Organizing Committee: Electa Arenal; Linda Basch; Mariam Chamberlain; Jennifer Disney; Maureen Fadem; Seiko Hanochi; Deborah Thomas; Kristen Timothy

Japan Preparatory Committee: Seiko Hanochi; Syuko Inamoto; Keiko Kobayashi; Yoshiko Misumi; Yuko Moriya; Kazuko Sato; Tatsue Tokizame

International Advisory Committee: Electa Arenal; Linda Basch; Mariam Chamberlain; Jennifer Disney; Hester Eisenstein; Nimalka Fernando; Seiko Hanochi; Tejal Jesrani; Yoko Komiyama; Francine Moccio; Achola Pala Okeyo; Sumiko Shimizu; Vandana Shiva; Constance Sutton; Deborah Thomas; Kristen Timothy

SYMPOSIA Program

SYMPOSIA PROGRAM

PROCEEDINGS

The National Council for Research on Women (NCRW), the Center for the Study of Women and Society at CUNY's Graduate Center, and the Japan Preparatory Committee co-sponsored this series during Beijing plus 5, the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly, to review the progress of the Beijing Platform for Action.

From June 5-8, 2000, more than four hundred women from around the world - leaders in government, academia, NGOs, and other sectors - gathered at the CUNY Graduate Center to analyze the impact of globalization on women and girls. The symposia series, workshops, and public fora were designed to consider how different social, cultural, economic, and political contexts have shaped current trends in globalization, and the ways these trends have affected women’s lives. Questions examined included: What strategies have been used by state agencies, NGOs, and women activists to address - and challenge - these changes? How are women leaders across sectors bringing their issues to public agendas? What kinds of partnerships do women and girls need to form to be effective? What are women’s and girls’ visions for the future?

The symposia was followed by facilitated break-out sessions during which participants discussed action strategies from their own experiences, and activities and new directions stemming from the symposia. Additional workshops and panels were held on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 6 and 7, in the afternoon and evening. The sessions emphasized a committment to diversity and coalition-building across boundaries of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, and generation, and focus on the interface between activism, academia, and policy.

MONDAY, June 5: WELCOME & OPENING PLENARY
[click on speakers’ names for full biographical information]

WELCOME
Electa Arenal (Director, Center for the Study of Women and Society, CUNY Graduate School and University Center)
Linda Basch (Executive Director, National Council for Research on Women)
Yoshiko Misumi (Managing Director, Kitakyushu Forum on Asian Women; Co-Chair, Japan Preparatory Committee)

HONORABLE GUEST
Ryoko Akamatsu (Former Minister of Education; President, Japanese Association of International Women’s Rights)

REVIEW of Purpose & Opportunities Presented by Beijing + 5 Special Session
Kristen Timothy (Former Deputy Director, United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women; Research Scholar, NCRW)
Electa Arenal opened the symposia series by reading poems written by Yosano Akiko called “My Brother, You Must Not Die,” and by Marge Piercy called “I Call on the Dead.” She welcomed participants to CUNY and to New York, offered gratitude to all involved in the planning of the series, and introduced Linda Basch.

Linda Basch highlighted the uniqueness of the meeting, the result of a cross-national collaboration between a network of Japanese women’s organizations - both grassroots and academic - that have formed the Japan Preparatory Committee Year 2000 Project, the CUNY Center for the Study of Women and Society, and the National Council for Research on Women. She introduced the work of the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW), highlighting the Council’s role in convening diverse constituencies to develop strategies to change the circumstances for women and girls. She continued by offering the following remarks:

The world has changed dramatically for women over the last several centuries. It’s hard to believe that it was not until the 11th century that the English pronoun “she” came into existence. Previously, women were submerged as part of the collective “they.” It only took a millennium for us to be recognized. Progress for women and girls has been slow over much of the last millennium as well, although the last century contains several gains, many due to the work of women’s activist, policy, and research organizations, and the international women’s movement. For example, the gender gap in primary and secondary schooling is closing in most parts of the world. Literacy rates, including those for women, are up worldwide. And women are moving into leadership positions in unprecedented numbers across diverse sectors. As Charlotte Bunch pointed out recently, the successful work of the international women’s movement, linked to the World Conferences sponsored by the United Nations, has assured that women are on local, national, and global agendas, and in fact are changing those agendas.

Yet, many challenges remain before us. The just released United Nations Report on the World’s Women, for example, tells us that two-thirds of the 876,000,000 people in the world who are illiterate are women, and that more women than men lack the basic literacy and computer skills to enter the world of technology. And that women remain at the lower end of the segregated labor market, and generally hold positions of little or no authority and less pay than men. And Angela King, the UN Secretary General’s Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women, points out that the percentage of women in political decision-making positions worldwide has declined over the past five years. One of the thorniest issues before us is globalization - the subject we’re about to dissect and analyze over the next four days. [ We know that as a result of the increasing privatization of resources - which has meant a decline in the supports provided by governments - women, who are more reliant on state support, are adversely affected. Globalization has negatively impacted women’s access to economic resources, and has had negative health and social impacts as well (e.g. the rapidly increasing spread of HIV among women, and the increasing trafficking of women across state borders).]

Over the next four days, we will not only develop a deeper understanding of the economic and political forces driving globalization and how it has affected women, but we will hear about the strategies developed by women’s organizations around the world to address and challenge the negative effects of globalization. We will also hear the kinds of partnerships women have developed that have worked. We have a true feast - women from many different parts of the world and of different ages sharing their analyses, experiences, and visions. Our vision for the Conference is to have the opportunity to hear from experts working in these areas, but also to share our thinking, ideas, and expertise - in other words, to hear from the experts among us, all of you sitting out there. Working collectively over the last two decades, women have literally moved the mountains of government, international organizations, business, and major NGOs, and changed thinking across the world about women and about social relationships. And the issues that women address - violence, peace, health, education, and economy equity - are no longer viewed merely as women’s issues, but are seen as issues that affect everyone.

Basch explained the structure of the conference, indicated that the goal is to identify and develop action strategies we can take home with us, thanked everyone for joining together in this venture, and introduced Yoshiko Misumi.

Yoshiko Misumi gave a brief address, thanking CUNY and NCRW on behalf of the Japan Preparatory Committee. She explained that the Committee was organized by women leaders in grassroots organizations who have been working towards gender equality in government and NGOs since the UN Conference in Beijing. She also reported that the basic law for gender equality was passed in June 1999 in Japan; this law sets forth the responsibilities of local government and citizens with respect to women’s rights.

Linda Basch called attention to honorable guest Ryoko Akamatsu, the former Minister of Education in Japan, and the President of the Japanese Association of International Women’s Rights. She then introduced Kristen Timothy, a research scholar with NCRW and the former Deputy Director for the Division of the Advancement of Women at the United Nations.

Kristen Timothy spoke about the challenges and opportunities presented by the five-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action at the UN. She traced some of the history of the women’s movement internationally - highlighting women’s struggles for suffrage, for anti-imperialism and independence, for basic rights and equality. She noted that because of the “second wave” of feminism in the United States - a period characterized by “women burning their bras in the streets” - at the United Nations, people were reluctant to use the word “feminism” until the end of the 1980s. This is because the images the word evoked made it difficult to build coalitions among women internationally. Instead, people focused on “Women in Development,” “Gender and Development,” and then, as a result of Beijing, “Gender Mainstreaming.”

What is gender mainstreaming and how do we implement it? Timothy explained that the latest wave of feminism grew out of the UN Decade for Women. This wave is characterized by more extensive networking, and perhaps a more strategic approach to pressing an agenda through governments via the use of international institutions. During the 1990s, women have been fairly successful at convincing the world that all issues are women’s issues - a considerable change from where we were a century ago. However, even though we are now working through a framework of human rights and development, these ideas still needs refinement and translation.

Timothy then defined a few of the current challenges with which we are presented. First, there is a serious backlash, a reaction to the progress made at Beijing, from many of the world’s conservative forces. This backlash seems to be based on a reassertion of patriarchy and fundamentalism in many places. One of the challenges this week at the UN, therefore, is to prevent going backward, to prevent losing ground on some of the wording in the Platform for Action - for example, on sexual rights, parental rights, reproductive health. One of the opportunities here, she continued, is that many women living under fundamentalist regimes are beginning to organize and think about what they want to do and where they want to go. Another challenge is how to bring more men into what we’re doing. The Scandinavian countries have put this on their agenda, but many others feel they’re not ready. Nevertheless, without working with men, we can’t make this a true movement for social change. A third challenge is accountability. “We’ve reached a plateau in our movement,” Timothy asserted, “and must hold all actors accountable for gender equality.” That understanding of this is still elusive was evident during the Opening Ceremony at the UN where speakers emphasized that it is “YOU are here to do something, it’s YOUR job to make this a success.” It’s true, Timothy said, that we have a responsibility but we all need to define our roles in bringing about gender equality.

Finally, globalization is a significant challenge to the women’s movement because the power of governments is declining and women have always put pleas before governments. “As women,” she said, “We will have to ask ourselves how we will work with the new forces controlling economies. We will also have to continue to capitalize on the opportunities globalization brings, such as the internet and other alternative media and our increased ability to travel.” Timothy concluded by encouraging everyone to continue to be strategic, strong, and smart.


OPENING PLENARY
New Strategies and Challenges for The Global Women’s Movement at 2000
Charlotte Bunch (Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University)
Masako Owaki (Senator, JAPAN)
Pregs Govender (Chair, Parliamentary Committee on Quality of Life and Status of Women, SOUTH AFRICA)
Nimalka Fernando (International Movement Against all Forms of Discrimination and Racism)
Rounaq Jahan (Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University)
Moderator: Rosina Wiltshire (UNDP)

The MAIN THEMES that emerged during this plenary had to do with the issue of defining globalization and challenging the present processes that are leading to a reinforcement of old colonial divisions and disparities throughout the world. Panelists also raised the issues of a globalization of arms and the need to ensure the rights of peaceful survivability; the need to redistribute resources as well as demystify the operation of the private sector while holding the public sector accountable; the promotion of youth dialogue; the need to resist cooptation when we enter institutions; the difficulty of changing the fundamental agendas of these institutions, especially those private institutions that are driven by the accumulation of wealth by any means, the exercise of power at any cost; and an assessment of how responsive the global women’s movement is to the nationally and culturally diverse needs of women worldwide. [Globalization, here, was seen as an incomplete process since capital and power concentration are globalized, but peace and the interests of women, children, and the poor are not.]

Charlotte Bunch encouraged us to think beyond Beijing Plus Five because, she argued, much of the opposition to the Platform for Action and the document that is being developed now is intimately connected to the forces of globalization - the changes that are occurring in our world today and the insecurity that that is creating. This has led many governments and individuals to cling to the past even more so than they might have done before when the changes didn’t seem so dramatic. Five years ago, she said, we couldn’t have anticipated all the ways globalization is changing the reality of women, and we have to defend the gains of the Platform while also acknowledging that new questions and problems are coming at us very fast. We are in the process of a transition in the world - economically, politically and culturally. And when you’re in the midst of that process, it’s very hard to know exactly how to move and where the changes are going to come. “Many of our ideas,” she said, “are shaped around ending the oppression of women from a previous era (which must be done), and at the same time we’re being thrown into a new era without having completed that task. These are the main challenges presented by increased globalization.”

“Strangely,” Bunch continued, “and I would never have thought I would say this after thirty years of working for women’s rights, but I think that the past thirty years were the easier part and that the really tough part is ahead.” She explained that over the past thirty years, women involved in the women’s movement have been doing the crucial basic work of redefining the world from the point of view of women’s lives, of putting the problems and issues on the agenda, of actually changing the way people understood what the world was about. The term “gender” was created to talk about the way social relations are constructed rather than just natural and inevitable. These efforts have been profoundly important, she said, because if you don’t have a reality that defines a problem you can’t create a strategy for a problem that doesn’t exist. Creating a language for a reality is the first step in changing the reality, which is in many ways the far more difficult task, especially as the world changes at an increasingly furious pace.

Bunch defined globalization as “a reality,” a process that has already occurred. “What we now have to look at is how to tame the forces of globalization and make them accountable to human needs and human rights,” she declared. Globalization is as much a reality as the Industrial Revolution was. Like that revolution, globalization has changed the ways people organize their lives and their work just as significantly, and has prompted the need for methods and strategies to address the exploitation accompanying these changes. She concluded by setting forth an agenda. “We will have to create new systems of accountability that take into account the fact that much of the power is no longer in the hands of the state, new systems for international financial institutions and non-state actors of all sorts,” she argued. “We need to think about what do we do as activists to respond to the reality that is in front of us in a way that will make those forces of globalization work to the betterment of women. We need to redefine ‘human rights’ in this era as a term that can give us a value system for accountability.”

Pregs Govender explained that her entrance into public life (and into these issues) was as an activist in the early 1970s in South Africa. Women in South Africa, she said, comprise the majority of the poor, the majority of those who experience the most violence, the majority of those who are homeless, landless, un- and under-employed, etc. As a grassroots activist, she worked not only within women’s organizations, but also with student, political, and community organizations, and eventually within the trade union. In all of these organizations, she raised the issue of how - in a context where the apartheid system had destroyed people’s sense of self and community - we can build and redefine power within ourselves, power with each other, and power to use resources to change the lives of the majority of women in our country. Empowerment, or “building power,” is critical. It is also crucial to link this to concrete campaigns for better wages, better working conditions, political rights, etc.

She related her work with the trade union movement and the Worker’s College - which is aimed at building worker leadership - specifically on building women’s leadership within very masculine, chauvinistic structures, and on ensuring that men who are potential leaders in the trade union movement apply a gender analysis to labor law, collective bargaining, and all other issues. In 1994, prior to the elections in South Africa, she worked with a coalition of national and provincial organizations to glean information from women regarding what they want from the new South Africa and what their needs were. This coalition also encouraged women to organize, to conduct participatory research, and to develop what has become known as the South African Women’s Charter for Effective Equality. Unfortunately, she said, media representations of that campaign did not cover what was taking place in rural areas, despite the fact that some of the most exciting uses of the campaign occurred in these areas as women took the opportunity to make visible their concerns regarding violence, land rights, and the power of the chief.

