committed to addressing gender inequality. To exclude women’s activ-
ism in movements for decolonization, democracy, human rights, and
economic inequality risks narrowing our definition of women’s move-
ments and confining attention to liberal, middle-class movements.
Following Maxine Molyneux (1985), one might differentiate be-
tween women’s practical and strategic interests. She suggests that stra-
tegic interests, commonly identified as feminist, emerge from and
contest women’s experiences of structural gender subordination. Prac-
tical interests, by contrast, emerge from women’s immediate and per-
ceived needs. Elisabeth Jay Friedman fruitfully employs this distinction
to describe the greater commitment of leftist governments in Latin
America to addressing women’s practical interests, concerning eco-
nomic inequality, than their strategic interests, concerning bodily au-
tonomy and identity recognition.
However, the distinction between the two is not always clear. Elaine
Salo points out that racism and misogyny were so tightly intertwined
under South Africa’s apartheid state that black women’s struggles
against bus boycotts, rent strikes, land occupation, and pass laws were
both strategic and practical. Furthermore, movements are dynamic en-
tities. What may begin as a struggle to achieve women’s practical inter-
ests can turn into a struggle to defend women’s strategic interests, and
vice versa. Sardenberg and Costa argue that women’s strategic interests
in Brazil are contextually defined; they vary by time and place, and by
female activists’ social locations.
 Introduction 7

A key feature of women’s movements in the contemporary era is

their focus on coalition building and intersectionality (a recognition of
multiple and overlapping inequalities). The two are closely related since
women’s movements must often ally with other social justice move-
ments, including peace, environmental and human rights movements,
to address the breadth of women’s interests. These alliances can be in-
formal and are sometimes barely visible. Benita Roth argues that not
only has an understanding of intersectional oppressions become part of
US feminisms, it has also been incorporated into the DNA of other so-
cial movements. By way of example she cites Black Lives Matter (BLM),
which was founded in 2013 by three black women who were social jus-
tice activists, to fight police violence against African Americans. Benita
Roth considers BLM a good example of how the feminist concept of
intersectionality has permeated other social movements.

II. Transnational Influences

Some of the most significant influences on women’s movements over
the past decades have been global institutions, discourses and actors.
Transnational advocacy networks, international funding for NGOs, and
global discourses concerning women’s rights, have dramatically ex-
panded. The growth of market forces and communication technologies
has fueled the growth of transnational networks.
Observers sometimes refer to global influences on women’s move-
ments without carefully differentiating those influences. I use the term
international to refer to nations and transnational to entities that oper-
ate between and beyond borders. Transnational networks differ in im-
portant respects from international organizations. Whereas
international organizations are typically composed of representatives
from multiple national member organizations, transnational networks
are coalitions of loosely affiliated, decentralized coordinating bodies,
whether government-connected or not.
Three distinct types of international and transnational influence
have had the greatest impact: UN international women’s conferences
and treaties that seek to promote gender equality; transnational and
regional networks and advocacy groups; and international funding for
NGOs. All three of these transnational and international influences
have generated new discourses, particularly by introducing or increas-
ing a focus on women’s rights or, more specifically, women’s human
8 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

rights. All of these global influences have contributed to institutionaliz-

ing women’s movements by strengthening NGOs and collaboration be-
tween the state and women’s movements.

The UN International Women’s Conferences

The UN is the source and site of vital transnational linkages among
women’s movements. It has produced international agreements on
gender equality that most national governments have endorsed. The
most important of these is the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which the UN
General Assembly adopted in 1979 and implemented two years later.
CEDAW is an international bill of rights for women that addresses dis-
crimination in areas such as education, employment, marriage and fam-
ily relations, health care, politics, finance and law. Countries that have
ratified CEDAW are legally bound to implement its provisions and
submit national reports to CEDAW every four years on measures they
have taken to comply with their treaty obligations.
Four UN world conferences on women—in Mexico City (1975),
Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995)—provided key
sites for interactions among national governments, between NGOs and
governments, and among women’s movements cross-nationally. These
UN conferences strengthened and were strengthened by national
women’s movements in several ways.
The first involved preparing for the UN global women’s confer-
ences. Feminist groups organized meetings throughout their respec-
tive countries to learn about women’s conditions across regional and
class lines and formed linkages with local women’s groups and other
social movement organizations. Sardenberg and Costa describe prepa-
rations for the Beijing conference as contributing to the growth of the
Brazilian women’s movement. Shaheed notes that because govern-
ments lacked relevant expertise, they often relied on women’s organiza-
tions to prepare draft plans and final reports for the conferences. The
skills that feminists developed through these processes enabled them
to lobby more effectively for better laws and policies.
Second, the UN conferences enabled women activists from around
the world to meet and collaborate, forming relationships that lasted
long after the conferences ended. They also increased the visibility and
legitimacy of nationally based women’s organizations, especially in
 Introduction 9

authoritarian settings like China. The Chinese women’s movement,

writes Wang Zheng, was the driving force behind China’s decision to
host the Beijing women’s conference. The opportunities that confer-
ence provided to network with international and diasporic groups
strengthened the Chinese women’s movement.
The third important impact of the UN women’s conferences was in
getting member nations to arrive at a common set of goals to promote
gender equality. Thanks to lobbying by feminist organizations, the UN
conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 took important steps to
protect and promote women’s rights. Twelve years later, the Beijing
women’s conference extended and expanded these initiatives. The UN
conferences offered unparalleled opportunities for women’s move-
ments to share experiences, gain legitimacy, and influence their na-
tional governments. Jean H. Quataert and Benita Roth summarize the
conferences’ contributions aptly:

They strengthened local women’s movements’ collective hands and

encouraged, through preparatory processes, the makings of links on
the ground among actors interested in women’s rights even across
borders. They facilitated exchanges among women where western
hegemonies of understandings about women’s rights, inclusive alli-
ances, and development agendas were challenged. They also forced
states, democratic and nondemocratic alike, to grapple with plans
for actions on women’s and human rights that emerged from the
meetings. (Quataeret and Roth 2012)

The most impressive and ambitious outcome of the Beijing women’s

conference was the Platform for Action. It covered twelve major areas:
poverty, education and training, health, violence, armed conflict, econ-
omy, power and decision-making, institutional mechanisms, human
rights, media, environment, and the girl child. It asked states to ensure
that women held at least 30 percent of elected positions. It called on
governments and NGOs to engage in gender mainstreaming, namely,
ensuring that gender perspectives and the goal of gender equality were
integrated into the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation
of legislation, policies, and programs. UN Women, formed in 2010 by
the General Assembly, took responsibility for implementing these goals
by working with national governments, intergovernmental agencies and
civil society organizations.
10 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

