50 MARGARET SNYDER Kerr, Joanna. 2001. "International Trends in Gender Equality Work." AWID Occasional paper no. 1. Toronto. Leys, Colin. 1996. The Rise and Fall of Development Theory. Bioomington: Indiana University Press. Mbiiinyi, Marjorie. 2001. Budgets, Debt Relief and Globalisation. Accra: Third World Network Africa. Oloka-Onyango, Joseph, and Sylvia Tamale. 1995. "The Personal Is Political or Why Women's Rights Are Indeed Human Rights: An African Perspective on International Feminism." Human Rights Quarterly 17:691-731. Peters, Julie, and Andrea Wolper, eds. 1995. Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. London: Routledge. Pezzullo, Caroline. 1983. Women and Development Planning: Guidelines for Program and Project Planning. Santiago, Chile: United Nations. Pietilä, Hilkka. 2002. Nordic Welfare Society: A Strategy to Eradicate Poverty and Build Up Equality. Helsinki: International Household and Family Research Conference. Pietilä, Hilkka, and Jeanne Vickers. 1990. Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations. London: Zed Books. Porter, Marilyn, and Ellen Judd, eds. 1999. Feminists Doing Development: A Practical Critique. London: Zed Books. Sen, Gita, and Caren Grown. 1987. Development, Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women's Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review Press. Snyder, Margaret. 1995. Transforming Development: Women, Poverty and Politics. . London: IT Publications. ——. 2000. "Women and African Development." CHOICE, February, 2-14. Snyder, Margaret C, and Mary Tadesse. 1995. African Women and Development: A History. London: ZED Books, 1995. Tarr-Wheian, Linda. 2003. Speech to the International Council for Research on Women. New York, February 27. United Nations. 1980. A/CONF. 94/19. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. 1972. "Women: The Neglected Human Resources for African Development." Canadian journal of African Studies: Ottawa 6. no. 2: 359-370. ——. 1974. The Data Base for Discussion of Interrelations between the Integration of Women in Development, Their Situation, and Population Factors. Addis Ababa: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. —------. 1977. The New International Economic Order: What Roles for Women? Addis Ababa: UN Economic Commission for Africa. Winslow, Anne, ed. 1995. Women, Politics, and the United Nations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 3 The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms Consensus, Conflict, and New Dynamics Aili Mart Tripp In the past two decades, we have witnessed the evolution of an international consensus around particular norms regarding women's rights. This rights-based consensus combines development and human rights interests, engages advocates within and outside transnational women's groups, and has been very much a product of global dialogue and interaction. Much of this consensus has been reflected in the various international agreements and treaties, including the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the 1995 United Nations Beijing Platform of Action, the 1996 International Labour Organisation Convention on Homeworkers, the 1999 UN Jomtien resolution on Education for All, and the 2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on the participation of women in peace-building. These and other international decisions indicate increasing international recognition of women's rights and interest in changing women's status and removing key impediments to women's advancement in almost every arena. The impetus in these international forums has been truly transnational, with non-Western and Western countries alike contributing to the growth of this consensus. The consensus represents an important convergence of feminisms and women's rights advocacy worldwide. Regardless of the common perception in the West that ideas regarding the emancipation of women have spread from the West outward into other parts of the world, this chapter argues that, in fact, the influences have always been multidirectional, and that the current consensus is a product of parallel feminist 52 AILI MARI TRIPP movements globally that have learned from one another but have often had quite independent trajectories and sources of movement. Today's global consensus is far from absolute. There remains polarization around issues such as lesbian rights, abortion, trafficking in women, and sex work. There is disagreement over the importance of other issues, such as militarization and global economic inequalities. These differences can be found within countries, as well as across various transnational divides. Slowly, however, the debates around these issues are changing even in regions that have been very resistant to incorporating these concerns into a women's rights agenda. In Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, a conference was held in May 2004 to discuss the rights of gays and lesbians in the country, and feminists were visible in discussing how to decriminalize homosexuality. Interestingly, the right to abortion was articulated for the first time in international law when, in July 2003, the African Union adopted the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, a supplementary protocol to the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. The new protocol, which covers a broad range of human rights issues, explicitly sets forth the right of women to medical abortion when pregnancy results from rape or incest or when the continuation of pregnancy endangers the health or life of the mother. Women from the North actively supported women from the South in getting the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 passed in 2000 to include women in peace negotiations and give them roles in peacekeeping missions around the world. These are small steps as new actors take up issues that have previously been sidelined or shunned. These changes represent a trend that is gaining momentum, especially as global diffusion of norms and ideas continues. At the same time, there exist very serious challenges to this consensus from the Vatican and Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. The United States under the Bush administration has similarly worked against this consensus through policies lilie the gag rule and withdrawal of support to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA). On January 22, 2001, U.S. president George W. Bush imposed what is known as the "Global Gag Rule," which restricts foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive U.S. family planning funds from using their own, non-U.S. funds to provide legal abortion services, lobby their own governments for abortion law reform, or provide accurate medical counseling or referrals regarding abortion. Then, in July 2002, under pressure from anti-family planning organizations, Bush withdrew all U.S. support from The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 53 the UNPFA, which has grave repercussions for international family planning efforts and the prospects for women's health around the world. This was money for contraception and sex education, for maternal health care and AIDS education that would have helped prevent millions of unwanted pregnancies and thousands of induced abortions and maternal deaths. Groups fighting AIDS abroad faced new restrictions in 2005 by USAID. They were given a litmus test that required them to pledge opposition to sex trafficking and prostitution in order to obtain funds. They are also required to inform clients of condom failure rates. The Global AIDS Alliance and many others fear that by stigmatizing populations most at risk for AIDS, they will end up creating distrust and undermining the effectiveness of their programs. Under the Bush administration, the United States has adopted a unilateral approach of undoing multilateral agreements. For example, the United States was the only country out of 179 that refused at a 2004 UNFPA meeting in Chile to endorse the 1994 Cairo consensus (International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action) affirming the need for reproductive health information and services to improve economic development and slow population growth. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has been ratified by 174 countries with a few holdouts, including the United States, along with Iran, Oman, Qatar, and Sudan. In the post-Beijing conference period, the United States has generally been uninterested in following up on the goals and gains made at that landmark 1995 gathering. Under the Bush administration, the United States has worked against the agreed-upon goals. At the 2004 meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the United States openly refused to continue its endorsement of the Platform of Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing in 1995. U.S. unilateralism in the CSW has undermined the commission's work overall. The European Union countries have made considerably more progress than the United States in using the Beijing Platform of Action to shape their women's agenda. The European Union has been engaged in the Beijing Plus Five meetings and in the Beijing Plus Ten discussions. The EU Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality has a wide range of gender-related concerns that intersect with the Platform of Action, such as equal opportunities in employment, the gender pay gap, violence against women, child care, and trafficking in human beings, especially women. The Beijing process, in particular, influenced the EU's efforts since 1995 to 54 AiLi marí tripp bring gender mainstreaming into the administrative institutions of the EU and its member states. There has being continuing pressure to continue this process and gain high-level support for it. Drawing on the Platform of Action, the Council of Europe adopted the Community Framework Strategy on gender equality (2001-2005) to foster awareness-raising campaigns regarding gender, improve the collection of data, and implement transnational projects. Other specific concerns coming out of the Beijing process have included an emphasis on reconciling family and working life and improving women's status in decision making (European Parliament Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality 2004; European Commission 2002). Even though the European Union endorses the Beijing Platform of Action, there has been an underlying perception within Europe that it is relevant primarily to developing countries and not to advanced industrialized countries, which are seen as already having largely attained equality. Such complacent attitudes in Europe and the United States have resulted in a situation where the most aggressive changes in attitudes regarding the need to improve women's status have tended to come from outside North America and Europe, especially since 1995. This chapter offers a framework for understanding how local women's movements around the world responded to broader national political, economic, and cultural trends and events, as well as how they influenced and were influenced by global women's movements over the course of a long history of global development. The national contexts of these movements affected the possibilities for change at any given time, as well as their choice of strategies, timing, and priorities. I suggest that many of the challenges in forging transnational linkages among these movements are a product of a difficulty in fully appreciating these differences, even when the goals have intersected. This has resulted, for example, in Western scholars often defining the global movement with respect to the first and second waves of feminism in the West as though these phases occurred universally and as though Western movements were the precursors to similar movements in other parts of the world. Looking through the prism of the history of transnational feminism, instead one sees national and local trajectories always featured significantly, creating regional waves of feminism with their own dynamics and pace that did not necessarily correspond to Western trends. In more recent years, for example, the momentum for feminist mobilization has picked up in non-Western The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 55 countries, whereas activism in Western countries has declined relative to them, as well as in absolute terms. First Wave of Transnational Mobilization (1880-1930) During the first wave of international women's mobilization (1880-1930), many organizations focused on issues of peace, suffrage, temperance, equal access to education and industrial training, equal pay for equal work, and labor legislation, but also on social welfare and religious concerns. The year 1868 marks the formation of the first transnational women's organization, the Association Internationale des Femmes, in Geneva to address issues of suffrage and secular education (Adams 2004). Between the years 1880 and 1900, the global mobilization of women expanded with the formation of new transnational women's organizations around a wide range of issues and in a variety of contexts. For example, although transnational influences were also evident, the suffrage movement in Japan in the 1880s emerged in response to a domestic popular rights movement; in China the suffrage movement of the early 1900s was part of an anti-Qing movement that demanded political rights for women. In both countries, the struggle for the right to vote was coupled with campaigns to get women elected into office. Later in the 1920s in Japan, suffragists like Ichikawa Fusae saw the struggle for the right to vote as more than just a means of getting legislation passed to benefit women and children, as women's suffrage had been framed in the United States. For her and other Japanese feminists, the women's vote would allow women to assert themselves on a wide range of issues affecting society The 1920s suffrage movements in Japan and India were, according to Ellen DuBois, more feminist and vigorous than any other such movements in that period worldwide (DuBois 2000, 541-549). Similarly, the Chilean Women's Civic Party, formed in 1922, advocated suffrage for women but saw it in a broader context of obtaining civil, political, and economic equality with men (Pernet 2000, 671). Some of the earliest transnational women's influences were religious in nature, like the Mother's Union, which originated in Britain. In addition to its Protestant Christian message, the organization also promoted education, leadership, and organizational skills among women, which had spillover implications for women's political activism around the world. 