In 1994, the issue of transforming Parliament - what was traditionally a white male institution in South Africa - came to the fore. The South African Parliament, and similar institutions throughout the world, make invisible a whole range of people, among them, large numbers of women. So, we must make visible the work that women do, the complexity of women’s lives, to foreground a gender analysis with all legislation and policy-development. For Govender, the major questions that arose when she entered Parliament were: How do we, now that we are in these institutions, begin to use it to ensure that it facilitates women transforming their own lives wherever they are? How do we actually ensure that government resources, for example, are benefiting the poorest?

South Africa, she continued, has experienced tremendous and wonderful changes - to the constitution, to the laws of the country - in a very short time. They’ve adopted CEDAW; they’ve implemented quotas in political parties and in Parliament that has resulted in South Africa having one of the highest number of women in Parliament; they’ve pushed for disaggregated statistics; they’ve delved into research on unpaid labor; and they’ve passed a law upholding women’s reproductive choices, despite considerable opposition from conservative forces both within and outside the country.

Govender concluded by listing what she feels have been key lessons and cautionary tales. Regarding globalization, she said, “Don’t trust the experts who say trade liberalization will generate economic growth. Ask the questions and go back to your constituencies and see what the effects are.” She also argued that ending poverty must be linked to a redistribution of resources, and encouraged everyone to address the arms industry and its effects on women’s lives. She cautioned more generally against allowing women’s strategies to be co-opted into technocratic tools. “We mustn’t reinvent the wheel,” she said. “We can learn, we can share with each other specific strategies that have been effective. We must recognize the power within ourselves, the power within each other, and use the power that we have to benefit the poorest of women. The policies that we fight for must not be the policies of division, of exclusion, of elitism. Our differences of age, disability, sexual preference, and locality must not be used to divide us.”

Since both Charlotte Bunch and Pregs Govender had to return to the United Nations deliberations, Rosina Wiltshire encouraged audience responses to their presentations prior to their departure. One audience member questioned Charlotte Bunch’s assertion regarding the inevitability of globalization, asking how we can work with key actors within this process without having our strategies co-opted. Bunch responded by saying that what she meant by “inevitability” was that we cannot reverse the trends of the world being more interactive and the economy being more tightly linked at a global level. She did not mean to suggest, however, that the negative processes we associate with globalization are inevitable or that we have to accept them. We do, she said, have to oppose these, but have to also think about how we change the effects of globalization while taking account of the fact that globalization itself has changed the nature of the struggle that we’re used to having. Indeed, the struggle against globalization is rooted in local action focused on developing ways to protect our rights and provide for our needs within this new system.

Govender also clarified her comments. She reiterated that unless we clearly define our goals and priorities when we interact with these institutions, we are in great danger of being co-opted by them. We need to have a very clear sense of what kinds of transformations we want to see, what kinds of transformations we want to see in the institutions themselves, and what we want the impact of the work of those institutions to be. “We must also make sure we link, within our analyses and our solutions, the micro to the macro, the local to the global, the political to the economic to the social to the spiritual,” Govender stated. “Unless we do link as activists operating within different institutions in different places, unless we draw on each other, support each other, and keep each other on track, we are going to get co-opted, no matter the numbers.”

Masako Owaki began by stating that the crisis stemming from the globalization of the market economy is destroying people’s lives and harming people’s solidarity and social networks of mutual assistance. The gap between rich and poor is wider and job security has been weakened. In a society where both women and men work, women are pushed into unstable peripheral labor such as part time and temporary work, while they bear the brunt of the responsibility of family and children. Globalization has also intensified the migration of people, which has brought about issues having to do with a diversification of lifestyles and culture. These are social issues - human rights issues - in every country. Feminists, Owaki continued, have been fighting for equality, but we need to reconstruct the system for securing self-determination, including her reproductive rights.

Owaki advanced several tasks for global feminists. First, she argued, we must realize the globalization of peace because, as pointed out in the CEDAW, without peace there is no equality. While the 19th century was an era of rights defined in terms of freedom and the 20th century was an era of rights for social survivability, the coming 21st century will be an era of rights for peaceful survivability. This means that everyone has the right to maintain his or her own lifestyles without war. Second, Owaki continued, we must further increase women and girls’ access to education and embrace diversity of all kinds - cultural, gender, and generational. In this sense, the concept of democracy as “majority rule” should be nuanced to make room for the opinions of minorities in the process of weaving the future. Third, both women and men should rethink the way we work, and explore other avenues to share labor. Concrete implementation of maternity and paternity leaves is important here, in order to secure a compatibility of work and life. The interchangeability of part time and full time basis of work and systems for realizing these are important. In Japan, she explained, the right for both women and men to refuse to work during early child-rearing years is institutionalized, and at present women are lobbying to turn this custom into legislation. They are also drawing more attention to the principle of equal hour recompensation - and benefits - for both full-time and part-time workers, and are pushing for legislation regarding violence against women.

Fourth, Owaki suggested that we share information and experiences more fully so we can fight together. The technological revolution promises not only speedier information, but also accelerated movement across time and space. “Now, we can walk globally together for the same purpose,” she said. “We must create new networks and safety nets for women to share our links with other individuals. We must generate politics to control governments. For that, opportunities must be created for women to express opinions in the political decision-making process.” Lastly, she argued, we must deal with the trend toward returning to nationalist and ethnically exclusive traditions as this is occurring all over the world simultaneous to processes of globalization. These narrower movements, Owaki stated, are hostile to families and have led to discriminated against foreign workers. “The 21st century is a century for women,” she concluded. “Let us take a step forward to create a bright future and the globalization of peace and human rights for ourselves.”

Nimalka Fernando began by noting that the promises of fairy tales for the developing world have often become horror stories in which men and women died. With the “lost decade” of the 1980s and the globalization of the 1990s, women still die of poverty and hunger, still face violence as a result of repressive regimes engaging in ethnic war or due to communal violence. “To me,” Fernando said, “the Platform for Action was not developed by the learned, knowledgeable, nor the experts. Rather, the Platform for Action recorded the hope, despairs, future, tears, and laughter of hundreds and thousands of women who were not there in Beijing.” Now we must ask the question many rural women worldwide might ask: What has Beijing done for our lives? Has it changed our realities? If it has not, where have we gone wrong? She challenged us all to think long and hard about these questions, and to determine how we will challenge the so-called reality of “inevitable” globalization.

Because globalization is a process whereby we are recolonized, whereby old hierarchies of race and ethnicity are reasserted, whereby the arms race thrives, it is a process that women involved in the global women’s movement must confront, challenge, and change. “I cannot speak for women if I am not challenging the globalization process,” she said. “I cannot claim to be a women’s activist if I accept that this kind of oppression should continue.” Fernando continued to say that when we are talking about a global feminism for the 21st century, it leaves us with a challenge to ask political questions of the women’s movement: Where are we today? Where are we heading tomorrow? It is good to celebrate the Platform for Action, she said, but we have to ask whether these celebrations and whether this defense will have any meaning for women in the 21st century. “You cannot catch the wings of poverty by the safety nets woven by the World Bank,” Fernando concluded. “You cannot achieve peace by the might of the majority, that is the might of men and the might of armed process. The liberation process began with the abolition of slavery and has now come to the face of the liberation of women. This is a terminology we have forgotten, but it’s time we resurrect it to define where we are going.”

Rounaq Jahan limited her remarks to the following two questions: What are the challenges that face the global women’s movement today? What are some of the strategies that we should prioritize or think about in the future? Jahan positioned herself as someone from the South, as an academic in the women’s movement, and as someone who worked for some time within the United Nations. She outlined, from her perspective, the strengths and weaknesses of the global women’s’ movement. The first strength is that the women’s movement has been successful in effectively mobilizing women worldwide around the World Conferences. Women’s movements have also been quite successful in changing some of the language in international documents to be more gender equitable and gender sensitive. Secondly, the women’s movement has been successful in articulating an agenda, and in gaining representation in multi-lateral institutions like the United Nations.

One of the major weaknesses, on the other hand, is that global women’s movement has had a very limited capacity to support national women’s movements. “Whenever we have World Conferences,” Jahan stated, “women activists from around the world come and try to ‘rescue’ in some way the global women’s movement. However, whenever women in various countries face problems, while the global women’s movement does pass the word around, it can’t mobilize people and strategize to rescue the situation.” As a result, there has not existed a very symmetrical relationship between national and global women’s movements over the last thirty years, as women from various countries have done more for the international women’s movement than the movement has been able to do for them. Comparatively speaking, Jahan asserted that the international trade union movement has been much more savvy in terms of solving problems locally. The second major weakness is that in most of the countries, links between the women’s movement, political parties, and other labor and social justice movements are weak. One exception here is South Africa, since the women’s movement there built all those alliances. Thirdly, Jahan continued, up to now the women’s movement has attempted to address grievances through public sector actors - either the state or multi-lateral institutions - and only a small group of women’s organizations have really followed the private sector and multinational institutions.

One of the challenges to the women’s movement now, therefore, has to do with the implementation of commitments in order to have a greater impact on the lives of women around the world. “As activists and academics,” she said, “we go from one conference to another just fighting to keep the language, but what happens on the ground?” A second challenge has to do with the economic aspects - deregulation, privatization, and trade union liberalization - of globalization. We must figure out how to protect the social sector policies and investments while also demystifying the operation of the private sector and multinational actors. Thirdly, Jahan listed, we must counter the influence of big money and special interests in democratic politics. This is because despite the fact that most countries in the world now operate under some form of democracy, women often cannot participate fully in politics because party politics is being run by big money and special interest. Unless that can be changed, asking for quotas won’t make qualitative difference.

Lastly, the women’s movement must determine how to work in partnership with mainstream institutions without being co-opted. If we are to address the effects of globalization, we must talk about redistribution and other types of structural changes that need to happen. While we now have plans to reduce gaps between rich and poor, we don’t attack the policies that create gaps in wealth. This is the reason we may see gaps decrease in education and health while they increase with respect to wealth and assets. It is unacceptable that the assets of three billionaires is more than the assets of all the Third World countries of six billion people. We have to be able to imagine the future, and unless we can capture the passion of people by saying “this is the world that we want to live in,” we are always talking about problems and addressing them. “We need to go and imagine ourselves,” Jahan concluded, “as diverse and rich as we are.”

The DISCUSSION following the panel centered around the difficulty of sustaining a unified movement against privatization among women globally since we are often divided into “developed” and “developing” countries. While the fight against violence against women has a strong international network, women’s solidarity on the issue of globalization is weak, especially among workers. One speaker reminded the audience that this is the case because a lower value is placed on the labor of women from certain areas in the world. As a result, when women from the South and North convene to discuss globalization, their specific concerns are often divergent.

Rounaq Jahan argued that the only way to make progress in global solidarity is by understanding our different needs and interests in different parts of the world and negotiating a common platform. “You cannot wish away the differences,” she said, “and particularly not the different economic needs.” It has been much easier to build a global movement around domestic violence issues than it has been to take a common stance on economic or workers’ rights issues because, for example, a real fear exists in countries in the South that the trade unions in the North are pushing international labor standards because they’re afraid they won’t be able to compete. “You can’t build solidarity on fear, or on the need to protect one’s own job in the North,” she asserted. Rather, if people everywhere need decent standards of living, we must negotiate together about how people can achieve this. Nimalka Fernando agreed, stating that the purpose of engaging in this kind of dialogue is to see both our differences, and ways of creating solidarity through these differences. “If we all spoke the same language,” she said, “it would be very boring.”

When asked to elucidate their visions for the future, and alternatives - from women’s perspectives - to the neoliberal, militaristic, masculinist version of globalizations, Rounaq Jahan noted that women have protested in various countries and have demonstrated alternatives such as, for example, the peace movement. “But I think we could do much more in almost every community,” she said. “The women’s movement has taken very tiny tiny steps. One could do wider campaigns and mobilization.” Fernando envisioned a future in which democracy is strengthened, political violence is removed, and poverty is eradicated. “We want a future,” she proposed, “where our children will be able to smile without violence, without being raped, without going hungry.” All speakers agreed that women’s movements around the globe have made great strides over the past thirty years, and will continue to grow despite processes that undermine women’s abilities to survive. “I don’t worry about what will happen this week at the UN,” Jahan stated, “because it is a small blip that will not stop the women’s movement.”


TUESDAY, June 6 PLENARY: Political Dimensions of Globalization
Cynthia Enloe (Clark University)
Manel Abeysekara (National Committee on Women, SRI LANKA)
Teresa Loar (U.S. State Department)
Yuko Moriya (The World Women’s Conference Network Kansai)
Jennifer Leigh Disney (CUNY Graduate Center)
Indira Kajoševic (American Friends Service Committee)
Moderator: Judith Saidel (SUNY-Albany)

Facilitated Breakout Leaders:

Yuko Moriya; Masami Shinozaki (Kumamoto Gakuin University); Hester Eisenstein (Queens College, CUNY); Constance Sutton (New York University); Manel Abeysekara (National Committee on Women); Lynette Jackson (Pan-African Gender Initiative, Barnard College); Indira Kajoševic (AFSC)

The MAIN QUESTIONS raised during this session were: What have been the effects on women of the globalization of democracy? How can we encourage and train women to enter public life in larger numbers? How can women maintain a feminist agenda once within the masculinist climate of party politics? How do we avoid being coopted? How can women continue to negotiate for rights within the public sector, even as its power and influence declines?

Cynthia Enloe began by noting that for those familiar with feminist ways of asking questions about the world, everything is political. Discussions about any kind of relationships based on inequality - of information, of status, of resources, of literacy - are therefore always going to be political. However, often when government leaders or the media talk about politics - and this is certainly true in the United States - it is shrunk, made to sound as though it’s only about elections, political parties, and government. “We have learned over the years,” she asserted, “that that kind of shrinking of what is political always disadvantages women because it means that so many of the things that women organize around, think about, strategize about, and investigate are somehow defined as not political.”

Politics, as non-feminists understand it, is made to seem like a very narrow men’s club. However, Enloe argued, politics is not simply elections, and not simply who runs political parties. As a result, when we are lobbying the UN or petitioning a member of our own home legislature, as women we have to constantly fight against that shrinkage of what is political. “We have to constantly make clear that who does the laundry is political, who has control over sexual relations inside of marriage is political, who is paid the most in a garment factory is political,” she continued. “We must constantly fight against masculinist ideas about politics.” Because these ideas are not confined to men, it is possible for a woman who has worked very hard in political parties to move up, win an election, get into the national legislature to have learned to think in masculinist ways. In fact, Enloe stated, so long as political parties run elections and elections determine who gets in those formal offices, it is very difficult for a woman with a feminist agenda to withstand that masculinist kind of thinking. On the other hand, even though as feminists we’ve worked very hard to expand the definition of what is political, it is still important to pay attention to party politics. Enloe concluded by identifying this paradox as one of the biggest challenges facing feminists currently.