In March 2015 the UN Commission on the Status of Women under-

took a review of governments’ progress in implementing the Beijing
Declaration and Platform for Action, twenty years after its adoption. It
reported on some positive developments, including a global rise in
women’s life expectancy, more laws to address violence against women,
increased girls’ enrollment in primary and secondary education, a
growth in women’s labor force participation, and women’s increased
access to contraception in most regions of the world. Citing a study by
Laurel Weldon and Mala Htun on seventy countries over four decades,
the report acknowledged that feminist organizations have played deci-
sive roles in countries which have made the most progress in adopting
gender equality policies and attaining women’s rights (Weldon and
Htun 2012).
However, overall, the failures and setbacks were more striking. UN
Women stated in its report:

Twenty years ago we were buoyed up by the unified determination

and conviction of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.
…Twenty years on, it is a hard truth that many of the same barriers
and constraints that were recognized by the Beijing signatories are
still in force globally.
In recent years, progress on gender equality has been held back
by forces in the global political and economic landscapes that have
been particularly hard to mitigate or combat. Persistent conflicts,
the global financial and economic crises, volatile food and energy
prices, and climate change have intensified inequalities and vulner-
ability, and have had specific and almost universally negative im-
pacts on women and girls. (“UN Women Summary Report: The
Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action Turns 20,” 2015)

The Report’s findings are sobering: women are more likely than
men to live in poverty and to have fewer opportunities for decent work,
assets, and formal credit. Due to pervasive occupational segregation,
women are overrepresented in low-paid jobs, have less access to social
protection, and are paid on average less than men for work of equal
value. Women’s employment outcomes are further limited by the dis-
proportionate share of unpaid care work they perform. Women are
more seriously affected than men by climate change. All regions have
unacceptably high rates of violence against women; according to recent
 Introduction 11

global estimates, 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced

physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual
violence in their lifetimes. Women remain significantly underrepre-
sented at the highest levels of political office as well as across public
and private sectors. Discrimination against women embedded in the
legal system remains pervasive, particularly in family law.
UN member nations decided not to hold a Fifth World Conference
on Women in 2015 as a twenty-year follow up to the 1995 Beijing Con-
ference. Some opposed another global conference on the grounds that
the gains women had achieved might be reversed, given the increased
strength of conservative anti-feminist groups. In 2015, a group of coun-
tries describing themselves as “Friends of the Family” formed a delega-
tion at the UN to challenge women’s rights for supposedly threatening
the family.5 Some opponents of another global conference felt that gov-
ernments should devote themselves to implementing the Platform for
Action before adopting new goals. Some feminists worried that govern-
ment representatives and bureaucratized NGOs would dominate a fifth
world conference and exclude more radical perspectives.
Opposition to a fifth world conference on women is a sad commen-
tary on the global political climate for feminism today. Concerns about
the bureaucratization of feminism that follows upon its institutionaliza-
tion, in part as a result of UN mandates, are well founded. However,
some observers believe that the response should be to create more in-
clusive processes rather than giving up on UN conferences (Sandler
and Goetz, 2015) A fifth global women’s conference would have en-
abled feminists to put collective pressure on governments to imple-
ment the Platform for Action and to devise strategies for confronting
right-wing attacks on women and sexual minorities.
Many seasoned feminists who participated in the UN conferences
and no longer view the UN as a platform for progressive struggles con-
sider the World Social Forum (WSF), a venue of anti-neoliberal activ-
ists, a more desirable, radical alternative (Wilson, 2007). At the 2002
WSF in Brazil, feminists launched the Campaign against Fundamental-
isms, a network of Latin American Southern Cone feminist organiza-
tions to challenge neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism.
Feminists from the global South organized packed sessions on Femi-
nist Dialogues in Mumbai in 2004 and Porto Alegre in 2005 that ex-
plored how feminists could address gender inequality within the global
social justice movement. Thanks to the efforts of Tunisian feminists,
12 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

women’s rights figured prominently in the WSF in Tunis in 2014. Im-

pressive as these achievements are, the WSFs are not a substitute for
UN women’s conferences since they cannot devise programs that carry
treaty obligations. More broadly, the UN remains an important site for
pressuring the state, which retains the ability to deny or support many
feminist demands.

Transnational and Regional Networks

Transnational networks are broad based coalitions that engage in re-
search, lobbying, advocacy, and direct action to achieve gender equality
and women’s empowerment. These networks are a product of global-
ization and have addressed the inequalities it generates with respect to
climate change, unemployment and low wages. They have also engaged
in struggles to promote women’s health, reproductive rights and family
law reform.
Transnational networks take many forms. Some include governmen-
tal and non-governmental actors, foundations, the media, and regional
and international agencies (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 9). Other more ac-
tivist-oriented networks exclude government representatives. This lat-
ter group includes Development Alternatives with Women for a New
Era (DAWN), Women in Development Europe (WIDE), the Associa-
tion for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), and the Women,
Environment, and Development Organization, all of which have ad-
dressed the impact of neoliberalism and globalization on women
(Moghadam 2005). Although movement activists may participate in
transnational networks, the networks themselves are not movements
but broadly affiliated groups.
Regional feminist networks have taken up UN mandates and
worked with transnational groups, but their character and concerns are
deeply influenced by regional political and economic forces. Some re-
gional networks have explicitly or implicitly contested national borders.
Regional networks have been especially robust in Latin America.
For Latin American feminists and women’s organizations that joined
other human rights groups in democratic struggles against military dic-
tatorships in the 1970s, a rights-based approach has been relatively un-
controversial. Such an approach considers certain rights universal
rather than culturally specific, a claim that feminists in other regions of
the world have contested. Sonia Alvarez argues that “the peculiarities
 Introduction 13