56 A I L I MARI TRIPP Other international women's organizations established in this period included the World Women's Christian Temperance Union (founded in 1883), the International Congress of Women (1888), the International Council of Women (1888), the General Federation of Women's Clubs (1889), which was one of the world's largest and oldest women's volunteer service organizations, the World Young Women's Christian Association (1894), and the International Women's Suffrage Alliance (1904) (Boulding 1977, 188). These particular transnational organizations were based in the West, and their leadership was almost entirely Western, although there were exceptions right from the beginning. The International Congress of Women's founding meeting in 1888 had delegates not only from Europe but also from India. The Women's Christian Temperance Union chapters that were formed in China, Japan, India, Korea, and Burma in the 1880s became an important focal point for the suffrage movement in these countries (DuBois 2000, 547). One of the first major transnational struggles of women was over the right to vote, which started in the Pacific and Europe and quickly spread worldwide with decolonization. New Zealand and Australia were the first countries that granted women this right, in 1893 and 1902, respectively. Finland was the first country in Europe to grant voting rights to women, in 1906; Canada was the first in North America (1918), with the United States following two years later; Ecuador was the first in Latin America (1928), as were Sri Lanka in Asia (1931) and Senegal in Africa (1945). After World War II, many countries granted women universal suffrage along with men as part of the process of creating newly independent nations, since by then the inclusion of women as voters had been institutionalized within new nations (Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997, 736). Ramirez and coauthors show how suffrage movements were only partially national struggles; they were part of transnational movements drawing on universal aspirations that use the resources of various kinds of international organizations. They appealed to global principles that transcended national boundaries. However, it is important to recognize that transnational influences were being absorbed by local movements in distinctive ways and that the inspiration and form the movements took were shaped by national events and trends. Moreover, the suffrage movement was not the only transnational movement in this period. In 1910 the International Women's Congress in Latin America met in Buenos Aires with delegates from Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina; their focus was on women's education and civil and political rights as well as divorce. The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 57 Although early Chilean feminists were influenced by North American and European suffragists whom they encountered while studying abroad, feminists like Amanda Labarca distinguished themselves from English-speaking feminists and their liberal approaches, claiming that they were too individualistic, too hostile to men as the enemy, and not sufficiently concerned with the family (Pernet 2000,666). Transnational influences were even stronger in the period following this initial wave of suffrage acquisition, although Europe and North America experienced a downturn in feminist linkages in the 1930s. With the rise of fascism in the 1930s, economic depression in Europe and North America, and the outbreak of World War II, international mobilization was hampered. Communication and meetings became difficult to organize. Some early organizations were torn by nationalist pressures that challenged their internationalist impulses. Other groups found themselves conflicted on principles of pacifism that they had adopted. Winning the right to vote for women in Europe and North America had taken the momentum out of many women's rights movements in these countries, but for the rest of the world, major women's rights movements were gearing up. Women in Pacific Rim countries, for example, met in 1928 in Honolulu to establish a women's rights network, and out of these early meetings the Pan-Pacific Women's Association was formed in 1930. In 1935 a coalition of women's rights organizations brought the treaty to the League of Nations, which voted to further study the issue. A series of Pan-American Congresses of Women were held from 1910 onward, and the Pan-American Association for the Advancement of Women (PAAAW) was formed in 1922 to promote women's education, property rights, suffrage, and peace in North and South America. As the North Americans in the PAAAW shifted their efforts to focus on peace issues, the organization dissolved and eventually was replaced by the Inter-American Commission of Women (ÍACW) of the Pan-American Union (later to be known as the Organization of American States), which was formed in 1928 in Havana. In the 1920s, Latin American feminists had distanced themselves from North American feminists, but by the 1930s these differences had begun to dissolve. Lack of funds prevented extensive travel between North and South America and so international communication largely took the form of correspondence and exchanges within newspapers. The IACW focused on women's civil and political rights and began monitoring progress on the legal status of women in the region. In the 58 AILI MARI TRIPP 1930s an initiative of the IACW led by Marta Vergara of Chile and Maria Pizano of Colombia lobbied the League of Nations to allow married women citizenship rights worldwide (DuBois 2000, 550). Although suffrage was clearly a concern, it is important to note that the emphasis of Latin American feminists in this period was much broader than suffrage and focused on women's equality and political rights as the touchstone of democracy. Women's rights in the international rhetoric of the time were about peace, democracy, and progress. In fact, these Latin American activists saw democracy in the Americas as worthy of European emulation, given the fascist tendencies that had emerged by the mid-1950s in Europe (Pernet 2000, 664, 681). During World War II, democracy became even more central to their cause, and after the war their emphasis shifted to peace building. In the decades under colonial rule in Asia and Africa, transnational activism was characterized by efforts by some Western women to work with colonized women in the areas of education, health, political representation, and legal status. These initiatives were complicated by the fact that they were frequently closely entwined with the colonial project of modernization and the missionary project of promoting Christian beliefs, values, and lifestyle. At times these initiatives were welcomed by local activists and contributed to their own efforts to eradicate various practices. This was the case with the efforts to abolish foot binding in China (1874-1911) and the initiatives to abolish bride wealth in Uganda in the 1950s. In other instances, as in Kenya in 1920-1931 and later in the 1950s, efforts to abolish female genital cutting strengthened the nationalist cause and gave new salience to the practice, which came to symbolize