Manel Abeysekara, a diplomat for 25 years, has been a member of the National Committee on Women since her retirement. This is an appointed Presidential Committee designed to advise the Sri Lankan government on gender issues. Abeysekara is also the Deputy Leader of the Sri Lankan delegation to the Beijing Plus Five: Women 2000 UN Special Session. She began her remarks by attempting to define globalization and by identifying the ways it has influenced women’s lives. “Globalization means interdependency,’ she said, “but we have an unequal interdependency.” Referring to the UN Secretary General’s Report, she noted that in the new age of globalization, the policy of governments has shifted in favor of openness of trade and financial flows, and that this trend has exacerbated inequalities around the world. She asked: If women had not achieved equality with men within the complexities of political, social and economic realities confined to the state, how can they withstand the impact of the external forces of globalization without there being further negative influences for those already affected? “In other words,” she said, “if we are not equal within national contexts, how can we be equal with globalization further polarizing populations?”

Whereas previously the state had been able to provide at least some measure of social services, liberalization policies coupled with technological advances in communications have accelerated the impact of economic integration, thereby eroding conventional boundaries, and especially those of the state. Globalization has also had a strong impact on cultural values and lifestyles, since the increased exposure to advertising and media often result in a shift towards heightened materialism - a trend contrary to the religious and cultural values of the South Asian region. As they have come more and more under the influence of multinational corporations, many countries in South Asia - where per capita income is low and industry was initially monopolistic - have boasted rising GNP and GDP statistics. However, she explained, this does not mean that people’s standard of living and access to social services have increased.

Indeed, though in some instances, the globalization of information and communications technologies has increased production, consumption and trade, if governments have proceeded with deregulation without introducing new forms of regulation to ensure the observance of social protection and provision of basic needs for people, societies become increasingly unstable, insecure, and unequal. Globalization, therefore, has intensified risk for marginalized groups, and especially women because the burden of increasing poverty has been disproportionately borne by women.

There have been, on the other hand, some positive aspects of globalization, Abeysekara pointed out. Momentous political changes have taken place, including the rise of identity politics; a transnational civil society has emerged; human rights have become universalized; and forms of governance have emerged; and some women have taken advantage of new economic opportunities. However, even where female labor force participation rates have risen, they have not been matched by improvements in women’s working conditions. Over the last two decades in South Asia, for example, women have been working in the free trade zones and export oriented industries - industries where they work long hours for low pay. There has also occurred increased migration, as women workers have sought greener pastures abroad, leaving behind families to the vicissitudes of undesirable social consequences. She concluded that on balance, therefore, globalization has had a devastating impact on women and family life in developing economies.

Yuko Moriya, a policy consultant for the government, helped to established an NGO that houses a school that trains women to run for political office in Osaka, the second largest city in Japan. She began by giving a brief history of women’s political participation in Japan. She argued that the modern industrial revolution in Japan has remained unfinished in terms of gender. In the latter part or the 19th century as Japan opened its doors, the Meiji Constitution stipulated that only tax-paying men were able to vote. Though the women’s suffrage movement was initiated at the beginning of the 20th century, it wasn’t until the post-World War II constitution that women were given the right to vote. The first general election was held in June 1947.

However, female suffrage has not led to women’s equality with respect to political representation, Moriya explained. At present, women comprise only 5% of the Lower House of Representatives, and 17% of the Upper House. Moreover, in more than half of the approximately three thousand local assemblies throughout the country, there are no female assembly members. As a result, a gender bias still exists in Japanese policies (e.g. women earn 62% of the male dollar). Because there is tremendous discrimination against women within political parties, it is much harder for women members to compete with men for candidacy. Additionally, because it is incredibly expensive to win an election, women, who make less money than men, are placed at a disadvantage. Furthermore, there exist deeply rooted and fixed ideas about gender roles and the social system that relegate women outside the realm of politics. These ideas lead people to think they cannot rely on female candidates, and make women think they are not suited to be politicians. Girls, therefore, have few opportunities to see female politicians as their role models

Moriya has been concerned with challenging these ideas and these statistics. In 1989, schools were established throughout Japan by grassroots women’s groups to train women to run for local elections without being supported by political parties and without spending too much money. The school Moriya established in Osaka has had 50 to 70 trainees per year for the last three years, and twenty women have won elections since the school was established. . In these schools, female assembly members speak to trainees about their experiences, and advise them on how to win elections. This has created a network among women involved in political life. The establishment of these schools has helped to effect some changes on Japan’s political landscape. In 1989, a female Diet member was nominated to become the leader of the Japan Socialist Party. She, in turn, supported many women candidates, which resulted in a percentage increase of women in the Upper House from 7.9% to 17.5%. Despite the fact that many men view female politicians as puppets for other men, since then Japanese political parties have had to realize that supporting female candidates has increased their number of votes.

Moriya continued by noting that the first female governor was elected in Osaka in February, and the second in Kumamoto in May. The election of these governors has been significant - it has helped women to realize that they can attain a political position of leadership. In Japan, a general election will be held on the 25th of June. “It is reported that the number of candidates for the office will be the highest ever,” Moriya said, “and if more female assembly members are elected, we can increase the quality of policies that have been dominated by a male gender bias.” It is also true, however, that female politicians still have a hard time establishing their points of view as feminists, because in many cases their decisions reflect party ideology more clearly than a vision rooted in gender equality. Therefore, she concluded, it is necessary for NGOs and female Assembly members to continue discussions regarding a gender agenda.

Theresa Loar is the Director of the President’s Inter-Agency Council of Women, an agency that President Clinton set up for the U.S. government to follow up on Beijing and to fulfill its commitments. She is also the Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues at the U.S. Department of State, which is a position in the U.S. foreign policy that was created through the efforts of American NGOs and the women’s human rights community. The Council is a temporary structure, Loar explained, and its continuation is dependent upon the NGO community and the responsiveness of the next administration. However, the other position is permanent.

Loar spoke about her experiences working with two women who have formed a partnership to stand up for women’s rights around the world - Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton. She argued that their model of leadership has had a great impact on women’s human rights, and women’s political participation and leadership here and around the world. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Loar said, has been a wonderful advocate for women’s engagement in public life round the world, as well as a great example. In her position, Albright is willing and able to raise very complex issues - such as trafficking in women and girls - with heads of governments, and their response is powerful and strong. Albright has also convened a group of women foreign ministers every year in September when all the heads of government and foreign ministers come together. Every year, their discussion focuses on one issue of importance to women globally. Last year they focused on the human rights issue of trafficking, and sent a letter to Kofi Annan to register their strong support of the work that the UN is doing on this. Some governments have complained that they don’t get to have one on one conversations with the Secretary of State, and she lets them know there’s a very simple way to fix that - appoint a female foreign minister.

Loar described another program that has been developed in the State Department has to do with how we can strengthen women’s roles in building democracy. The Vital Voices Democracy Initiative brings together a strong network of women leaders (and emerging leaders) from around the world, and helps them access the networking tools and other resources they need to strengthen their role in bringing their countries forward - whether it’s in Northern Ireland, Central Asia, or in Latin America or Russia. Loar concluded by saying that she’s proud to be involved in the work of this administration with respect to strengthening women’s leadership, and argued that we must continue to push for that work to continue.

Jennifer Leigh Disney related several case studies of women in positions of leadership in Nicaragua and Mozambique. Their experiences in revolutionary and post-revolutionary socialist governments highlighted some of the contradictions within revolutionary analyses of women’s emancipation. Her dissertation will be an assessment of the forms and strategies the contemporary women’s movements in each country are adopting to pursue their own feminist agendas within post-revolutionary civil society. Mozambique and Nicaragua provide a unique opportunity for comparison, Disney argued, as guerilla movements committed a socialist agenda in both countries were successfully able to seize state power. In 1974, after fighting a ten year war of liberation, FRELIMO became the government of an independent Mozambique, and in 1979, the united opposition led by the FSLN, or Sandinistas, defeated the 46 year dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty. In addition, both countries experienced post-revolutionary civil wars fostered by foreign supported counterinsurgency forces attempting to destabilize their socialist experiments. With the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990 and again in 1996, and the decision of FRELIMO to adopt a Western style liberal democracy in 1992, the socialist agendas in both countries were abandoned in order to follow the path of so-called political democratization.

During the recent period of political globalization, or liberal capitalist democratization, in each country, women have been engaging in more autonomous organizing which has raised the issues of women’s reproductive labor, and sociocultural forms of oppression including reproductive rights, violence against women, and men’s cultural attitudes towards women, yet they have done so to a large extent within a harsher economic climate. Women have gone from being mobilized by the revolutionary state parties in power in each context for the purpose of achieving the socialist and nationalist goals to organizing themselves for feminist political change to varying degrees within a liberal capitalist environment. Women’s autonomous organizing has taken different forms in each country today, to a large extent based upon the party politics. In Mozambique, where FRELIMO remains the party in power, the OMM (the national women’s organization of the revolutionary party helped to create an autonomous umbrella organization of all the emerging women’s groups in the country which is separate and distinct from the party.

In Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas have lost power, the women’s organization remains an autonomous organization. However, there has been a vast proliferation of other women’s NGOs and a self-defined feminist movement in Nicaragua, which has left the nationalist women’s organization, to a large extent, a women’s organization of the past. Unlike the OMM, which remains the main women’s organization in Mozambique, the autonomous women’s movement in Nicaragua emerged when grassroots women began pushing from below within the Sandinista mass organizations. Now that the FSLM is out of power and the organization has asserted its autonomy, there is a real space to be critical about the revolutionary period. It is true in both countries that despite the fact that the women’s organizations were created within the revolutionary parties and were constrained by the top down leadership of these parties, both parties still created a space for the gender analysis and feminist movements taking place today.

In Mozambique, women mobilize for increased education for girls and expanded economic opportunities for women. In the contemporary women’s movements of Nicaragua, the most radical demands of women are control over their sexuality; reproductive rights; public denunciation of domestic violence, sexual abuse, harassment of women on the job and all forms of sexual violence; and the decriminalization of abortion. There, the biggest discussion of the 1990s has had to do with how to organize the autonomous women’s movement on the national level. Two factions have emerged, one supporting networking around topical themes; and the other which supports the creation of a democratically-elected representative organization on the national level which would be “horizontal enough to be democratic and vertical enough to be efficient.”

During the recent transition to liberal capitalist democracy, both countries have experienced increasing political freedoms, increasing commodification accommodated by decreasing access to the commodities people need and increasing economic inequality. Globalization - a process that has been occurring for the past five hundred years after European colonization of the “New World” - is the economic and cultural process of convergence, Disney argued, which brings all of us around the world closer together. Decisions made by political and economic elites in one part of the world have a huge impact on the everyday life of people in another part of the world. Colonization, imperialism, neo-liberal structural adjustment policies, and the hegemony of liberal capitalist democratization all represent oppressive aspects of globalization. However, the emergence of an international social movement against the policies of the IMF and the World Bank, as well as the growth of the international women’s movement, epitomize the kind of resistance that is also possible in a global feminist civil society.

Indira Kajoševic is a recent graduate of CUNY from Montenegro, a part of the former Yugoslavia. She also works with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization dedicated to social justice. She spoke about how the rape of Bosnian Muslim women in the Balkans became a global issue. She noted how media accounts of ethnic cleansing and the rape of Muslim women moved people beyond the area of humanitarian and emergency assistance into the area of human rights. Additionally, because many victims spoke out, historically something that is very difficult, rape entered the public discourse in unprecedented ways. Kajoševic explained that feminist scholars of nationalism have pointed out that women’s bodies are viewed as belonging to a nation. As a result, a woman’s body is seen as always in danger of being violated by foreign males. Implicit here is the agreement that men who cannot defend their women/nation against rape have lost their claims to that body. In this case, women are perceived as victims of repression and brutality but only at the hands of other nationalities, and a woman who has been raped is a devalued property, a symbol of the man who has failed in his role as protector.

In the case of Kosovo, victims have had to deal not only with pain but also with breaking the silence and patriarchal common law. They are victims a second time, she explained, as a result of their communities commitment to the traditional code of a body of customary law which state that a man who fails to protect his wife or daughter accepts responsibilities for dishonor of the women, which, in turn, brings shame on his entire family. Because the rape victim is seen as bringing shame to her entire family, the family becomes isolated from the community.

Official recognition of the injustice that women have suffered is an important element of the support of victims of rape in the war. Additionally, recognition that this suffering is not a by-product of foreign conflict as many people believe, but heinous war crimes of central importance to political consolidation has been key. The UN has defined rape as being part of genocidal policy, but this has tended to render invisible the horror of rape to the individual women themselves. Feminists in the region dealing with these issues have brought international feminists together to help victims to deal with the issue in an effective way. Kajoševic concluded by arguing for a recognition of rape not only as a war crime and a human rights violation, but also as a political issue that has been discussed at the national and international levels.

The DISCUSSION following the panel addressed the inconsistencies within U.S. foreign policy; the pros and cons of implementing a quota system within representative politics; and militarization. Several audience members and one panelist raised the issue regarding the debt owed to the United Nations by the United States, as well as the fact that despite acting like the world’s policeman, the U.S. has not yet ratified CEDAW or the Children’s Rights Convention. Cynthia Enloe explained that because the Republican party controls the Congress (and specifically, the Senate), U.S. foreign policy toward the United Nations is hostile. This is because Republicans view the United Nations as a threat to American sovereignty. She noted that unless there is a change in the party that controls the U.S. Congress, there will not be a pro-UN foreign policy in the United States. Again, this is impetus for the increased participation of women in electoral politics. Nevertheless, one audience member from the Middle East pointed out that despite the fact that the U.S. Secretary of State is a woman, and despite her work on women’s human rights, Albright has not changed the fundamental U.S. foreign policy toward countries like Cuba and Iraq. The embargo strategy has made - and especially poor women - suffer. “To change the policy of a country is a tool in the hands of the people,” the speaker concluded,” and we women have to go to the ballot to choose whose party is the better for the changing of this policy.”