of the regional and national political contexts in which feminisms un-

folded also impelled local movement actors to build trans-border con-
nections from the bottom up” (Alvarez, 2000, 30–31). Since 1981, Latin
American and Caribbean feminists have organized encuentros, gather-
ings for sharing ideas, developing strategies, and fostering closer links
among women’s movements in the region. They have also brought to-
gether indigenous women, lesbians, and Afro–Latin American and Af-
ro-Caribbean women who experience marginalization within national
and regional contexts. Encuentros have taken place in Argentina, Bra-
zil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador,
Mexico, and Peru. Participants in the encuentros have fiercely debated
contentious issues and insisted on inclusion despite differences (Fried-
man 2015).
Regional networks in Africa have sprung up in the aftermath of civil
wars and ethnic conflicts since the mid-1980s. They are a product of both
international influences and the cross-fertilization of ideas among national
women’s movements that are committed to peace, security, personal law
reform, and economic justice. Women have mobilized for peace in con-
flict-ridden nations like Nigeria, Burundi, South Sudan, Somalia, and the
Eastern Congo as well as through regional networks. Liberian women’s
peace organizations have been particularly active, and worked with Afri-
ca-wide peace organizations like Femmes Africa Solidarité.
In Europe, alongside a number of regional networks that address
women’s rights and development, the European Union (EU) has
strengthened ties among women’s movements and led the twenty-eight
EU member states to adopt more gender-equitable laws and policies.
Silke Roth argues that the EU played a significant role in strengthening
feminist demands. She suggests that gender equality legislation was an
unintended side effect: initially France, the only founding member
with equal-pay legislation, demanded that the other member states fol-
low its lead. Over the years, gender equality policies expanded beyond
pay equity. Prospects of joining the EU led—for example—Polish,
Czech and Irish feminists to lobby their governments for gender equal-
ity legislation, and for the creation of official bodies and funding to
support their activities. Silke Roth describes EU policies as a hybrid of
liberal and social-democratic approaches that reflect the policies of dif-
ferent member states.
In the Maghreb, as Valentine Moghadam describes, regional net-
works, like the Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité, created by feminists in
14 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in the early 1990s, have sought to advance
women’s rights. The Collectif worked with women’s groups across the
region to fight for egalitarian family codes and women’s full and equal
citizenship. The Collectif also forged ties with other transnational femi-
nist networks: first with Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML),
formed in 1984 in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism and discrimina-
tory family laws; and later with the Women’s Learning Partnership for
Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP), established in 2000 with many
network partners. A WLP conference facilitated networking between
Moroccan and Iranian feminists. In 2009, Iranian feminists collaborated
with the WLUML in the Stop Stoning Forever Campaign.
The strongest networks of Asian feminists have emerged in coun-
tries that share conflictual histories and contested borders. In 1989 Ka-
mala Bhasin, at the time an officer with a UN agency, organized the
first gathering of South Asian feminists in a small village in Bangladesh.
Suspicion and recrimination among women who had experienced wars,
militarization, and ethnic violence gave way to strong affective ties and
a shared political commitment to denationalizing identities and
strengthening cross-border ties and perspectives (Chhachhi and Abey-
sekera, 2015). Several regional gatherings and South Asian Feminist
Declarations in 1989 and 2006 followed. In 1998 Sangat was formed, a
network of South Asian gender activists and trainers. Sangat has broad-
ened its focus from gender inequality to address justice, peace, and
democracy throughout the region.
Several authors comment on the open, inclusive character of re-
gional networks. Tripp notes that women’s movements have demon-
strated an extraordinary capacity for building coalitions across ethnic,
class, religious, and other cleavages in nations riven by civil war and vi-
olence. Moghadam argues that although critics have long faulted wom-
en’s movements in the Maghreb for being westernized, elitist, and
intolerantly secular, in fact these broad networks include both men and
women, both religious and secular women, and both younger and older
activists.

International Funding for NGOs

A third form of transnationalism occurs through international funding
for nationally based NGOs that engage in education, advocacy, service
provision, income generation, research and documentation, and,
 Introduction 15

sometimes, protest activities. The impact of NGOs on women’s move-

ments has generated heated debate. Some critics claim that NGOs,
driven by donor funding and agendas, dissipate feminist activism. Oth-
ers who may share some of these questions nonetheless consider cer-
tain NGOs crucial to sustaining feminist struggles, believe women’s
movements can avoid donor dependence, and worry about increased
government restrictions on funding for women’s rights NGOs.
One influential critique concerns the very conditions associated
with the growth of NGOs (Alvarez 2000). International funding for
NGOs has grown alongside neoliberalism as states have transferred
tasks they once performed onto civil society actors (Fraser 2009 and
Silke Roth in this volume). As a result, Silke Roth argues, women’s
movements became NGO-ized in East Germany and other Eastern
European countries in the wake of the state’s retreat from social wel-
fare in the 1980s. This raises the question of the extent to which NGOs
can and should take up responsibilities that states are better equipped
to handle.
Another critique is that women’s NGOs have contributed to the de-
mobilization of women’s movements. As one observer notes,

Part of the problem is that the science of delivery has been stran-
gling the art of social transformation. Driven by the need to mea-
sure results, donors have helped to nurture a cadre of contracted
civil society organisations, who are excellent at “accounts-ability”
but less good at disruptive change. (Sriskandarajah, 2015)

Islah Jad questions a tendency to use the terms social movement and
NGO interchangeably in Palestine. She argues that the grassroots wom-
en’s organizations that emerged during the first Intifada in 1987 mobi-
lized women across the class spectrum. International funding transformed
women’s organizations into NGOs that collaborated closely with the Pal-
estinian Authority and failed to challenge the Occupation. In the process
they left a political vacuum that Islamist forces have filled.
The kind of funding NGOs receive and the freedom they have to
determine how to use their resources often constrain the activities of
progressive grass roots organizations. Most donors are located in the
global North and fund large, professionalized civil-society organizations
that have the capacity to deliver tangible outputs. In South Africa, Salo
argues, professionalized, urban NGOs have failed to work with poor
16 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

rural women. The most restrictive funding in Africa, Tripp notes, is

from corporations that do not fund programs that address the struc-
tural underpinnings of gender inequality. However, even multilateral
and bilateral donors provide relatively little funding for grassroots orga-
nizations. Moreover, women’s organizations generally do not receive
multi-year and unrestricted core funding that they can use to strengthen
their organizational capacities (AWID 2011).
NGOs have become increasingly bureaucratized and de-politicized.
Sundstrom suggests that Western funding in the 1990s was partly re-
sponsible for the emergence of women’s NGOs that addressed violence
against women and formed crisis centers in Russia. International fund-
ing enabled these activists to achieve autonomy from the state and cri-
tique its policies. But if foreign funding played a valuable role in the
short run, it deterred NGOs from mobilizing domestic resources to
achieve long-term viability and establish their own agendas.
Until around 2000, Shaheed notes, women’s organizations in Paki-
stan received foreign funding for programs of their choosing. Thereaf-
ter, donors began tying funding to their own agendas, using a bidding
process and boxing ideas into Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Rele-
vant, and Time-Bound (SMART) outputs. This increased competition
among women’s organizations and impeded the creation of broad-based
coalitions. It also shifted activists’ attention to specialized activities and
measurable outcomes, limiting the scope for independent, innovative
activism aimed at achieving broad social-change goals.
However, Shaheed cautions that blanket, sweeping criticisms of
NGO-ization in Pakistan and elsewhere can reflect and provoke
broader opposition to feminism and human rights. Movements that
reject international funding are deprived of resources that are essen-
tial to sustaining and expanding their activities. She notes that in
both Pakistan and Bangladesh, many feminist NGOs that have ac-
cepted international funds have resisted donor-driven agendas. Sha-
heed’s observation is especially valuable because she was a founding
member of the leading feminist organization in Pakistan, the Wom-
en’s Action Forum (WAF), which has always refused funding from all
government and international sources as a matter of principle. Sha-
heed argues that although WAF’s financial autonomy enabled it to
launch a radical movement against the Zia dictatorship in the late
1970s, it has been hampered by a lack of resources and effective
fund-raising strategy.
 Introduction 17