nationalist opposition to colonialism. In 1930, the Anglican Church in Meru banned female genital cutting and said it would excommunicate African members for practicing it. When the colonial government banned the practice in 1956, girls in Meru went so far as to circumcise themselves in protest. Africans left the church in droves to protest the ban. Similarly, Adams (2004) shows how in both French and British Cameroon, efforts by colonial administrators and missionaries to abolish bride wealth through the education of women were largely ignored by the local population. Women from the colonial countries themselves varied in orientation, as Kumari Jayawardena (1995) has shown in the case of South Asia. Some colonial feminists thoroughly supported the imperial project and were bent on carrying out their civilizing mission, whereas others were social The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 59 reformers who did not challenge colonialism but did not actively support it either. Although few in number, there were individual Western women's rights advocates who actively supported the cause of third world independence. Similar variance in colonial women activists was found in Africa (Callaway 1987; Denzer 1992; Jayawardena 1995; Labode 1993; Ranchod-Nilsson 1992; Strobel 1991; Tripp 2002). Second Wave of Transnational Mobilization (1945-1975) After World War II, a new wave of international gender-based mobilization took off as women became active in efforts to secure independence for their countries and resist colonialism. Organizations that had a European and North American focus became more international in scope. The membership of the International Council of Women (ICW) jumped from having 78 percent of its affiliate councils based in Europe and the United States in 1938 to having only 47 percent of its membership from these countries by 1963. Many women's movements worldwide sprang up in this period quite independent of women's movements in the West, contrary to claims that they originated in feminist movements in North America and Europe (e.g., Keck and Sikkink 1998,168). In Africa, as Margaret C. Snyder (2003) has argued, the African women's movement evolved from its own independent base with its own intrinsic philosophy and distinct goals. It was not a carbon copy of Western movements and in fact predated the second-wave movement in the West. Its beginnings were African, rooted mostly in the fight for independence. DuBois (2000), Jayawardena (1986), Lavrin (1995), Pernet (2000), and others have shown much the same in the case of women's rights movements throughout Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. In their local struggles for equal rights, women in these regions developed their own feminisms distinct from Western feminisms. After World War II, the UN Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1945, became a focal point of international advocacy and for the promotion of women's rights in all spheres. It was largely a product of efforts of Latin American women suffragists. The 1950s was not a period of "doldrums" for feminism in Latin America but rather the decade in which many Latin American countries extended the franchise to women and activists there were energized and internationally engaged. Nonetheless, when the CSW began, its fifteen members came primarily 60 AILI MARI TRIPP from Western countries. Today it has forty-five members, including thirteen from African states, eleven from Asian states, four from Eastern European states, nine from Latin American and Caribbean states, and eight from Western European and other states. The makeup of the CSW not only reflects global demographics and changes in the structure of the UN that took place after independence but also suggests a geopolitical realignment that has resulted from shifting dynamics within transnational women's movements globally, giving more voice and legitimacy to the global South. Third Wave of Transnational Women's Mobilization (1985-) Although influences from the global South had always been in evidence throughout the two earlier waves of mobilization (1880-1930 and 1945-1975), it was not until the third wave of transnational women's activism (1985 to present) that the South began to challenge in a concerted fashion the ideological dominance of the North in framing the international women's agenda. This coincided with a major expansion of transnational mobilization. The 1970s were a period of ferment in the West. Large numbers of organizations formed around feminist principles with the rise of "second-wave feminism" in the United States and Europe. Women's movements and broader social movements increasingly interacted with and influenced one another. New international organizations and networks, such as Women's International Network (WIN), International Feminist Network, and International Women's Information and Communication Service, emerged and were focused on women's health, reproductive rights, peace, human rights, poverty, prostitution, and violence against women. But many of the established international groups in the 1970s were led by white, middle-class women from the North, and the majority of their funding came from North America and the United States (Stienstra 1994, 100-101). This became an increasing source of tension. The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 61 Early Challenges to Northern Dominance: Women in Development Agendas The UN conferences became a venue in which various North-South tensions were played out. Many of the conflicts focused on the objections by women in the South to the northern women's emphasis on the primacy of feminism and on relations between men and women. Many women from the South, for example, accused women from the North of coming to the UN women's conference in Mexico in 1975 presuming that a specific feminist orientation would provide a common framework for action. Gloria Steinern had drawn up a feminist manifesto without any input from women in the South, which seemed to many third world women to be a subtle form of cultural imperialism. Women from the South tended to focus on how women's problems were defined by global inequality, imperialism, and other political concerns that were not seen as gender-specific. At this first UN conference on women, and even more so at the Copenhagen conference (1980) that followed, women from the South challenged Northern women to see development issues as women's concerns. Similarly, at a conference of academics held at Wellesley College in 1976 to bring together women from the North and South to discuss the concerns of third world women, participants from the South criticized what they perceived as a limited and singular vision of feminism presented at the conference, one that ignored global inequalities and political differences and the ways in which multinational corporations and trade relations were tied to the oppression of women. Rather than just a critique, alternative visions were offered. Third world networks of activists and scholars, like Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) formed in 1984 in the Caribbean, Latin America, and South Asia, pushed for an agenda that incorporated women's concerns in development strategies, policies, and theories. These concerns became integral to