When asked about the merits of a quota system in party politics, panelists took somewhat differing views. Jennifer Leigh Disney explained that both Mozambique and Nicaragua adopted quota systems for women within the Marxist parties, and on their party lists to get women in their elected offices. As a result, Mozambique ranks eighth in the world in terms the percentage of women’s representation in the National Assembly (28%). On all the other levels - local, national, party membership - quotas are also set, but the actual reality is even higher than the quotas. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas had also implemented a quota system, and when they were the dominant party in the National Assembly, their percentages of women representatives were only slightly lower than Mozambique’s. Unfortunately, under the Liberal Alliance currently in power, there is no quota system and only 10% of the National Assembly is female. Disney concluded by arguing that while quotas are essential, “we can’t be sure that once women are elected they will pursue feminist policies.”

Cynthia Enloe explained that in the United States, there is almost no discussion of implementing a quota system, but that she’d like to see the kind of progress here that has occurred in Sweden, France, or even Japan. Judith Saidel further clarified that the reason there is no discussion here on quotas is that the word “quota” is caught up in a very severe backlash against affirmative action. “Even to talk about quotas in this country is virtually an impossible thing to do,” she said, “since we are in a post-affirmative action period where the dominant discourse makes quota into a bad word.” Saidel suggested that more progress along these lines might be made in the United States if we spoke instead of “gender balance.” UNESCO established a target of 30% in terms of a gender balance level, and this has not been reached anywhere in the U.S. at the state level in any arena of decision making power except in governor’s offices. Indira Kajoševic also cited a UN study that argued that for women to fundamentally change the notion of power, they must make up at least 40% of decision making bodies. In the first multi-party elections after the collapse of communism in the former Yugoslavian countries, only 1.5% of the elected representatives were women. She, therefore, advocated the implementation of quota systems, but felt this would only tackle a small part of women’s concerns in the Balkans.

Offering a perspective from the South Asian region, Manel Abeysekara said that although they’ve had women Presidents and Prime Ministers, there are few women in Parliament. “Today in Sri Lanka,” she noted, “we have a woman President, we have a woman Prime Minister, we have two women Ministers, but in Parliament, only 4% women, and this has not changed from independence which is 1948.” In India, she continued, they’ve implemented a quota system at the grassroots level of the Assembly, but they have not succeeded at the highest level because the opposition language is couched within the idea that if women have a quota, then the low caste people must, and other groups as well. This blurs the whole point of the need for increased female representation in Parliament. In Scandinavia, on the other hand, the quota system was voluntarily accepted by the political parties. “The problem in our countries,” she said, “is that men control the politburos of the political parties and decide who the candidates will be based on who will win, and they think women can’t win.” A quota system, therefore, should be implemented at the party level and not only within national bodies. Women must also agree to come forward and fill these quotas, and for this we need more training. She concluded with a cautionary remark: “Beware about quotas, because what can be an enabling quota today may very soon become a disabling quota tomorrow. We think, in Sri Lanka, that we can make it on our own, because if we allow a quota to be imposed, the political party might nominate his aunt or his mother or his sister or somebody and it becomes tokenism.”

At this point, an audience member raised a question she felt hadn’t been sufficiently addressed within discussions of political globalization - the connection between violence against women to the militarization of the world that the United States has pushed simultaneous to the globalization of capital and trade. In the United States today, the greatest source of profit is the production and selling of killing weapons to the rest of the world. And neither the population movement, nor the environmental movement, nor the human rights movement have found a way to address this most dangerous aspect of globalization. The speaker argued that we must think, therefore, about how to demilitarize in this next century.

Manel Abeysekara agreed that militarization is an especially negative result of globalization. Despite a lack of World Wars since 1945, localized wars have transpired globally, leading to massive and human rights violations worldwide. Women do not have enough influence, she said, upon defense policies or international trade. Cynthia Enloe concluded by arguing that when we address issues such as war and its causes, the arms trade, and military budgets, we must not stop thinking like feminists. We must keep asking how any form of militarization requires and depends upon women remaining in conventional feminine roles. With respect to entering masculinist political structures and maintaining a feminist agenda, she suggested that women in this position must remain connected to organizations and movements. “None of us can do it alone,” she said. “If you’re alone in an organization, you are a sitting duck. Isolation is the greatest gift to the masculinizer of women’s minds.”


WEDNESDAY, June 7 PLENARY: Economic Dimensions of Globalization
Devaki Jain (DAWN)
Brigitte Young (University of Muenster)
Lee Jung Ok (Department of Sociology, Hyosung Women’s University)
Momoyo Kamo (The Part-Timers Committee for Women, JAPAN)
Rose Lugemba (Ministry of Labour, TANZANIA)
Franziska Brantner (Heinrich Böll Foundation, Beijing Plus Five Youth Caucus)
Alexandra Spieldoch (Global Women’s Project, Center of Concern)
Moderator: Ellen Chesler (Open Society Institute)

Facilitated Breakout Leaders: Momoyo Kamo; Kazuko Sato (The World Womens’ Conference Network Shizuoka); Irene Tinker (Equity Policy Center); Mariam Chamberlain (IAFE, NCRW); Gale Summerfield (Office of Women in International Development, University of IL-Urbana); Alexandra Spieldoch (Center of Concern); Risa Lieberwitz (Institute on Women and Work, Cornell University); Kate Cloud (Office of Women in International Development, University of IL-Urbana); Kristen Timothy (NCRW); Joan Mencher (CUNY); Lee Jung Ok (Hyosung University)

Ellen Chesler introduced the panel by reminding participants that Beijing’s clarion cry - “Women’s Rights are Human Rights, and Human Rights are every Woman’s Right” - told us that the personal is political for women; that women must be protected against violence and abuse; that they must have health care and education; and that simple enfranchisement or political rights as conventionally defined were not even adequate. The aphorism that is emerging out of this Review of the Beijing meetings is that “Women’s Rights are Workers’ Rights.” Therefore, she said, it is not enough to think of women’s equality only in political contexts or in personal contexts (reproductive rights, sexual rights), but also in their capacity as workers. In a global economy, issues regarding the protection of workers and freedom to organize become extremely important because of the global transfers of capital that are occurring. As a result, the most salient question is not what one government might do, but rather how many governments will work collectively through bilateral negotiation and multilateral institutions to oversee flows of capital.

The MAIN THEMES that emerged all had to do with the fact that an economic framework in which women’s rights and a gendered agenda are taken seriously must now be discussed on a global level. Ellen Chesler summarized the discussion with a “top eleven” agenda for action:

1) Regulate both labor and industry standards for workers and the environments in which we work;
2) Forgive large-scale debt burden (This is because the demands on debtor nation’s public sectors are so great that unless donor countries address the question of debt forgiveness, the governments themselves are not going to be able to make the kinds of investments in industry and labor conditions that are necessary to balance out standards of labor universally);
3) Address the ways an imbalance of standards and pay for labor has caused increased labor migration, as well as the protection of immigrant workers in developed countries;
4) Raise and universalize standards of social service to allow women workers to balance work and family;
5) Reform party politics in order to rid governments of corruption;
6) Make sure labor standards apply as well to part-time workers;
7) Increase young women’s access to high standards of education since they won’t be able to equitably participate in labor or government if they don’t have education;
8) Create conditions in both work and family that will allow both men and women to balance these better, especially in countries moving from socialism to free markets;
9) Increase the role of NGOs in agenda setting around all of these issues;
10) Make sure NGOs address macroeconomic policies, international institutions and national governments that control those policies; and
11) Create advocacy and a local and global communications strategy around these issues.

Devaki Jain argued that we should shift our attention from the broad term globalization to the term regulation, and noted that this represents a major shift from the message that has prevailed in recent years from international lending organizations. The word regulation, she stated, has found its way back into legitimacy due to the experiences of the last five to ten years as liberalization policies were being applied across the world as the road to prosperity. The major questions that have emerged now are: regulation of what? How much? Where? And under whose control?

Jain also argued that it is in the area of regulation that feminists can develop and put forward new ideas - and develop action strategies - whether about theoretical economics, about the ways institutions are established and functioned, and about international agencies such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Foundation (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). “There is a strategic advantage in moving away from the word globalization,” she said, “because this is a term that has lost its boundaries and therefore is too amorphous.” She drew support from her argument from the global discourse on globalization as contained in what are called mainstream documents (the World Development Reports of the World Bank; the UNDP’s Human Development Reports; etc.); examples from the Indian experience; and the responses of women’s collectivities at the grassroots level prior to the Beijing Plus Five Review.

In the literature, she noted, what is striking is that everyone in the system - be it the World Bank, an academic economist, or the NGOs - is currently engaged in drawing out the subtleties and details of the globalization process. In other words, the discourse has shifted from sweeping statements about states and markets, liberalization and reform, to a concern with qualifying the program. This transformation is due in part to the work of the UNDP, but also to the effectiveness of the NGO movement and the inclusion of women in larger numbers than before in the various consultative and decision making processes at the local or international level. Here, among the issues that are being debated are whether there should be a terminological switch from “development” to “transformation,” a term that is inclusive of political, social, cultural, and economic change; and what the role of national governments should be. Regulation, Jain asserted, has become a prescription around which there is convergence - regulation of financial institutions, regulation of labor movement, and the regulation of trade regimes within and between countries.

She continued to point out that people are also revisiting old ideas such as regulated trade and sovereignty by giving the example of a meeting of economists called by the UNCTAD in February 1999. There, agreements were reached that there should be no hard and fast attitude about protection; that the national economy had to be strengthened almost as a precondition to the entry of multinationals; that the design of development had to be suited to the countries’ political, economic, and social situations so there would be no universal formula; and that the entry had to be gradual. These economists also highlighted the asymmetrical application of globalization principles. They showed that while capital is to be freely moved around, labor is to be restricted; that subsidies for agriculture are permitted in the US and Europe but not in less developed countries; that imposed dumping laws are not considered as protectionist, but quota systems are.

Jain then turned her attention to experiences in India. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Indian state adopted what was then called a mixed economy. Certain sectors were given over to the state such as heavy industry and state services. Over the decades the Indian experiment in self-reliant development has been assailed for its failure on all counts, and particularly the persistence of poverty and the neglect of key promises in the constitution, namely the right to universal elementary education and primary health care. However, it did develop the capacity to produce for itself a range of goods from food to airplanes and now information technology related goods, not to mention nuclear bombs. It was able to develop this scientific and technological capacity because of a policy of restriction over trade and capital into the country - i.e. regulation.

Alongside these economic approaches, India also developed an intricate system of laws for the provision of social security, data collection, and monitoring. Today when the world is being pressured to “open up,” India has both the capacity to trade in a wide variety of goods and services, skills developed over decades. This internal strength has also enabled India to stand firm in international fora where trade regimes are being negotiated North-South, and India is one of the few countries on which economic sanctions - oil supply freezes, etc. - won’t work. Moreover, India had the capacity to withstand the Asian crisis. Today, with India going full speed ahead with the so-called reform process, the government has had to adopt cookie-cutter policies and projects that are carelessly eroding its own industrial and technical capacities, as well as its programs for absorbing labor into the hand industries (such as handloom weaving, dairying, even dry land farming). Similarly, the weakening of labor laws has been a deep gash into the democratic process. These changes have resulted in increased violence against women; a decline of cooperative dairy industry (and other employment) due to the lowering of trade barriers; and a backsliding trade union movement.

Jain continued to note that the UN’s 1999 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development, Globalization, Gender and Work found that women’s absorption into the waged labor force has been higher than that of males and that women have had greater mobility. For example, women domestic workers from poor countries are providing opportunities for women from the richer countries, like the Middle East, to take on higher quality, salaried professional jobs by undertaking their reproductive work. The flip side to this is that in the informal sector, there is no worker protection either in wage laws or job security, yet work in that sector is increasing and women are flocking there. With a democratic political regime and millions of consumers, European and American businesses see India as the next after China to offload their goods. Unlike China, India has not protected herself with a regulatory system, which can resist and open according to a carefully designed policy of self survival.

“Where does regulation come into all this,” she asked. Many valuable responses are developing in India. By and large the attention is moving from development as a funded activity to the area of law and political reform - once more, into the area of regulation. Those who are working with workers in the informal economy are working on more protective labor legislation, obtaining social security provisions for this labor, while strengthening the organized collective strength of the workers. Those who are struggling against the massive destruction of the natural resources and peoples lifestyles along with this are also using the law, as well as public action to build up public opinion through knowledge on the side of justice. The right to information movement is also addressing laws. At another level, local government councils have implemented a quota system (1/3 of the seats in local councils should be women) with a view toward changing the electoral system, in the procedures for the selection of candidates, in the provisions in the constitution.

Jain also argued that we need to broaden the basis of the international alliances on a feminist platform. It is at the implementation stage that rules and policies become asymmetrical. In this respect, she offered several initiatives for the future: 1) to move away from the notion of governance and management to transformation to better quality of representation in politics; 2) to redefining of governance from feminist experience and thereby changing the focus from market determined efficiency to the efficiency of a just and equitable society; 3) to move away from taking a report card approach to taking a platform of ideas and practices emerging from large scale women’s actions in the world and let these teach towards a revised and reconstructed agenda; 4) to redesign the participation in the discussions on a new financial architecture; 5) to consolidate the ideas and experiences at the national and regional level of the women’s movement independently of UN and other world mandates.

In conclusion, Jain suggested that globalization has not really taken place across the board. Information technology globalization has taken place, and this aspect has the potential to create equal access to knowledge. There has also been a globalization of capital without control mechanisms. However, there has been no globalization of labor - there are still very controlled mechanisms for migration of labor. Globalization, then, is much easier to deal with in parts. Additionally, if we take regulation as the term with which we work, there exists the potential for a movement for a completely new financial architecture based on human rights. In other words, regulation gives us an entry into the language of rights, and that gives us a crack where feminists can speak to these processes.

Brigitte Young began her remarks by stating that most accounts of economic restructuring concentrate on global culture, the hypermobility of capital, and the power of transnationals. However, she said, in neglecting the sites of material production of advanced information and communications technology, we overlook the capital that is at least still partly embedded in national territories. If we focus on the practices that provide the infrastructure for the production and reproduction of global capital, we uncover a multiplicity of work cultures involving real people in real places - mostly blue-collar workers who have become invisible in the narrative of hypermobile capital. Corporate work culture, with its emphasis on specialized information services, is overvalued while other kinds of work cultures are devalued. This is especially true of the work of women and migrants.