Many feminist NGOs must choose the lesser of two evils. Sund-
strom argues that independent activists in Russia can either join or cre-
ate NGOs whose funding is meager, unreliable, and constrained, or join
state-supported organizations which are more stable but completely
dependent on the government. In Iran, where foreign-funded NGOs
also operate under severe constraints, Tohidi notes that women’s orga-
nizations are either hindered by a lack of resources or by being branded
foreign agents and thus subject to government repression.
Indeed, foreign-funded NGOs’ ability to achieve autonomy from
the state has declined as many governments have restricted the fund-
ing and activities of progressive, social change-oriented NGOs. A re-
port by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace identifies
fifty countries that place restrictions on overseas funding of NGOs
(“Foreign Funding of NGOs: Donors Keep Out,” 2014). In Russia,
for example, a law enacted in 2012 limits NGOs’ ability to receive
foreign funding by requiring them to declare themselves “foreign
agents” or face fines and eventual dissolution. A decade after the Bei-
jing women’s conference in 1995, the Chinese government restricted
international funding and engaged in increased monitoring and con-
trol over NGOs. In 2016 it passed a law constraining the work of over
seven thousand NGOs; women’s rights NGOs figure prominently
among them.
Poulomi Pal points out that foreign funding does not provide wom-
en’s rights NGOs much autonomy, given increased government regula-
tion of NGO activities in India. The Indian government canceled the
registrations of thousands of foreign-funded NGOs, supposedly for fail-
ing to file tax returns in 2015. It also temporarily put the Ford Founda-
tion, one of the largest donors to Indian women’s organizations, under
watch and froze its bank accounts.
The extent to which women’s movements can function autono-
mously is deeply influenced by global geo-political inequalities. Among
the countries described in this volume, the US women’s movement has
historically been least influenced by international forces. Benita Roth
points out that with the exception of a few individuals and organiza-
tions, the US women’s movement has not been very active in transna-
tional organizing. On the one hand, this has been costly to American
women; the US has not joined other countries in promoting women’s
rights through such measures as ratifying CEDAW and adopting gen-
der quotas. On the other hand, given the wealth and power of the US,
18 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

its women’s NGOs have not needed international funding and have
thus avoided donor dependence.

III. The National Context

Women’s movements have arisen alongside other social movements—
for independence, democracy, and socialism—for several reasons.
First, like other national social movements, women’s movements
emerge following the creation of modern states. As Charles Tilly (1995)
argues, states constitute both the citizens who are claimants and the
objects of their claims. The state’s authoritative control over resources,
power, and violence makes it the target of national social movements.
Second, women often become politically active as old regimes collapse
and existing power structures erode, thereby temporarily loosening pa-
triarchal control within the family and broader society. Women achieved
significant political gains in Europe and the US following the first and
second world wars and in large parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle
East during and following decolonization. Third, the close links be-
tween women’s movements and other social movements reflect the in-
tersectional nature of women’s interests in fighting to achieve freedom
both for the nation and as women.
Women were extremely active in anticolonial nationalist movements
in many of the countries discussed in this book. In most of these in-
stances, they challenged traditional gender roles both explicitly and by
virtue of their activism. In Cameroon and Nigeria, Tripp notes, women
became active in nationalist struggles to advance their own gender-spe-
cific and other agendas, including those related to taxation and market
prices. Nationalist leaders in Guinea and Mali recruited women into
independence movements by appealing to women’s concerns. But while
women achieved certain political rights in the aftermath of indepen-
dence, most countries failed to address deep-rooted patriarchal prac-
tices in the postcolonial era.
The Palestinian women’s movement, Jad argues, has been inextrica-
bly linked to the Palestinian movement for independence. However,
although Palestine has yet to establish statehood, the women’s move-
ment has declined. The Israeli Occupation threatens Palestine’s exis-
tence and stifles citizenship rights in the West Bank and Gaza. At the
same time, the Palestinian Authority has depoliticized civil society and
demobilized the women’s movement. Palestinian feminists face the
 Introduction 19

nearly impossible challenge of mobilizing against Israeli Occupation

while seeking rights from what is not a full-fledged state.
State repression, particularly when it transcends the political do-
main and permeates civil society, has often been a catalyst to women’s
activism. Women played critical roles in movements against authoritar-
ian regimes in Latin America. They have been at the forefront of strug-
gles against state repression in post-Khomeini Iran. Women’s rights
activists were deeply engaged in the Arab Spring protests in 2010–
2011. In Africa, women’s activism was essential to the collapse of mili-
tary dictatorships. In Kenya, for example, women were at the forefront
of the democracy movement in 1992; more recently, women partici-
pated in Côte d’Ivoire’s democracy movement in 2011.
Women’s groups have been active in drafting constitutions in
newly formed multiparty democracies. Thanks to feminist pressures,
the Polish constitution includes an article decreeing equal rights for
women and men. In South Africa, the Women’s National Coalition
waged a successful struggle to ensure that the constitution guaran-
tees equality and freedom from discrimination for all, regardless of
race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and disability. The post-
2000 constitutions adopted in twenty-two of the twenty-nine African
countries that recognize customary law include provisions that allow
statutory law to trump customary law. After the collapse of the Ben
Ali government in Tunisia in January 2011, feminist groups mobi-
lized to ensure a democratic transition that supported women’s
rights. In Morocco, women’s rights organizations persuaded the gov-
ernment to ratify CEDAW’s Optional Protocol, which permits the
CEDAW Committee to receive and consider communications from
feminist groups.
However, democratization has also given rise to the emergence of
conservative civil society organizations that the state is either unwilling
or unable to contain. Diane Mulligan and Jude Howell note that

Civil society is a double-edged sword for feminists. It can provide a

site for organizing around feminist issues, for articulating count-
er-hegemonic discourses, for experimenting with alternative life
styles and for envisioning other less sexist and more just worlds….
Yet it can also be an arena where gendered behavior, norms and
practices are acted out and reproduced. (Mulligan and Howell
2005, 6)
20 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