the efforts of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), which supported women's projects and women's participation in mainstream development programs (Pietilä 2002,37,38). The formation of many third world-based international networks—like DAWN and Women Living under Muslim Laws in the mid-1980s and Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAE) in 1990—represented the beginning of the shift in the center of gravity in global women's mobilization dynamics. These organizations were not just coexisting alongside organizations based in the North, but 62 A I L I MARI TRIPP claimed a leadership role in transnational women's movements (Bunch 2001,380). Shifting Momentum By 1985 at the UN Nairobi conference, the earlier North-South tensions over agenda priorities had subsided. Feminist activists in the North had come to accept the importance of global development concerns as relevant to women, and women in the South became more willing to focus on gender equality (Snyder and Tadesse 1995). More than 60 percent of the attendees in Nairobi were from the South. It was at this point that the overall feminist center of gravity began to move from the North to the South. Transnational networks were formed around violence against women as early as 1974, with the creation of Isis. By the 1990s, violence against women had gained in importance as a major issue around which activists forged networks and alliances around the world. By the end of the century, it had become the most important international women's issue and the most dynamic human rights concern globally (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 166). Women's organizations had been working on issues of state violence against women in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1981 feminist Encounter for Latin America and the Caribbean in Bogota held a Day to Resist Violence against Women, which led to annual commemorations throughout Latin America and eventually to the global campaign Sixteen Days of Activism against Gender Violence. Transnational networks focused on violence began to emerge at the UN Women's Conference in Copenhagen in 1980 and in Nairobi in 1985. Regional groups formed in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, and global networks formed around particular issues such as the trafficking of women. At the UN conference in Nairobi, understandings of violence against women were broadened from domestic violence and rape to violence against women caused by economic deprivation, structural adjustment, environmental degradation, war, and political repression. The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna marked a turning point: it represented a major success in bringing the women's rights agenda into the human rights agenda. Foundations made funding available in this area of women and human rights, and new organizations The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 63 emerged, like the Global Campaign on Women's Human Rights organized by the Center for Women's Global Leadership (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 181). New international conventions adopted these concerns. The phrase "violence against women" was first used by the Organization of American States when it adopted the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women in 1994. It was the culmination of years of work by women's activists. There was also a new awareness that emerged around the use of rape in civil war in former Yugoslavia that could then be used to highlight the use of rape in other conflicts as well. In part, as Charlotte Bunch explained, the unities came from a realization that while everyone shared these problems, no one had a monopoly on the solutions, thus laying a better basis for discussion. Violence against women was absorbed into the language of human rights, which already had gained acceptance as a legal norm (Bunch and Fried 1996). Particular experiences of violence, for example, sati, dowry deaths, and female genital cutting, were treated as examples of violence against women rather than as "exotic practices signifying the primitive nature of national cultures," as they had been characterized in UN conferences in Mexico and Copenhagen. The inclusivity of the movement was key to its success, Weldon argues (2004). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the two strands within the global women's movements had come together: human rights issues and sustainable development concerns. They merged into what is referred to as the "rights-based approach." Human rights is seen as the central focus of sustainable human development: it offers the means, the ends, and a framework for assessing sustainable development and for guaranteeing a full array of rights that went well beyond those found in legislation and constitutions. This rights-based orientation had a more expansive reach beyond the approaches to development that emphasized donor or NGO assistance and local participation by adding to these concerns another level of action. The rights-based advocacy approach stressed the need for coalitions of NGOs and local activists and other actors to lobby governments, corporations, international financial institutions, and other global and domestic actors to create the necessary political, economic, and human rights conditions for equality, sustainable human development, and social justice. This new universalism faced challenges when it came into conflict with defenders of cultural practices who regarded women's rights as secondary to ethnic, religious, clan, and other such particularistic practices and 64 AlLI MARI TRIPP beliefs. While theorists became interested in attempting to resolve these issues intellectually (Kymlicka 1995; Okin 1999; Phillips 2002), it was also increasingly clear that these seemingly intractable issues would ultimately need to be struggled through in real-world political battles and accommodations. By the time of the UN's Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, there was considerable unity around the framing of "women's rights as human rights" and opposition to violence against women, which helped further bridge Northern and Southern interests. The gap between the North and South was closing. Thus, in the third-wave debates around human rights and development, women's movements in the South were especially important in expanding definitions of what women's concerns included and in looking at the broader global political and economic forces that influence women's status. They pointed to changing factors that shaped gender relations, ranging from colonialism during the struggles for independence, to poverty, militarization, and democratization both in newly independent states and in the former colonial powers, to contemporary issues of globalization that institutionalize inequality through international debt, structural adjustment policies, and unequal trade relations. In sum, the changing global dynamics in women's mobilization can be traced to the initial challenges to Western dominance around the time of the 1975 Mexico conference. The 1985 Nairobi conference marked a major turning point in North-South dynamics as new third world networks emerged. The impetus generated by the 1995 UN Beijing conference produced a new