The increased flexibility of the labor market has produced greater equality between educated middle-class women and men while creating greater inequality between women. High value is placed on the integration of professional women into the formal economy while the paid reproductive work of women in the informal economy (the household) continues to be undervalued. Women’s paid work outside the home is not equal to women’s paid work inside it. These changes have produced two categories of women within the household: professional women and maids. The growing participation of professional women in the labor market is accompanied by the largely invisible development of paid work in the private household. An invisible link has thus emerged between women’s increasing participation in the formal labor market and the informal labor market roles of migrant and immigrant women.

She continued to say that if we address women’s rights as workers’ rights in the EU, then we also need to talk about the exclusion of non-EU citizens from the benefits of the EU. New legislation designed to further integrate women, to achieve equality, is confined to EU citizens. Therefore, within the EU context, one of the most important things is not only to focus on the rights of women, but particularly those of non-EU citizens. Additionally, one of the biggest achievements in Europe in the 20th century has been its socialist orientation and accomplishments. The latter are now challenged by the reductions in public expenditures that have made it more and more difficult to combine work and family life. The culture of globalization, in addition, has produced an environment where we must compete, and unless we dispense with social policies, we won’t be able to. The problem with European integration, therefore, is that the neoliberal strategies being pursued have produced a concentration of capital without any of the regulations. Young echoed Jain in her call to re-regulate the globalization for the capitalist markets.

Lee Jung Ok spoke about the ways the Asian crisis has affected women throughout the region. Asia, she said, is one of the regions in the world that expresses the paradoxes of globalization - they are included in the global economy but still excluded in global success. Moreover, multiple variations within Asia itself has led to some confusion regarding globalization issues. Many Asian women, Ok explained, have experienced backlashes due to the recent financial crises. In China, women were told to return to the home after having been incorporated into market economies. In Korea, a campaign to strengthen husbands’ roles as breadwinners also emerged. In Malaysia and Sri Lanka, resurgent patriarchies are expressed in militaristic ways. When the most pressing question was how to save the national economy, women’s rights and women’s equality took a back seat.

The women’s movement and the worker’s movement have attempted to confront this situation. In Western society, Ok said, civil society agencies are composed of trade unions, political parties, NGOs - and some women’s organizations are incorporated in NGOs. But in Asian societies, without democratic political parties and trade unions, NGOs that are supported by international networks are the only organizations that have been able to give voice to women’s and environmental concerns. Still, Ok asked, how can women’s organizations become more awakened? In Asian settings, she said, it would be helpful to demystify the whole idea of globalization and confusing discourses about it. The second task is to find ways to cooperate with Western women’s organizations.

Rose Lugemba, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Labour and Youth Development in Tanzania, described the effects of globalization and structural adjustment programs in personal terms, arguing that in less developed countries, it is particularly necessary to think globally and act locally. In most less developed countries, the implementation of structural adjustment policies meant that people started having to cost-share - to pay for school, health care, etc. Subsidies in agriculture were erased, and public institutions and social services were restructured. “International lending agencies kept telling us to hang on,” Lugemba said, “but we who live in these countries know that things are not getting better.” The gains that had been made over the past 20 to 30 years in literacy, life expectancy, and the GDP have been eroded. What is most bothersome, she said, is that these lending agencies have applied the same formula without making distinctions between different countries: you must have a stable macroeconomic policy in place; a reliable infrastructure; a so-called efficient legal system based in industrial and commercial courts; favorable tax regimes. “What has happened,” Lugemba said, “is that we have opened our doors so that the big people can come and steal our virgin land, exploit our natural resources, exploit our mineral resources, exploit the labor.”

In the Third World, the capacity to deal with all these reforms doesn’t exist, but it is also very difficult to challenge the policies since most less developed countries depend on donor assistance for survival. Women, Lugemba argued, must vote in honest governments and honest leaders who can insist on “local globalization” - negotiating contracts at the local level. In Tanzania, women mobilized to convince government delegates that they must negotiate their contracts with the IMF and World Bank in Dar es Salaam instead of going to Paris for consultative meetings. In this way, local civil society organizations can have a voice in the process, and the donors can know firsthand the problems less developed countries are facing. Secondly, she proposed, women from less developed countries must work in blocs in order to speak with a bigger voice. “Globalization can’t work if the national economies that are supposed to be globalized are not strong,” she concluded. “We must try to strengthen our capacities in the Third World and to vote in honest governments.”

Momoyo Kamo spoke about the situation for part-time laborers since the part-time labor law was implemented in Japan in 1993. Despite that law, which guaranteed equal treatment as toward full-time workers, part-timers remain in a disadvantaged situation. Kamo explained that in Japan, the increasing mobility of labor, the economic depression, and business restructuring has decreased the amount of regular full-time labor available. Since 1995, the number of total employees has increased by 1.5 million while the number of full-time employees has decreased by one million. Meanwhile, the number of part-time workers has increased by 2.5 million.

Women comprise 70% of part-time workers. Since part-timers have been recognized as workers with less obligation and restriction, it is assumed that the women are more flexible, less restricted, and are working because of free choice (not because they need the income to support their families). However, 24.5% of private irregular employees are working as the main breadwinner. This number is not limited to single mothers. Rather, it includes housewives who see themselves as main breadwinner because they consider their income as supporting the family’s educational or housing expenses even though their incomes are actually less than those of their husband’s. In fact, 43% of workers stated that their reason for working was to support their standard of living, and 50% of private irregulars do not qualify as dependents for tax exemption. Moreover, 34.8% are single and in charge of independent households. And the wage gap between part-timers and full time employees is expanding.

Labor laws have been rapidly revised since 1998. Now, equal treatment within various types of employment is becoming a global standard. However, the Japanese government and the Diet have been reluctant to meet these international standards. As a result, Kamo’s organization has started the new campaign called Equal Treatment 2000, which aims to revise the part-time labor laws for equal treatment, to correct indirect discrimination, and to realize the same job/same wages rule.

Franziska Brantner, in cooperation with Shireen Lee (Co-Chair of the CSW Youth Caucus), offered a youth perspective on the economic dimensions of globalization. She noted that, as is obvious, globalization has had multiple impacts on young women’s lives that have been both positive and negative. We have recently seen mobilization addressing the negative effects of globalization in Seattle and Washington DC. However, she said, many activists of her generation underestimate the positive possibilities of globalization. She sees these positive aspects as having to do with increased democratization processes and access to information.

On the other hand, one of the negative impacts of globalization has been the privatization of education, especially secondary and tertiary. This model is based on the American education system and is actively promoted by the World Bank and the IMF. However, in the United States, the privatization of education has essentially created a dual system where, if your parents can afford it, you can buy a good education. As a result, quality education, rather than being a right that is available to all, is now a commodity that can be bought and sold. In fact, Merrill Lynch, a big investment company here in the United States, estimates that there is a global market for education worth $2 trillion dollars. So what does all this mean for young women?, she asked. If education is not free, parents have to decide whose education they can afford to pay for and most times it is the boy’s. With the proliferation of technologies throughout the world, many of the new jobs that have been created require an education, and especially a higher education. Privatization of the educational system, therefore, can result in the exclusion of young women from huge parts of the labor market and thereby restricts their possibilities of achieving a better economic and social situation.

The second major negative impact of globalization on young women has been evident in the countries of the former Soviet Union. These young women are living under continuous transition and face a specific situation. During the Preparatory Committee for the Special Session in March, Brantner had organized as co-chair of the Youth Caucus a subcommittee on Economy and Globalization. During their meetings, a young woman from Kazakhstan stood up and said: “You know that what you are discussing here-how to combine work and family-was possible for women in my country until several years ago. But now, with the privatization processes, women are subsequently driven out of the labor market.” Young women in the former Soviet countries still receive the same education as young men, but once they enter the labor market, they are challenged by the tremendous changes, Brantner said. It is very hard for them, despite having the same education level as their male colleagues, to find an appropriate job, and many struggle in the informal sector without benefits or protection. As a consequence, many young women are disappointed by capitalism and at the same time lose faith and confidence in democracy.

The third development with a special impact on young women is the question of debt. Debt burdens cut the possibilities for a younger generation to create and design new policies in both developing and developed countries. “Despite efforts to lower the debt in Germany,” she stated, “the debt burden will be a heavy million dollar heritage for my generation.” She argued for the development of a sustainable budgetary policy and cancellation of debt burdens in developing countries.

Brantner then asked what international institutions could do, and answered that IMF and World Bank policies and projects should be based on standards that would improve women’s lives, for example, by implementing budget allocations to women’s projects. To minimize the impact on vulnerable populations, specifically young women, budget cuts in the health and education sectors must be avoided. Additionally, these lending institutions should no longer implement “cookie-cutter programs,” but rather should adapt their program development in each country based on consultative partnerships with community-based and other civil society organizations. It is also very important, Brantner argued, to monitor World Bank/IMF policies. Headquartered in Washington DC, they are very removed from the problems they are supposed to solve.

However, this is a challenge for NGOs: Who knows the name of their national representative to the IMF? Who knows the name of the responsible person in the World Bank for your country? And if you know, have you ever contacted them? NGOs also must mobilize at several levels in order to achieve their goal of a consistent, human and gender sensitive development policies. In donor countries, NGOs should pressure for a change in the standards; in borrower countries, NGOs should educate their public about the development policies as well as to find new allies in donor governments in order to influence the set of standards.

Finally, in order to be able to address women’s and especially young women’s issues in economic policy, we need more women in these fields, on both the NGO and the official sides. Toward the goal of attracting more young women to the field of macroeconomics, she is involved in developing a Young Women and Macroeconomics project that includes fellowship programs, teach-ins etc.

Alexandra Spieldoch works for the Global Women’s Project at the Center of Concern, a small non-profit social justice organization that promotes human rights and development through research, advocacy and public education. The Global Women’s Project is the interim Secretariat to the International Gender and Trade Network that has newly formed, and they work with partners from the south. She is attending the meetings with the Center, and as part of the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice that formed during the Prepcom in March at the United Nations. WICEJ has been working to bring a macroeconomic critique to the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action. It is a coalition that has been raising the question of whether the Platform can really be implemented if we do not recognize and change the current macroeconomic policies that are impoverishing women. Finally, Spieldoch represents US Women Connect, which is a new network that has just come out with a federal report card that addresses how our government has fared in its implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action.

Spieldoch began by speaking about the U.S. experience of privatization. According to the recent WEDO Shadow Report that just came out for the Beijing Plus Five Special Session, she said, in spite of a growing economy in this country, 34 million people still live in poverty, the majority of whom are women and girls. In spite of the impression that we get through media that living standards have never been better and that we are in the midst of an economic boom, poor women continue to be marginalized, and too often do not have access to services. In the US, we have privatized healthcare, more and more schools, and currently on the political table are numerous proposals to privatize social security as an investment rather than a hard-earned right. Since Beijing, the US has strongly supported microenterprise programs abroad and at home as the solution to women’s poverty and an end to women’s alienation from access to credit and markets. While microenterprise is not a bad strategy for some situations, it is not the solution to poverty, which we know to be systemic and based on macro solutions and not micro - which too often provide some immediate relief but do not empower women.

While the International women’s movement knows what impact globalization (that is: international trade and investment schemes) has had on women workers abroad and in the US, the U.S. women’s movement is not yet well enough organized to fully challenge the false assumptions of the current neo-liberal model and strength of the transnationals without research, advocacy and popular education. “Furthermore,” she said, “it is our challenge to better define what the impacts are at the international, regional and national levels.” Many women in the U.S. are still not connected to the international experience of their sisters, and so large scale educating and teaching must continue to build a movement based on justice. As U.S. organizers, researchers and literacy specialists, she proposed, we have the responsibility of analyzing our own negative trends (for example, many US women have identified welfare reform as our own version of structural adjustment) and relating them to parallel trends with women from the South.

Very few women’s groups in the US are grappling with globalization by specifically looking at the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF. Although women are now involved in the Jubilee 2000 effort in the US, Southern women have been speaking out against structural adjustment for the last fifteen years. While we see gender and development as central to every kind of analysis, it is usually ignored by our colleagues - the two most powerful NGO groups, labor and environment. It would be important, therefore, to constantly raise the issue of gender and trade.

In terms of lobbying, Spieldoch explained, women’s organizations dealing with these issues have mainly dialogued with the State Department and the United States Trade Representative to push for social development, including gender, to be at the core of all trade policymaking - specifically around the WTO and the Free Trade Area of the Americas - our regional trade agreement that is being negotiated for the year 2004. “When we have indicated to them that gender-neutral policies are in fact biased against women’s unpaid work and provision of services,” she related, “we often face a room full of perplexed faces that struggle to see beyond the market definition of growth.” We need to make the connections for people: that sex trafficking is connected to the tourist industry; that women who carry water will be the most alienated by the privatization of water; that women generally will be most affected by the privatization of healthcare and education; and that multilateral agreements must provide provisions for services and investment for poor women in the United States.

“Our challenge,” Spieldoch said, “is to continue to push our government to recognize and analyze these impacts on women. The US is the largest exporter of services and our transnationals have the most to gain - but where do women and their families fit into the equation of access and social well-being? And how do governments regulate trade and investments that benefit their people?” Globalization, in this sense, has been renewed colonization - widening the gap between rich and poor and paralyzing the masses, and strengthening existing patterns of slavery and racism at the global level.

The DISCUSSION that followed the panel centered around the complexities of both globalization and regulation, and a need to identify and qualify exactly what we mean by regulation. In response to an audience member who asserted that globalization is unavoidable, Devaki Jain argued that in fact, true globalization has not yet occurred at all. For example, she explained, the movement of labor is not globalized. Neither is the so-called deregulation movement equally applied, since in Europe and the United States, there are still agricultural subsidies and a social security base. However, when it comes to Africa or South Asia mobilizing for a social security base, this is rejected. Globalization, therefore, is extremely partial and unequal, and is causing deep internal breakdowns.

With respect to regulation, a Japanese audience member noted that within the Japanese context where there is a long tradition of tight imperialist and nationalist control, they were happy to deregulate after World War II. Regulation, in this sense, connotes increased governmental control over its citizens, and inspires a negative reaction among people. Devaki Jain acknowledged this very important point, and said that we should understand regulation as a means of rebuilding institutions that have been used to mediate between growth and equity, between men and women, between rich and poor. These are political, economic, and social institutions that we could use to reconstruct a vision of social justice - to rebuild rather than reviving old regulatory mechanisms.