Burgeoning civil societies have given rise to conservative, misogy-

nist groups that claim to speak in the name of “traditional” religious and
ethnic values. Such is the case in India, Palestine, Iran, and South Af-
rica, among other countries in this volume. Jad notes that the growing
power of Islamists in Palestine has weakened the secular women’s
movement and its attempts to strengthen secular over religious law. In
South Africa, Salo argues, rural women have been subject to extensive
discrimination, particularly with respect to land ownership and inheri-
tance. Jacob Zuma’s presidency has strengthened chiefs who exercise
enormous power over traditional courts and communal land and op-
pose women’s inheritance rights. In India, reactionary forces have
grown within both civil society and the state. Hindu nationalist organi-
zations have policed women’s sexuality, resulting in attacks on interfaith
couples and assaults on women who frequent bars. Since the BJP came
to power in 2014, Pal argues, it has lent support to these organizations,
crushing citizens’ democratic rights and restricting space for dissent.
The Catholic Church became the major opponent of reproductive
rights once democracy was achieved in Latin America, as well as in
Eastern and Central Europe. Thus, despite state support, women’s
movements have been unsuccessful in securing the right to legal
first-trimester abortions in Poland, Russia, and Latin America. Fried-
man argues that while leftist governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Argen-
tina, and Chile have addressed socioeconomic inequality and increased
women’s representation in decision-making bodies, they have been less
willing to confront the Church on sexuality and abortion. In Brazil,
Sardenberg and Costa describe how the Church has supported legisla-
tion prohibiting distribution of the “morning-after pill” through the
public health system in several cities. The growth of Christian funda-
mentalism in Latin America has further threatened the rights of women
and LGBT groups. In the US, the religious right has crusaded against
abortion and attacked abortion clinics. Right-wing Republicans, Benita
Roth points out, have sought to defund Planned Parenthood and influ-
enced many state legislatures to limit a woman’s right to choose. A 2014
Supreme Court decision established the right of employers to make
their religious beliefs grounds for limiting their employees’ access to
reproductive services.
Women’s movements have responded to these conservative forces
in a variety of ways. They have tried to influence policies by putting
pressure on executive branch agencies and through organized mass
 Introduction 21

demonstrations and petition campaigns. They have forged alliances

within civil society, sometimes with religiously observant women who
share some of their objectives. They have sought to legitimate their
claims by using international instruments. These attempts have some-
times been successful; at other times they have provoked an even more
conservative backlash.

IV. Women’s Movements and the State

Women’s movements have often directed their demands at the state
because of its power over so many feminist goals: increasing women’s
political representation, instituting laws that punish violence against
women, curtailing discrimination based on gender and sexual orienta-
tion, ensuring equal pay, making abortion accessible, expanding social
welfare, and providing services like shelters for battered women.
However, when and to what extent women’s movements confront
the state and their success in achieving state concessions varies. Women
who have contributed to the creation of new regimes have leverage in
getting them to address gender inequality. In the aftermath of anticolo-
nial struggles, we witnessed women’s movements securing states’ prohi-
bition of gender discrimination, as in India, and of discrimination against
women and LGBT groups, as in South Africa. Women’s movements are
also likely to confront the state when there are glaring gaps between of-
ficial pronouncements and actual policies. Examples include states that
recognize only some women’s citizenship rights, acknowledge the rights
of racial or religious minorities but not those of women, accept and then
retract women’s rights, and violate international conventions and consti-
tutional guarantees prohibiting gender discrimination.
Given the extent to which women’s movements have made demands
on the state, they are strikingly ambivalent about working with it. There
are good reasons for this caution. The first is that the terms of collabo-
ration are generally set by the state rather than by feminists, and activ-
ists often fear that the strength and radicalism of women’s movements
will be depleted by institutionalization. For example, excessive reliance
on the state to enact public measures supporting gender equality in
Poland and Russia during the communist era impeded the develop-
ment of autonomous women’s movements. Similarly, Silke Roth notes
that Northern European social-democratic welfare states, which
emphasized gender equality and integrated women into political
22 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

institutions, weakened independent women’s movements. By contrast,

in liberal democratic states, which pursued more conservative social
and economic policies, women’s movements were stronger and more
sovereign.
A second reason for feminists’ ambivalence is that working within
the state highlights and exacerbates stratification within women’s move-
ments. Educated, urban, elite women are more likely to be drawn into
women’s policy machineries and run for office than poorer, less edu-
cated, minority women. In the US, as Benita Roth argues, the neolib-
eral, minimal welfare state has promoted liberal feminism, which has
favored the interests of middle-class over poor women and hindered
cross-class coalitions and alliances.
Related to this issue is a debate among feminists involving the ex-
tent to which the state’s institutionalization of feminist demands has
diluted, narrowed, and undermined the goals of women’s movements.
The chapters in this book suggest that the answer to this question de-
pends on the character of the state and its relationship to women’s
movements both historically and in the current period. The most pro-
ductive relationships between feminists and the state exist when wom-
en’s movements and other social movements play important roles in
bringing sympathetic governments to power and continuing to pressure
them to improve women’s conditions.
Another key question concerns the character of state feminism and
its relationship to women’s movements, both of which have changed sig-
nificantly. What was termed state feminism in the past and was associ-
ated with authoritarian, modernizing regimes in Africa and the Middle
East, depended on the goodwill of political leaders. Moghadam de-
scribes two important older models of state feminism, Tunisia under
Habib Bourguiba (1956–1987) and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser
(1956–1970), who circumscribed women’s rights much more than Bour-
guiba. In Africa, Tripp argues, the state-affiliated women’s organizations
that most African countries created from 1975 to 1985 were designed to
generate support for ruling parties. As single parties lost their grip and
multiparty competition grew in the 1990s, autonomous women’s groups
displaced these state- and party-affiliated women’s organizations.
In the contemporary period, we see several different patterns of
state feminism. One pattern, which Jad describes, is for the state to
appoint femocrats—because of their patronage ties and not their femi-
nist commitments—to pursue the state’s agenda. Another pattern,
 Introduction 23

which Salo describes, is a declining role for progressive femocrats in

South Africa in the years after Jacob Zuma came to power. She argues
that the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) jetti-
soned feminism and became wholly aligned with President Zuma’s per-
sonal agenda. A third pattern, which Wang Zheng identifies, is for
state-affiliated women’s organizations to work surreptitiously to support
feminist goals that exceed state dictates. She argues that Western fem-
inists mistakenly fault the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation
(ACDWF), which is officially linked to the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP), for submissively toeing the party line. In fact, she argues, the
ACDWF has maneuvered behind the scenes to achieve feminist goals.
Feminist NGOs have relied heavily on the ACDWF’s funding, organi-
zational networks, institutional legitimacy, and administrative reach.
One of their most important joint achievements was the passage of Chi-
na’s first law against domestic violence in December 2015, after two
decades of persistent feminist struggle.
The most effective forms of state feminism entail close and open
links between femocrats and strong and independent women’s organi-
zations. According to Sardenberg and Costa, this is the case in Brazil,
where state feminism emerged because of pressure by women’s move-
ments from below. The election to national office of the progressive
Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT), which was commit-
ted to participatory forms of governance, provided further support for
feminist demands. Sardenberg and Costa recognize, however, that
many rights, including sexual and reproductive rights, have yet to be
achieved in Brazil. Friedman makes a similar argument about Latin
America more broadly and anticipates that feminist and LGBT rights
are likely to experience a setback amidst the ascendency of the political
Right, which has strong ties to the Catholic Church. Further damage
stems from austerity measures that disproportionately affect poor
women and transgender people.