rights-based approach blending sustainable development and human rights concerns in the twenty-first century. Today, the shift in momentum from North to South is evident in three ways: in the types of issues being put on the table; in the kinds of organizations championing these agendas, including informal networks; and in the extent to which women's rights is perceived as a universal goal rather than as a Western feminist project. Changing Agendas and Actors In the past decade, many of the specific initiatives pertaining to women's rights have come from the global South. For example, a key demand of many women's movements is equal representation of women in legislative The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 65 bodies, local government, and other decision-making bodies. In various African countries like South Africa, Namibia, Uganda, Kenya, and Sierra Leone, there are 50/50 movements advocating that women claim half of all parliamentary seats. International and regional bodies, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Beijing conference on women, the Southern African Development Community, the Socialist International, and the Organization of American States, have been debating the use of quotas to promote women's parliamentary representation. More than eighty countries have adopted some form of quotas to improve the selection of female candidates running for office, and another twenty have launched quota debates over the past ten years (Krook 2004). These include legislative or constitutional provisions for the adoption of party quotas or reserved seats or the adoption of quotas on a voluntary basis by parties themselves. Some regional organizations set targets for member states to attain. In the 1990s, new efforts to introduce quotas to improve women's legislative representation were especially common in Latin America and Africa. Drude Dahlerup and Lenita Freidenvall (2003) have argued that the incremental model of increasing women's representation in parliament that led to high rates of female representation in the Nordic countries in the 1970s was replaced by the fast-track model one finds in many developing countries, where dramatic jumps in parliamentary representation are brought about by the introduction of electoral quotas. Another area that has generated considerable momentum in the South has been the adoption of "gender budgets," or attempts to make the gender implications of national spending priorities more explicit and ultimately more fair. After the UN women's conference in Beijing (1995), many countries adopted women's budgets patterned along the lines of South Africa's 1994 budget exercise and the budgets of federal and state governments in Australia that were adopted as early as 1984. By 2000, gender-sensitive budget initiatives were under way in eighteen countries in four regions. Gender budget initiatives are generally coordinated by the ministry of finance and involve collaboration among NGOs and the legislature. The gender budgeting process involves analysis of existing budgets to determine the differential gender impact on women, men, girls, and boys, and making recommendations for future budgets to improve the way in which funds are allocated (Buchender 2000). Much of the impetus for gender budgeting came through the Commonwealth Secretariat, which explains why most of the countries that first adopted the budget initiatives were formerly part of the British Empire, including Uganda, 66 Al LI MARI TRIPP Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Sri Lanka, Barbados, Namibia, and Tanzania, as well as Australia. Gender budgeting has now spread more widely in the West; the European Union has endorsed this as an approach, as have the parliaments of some of its member states such as Germany. Women's economic activity also gained recognition as new women's entrepreneurial organizations linked economic empowerment and access to credit to social empowerment issues, including access to health care, literacy, and housing, opposing domestic violence and other such issues. Feminist economists and activists struggled to make policymakers understand that key economic indicators like the gross domestic product and gross national product do not account for women's unpaid labor in the home and the community. Such labor includes care work of the family, voluntary work, subsistence agricultural labor, and self-employed or subcontracted labor in informal markets, all of which are important to the economy in many developing countries. Were such labor to be accounted for, they argued, economic reform, welfare, labor, and other such policies would be shaped in fundamentally different ways. Policies should respond not only to the demands of the market, which is only a portion of the economy, but also to the needs and priorities of those involved in unpaid labor, informal labor markets, and other forms of "hidden" labor, they argued. These new understandings of women's labor began to reconfigure the way many policymakers thought of the market, as well as notions of value, efficiency, and productivity. Another aspect of gendered globalization is the flow of labor across borders. In December 2000, 121 countries signed the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime to States, and more than 80 countries signed one of its supplementary protocols—the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children—which was aimed at undermining international crime networks and righting the trafficking of people, especially women. Trafficking includes the recruitment, transportation, transfer, holding, and receipt of people through coercion, abduction, fraud, or deception. It also refers to the abuse of power to exploit someone through prostitution, sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery, servitude, or other such means. The protocol was the result of years of extensive lobbying by coalitions, alliances, and organizations of women's rights, antitrafficking, human rights, and migrants' groups, many of which had very different views on prostitution and its relation to trafficking (Sullivan 2003). The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 67 One of the main strategies that has developed to foster women's empowerment in poor countries is the provision of microcredit and the means to a living, generally through self-employment. The Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), based in Ahmedabad, India, adopts a holistic approach to women's empowerment, serving as a model globally. SEWA was formed in 1972, drawing inspiration from the thinking of the Indian nationalist leader and pacifist Mahatma Gandhi. It is an advocacy organization and at the same time a movement of poor, self-employed women workers themselves. Such women workers are part of the larger sector of nonsalaried unprotected labor that makes up 93 percent of all workers in India. SEWA not only has pressed the Indian government to provide training programs and other services for this sector and lobbied for better legislation for self-employed workers in India but also has taken its campaign onto the global arena. It was a leading force in mobilizing international pressure to get the International Labour Organisation's Home Work Convention (1996) adopted. Regional Influences