One audience member suggested that one of the regulatory policies to improve labor conditions for women might be to decrease the number of hours in the workweek, as has been done in Europe. Brigitte Young noted that while the unions there have been very successful to reduce the work week to between 35 and 36.5 hours/week, if these measures are not applied across the board, other problems emerge. In the U.S., for example, people are working more and so Europeans are confronted with having to compete on unequal terrain. In addition, many European industries are relocating to the United States where unions don’t have a big impact on collective bargaining. “I think the issue is that one country cannot do it alone,” she said, “Work time needs to be a global project.” Lee Jung Ok agreed, mentioning that though activists in Korea have been successful with their 35 hour workweek campaign, they have not been successful at building solidarity across borders.

Franziska Brantner also took on the issue of regulation. “The WTO already has a lot of regulations,” she argued. “The challenge is to find the right regulations.” Alexandra Spieldoch countered this perspective by saying that the regulations of the WTO, for example, promote liberalization at all costs. “To me,” she said, “it is not helpful to look at gender mainstreaming systems in place that are not promoting a common good, that are not fair and equitable to begin with. Gender mainstreaming the WTO or the World Bank is not going to promote the social welfare of women and families around the world.”

An audience member queried the role of feminism in this increased regulation movement. “Deregulation,” she said, “has characterized some of the newest policy frameworks that have been adopted in site of some of the most powerful national struggles of workers, women, and students, and it seems as though people are calling for a more international form of struggle for this change to happen.” She continued to say that while many call for coalition-building, often women’s groups in the North attempt to speak for women in the South. Moreover, they suggest that southern women interact with the IMF and World Bank, without ever interrogating their own role in the process of leading the internationalization of capital. For example, she said, they’ve been making calls for us to accept flexible labor as a means of increasing women’s access to the economy. If an uninterrogated feminism is to be the mobilizing force, she asked, is there not a danger that the silenced voices will never be heard, and that marginalized voices will actually be sidelined and used to give credibility to undemocratic processes?

Devaki Jain responded that whether feminism is a problematic foundation for informed advocacy depends on how the notion of feminism is defined. “If feminism wants to stand for social justice and against social exclusion, to identify sexism with racism, to work with workers, anti-racism movements, and indigenous peoples, and to create a broad alliance, this would make it a productive tool and not a tool of exclusion.” Alexandra Spieldoch also noted that while the idea of common cause between women in the North and South is critical for an alliance that can challenge the negative impacts of globalization, she also felt that it is necessary to fight for a larger sense of global justice by developing dialogues led by the South. “Women in the North,” she said, “have a greater responsibility to challenge and counteract privatization because we have many more resources. However, we must enter the conversation as learners rather than teachers.”


THURSDAY, June 8 PLENARY: Bringing the Platform Home
Rosa Castaneda (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)
Gulmira Asanbaeva (Gender in Development Bureau, KYRGYSTAN)
Sato Miho (Japan’s Network for Women and Health)
Judy Han (Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health)
Maureen Lane (Welfare Rights Initiative, Hunter College)
Lateefah Simon (Center for Young Women’s Development)
Robin Levi (WILD; with Youth Advisory Board members Raha Jorjani, Lisa Garrett, Abigail Kramer)
Moderator: Deborah Thomas (NCRW)

Facilitated Breakout Leaders: Sato Miho; Lateefah Simon (Center for Young Women’s Development); Temma Kaplan (SUNY-Stonybrook); Maureen Lane; Madeline Lamour (Sister’s Lending Circle, Central Brooklyn Partnership); Ossai Miazad (Feminist Majority Foundation); Janet Poppendieck (Center for the Study of Family Policy, Hunter College); Amy Richards (Third Wave Foundation)

Deborah Thomas introduced the plenary by explaining that the idea for it emerged out of the work that the Council has been developing over the past three years loosely called the “Fourth Wave” Initiative. During the 1997 Annual Meeting, the Council organized an intergenerational dialogue during which women of different ages offered their perspectives on key societal issues and challenges to their leadership. Building on the favorable response to this session, NCRW organized a panel during the 1998 conference called “Where is Feminism’s Fourth Wave?” Last year, in 1999, the Fourth Wave Initiative was developed more concretely as a programmatic area within the Council to work with young women activists concerned with leadership development. NCRW’s experience with young women indicates that they engage around an activist agenda and that they are interested in generating new feminist theoretical frameworks based on their activities in community-based and cultural organizations. Contrary to media proclamations of feminism’s death, young women in the Council’s national and international networks are VERY active in social justice work, but seem to be mobilizing and building coalitions around specific issues rather than working through women’s organizations, a point that was also made during the Youth Caucus panel discussion on Monday.

These dimensions of younger women’s relationships to feminist research and action raise several important questions: What can be learned from the activism and theorizing of younger women? How does it draw upon, yet diverge from, the 1960s/1970s generation of activism and cultural and theoretical production? How can we support the development of leadership skills in these young women as we also learn from them? And how can we together bridge barriers between the academy community organizing?

During the Council’s Annual Conference at the United Nations in December 1999, a “Fourth Wave” Working Group meeting was convened at which interested young women identified both short-term and long-term objectives. As a result of that meeting, the Council developed plans to highlight the voices of young women here. Specifically, the young women at that meeting wanted to address whether the promises regarding younger women within the Beijing Platform for Action had been met, especially in terms of their participation in the implementation of the Platform’s policies. They were interested in looking at the impact of the changing economy upon younger women (something that Franziska Brantner and Alexandra Spieldoch touched upon yesterday); at the efficacy of gender budgets; at linking activism and political participation among younger women; at how to institutionalize ways to “incubate” activists; and finally, at the contexts in which young women serve as particularly successful brokers - for their families, for communities, within international networks.

The MAIN THEMES that emerged from the panel addressed the interrelatedness of activism, leadership development, women’s political representation, and the ability to make an impact on policies such as budget priorities. The integration of young women within these processes is critical, not just in terms of informing the women’s movement but in leading it, having their concerns direct it, and building action from the perspective of those most marginalized and disenfranchised. Panelists spoke about the need to create institutional change from the perspective of young women and through the leadership of young women. They were identifying a new kind of feminism - one that is more inclusive, creating more extensive links with women outside the United States as well as with grassroots communities, and building coalitions as well of issues themselves. The latter is facilitated by their use of a Human Rights framework to make links between a global political economy, economic self-sufficiency, education, the welfare of women and children, the provision of social services, and the criminal justice system.

Rosa Castaneda works at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-profit policy think tank for issues that affect low income families. She placed the work of the Center within the framework of the global women’s movement in order to discuss a feminist perspectives on the US budget, and to articulate what a feminist vision of the U.S. budget would look like from a younger generation’s point of view. The government budget is one document that comprehensively states the nation’s priorities, she explained. It tells us what our government values, who it values, and who it doesn’t value. If we use the Beijing Platform to analyze the current federal budget, the main question is, Does the budget for mainstream programs reflect gender equity objectives? Because women and people of color have the most at stake from our federal budget priorities since they have come to rely most on government programs, so the U.S. budget should not escape feminist analysis.

Castaneda explained that the budget is divided into mandatory spending (which encompasses Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, WIC, etc.) and discretionary spending. Discretionary spending is further divided between non-defense discretionary spending (transportation, research, international initiatives, etc.) and defense discretionary spending (the Pentagon). With a $2.9 trillion projected surplus over the next ten years, the challenge in the U.S. isn’t rationing scarce resources so much as distributing abundance. However, budget proposals from the administration and congress allocate little money to the programs we care about - social services and any programs that aid women, especially poor women. Non-defense discretionary spending continues to decrease as a share of the budget, this while money for the Pentagon continues to rise. The part of the surplus for debt reduction is mostly used for tax cuts that benefit businesses but don’t aid low income women. We spend a lot of time fighting these tax cuts and propose alternative budget allocations.

When we look at the effects of Structural Adjustment Programs throughout the world, Castaneda continued, and then we compare these economies with the direction the U.S. budget is taking, it looks as if we are implementing structural adjustment policies locally. “Why are we cutting programs for people in need when our poverty rates aren’t decreasing?” she asked. “Let us rethink the budget from a gendered lens.” The Beijing Platform for Action calls for creating access to productive resources, and offering basic social services. Our current budget priorities do not reflect cooperation with the principles set forth in the Beijing platform; they do not reflect gender equity agendas. “This is partly because the budget process is fundamentally undemocratic,” she argued. “We don’t have proportionate representation of women in political power, in the high-ranking budget committees in the Senate.” Castaneda concluded by suggesting we look at the Women’s Budget Initiative in South Africa as a model, since there, Departments seeking government funding must indicate the impact of their programs on the status and condition of women when they request the money, and then report on an annual basis.

Gulmira Asanbaeva spoke about how the Beijing meetings influenced the women’s movement in Kyrgystan. The transition to democratic governance and the free market economy since 1990 in Kyrgystan has brought about numerous opportunities, she explained, and at the same time many constraints to promoting gender equality. The Platform for Action was incredibly powerful since it outlined new approaches to improve the status of women in society. The Kyrgystan public was directly involved in the Beijing conference through its official government delegation and NGOs. The initial mechanism to promote women’s advancement and gender equality in Kyrgystan was established in 1996 as that year was proclaimed by the president of the Kyrgyz Republic as the Year of Women. In January 1996 Kyrgystan ratified the principal international documents protecting women’s rights, and by 1999, the State Commission for Family, Youth, and Women’s Affairs developed a draft law on gender equality. By April 1999, Kyrgystan was mentioned as one of the first ten countries to successfully meet their obligations from the Beijing Conference.

The Gender in Development Bureau was established in 1996 following the Beijing Conference to establish dialogue between the government and NGOs, and to support capacity building in women’s organizations in Kyrgystan. They have reported on political issues at the national level, and have worked to mobilize women at the grassroots level. The Bureau has also promoted a Women in Leadership Project, a Women in Poverty Project, and Youth Leadership Development Projects. Finally, the Bureau contributes to the strength of the national machinery and the state commission, and works in the area of institutional change according to the twelve critical areas of concern listed in the Platform for Action.

Miho Sato is a member of Japan’s Network for Women’s Health, an organization that was established in 1994 in preparation for the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. Members of the Network include women parliamentarians, NGOs, medical professionals, legal professionals, housewives, working women, students, and academics, and their work has both domestic and international components. Domestically, they work to integrate the ideals of the Cairo Program of Action into Japanese laws and policies and programs, and internationally, they advocate to link the principles of gender equality, lifelong reproductive health, and reproductive rights with the development of cooperative programs between NGOs and the government.

The Network has lobbied for the termination of the Eugenic Protection Law, which was enacted in 1948. This law legalized abortion for the first time in Japan, but also contained the provision of compulsory eugenic operations, such as sterilization without consent for mentally challenged women. As a result of lobbying for the termination of the eugenic protection law, the eugenics philosophy was eliminated, but in the end the law was renamed as the Mother’s Body Protection Law in June 1996. They continue to lobby for further amendment to this law, and for more comprehensive and holistic laws for women and health. In June 1999, after nine years of deliberations, the Ministry of Housing and Welfare approved the sale of contraceptive pills. However, the cost of the pill is not yet covered by national health insurance programs so young women and working women, etc. have difficulty in paying for contraception.

Sato Miho attributed the difficulty in changing these laws to the very small number of women parliamentarians who can defend women’s rights in a national policy-making process, and to the low number of young women who are actively involved in the women’s movement. Young women’s participation is low, she explained, not because they’re not interested in defending their rights, but because most organizations, especially NGOs, don’t have sufficient resources to support them. For her, participation in International Conferences and Workshops - and especially the Network of Asian Pacific Youth (NEPY) - provided the opportunity to build relationships with young women from various countries. “Solidarity among women across nations and generations is the key to solve problems that women are now facing,” Miho argued. “Five years have passed from the Beijing Conference but many problems remain unsolved. I hope to be a bridge between Japan and other countries to facilitate mutual understanding and cooperation in order to achieve a gender-equal 21st century.”

Judy Han stated that Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health (APIRH), like many of the organizations represented on the panel, works with those considered “on the margins” of feminism - women of color, poor women, and young women. APIRH is a feminist organization that works towards social and economic justice through collaboration with other organizations and community outreach, education, community-based research, advocacy and organizing, APIRH promotes safe and viable options for the reproductive health and sexual well being of Asian and Pacific Islander women and girls. There are three major program areas of APIRH’s work: 1) to develop a very broad reproductive freedom agenda that aims to build strong and lasting alliances between Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders working in the arenas of reproductive rights, economic justice, and human rights (it’s important to understand reproductive health and freedom beyond the pro-choice movement and our right to contraception and abortion but more broadly, including issues like sexual harassment). Through research and policy analysis, the reproductive freedom agenda aims to provide groundwork for organizing and advocacy around reproductive freedom issues. It uses reproductive freedom as a lens to explore all issues of social justice. That is, if a woman has true reproductive freedom, she has the freedom to be safe from domestic violence; to live in a home free of environmental toxins; to work in a safe place of employment without facing occupational health factors; to choose to have and raise children regardless of her sexual identity.

One major program at APIRH is called HOPE for Girls Project. HOPE stands for Health, Opportunity, Problem-Solving, and Empowerment, Han explained, and the Project in Long Beach, California works with young, low-income Cambodian girls in order to create a sustainable and progressive vehicle for creating institutional change that is led by young Asian-American and Pacific Islander women. Through popular education, leadership development, community-building, action research, and community organizing, the project builds the capacity of the young Cambodian girls so that they themselves can be agents of change in their own communities. During the past year, HOPE members launched a campaign against sexual harassment in the Long Beach school district after an alleged incident of harassment in a high school where the overwhelming majority of the students are people of color and teachers are white. This incident has since revealed the high rate of sexual harassment experienced by female students, and the lack of adequate school policies to address this problem. Sexual harassment is often mixed with experiences of racism, and it’s not always easy to separate the two because they intersect with each other so often.

A survey developed and conducted by the HOPE members showed that eight out of ten girls at the school had experienced sexual harassment, and that 14% of these incidents were committed by male teachers or school staff. The survey also showed that for 50% of those surveyed, sexual harassment impacted the girls’ ability to learn. As the HOPE girls have learned, sexual harassment impairs learning as well as a young woman’s ability to form and hold a positive self-image, especially when combined with the racist stereotypes that work with sexual harassment. It makes women and girls hyper-aware of the control that others have over their identity, and makes them feel defensive and defenseless. For young women of color, sexual harassment also feeds the power of those who can harass - the teachers, the male students, and sometimes even the white female students. The HOPE girls also realized the connection to reproductive freedom, asking: In an environment of harassment, how are girls supposed to make self-protective and self-actualizing decisions about sex and health? How are they supposed to find a safe space in which to identify for themselves their sexual orientation?