Political Representation
One of the most important gains that women have made since the mid-
1990s is increased political representation in national legislatures. As
Dahlerup notes, “The quota system shifts the burden of recruitment
from individual women to those who control the recruitment process”
(Dahlerup ed., 2006). Women parliamentarians worldwide grew from
24 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

13 percent of all parliamentarians in 1998 to 21 percent in 2013. Thir-

ty-seven countries achieved the UN mandate of having women consti-
tute at least 30 percent in their lower houses of parliament. In the past
decade alone, women’s legislative representation has increased by at
least five percent, with especially marked increases in Arab states.
Much of this increase is due to the implementation of gender quotas by
approximately 128 countries.
Quotas are not confined to any particular region of the world but
they are more or less likely in certain political contexts. They are un-
common in former communist countries. Sundstrom suggests that
women’s political representation in post-communist Russia declined
following the abolition of Soviet-era legislative quotas. Governments
have introduced constitutional quotas after attaining political inde-
pendence, as in in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Governments in coun-
tries that have experienced democracy movements, like Algeria,
Tunisia and Morocco in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, have intro-
duced quotas in response to feminist demands. Regional influences
play a significant role. For example, after Argentina revised its elec-
toral laws in 1991 to require that all political parties nominate at least
30 percent women to run for office, other Latin American countries
followed suit.
International factors, like the UN Women’s Conferences and CEDAW,
have encouraged some governments to adopt quotas. Countries that
have experienced civil war and extreme conflict, like Nepal, Afghani-
stan, Liberia, and Rwanda, introduced quotas as a result of international
influences, notably UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (adopted in
2000), which promotes women’s participation in decision making on
peace and security issues.
However, international pressures cannot ensure quotas’ success.
Countries with strong women’s movements are sometimes resistant to
quotas (Hughes et al, 2015). One possible explanation is that strong
women’s movements may be unenthusiastic about quotas. There is
some evidence for this in the Indian context. Although on balance the
Indian women’s movement supports quotas, it is not without ambiva-
lence. Indian feminists have worried that quotas could create a ceiling
rather than a floor, and that male politicians would field pliable wives
and daughters as proxies. Further, feminists have criticized quotas for
treating women as a homogeneous group and ignoring the deterrents
to the candidacies of poor, low-caste women. Low-caste parties have
 Introduction 25

similarly opposed women’s quotas on grounds that they would be

filled primarily by upper-caste women. As a result of this combination
of opposition and ambivalence, reservations for women as yet exist
only in the panchayats, local elected bodies. A bill mandating 33 per-
cent reserved seats in state and national legislatures still awaits parlia-
mentary approval. The higher the political office, the greater the
challenges women confront. Thus, women in Russia, Brazil, the US,
and India have achieved greater electoral success in local than in na-
tional elections.
Countries that adopt quotas do not always implement them, fully or
at all. When, as is often the case, only small political parties adopt vol-
untary party quotas, this has relatively little impact on women’s political
representation. Voluntary quotas have been much more successful
when adopted by dominant parties, for example the ANC in South Af-
rica. Some countries have adopted party quotas for elections decided
by proportional representation drawn from a party’s list of candidates,
but do not specify the list’s rank ordering. Parties may place women
candidates at the bottom of the list, putting them at a severe disadvan-
tage. In many countries there are no sanctions for noncompliance with
party quotas and little financial support for female candidates’ election
campaigns. In this respect, constitutional or legal quotas that regulate
the activities of all political parties and are more effective than volun-
tary party quotas.
In general, quotas have reduced but not removed the innumerable
barriers impeding women’s electoral success. Furthermore, some coun-
tries with legislative quotas for women otherwise have poor records on
women’s rights. Although women’s increased political representation is
valuable in and of itself, clearly it is insufficient to address the struc-
tural bases of gender inequality. And women’s movements have been
much less successful in addressing poverty and class inequality because
states, political parties, and the most powerful international actors are
generally less receptive to these demands.

Economic Justice and Neo-liberalism

In the past, welfare states in the global North and South adopted social
welfare policies that provided a safety net for women in poverty. Most
states today fail to do so. Reconfigured states (Banaszak et al. 2003,
6–7) have downloaded power and responsibilities to lower rungs of the
26 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

state, uploaded power and responsibility to higher branches of the

state, laterally delegated responsibility to non-elected state bodies, and
off-loaded responsibilities to non-state actors. Encroachment on states’
authority by institutions like the International Monetary Fund, World
Trade Organization, and World Bank and many bilateral and multi-lat-
eral treaties have reduced national states’ accountability to women’s
movements. By off-loading responsibilities, states have shifted social
welfare responsibilities to NGOs that cannot or do not seek to address
the macro-level causes of poverty and inequality.
In some countries and regions, women have engaged in mass resis-
tance against austerity measures. Silke Roth describes coalitions that
have emerged in Turkey and the UK to protest public sector cuts.
Sundstrom analyzes widespread protests in Russia, that began in 2002
and grew during the financial crisis of 2008–2010, to oppose employers’
failures to pay government-provided parental leave benefits.
With the exception of a minority of countries in which left-of-center
governments occupy power, most governments are unsympathetic or
hostile to demands for economic justice. As Wang Zheng notes, al-
though urban female workers in China bore the brunt of economic re-
forms, and were the last to be hired and the first to be fired, Chinese
feminists could not rival the state’s power to privatize public assets and
regulate labor relations. The same could be said of other countries in
which even the strongest women’s movements cannot change states’
macroeconomic policies.
Still, most women’s movements have not prioritized questions of
poverty and inequality. Rights-based approaches that women’s move-
ments have fruitfully employed to address violence against women are
primarily concerned with civil rights and liberties—even though some
proponents of the women’s human rights approach have sought to ad-
dress economic rights. A chasm has sometimes emerged between mid-
dle-class feminist organizations that focus on social and political issues,
and labor unions, peasant organizations, and social justice movements
that focus on poverty and class inequality. Benita Roth argues that in
the US, while liberal feminists have addressed equal pay largely for the
middle-class, women-of-color organizations have addressed problems
of black and Hispanic women on welfare. In other contexts, like Iran
and Palestine, the climate of political repression has narrowed the
agendas of women’s movements to confronting overt physical violence
rather than systemic or structural violence.
 Introduction 27