on Transnational Women's Activism Some of the new influences come out of particular regions of the South. African influences, for example, have been numerous, as Peg Snyder argues (2003). Snyder has shown how African women had not merely absorbed a brand of feminism diffused by Western activists. Rather, women's activism in Africa developed from indigenous bases and influenced international women's movements. African women's organizations pressed the UN Economic Commission for Africa to establish a training center for women. The African Training and Research Center for Women, which was formed in Addis Ababa, became the first regional center in the world and soon became a model for the UN system as other such centers were established. Similarly, Women's World Banking was inspired by women's economic activity in Africa. At a preconference seminar before the 1975 Mexico City UN World Conference on Women, the successful Ghanaian entrepreneur, industrialist, and philanthropist Esther Ocloo pioneered the idea of formalizing local women's credit associations to help women access capital to improve their economic situation. Ocloo worked with Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self Employed Women's Association in India, and Michaela Walsh, a New York investment banker, and together they founded Women's World 68 AILI MARI TRIPP Banking in 1979. Ocloo became the first chairperson of its board, serving in that capacity from 1980 to 1985. As of 2005, Women's World Banking operates in forty-five countries around the world. In the early 1970s, African women pioneered the collection of gender-disaggregated data, and in particular information on the gender division of labor. Scholars of African households like Simi Afonja, Nancy Folbre, Judith Bruce, and Eleanor Fapohunda were among the first to highlight the divided nature of households along gender lines. This led to a dramatic shift in the way many leading economists and development practitioners worldwide thought of household income and labor, challenging previous conventions in economics that assumed a unitary household defined by male preferences. Coming from a continent that has experienced a great many of the world's civil conflicts, African women also were very proactive in pushing issues of peace and peacemaking in international forums and in confronting various heads of states. Women's marginalization from politics meant that they brought a different set of interests to bear on peace processes and talks. African women, in particular, made peace a central issue at the UN Beijing conference on women in 1995. Their efforts contributed greatly to the passing of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on October 31, 2000, to include women in peace negotiations and give them roles in peacekeeping missions around the world. The resolution requires protection of women and girls against sexual assault in civil conflicts and heightened efforts to place women in decision-making positions in international institutions. Already women had been active in informal peace initiatives in civil conflicts in Colombia, Guatemala, Burundi, Rwanda, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. In these countries they had formed coalitions of women's organizations across "enemy lines" focused on very practical concerns. In Africa, the equal representation of women in peace negotiations and peace-building initiatives has become a key agenda item in conflict-ridden societies because women believe they have a different approach to conflict and different perspectives to bring to bear. In peace negotiations in Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and elsewhere, women generally came to the peace table already united as a bloc of women. Unity across ethnic or religious division is their starting point rather than the end point. Their demands were more oriented toward pragmatic solutions to heakh, education, and other problems, rather than vying for positions of power in a restructured state. The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 69 Africa was by no means the only region exerting these types of transnational influences. Women in Latin America forged and expanded some of the strongest regional networks: they took the lead in developing networks among movement activists and state policymakers and in creating models for networking worldwide (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 170). For example, each year since 1981, Latin American and Caribbean feminist encuentros (meetings) have brought together thousands of women from across the region to discuss issues of transnational importance to the movement. In some cases activists formed networks around particular themes (reproductive rights, trafficking of women and children, domestic violence). New regional networks in Africa emerged in the late 1990s and after 2000 around female education, reproductive rights, violence against women, women's political empowerment, women in peace building, land rights, and many other concerns. Similar regional networks were found in other parts of the world. In sum, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, most global networks were still based in the North. But global networks are increasingly initiated and led by women in the South, and even though much of their funding still comes from the North, the perspectives and priorities they offer are their own. For example, the Wise Women Process group, which started meeting at the Beijing+5 conference in New York in 2000 and was renamed Revitalising the International Feminist Movement at its 2002 Kampala meeting, is an informal network of activists that is one of the brain trusts of the international women's movement. This group involves activists, journalists, UN officials, and academics and is led by non-Western women; of its thirty-nine members, only five are from the global North. Its priorities, according to Mahnaz's Afkhami, were to revisit "the women's movement from the perspective of the women of the South" and to "rethink the movement's premises in ways that are more inclusive, more grassroots-oriented, more culturally relevant and nuanced, and more apt to appeal to a large segment of the world's population than West-focused and initiated efforts of the past that were shaped primarily by the experience of the women of the developed world" (Wise Women Process 2002). Causes of the Shift in Momentum Several factors have contributed to the shift in momentum in women's mobilization from the global North to the South. In the United States, for 70 AILÍ MARI TRIPP example, there is a growing complacency about the necessity of improving women's status and a greater need to defend gains already made. The demise of the labor movement, a deficit in the numbers of women activists holding political office, especially at the national level, a lack of femocrats in government positions, and the general strengthening of the position of conservative political forces have all contributed to a situation where the United States is falling behind in many key areas. The Bush administration's unilateralism in foreign policy has only reinforced these tendencies. The lack of media coverage of international initiatives that are adopted by feminist organizations contributes to the general