The girls not only took the individual rights approach and used the grievance procedures that already existed at the school, but they also organized. In the process of surveying over four hundred girls, they educated and mobilized the students and their communities about the harms of sexual harassment and student rights. They, in effect, redefined school safety to include not only sexual harassment but also racism, sexism and homophobia as issues of school safety. In addition, their research shows that sexual harassment in schools is a systemic and institutional problem manifested in the real life experiences of girls whose educational opportunities have been undermined. All students have the right to a safe learning environment, and unless long-term school and community partnerships are formed, the right of girls to grow and develop to their fullest potential will remain an ideal rather than a reality.

At a Community Forum the week prior to Beijing Plus Five, the girls showed off all their graphs and charts and survey results to the board members, the principals of the high schools, as well as various community figures. Before the event, a lot of the officials were saying that Cambodians don’t vote and aren’t interested in politics, so they didn’t expect a big turnout. But there were 250 people present, the majority of them community members and parents, who really were concerned about the safety of their children in public schools and who recognized that sexual harassment was very much a school safety issue.

APIRH’s commitments to a reproductive freedom agenda, and these action-based research projects, are consistent with the Beijing Platform for Action and the suggested actions to be taken, Han stated. APIRH not only works to increase the opportunity for girls in public education, but also to extend the analysis to look more closely at some of the dynamics within public schools and understanding the different kinds of discrimination that girls face. The whole project is led by the young Cambodian women who have demonstrated their commitment to building a different kind of feminist movement in the United States. Their work isn’t a simple one plus one combination of Cambodian plus American women’s issues and actions because their arrival in the United States doesn’t automatically create American values. They navigate back and forth between what they consider the white American cultures and values and their homes of Cambodian-American cultures. “Understanding the particularities and complexities of Asian-American and Pacific Islander women’s issues in the United States, and women of color feminism more broadly, must be an integral part of an effort to build a more inclusive women’s movement that doesn’t just tokenize our experiences but really uses these as the foundation to make connections to other women’s movements outside the United States,” Han argued. “This kind of feminism is committed to including our mothers and our families, and not just educate us out of our roots.”

Maureen Lane, the Coordinator for Campus and Community Organizing for the Welfare Rights Initiative (WRI), explained that WRI was developed at the Hunter College Center for the Study of Family Policy around the time of the Beijing Conference in 1995. At that time, a debate regarding welfare reform was raging in the US, but those debates did not include the voices of women on public assistance. Nor was there discussion about socially constructive and humane welfare policies. These are issues that WRI seeks to address.

The cornerstone of WRI, Lane said, is a seven-credit year-long course taught at Hunter College geared toward women on public assistance. In the fall, students learn about the history of welfare policy and law nationally, internationally, and locally in New York State. They also learn leadership and communication skills - how to attend a meeting; how to take minutes at a meeting, etc. The spring semester consists of an internship where all of these things are combined and applied. Lane herself was a member of the first class at the WRI. At that time, 28,000 students at the City University of New York were on public assistance, about ten percent of the student population. Even now, 60% of the population at CUNY is at or below the poverty level and a vast majority of these are women. Additionally, most of the women on staff at WRI are women who have direct experience of welfare.

Lane assessed the ways the welfare law that was enacted in the United States in 1996 reflects the themes in the Beijing Platform for Action. While there were 28,000 CUNY students on public assistance in 1995, there are now less than 7,000. That decrease is directly related to current welfare policy and the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law. In Beijing, it was declared that women must have access to education. This decrease of CUNY students on welfare actually represents a loss of 21,000 students who were accessing higher education, who were living 27% below poverty level, and who had the potential of raising their family out of poverty by getting a college education and going on to a higher paying job.

Moreover, a very large population of women on welfare are women who have domestic violence in their background. Cash assistance is a tremendous leverage in the power relationship within the home, allowing women to be able to leave their abusive partners with the assurance that they’ll have the money, health care, and benefits they and their children need. With the Welfare Reform Law in 1996, cash assistance was reduced, leading in many instances to increased violence against women. Finally, since the change in law, welfare rolls nationally have decreased by half, yet the number of people living below the poverty line has increased. So rather than reduce the number of people living in poverty, the 1996 law has deepened and broadened poverty. Again, Beijing suggested that women need to have access to health care and access to political power. With the reduction of welfare rolls, also reduced were benefits like Medicaid and a great many other services.

The WRI is student-driven, and one of the things that we learned over the last five years is that there is a commitment among the students who are in the Initiative now and are working to change these egregious policies to helping younger women in high school to advance towards education. These are young girls who are being raised in welfare households and don’t feel they have a chance at an education. WRI has begun preliminary work on a girls project in which they conduct leadership training workshops within the high schools in New York City. They also work intergenerationally with older citizens.

Lateefah Simon is the Executive Director of the Center for Young Women’s Development (CYWD) based in San Francisco, “which basically means I’m a janitor and a fundraiser.” To her, and to the young women with whom she works, she said, feminism is a movement for those who continue to struggle day after day to feed their children with pride and dignity in the face of a lack of recognition, respect, and justice. The Center for Young Women’s Development is a non-profit organization based in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco and run by the young women it serves, that works toward leadership development and skill-building for young women who have been incarcerated and who’ve survived and lived on the streets, supporting themselves whatever way they could. “Some of us were turning tricks and some were selling drugs,” Simon said, “and some say these kinds of things aren’t aspects of the feminist agenda. But when you’re not even in the conversations of a feminist agenda, you do what you have to do to survive. I always say that if you sold crack, you can run an institution. If you’ve been in jail, you can lead. If you have survived the streets, if you have survived social services, if you got that four hundred dollar check and stretched it, if you sold food stamps on the street to pay for socks for your children, you can learn this accounting program and you can raise this $400,000.”

The Center works in three major program areas. First, they emphasize that young women - especially poor girls, young women of color, young women who are filling the jails for non-violent crimes - need to be included at the decision-making tables, running institutions, developing and pushing policy so that they have an impact on the future of our communities. Secondly, the Center employs young women. Their philosophy is that in order to organize young women on the streets - not in high schools, not in colleges - they need to employ and train them because they want to survive. By employing people and paying them a living wage that also includes benefits, the Center fulfills some of the objectives of the Beijing Platform for Action. “If young people who are poor are going to do the work, they need to be paid,” Simon argued. “Volunteerism doesn’t work for everybody.” To date, the Center has employed over two hundred women. Third, the Center works within the juvenile justice system to teach young women about the power they have. “The reasons they are incarcerated are simple,” she continued, “they’re purely economic.” The objective is to offer political education and to organize inside the jails, and when the young women are released, the Center hires them.

Finally, the Center works on the streets with girls in the sex trades, drug trades, and those who are being trafficked. “We don’t tell them to get off the street,” Simon noted, “but we let them know that there is a movement growing and that they are a vital part in it.” The Center has reached over ten thousand young women on the streets in the past seven years, and has remained committed to being run by and for girls in the community. Simon concluded by offering ideas about what kinds of support organizations or movements led by young women need. For young women who are trying to generate institutional change, building strong, viable institutions is very difficult. An older generation of women must learn to take risks, she said, and to support ideas that are perhaps more radical than their own.

Robin Levi represented the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights (WILD), an organization dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls in the United States through applying a human rights framework. WILD’s focus is also on women of color, poor women, and young women, as their vision is that those who are most impacted are the ones who should be able to affect change. Levi introduced three members of WILD’s Youth Advisory Board - Abigail Kramer, Lisa Garrett, and Raha Jorjani - who accompanied her, and offered some examples of how WILD has worked to apply a Human Rights framework and the Beijing Platform for Action locally in San Francisco.

WILD was formed after the Beijing World Conference in an effort to bring Beijing home to the United States, and one of the first things that they did was start organizing in San Francisco to implement the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a treaty the U.S. has still not ratified. WILD felt that organizing at the local level would result in a law that would be more applicable to the people they represent. They worked with local activists and organizers, conducting a training workshop on the Women’s Convention. They then collaborated with a government organization, the Commission on the Status of Women in San Francisco, to look at how the Convention could become real for women and girls in San Francisco. About twelve months later, they held a public hearing in front of San Francisco government officials, members of the City Council, members of the Mayor’s office, department heads and community members where approximately thirty women and men testified about their experiences and ways that their human rights had been violated in San Francisco, as well as how passing the Women’s Convention would provide remedies for their rights. People talked about not being able to get credit, Levi recalled, about batterers’ access to the workplace. Six months later, San Francisco became the first city to implement CEDAW.

The law that was passed locally in April 1998 consisted of two main elements. One was a body to monitor the Women’s Convention in San Francisco that had both public members (NGOs, etc.) and also government officials to make sure that they were implementing it. The second element was a gender analysis of selected San Francisco city departments in three areas: employment; the delivery of direct and indirect services; and an examination of the budget. They asked questions such as: How many women are employed, and in what kinds of positions? Are health services being delivered in a way that women who do not speak English are able to access them? In a culturally acceptable way? Are street lights positioned in a way that women feel safe coming home at night? How are the public transportation systems set up? Can women get back and forth from work at night in a safe situation? Can she deal with her child care? Is the budget formed in a way that services are being provided for women in a non-stereotypical way?

The first Department they analyzed was the Department of Public Works. One outcome affected the Juvenile Probation Department. Although they realized their population of girls was growing, they felt that merely saying that more of their budget was applied to those girls was sufficient, rather than developing programs that would deal with the specific reasons girls get into the juvenile justice system in the first place, such as running away and sex work. The Department of Public Works learned that a very small mentorship program that they had developed was what retained engineers in their department. They took efforts to expand that program, not only recruiting engineers but also providing them with support, allowing them to continue their educations, and otherwise keep them feeling comfortable in the department. It’s new for any department to think about human rights and a gender analysis, so we conduct trainings for them. Finally, Levi stated, young women were involved throughout the process as decision makers, as leaders, and as people who decided how the program was going to go and what CEDAW was going to mean to them. Young women also worked with the departments in this gender analysis.

Two members of WILD’s Youth Advisory Board also spoke. Abigail Kramer reminded the audience that young women also face sexism, ageism, racism, hererosexism, poverty, xenophobia, and discrimination on the basis of ability. Since all these issues intersect in people’s lives, she said, it can be incredibly difficult to isolate, identify, and name these categories of oppression. What WILD has done for her is give her a framework with which to identify and analyze and deconstruct all these different root causes of the oppressions affecting them. “The human rights framework,” she asserted, “is a multi-issue way to understand why we face violence, why we’re locked up in prisons, and so on. The idea is that we can take this framework and work on issues we see as relevant and important in our lives.”

Lisa Garrett, who works as the Youth Program Coordinator at the International Indian Treaty Council, and organization that has worked for the past 26 years on indigenous peoples’ rights from North, Central, and South America, and the Pacific, began working with WILD about two years prior. She noted that for indigenous women, when we look at sexual and reproductive health rights, at issue is their right to have children since they have faced forced sterilization as a form of assimilation and genocide within our communities. Additionally, they fight for the right to not be studied and not be researched in intrusive and manipulative ways, and for environmental justice. Many organizations, Garrett said, forget that indigenous peoples’ concerns are sometimes different from their own. However, she was impressed that WILD addressed human rights from a gendered and raced perspective. Because their base is incredibly diverse in terms of race, occupation, generation, and class, and because youth are an integral part of the organization, WILD has been able to demonstrate that community organizers and human rights activists are the same thing.

The DISCUSSION following the panel touched on a variety of issues including capacity building; funding; and movement and coalition building. One audience member asked how organizations can make sure young women have the skills to actually manage as opposed to doing direct service work. Lateefah Simon responded by saying that if young women’s leadership is the essence of the movement, we must provide them with support and training. “It takes a lot of time, and I write grants just for capacity building,” she explained. “But I believe that if it is a strong commitment to set up an organization, an infrastructure, train and leave. That won’t work in every institution, but if the value is there, if the time is put in, if the resources are granted, it is possible.” Similarly, Robin Levi noted that WILD’s policy is that the Youth Program Director should be under the age of twenty-five, and that she is responsible for fundraising for that program. She researches the foundations, drafts the grants, and is responsible to develop the organization’s future planning. “We come from the vision that people can do this,” she said. “our idea is that it’s not rocket science, it’s just a matter of putting the time into training.”

Panelists also discussed the difficulty of funding their work. Lateefah Simon pointed out that they would love it if foundations like Ford and MacArthur began to recognize their organizations as having generated new models for social justice work, to see it not just as young women’s activism but as creating a sustainable movement among the next generation of middle-aged women. Though the Ms. Foundation supports a lot of CYWD’s work, they get more money - albeit smaller grants - from the radical, smaller family foundations. Gulmira Asanbaeva pointed out that every year in many European countries, they request a specific amount of government funding for its projects, and every year they receive just 20% of the requested amount, which means they cannot implement all their activities. In Kyrgystan, because the government is so poor, most programs are funded by international donors, but this is also sometimes difficult. “We decided to start a program for young women’s political leadership,” she recalled, “and we found that among international donors, no one was working in this field. Also, just a few are working on gender programs. The UNDP, for example, and UNIFEM are working in Central Asia, but not in Kyrgystan.” Sato Miho explained money is tight in Japan for these initiatives as well. For example, her organization produced a report on women’s health, but then ran out of financial resources so she had to pay her own way to New York. They have, however, also received support from international organizations, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Lisa Garrett added that often with community-based organizations, foundations are often surprised to receive proposals having to do with the impact of multilateral organizations like the IMF and WTO. She argued that we need to translate for funders how the macro translates down to the very micro level, to show how these larger processes affect our communities locally.

In response to an audience member who asked how to make these young women’s feminist movement more visible, Robin Levi joked that “I think you can see from the blank looks on everybody’s faces that that’s the million dollar question right there.” She stated that visibility depends on resources, requires us to travel to more areas and to talk more, to get our voices heard in the newspapers and on the radio and TV. All this, she said, takes time and money that many organizations don’t have. Even more, it takes access, and people don’t generally value young women’s voices. “It’s just a matter of a lot more time and resources,” Levi explained, “to change the mindset of the media.” Toward that end, young women working with WILD are sent to conduct workshops at various kinds of events.