V. Burning Issues
Violence Against Women
From the “Stop Stoning Forever Campaign” opposing the stoning of
women who are accused of adultery in Iran, to the One in Nine Cam-
paign against rape in South Africa, to protests against femicide in Bra-
zil, violence against women has been a central concern of women’s
movements. Feminists have expanded definitions of rape and sexual
harassment and revealed the entanglement of violence against women
with other forms of domination and power. Women’s movements have
proposed multiple levels of intervention, from legislation and public
policies to assistance for individual women. They have advocated the
creation of shelters, family courts, walk-in assistance, and counseling
centers for battered women. They have engaged psychologists, social
workers, lawyers, and doctors to work with survivors. They have devel-
oped education and job-creation programs so that women do not have
to return to abusive situations. Movements combating violence against
women have scored some important achievements among the police,
judges, medical professionals, and other government officials and pro-
fessionals who interact with survivors. An indication of movement ef-
fectiveness is the increasing involvement of municipal governments in
founding and supporting crisis centers that NGOs have formed. Euro-
pean Union members and candidate states have adopted a variety of
policies to address gender violence (Montoya 2013).
International forces, from the UN women’s conferences to interna-
tional treaties to internationally funded NGOs, to transnational advo-
cacy networks, have encouraged women’s movements to confront
sexual violence. In Pakistan, Shaheed observes, activists only started
using the internationally recognized term violence against women in
the early 1990s, when they engaged with global forces. In Russia, Sund-
strom notes, many of the terms concerning violence against women are
of English origin.
However, the extent to which transnational forces initiate move-
ments concerning violence against women varies. They have been im-
portant in situations in which the state is repressive and the possibilities
for women’s activism are constrained. They have been less influential in
countries that have strong civil societies and somewhat responsive
states (Basu, 2000). In India, for example, the women’s movement has
been organizing campaigns since the 1970s against the rape of women
28 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

in police custody and “dowry deaths,” that is, the murder of newly mar-
ried women following their being tortured and abused by their hus-
bands and in laws on grounds that the dowry at the time of marriage
was insufficient. Men who murder their wives often remarry and re-
ceive another dowry from the families of their new wives.
Struggles addressing violence against women have deepened and
grown when the state has vacillated in its commitments and demon-
strated biases in addressing violence against women. In both Brazil and
South Africa, women’s movements have allied with LGBT groups to
confront the state’s shortcomings and address gender violence in a
more inclusive manner. As Pal shows, in 2012 the Indian government,
under pressure from women’s groups and other civil society organiza-
tions, established a committee to address reforms of laws and public
policies relating to rape, trafficking, and sexual harassment. The com-
mittee strengthened women’s organizations by involving them in the
consultative process. Feminists and LGBT groups demanded, among
other things, that laws should define sexual harassment and rape more
broadly, decriminalize homosexuality, criminalize marital rape, rede-
fine the age of consent, consider violence against dalit (Scheduled
Caste or untouchable) and tribal women aggravated sexual assault, em-
ploy gender-neutral terms to refer to victims/survivors, and hold senior
public officials and members of the armed forces accountable for rape.
They achieved some of these demands.
South Africa offers a particularly important instance of how the
movement to stop violence against women has evolved and grown. Salo
shows how the One in Nine Campaign (named to emphasize that only
one out of nine rape survivors reports the attack to the police) emerged
to support a woman who charged Jacob Zuma, then deputy president
of South Africa, with rape. After a court acquitted Zuma in 2006, the
campaign extended its support to other women who had filed rape
charges in the courts. Over the next few years, it protested homophobic
rapes and murders targeting black lesbians. A catalyst for the sustained
struggle was the fact that the South African Parliament enacted a law in
2007 that criminalizes marital rape, expands the definition of sexual
assault to include all forms of non-consensual sex, and includes men
and children as potential victims of sexual assault.
However, the depressing reality is that, despite sustained activism
by the women’s movements and LGBT activists, India and South Africa
still suffer among the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. Salo
 Introduction 29

notes that sexual violence against women living in urban informal set-
tlements and the rural periphery is especially extensive. Government
measures have not addressed major underlying causes: the cultural and
material bases of gender oppression; links among gender violence, pov-
erty, and class inequality; and the growth of conservative, patriarchal
ethnic and religious nationalisms.

Sexual Rights
Our authors were asked to address the conditions and struggles of sex-
ual minorities because the oppression of LGBT groups, as of the poor
and racial and ethnic minorities, is central to a broadly conceived femi-
nist agenda. Furthermore, there are many similarities between the con-
ditions under which feminist and LGBT struggles succeed or fail.
As is true of women’s rights, there is enormous cross-national varia-
tion in the rights of LGBT communities. Many states have pursued
homophobic policies. Homosexuality is illegal in seventy-three coun-
tries, including Iran, Pakistan, India, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and
thirty-four African countries. The Palestinian Authority has not passed
legislation on homosexuality but male homosexuality is illegal in Gaza
under an old British criminal ordinance code. Homosexuality is subject
to the death penalty in Iran and Pakistan. Even in the absence of clear
laws on the subject, the Chinese state has engaged in harsh treatment
of homosexuals. In India, the Delhi High Court in 2009, struck down
Section 377 of the Penal Code, a colonial law that deems certain sexual
acts “unnatural” and punishable by law, but four years later the Su-
preme Court overturned the High Court judgment. Although homo-
sexuality was decriminalized in Russia in 1993, there are no laws
prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The city of
Moscow banned gay rights parades in 2011, and a national law bans gay
propaganda.
By contrast, LGBT groups have achieved important legal gains in
the US, Latin America and Europe. Same-sex marriage is now legal in
the US, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina, Uruguay South Africa, and
many EU member nations. As Friedman describes, Argentina has been
a regional and global leader with respect to LGBT rights. It legalized
same-sex marriage in 2010 and soon after passed a progressive gender
identity law. Venezuela has promoted equality regardless of sexual ori-
entation in banking, housing, policing, and employment. The new
30 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