lack of awareness of how far behind women in the United States have fallen. In contrast, we have witnessed in the global South the vigorous use of transnational coalitions and networks, along with international treaties, platforms, and conferences to push new women's rights agendas. Intense regional networking in Latin America, Africa, and Asia around particular issues (trafficking, land reform, education, peace building, reproductive rights, violence against women, electoral quotas) has helped define these concerns and develop strategies to address them. Feminists in state and international policymaking positions have supported movement initiatives in these areas. Some of the elements of this global shift have regional dimensions. Active or nascent women's movements have emerged in Africa, creating new energy around women's issues. The increased influence of femocrats within state institutions as in Latin America coupled with the NGOization or professionalization of women's activism have provided sustained interest in women's concerns that had been primarily the domain of women's movements in the 1970s and 1980s. New donor interest in supporting gender concerns as part of effective use of development aid has also contributed to the new momentum found in the global South. The educational levels of women have changed dramatically around the world since the 1970s. The gender gap in literacy and school enrollment closed by half between 1970 and 1990. The gap between female enrollment at the tertiary level jumped from less than half the male rate in 1970 to 70 percent by 1990 (UNDP 1995, 33-34). This meant that the numbers of women with the necessary skills to lead national organizations and to hold decision-making positions increased dramatically, which had implications for women's participation in international forums. As Moghadam has observed, "Transnational feminist networks have emerged in the con- The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms 71 text of a growing population of educated, employed, mobile and politically aware women around the world" (2000, 79). After the 1990s, the expanded use of the Internet, e-mail, faxes, and other forms of communication greatly facilitated networking globally. Governments were increasingly eager to demonstrate that they had modernized and were seeking to adhere to the emerging international norms regarding women. They had committed themselves to many international and regional treaties and conventions regarding women's status and needed to show progress in at least some of the goals ratified there. All these factors contributed to the shifting dynamics in transnational mobilization around women's rights that increasingly placed the momentum in the South. Another factor contributing to the shift in the global momentum in advocacy for women's rights relates to the dynamics within the women's movements in the United States and Europe. In European and U.S. women's movement organizations there is surprisingly little discussion of how their countries' policies and economic practices affect women in other parts of the world. This is especially striking because the policies of the global North are a key subject of discussion in women's movements in the global South. The locus of global economic and political power resides in the industrially developed countries, and what happens in them has worldwide implications. There has yet to emerge a full appreciation of the way in which the policies of the North affect the South, and the interconnections between our mutual fates and futures. With a few important exceptions (e.g., political representation for women in Iraq and Afghanistan and development policy in Scandinavia), there is relatively little lobbying of the governments in the North by U.S. and European women's organizations to address concerns of women in the South, especially regarding global inequalities and the role of international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The disconnect between the Northern and Southern feminist movements has implications for conditions for women in the North as well. There does not appear to be tremendous pressure on the U.S. government to ratify the CEDAW, which is used by women worldwide to advance their causes and concerns. The United States signed the convention in July 1980. The lack of urgency is especially strange when 90 percent (177) of the UN member countries have ratified it. As Charlotte Bunch (2002) noted: "There has been little interest here [i.e., in the United States] in 72 A I L I MARI TRIPP using international human rights treaties like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), to advance domestic issues. There is a tendency not to see the international arena as adding anything to causes at home" (39). This is a striking difference with the earlier suffrage movements, which saw the adoption of the right to vote for women in other countries as an impetus for the United States to do the same. American feminists seem little bothered by the fact that countries like Rwanda have 49 percent female representation in parliament (women hold 14.3 percent of the seats in the U.S. House and 13 percent of the seats in the Senate) and appear disinterested in the major ongoing worldwide debates about how to increase female legislative representation. U.S. feminists remain virtually untouched by these discussions. Moreover, the United States does not seem concerned about keeping up with other industrialized countries in terms of maternity and paternity leave, welfare benefits for single mothers, health care for uninsured women, and many other benefits that affect the well-being of women and of society. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act permits any employee who has worked for at least one year to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave a year to care for a newborn, adopted child, or another family member in need of care. There is little outrage at the limitations of this policy, perhaps because Americans are unaware of how far behind they have fallen when it comes to women's rights. Most women worldwide, even in the Middle East, enjoy paid maternity leave. For example, women have fourteen weeks maternity leave in Algeria, and twelve weeks in Morocco with 100 percent of their wages paid by social security. Conclusions This chapter has traced some of the changes in momentum at a transnational level and explored the consequences of these changes. It has evaluated the need to address these issues at a time when bilateral and multilateral aid is shrinking, and to consider the difficulties posed by continuing North-South gaps in approach and concerns. Even though feminists in North America and Europe have seemed to dominate transnational movements at particular moments, such as the early UN conferences on women in the 1970s, the closer one looks at particular movements, the more one finds that the influences on both agenda and The Evolutton of Transnational Feminisms 73 organizations have always been multidirectional, even going back to the late 1800s. But one also finds that despite their transnational dimensions, women's movements define themselves and their vision of feminism with respect to local conditions. 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