Bolivian constitution is progressive on transgender rights but does not

recognize same-sex unions. The Chilean government has legally recog-
nized same-sex unions, but executive attempts to prevent discrimina-
tion against LGBT groups have not won legislative approval.
Like women’s movements, LGBT activism has been greatest when
states are sympathetic to their demands and/or vulnerable to their op-
position, and when activists have formed alliances with other social
movements, or organized within a broader human rights framework.
The South African constitution provides far-reaching protections to
gays and lesbians, including legalizing same-sex relations and banning
anti-gay discrimination, and has thereby catalyzed the growth of activist
organizations like the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which has
been at the forefront of AIDS activism. TAC has advocated better ac-
cess to health care for gay and straight men and women. Its allies in-
clude the Social Justice Coalition, the Anti Eviction Campaign and the
Congress of South African Trade Unions. Groups like the Human
Rights Campaign have lobbied for marriage equality in the US. In
Latin America, Friedman argues, LGBT activists have, like feminists,
been most successful where they have been able to use constitutional
reform openings and the executive branch has supported their de-
mands. By contrast, when states have repressed LGBT groups, activists
have organized in an underground, defensive manner. Such is the case
in Russia, Tunisia, and China.
The very gains of LGBT movements, as of women’s movements,
have often increased homophobic hate crimes. Relatively few countries
have adopted laws prohibiting incitement to hatred based on sexual
orientation. The June 2016 massacre of forty-nine people in a gay bar
in Florida raised public awareness of homophobic violence. An article
in the New York Times revealed that there are far more hate crimes
against the LGBT community than against any ethnic or racial minority
in the US (Park and Mykhyalyshyn 2016).
In most of the world, LGBT groups continue to face discrimination
in employment, housing, education, health care, religious practice, and
adoption of children. Like feminists, LGBT activists have debated the
extent to which they should intensify struggles to expand their legal
rights. Some activists worry that legal struggles divert energies from
grassroots movements and the attempt to change cultural values and
economic structures. The question surfaced in the US after the Su-
preme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage; some prominent
 Introduction 31

LGBT activists cautioned that the decision should be seen not as an

end in itself but a step towards eradicating systemic biases against the
most vulnerable LGBT groups, including trans communities, people of
color, immigrants and sex workers. For these groups, as for many wom-
en’s movements, one important priority is to forge alliances with other
oppressed groups and another is to address substantive rather than sim-
ply legal inequalities (Vaid, 2013).

Conclusion
The chapters in this volume chart the immense challenges women’s
movements confront, their response to these challenges and the tasks
ahead. A crucial question is how women’s movements can address the
multiple inequalities that women, especially subaltern women, experi-
ence. Women’s identities are determined by myriad social cleavages
and for poor women from racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, the
compounding of inequalities mitigates against single-issue campaigns
and claiming singular identities. As a result, there are few issues that
concern all women across social divides. One important exception is
sexual violence which affects all women. Not surprisingly, most wom-
en’s movements and many transnational and regional networks have
addressed this issue. Most governments are at least in principle com-
mitted to stopping violence against women and international organiza-
tions, particularly the UN, have taken a lead in doing so. However even
violence against women has different consequences for women from
different social backgrounds and calls for intersectional approaches.
A bigger challenge concerns the efforts and effectiveness of wom-
en’s movements in addressing poverty and class inequality, which is of-
ten overlaid with racial and ethnic inequality. Rights-based liberal
feminism can be quite radical in highly repressive contexts, as Tohidi
observes, but is ill-equipped to address structural inequalities, particu-
larly in the current neo-liberal era.
For women’s movements to effectively address homophobia, mi-
nority rights, and race and class inequalities necessitates forming sus-
tained alliances with movements of other oppressed groups. Women’s
movements have often grown out of broader political struggles: the
civil rights and antiwar movements in the US; nationalist movements in
Palestine, South Africa, and India; and movements against authoritari-
anism in Latin America. Links between the women’s movement and
32 Women’s Movements in the Global Era

other popular democratic struggles have broadened the social base of

women’s movements. The chapters in this book record the productive
linkages women’s movements have increasingly forged with AIDS ac-
tivists, health, labor, human rights and civil liberties groups. Indeed,
women’s movements are more committed to inclusivity and coalitional
politics than most other social movements.
Another challenge is generational. Pal, writing on India, and Sha-
heed, on Pakistan, call for older feminists to listen to younger women
and to appreciate their distinctive modes of activism and demands.
Drawing younger women into women’s movements requires greater
use of social media, which played a key role in the Arab Spring, the
World Social Forums, the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter.
In Pakistan, an Open Forum on WhatsApp preceded the highly suc-
cessful WAF national convention, which was held in 2016 after a ten-
year hiatus and brought together different generations of feminists. In
Europe, Silke Roth notes, “interactive communication repertoires”
have given rise to new forms of online activism and transformed wom-
en’s networks. Tohidi describes how new communication technology in
Iran has enabled Iranian feminists to interact with diasporic and other
transnational groups. Sundstrom states that feminists relied on social
networking sites to stage recent pro-choice demonstrations in Russia.
Some of the most exciting developments in this regard have occurred
in China, where young feminists have found the Internet a powerful
medium for organizing. As Wang Zheng shows, they have used the In-
ternet to make visible commonly unseen violations of women’s rights,
and WeChat to challenge heterosexual normativity and to forge links
with women worker organizations.
Women’s movements face formidable challenges that emanate from
the global political and economic environment. As external challenges
have become more daunting, they sometimes widen class, ideological,
and other differences within women’s movements. Some issues like the
growth of militarization, the religious right and economic austerity, are
simply too daunting for women’s movements or any social movements
to change. It is a credit to women’s movements that they have tackled
these issues at all.
The chapters in this book identify the dynamism of women’s move-
ments in enduring, evolving, and adapting to changing circumstances.
Activists who were principally committed to a single set of issues and a
single set of strategies have broadened their agendas and adopted new
 Introduction 33

modes of organizing. Secular feminists have formed alliances with reli-

gious groups. Feminists have forged alliances with LGBT activists.
Many activists who were exclusively concerned with gender inequality
have increasingly addressed racism and indigenous rights. Movements
have altered their strategies of working with the state and international
donors in response to changing political conditions. While cognizant of
enormous challenges, the authors in this volume illuminate the resil-
ience and power of feminism and women’s movements then, now, and
in the years to come.

Notes
1. I am grateful to Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Kate Hartford, and Mark Kesselman for
detailed and very helpful comments on a previous draft of this chapter.
2. I use the term “feminist” to describe ideas, discourses and practices supporting
gender equality and discuss the concept and its relationship to women’s movements
below.
3. Although I use the short hand term LGBT for convenience, it does not capture
the varied forms of gender and sexual self-identification within and across nations.
4. The Comparative State Feminism series, for example, focuses on women’s move-
ments in democratic, advanced industrial societies in order to develop testable hypoth-
eses about their achievements.
5. Friends of the Family includes: Belarus, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Libya,
Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Turkmenistan, Ye-
men, and Zimbabwe.