Judy Han offered a different perspective. “I’m a little puzzled whenever I hear that question,” she said, “because my personal experience has never been that of apathy and indifference to political issues. So when I hear the question of visibility, I always ask back, ‘visible to whom?’.” She made the interesting point that in recent years the non-profit sector has been criticized for an increased professionalization. “We aspire to be the executive directors,” Han said, “not of the janitor kind, but of the reception attending, picture in the paper kind.” However, for an organization like APIRH to work with Cambodian girls and their families who, for the most part, know nothing about community organizations of anything but those providing direct services, they must convince the parents of the community that community organizing is very much essential to the survival and sustainability of their community. Relatedly, Gulmira Asanbaeva said that women political leaders in Kyrgystan are interested in organizing more internationally, in building coalitions and applying for funding to do so. This has had the result of making the movement too rigid, or too much of an institutional vision. She advocated instead for a more locally rooted movement with a wider variety of activities.

A speaker from South Africa asked whether any of the young women’s organizations had attempted to launch campaigns against the financial institutions and governments, since in South Africa, where young women are directly experiencing problems related to macro-economic restructuring, they are interested in forming coalitions with other organizations based in the north. Lateefah Simon expressed her interest in such a coalition, and also said that many times, there’s great interest but no follow-through. Another audience member offered a cautionary note about this kind of coalition-building. She said that in situations where state agencies act as gatekeepers - either facilitating or preventing meetings across borders - coalitions can be difficult because it can happen that the groups that we’re trying to help may come under punitive injustice because of the perception of our work. Robin Levi seconded that point, relating that when she worked with Human Rights Watch, it was very important for them to remember that collaborating with another women’s rights organization could put that organization in serious danger. It is critical, in these cases, to be prepared with a safety plan, mechanisms for trying to access someone in power to make sure any problem is fixed quickly. In this respect, it can also be important to preserve organizational or individual anonymity.


CLOSING PLENARY Carrying the Movement Forward
Frances Degen Horowitz (President, CUNY)
Alison Bernstein (Ford Foundation)
Seiko Hanochi (York University, Japan Preparatory Committee)
Eleanor Smeal (Feminist Majority)
Dessima Williams (Brandeis University)
Moderators: Linda Basch (NCRW) and Electa Arenal (CUNY)

Linda Basch introduced panelists and recapitulated the key agenda items and interconnections that were identified throughout the week that might inform any action strategies to emerge from the Conference. During the first day, Basch reflected, Charlotte Bunch emphasized that globalization, a complex system, is here to stay. The challenge for the women’s movement is to find ways to organize to oppose it and to change it. She also underscored that any struggle must be rooted in local action, but have global interconnections. To challenge these trends, that those of us involved in the women’s movement need to:
1) Demystify, deconstruct and understand the operation of global financial institutions and the private sector and make them accountable;
2) Be responsive to national and cultural diversity, in other words, to build solidarity (e.g. between the North and the South)
3) Build broad coalitions in order to challenge the organization and structure of power globally and nationally.

On Tuesday, during the discussion of the political dimensions of globalization, Cynthia Enloe framed the question that has been important throughout these symposia: how can women, with feminist agendas and goals, play politics in the masculinist structures that dominate most countries; or, how do we bring a feminist perspective to these masculinist structures? As Yuko Moriya pointed out in her remarks, the mere presence of women does not automatically transform masculinist political, economic, and social structures. The specific situations of Sri Lanka and Tanzania were discussed. Additionally, Basch continued, we analyzed how the forces of globalization and structural adjustment have made developing states weaker in terms of providing for their citizenry and have made achieving women’s equality particularly difficult. Several participants emphasized that gender equality could not be achieved without a fundamental transformation of national political and economic structures, and that this applies to developed countries as well as developing states. In other words, we’re all feeling the pinch of structural adjustment in one way or another. Several strategies were discussed during the breakout groups and important interconnections were also made. We need to:
1) Connect economic and political globalization;
2) Connect globalization and militarization, and to recognize the extent to which a culture of violence is being globalized;
3) Connect universalism and relativism (i.e. if problems are universalized, if we can show how the privatization of resources hurts many women in all countries, it will become much easier to create an international women’s movement that can act collectively. The trick here is to unite while at the same time developing an appreciation of diverse cultural ideas and practices);
4) Connect the situation of part-time workers in Japan and contingent workers in the United States (especially adjunct part-time faculty workers), and encourage gender-sensitive labor union activity;
5) De-nationalize rape and remove it from definitions that subsume it under genocide, thereby personalizing it and seeing rape not only as a crime against property, but also as a crime against individual women.

The panel on the economic dimensions of globalization also led to a number of action strategies and unified suggestions for the women’s movement. Devaki Jain emphasized that we need to shift the terms of the argument from globalization to regulation, regulation of internal financial institutions and of labor. As Devaki said, the wild horse of globalization needs to be tamed. We need to:
1) Work for debt forgiveness and do away with nationally debilitating structural adjustment policies;
2) Address how labor migration is caused by imbalances in standards and the payment of labor;
3) Increase social sector investment to allow women workers to balance work and family obligations;
4) Strengthen the political participation of women and rid governments of corruption;
5) Develop equitable standards that apply to both full-time and part-time labor
6) Broaden access to education for young women worldwide so that they will be competitive workers;
7) Help women in transitional countries of Eastern and Central Europe juggle the complicated demands of work and family, especially since many social burdens such as health, child, and elder care were previously borne by the state and these structures no longer exist;
8) Collaborate to analyze and address macroeconomic policies and the international organizations that control those policies, and create powerful advocacy strategies and coalitions to bring about change;
9) Invest in global networks and telecommunications so that a strong women’s movement can be built.

Basch concluded her remarks by saying that the discussion during the Thursday morning session energized and electrified the audience. She was impressed, in particular, by three points: 1) the extent to which the Beijing Platform for Action has animated the visions and value-based leadership shared by the young women leaders on the panel; 2) the extent to which the young women recognize the importance of women assuming political leadership roles; and 3) the extent to which the young women projected a sense of empowerment to bring about the changes that they want to see for their generation.

Electa Arenal also spoke briefly about the variety of workshops that transpired, as well as the art exhibits and other cultural events. She emphasized how necessary it is to combine the sociological with the artistic since the latter can often move the spirit. She also reiterated that experiencing women’s artistic expression helps us to remember that women should not be thought of merely as victims, but as having agency over their own lives.

Frances Horowitz began her remarks by recalling a conversation with Bella Abzug after her return from Beijing. In that conversation, Horowitz remembered, Abzug had the conviction, the belief, and the faith that the energy that was generated by the Beijing Conference would be carried by women all over the world to transform their world. She continued by saying she wished Bella could have been in New York this week to see some of her faith fulfilled, not only at the Graduate Center but also at the United Nations and all over the city.

Horowitz then related her experience earlier that morning of presiding over a commencement ceremony for the CUNY Baccalaureate program, a program for students - a large number of whom are women - who began college many years ago, didn’t complete it for a variety of reasons, and decided to return and complete their education. The commencement for this program, she explained, is full of joy because it is made up of students who have fulfilled the dreams that they deferred. One of the women who received her bachelor’s degree this year had begun her college education sixty years ago at Hunter. Her dream at the time was to become a doctor, but because was discouraged from all sides, she dropped out of college and did other things. At the age of 74, she decided she wanted to return to complete her bachelor’s degree. She graduated today and will be attending the Social Welfare program at Hunter College to earn her master’s degree. She will be 80 when she completes the degree. Like this senior student, women, Horowitz concluded, have triumphed against the odds all over the world. It is up to us to continue the transformation on behalf of women in our communities and our countries.

Alison Bernstein brought greetings from Susan Berresford, the first woman president of the Ford Foundation, and made two observations. First, she said, she is probably one of the few people in the room who is a veteran of the Women’s Conference of 1985 that was held in Nairobi, Kenya. Bernstein remembered that she attended with a delegation of Ford staff whose primary frame of reference for the women’s movement was North American in scope. Fifteen years later the overseas component of the Ford Foundation’s gender equality work is far more substantial and powerful than previously. As a result, she noted two positive aspects of globalization - the globalization of both the women’s movement and the human rights movement. Importantly, at the UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, these two movements began to talk to each other. Additionally, the growth of these two movements, and of social justice, is not dependent on conferences and events, or on the resolutions of national delegations inside the United Nations. Rather, NGO struggles are bigger, broader, and deeper than even the United Nations in their ability to change the world. Nevertheless, despite an increase in grassroots activity, and a concurrent increase in the number of women in positions of political power throughout the world, we’ve still not eradicated poverty. “I call this a paradox of power,” Bernstein explained, “because being there is only half the story. Absolute numbers may be necessary but they’re truly not sufficient for the kind of social change, social justice, and transformation of our societies that we all seek.”

In introducing an outline for forward looking strategies, Seiko Hanochi explained that the Japanese Preparatory had decided to use the UN Women 2000 Special General Assembly to develop a global network for Japanese women involved in grassroots women’s organizations. She suggested three next steps. First, we must develop a global strategy by putting our efforts together using the UN as a lobbying point. Secondly, we must face the complex web of gender discrimination that takes different forms in different parts of the world. Thirdly, we must understand and address the inequities and insecurities created by the global political economy, and must develop a dialogue between the different schools of thought, economic interests, and cultural traditions represented by the different feminist movements.

The first point, Hanochi said, is obvious but easy to miss. Despite not being able to participate, or even to observe, the UN inter-government sessions, their delegation has been able to make their voices heard to their governments through the UN. In Japan, they were able to obtain basic gender-equitable legislation following the Beijing Conference. Because the global political economy is still controlled by a tight patriarchal alliance, she argued, feminists must fight not only at local and national levels, but also at the international level of the United Nations.

Additionally, Hanochi called for the further development of efforts to create alliances with other NGOs in order to create a new civilization - “a universal civil society of peace and human rights.” This kind of alliance, she said, must unite women across barriers of ethnicity, religion, culture, class, caste, and status. Though feminist thinking raises the issue of overcoming patriarchal dualisms between men and women, between public and private, between human and nature, our own movements sometimes reinforce these same dualisms. “We should develop holistic understandings of the realities of power,” she entreated, “we must take stock of the rich traditions we each represent which once engendered can turn into so many sources of inspiration for a new world.”

To do this, we must take advantage of this Global Feminist Symposia and continue the dialogues that have begun regarding the linkages between global politics and global economies; the resurgence of global colonialism; the undervaluing of unpaid work; and the need for equal treatment of part time labor. A web-based global feminist network, Hanochi concluded, would allow us to continue our cooperation, and to broaden it to include our sisters from other countries and traditions who were unable to be with us today, but could certainly be ready to join us for a global dialogue in preparation for Beijing Plus Ten.

In reflecting on women’s progress throughout the world over the past thirty years, Eleanor Smeal remarked that there is still much to accomplish if the formal UN deliberations are being held up by five governments - the Sudan, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the Vatican - that comprise a bloc of fundamentalist countries. Despite the fact that within the UN, women now head several major agencies, we as women who are involved in the women’s movements still are not in positions of power in world organizations or in our own governments. One of the goals in moving forward from Beijing Plus Five, then, is that this must never happen again.

How do we guarantee this, she asked? We must have half the power of any political assembly. Though we know that the mere presence of women doesn’t guarantee change, it is still true that nowhere do we have a critical mass in the power elite. Smeal said she’s admired governments that have adopted a quota system since this has driven up the number of women in representative bodies around the world. It is also traditionally the case, however, that when women enter power seats in larger numbers, the power moves, and this is what has sometimes occurred in countries operating a quota system. Therefore, she noted, we must not only think of how we reach positions of power, we must also think of how to make sure the rules aren’t changed before we get there. This can happen because we do not have the economic or political clout to be in the right room, or even to know where it is.

Smeal continued by recalling that during her recent travels to Japan, she was constantly asked how the U.S. women’s movement mobilized. “We were told repeatedly, ‘We have theory, we have education, how do you do it now?’” As we organize, she reflected, the key is to make sure we do something as we are gaining strength. The movement is at its strongest when we are not only exposing problems, but also presenting solutions our opposition must deal with. “The more outrageous our demands, the more likely we are to get something,” she argued. “We should never be in a position when we just compromise with ourselves; we should always ask for more than what we need, knowing that in any negotiation you will be taken down some. Maybe you’ll get what you need if you imagine more than what you need.”

As an example, she spoke about the Feminist Majority Foundation’s campaign to stop gender apartheid in Afghanistan. In 1995 in Beijing, governments agreed that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, she explained. “By 1996, the Taliban took from the women of Afghanistan every civil right you could imagine. We cannot forget that because if they can do this in Afghanistan today, what can they do in our countries tomorrow? Our rights are not that secure.” For example, despite the very strong women’s movement in the United States, in 1984 Reagan’s government defeated the equal education program (Title IX) in the courts. It took the women’s movement four years to restore it.

Smeal too made a plea to network via the internet; to support Women’s Studies programs everywhere; and to strengthen youth programs. She also argued that tougher legislation against trafficking in women should be passed in the world courts, and in each of our own governments; and that reproductive rights are a part of the basic human rights of women. “There’s so much to do,” she said, “but there is hope in the globalization of the women’s movement.” Smeal concluded by suggesting that the women’s movement hold World Meetings every four years independently of governments.

Dessima Williams framed her remarks by three points: attainments/achievements; accountability; and action. When she returned from Beijing, she said, she collaborated with other women locally to form an organization called the Massachusetts Action for Women to carry the movement forward. The energy and possibilities they found in Beijing grounded them to continue their commitments locally. During the first three years of the organization’s existence, they launched a statewide audit examining and documenting the state of girls and women in Massachusetts according to four of the twelve critical areas of concern in the Beijing Platform for Action - education, economic empowerment, political participation, and health. By using statewide institutional data as well as ethnographic insights and comments made during meetings around the state with girls and women, they assessed the progress of the Massachusetts state government on implementing the Platform, and identified resources they might use to change the condition of girls and women in the state. As a result of their pressures, the state of Massachusetts established Women’s Commission with a budget line. In addition to the Massachusetts Action for Women, Williams also started an organization at home in Grenada that focused on making education a tool of empowerment and change for boys and girls.

This week, 150 UN member states sent in five-year reports as they had been mandated to do in 1995, and 135 of these reports had been taken into account when the Secretary General prepared his report. Because of women’s movements globally, governments have begun to take women more seriously - they know they must report, and before they report, they have to have acted. As a result of women’s mobilization, Williams continued, we now have a commitment to and understanding of rights and a rights-based approach as a cultural norm. We also now know that we have a right to information, to education, to development, and to access education, health care, etc. Additionally, we are demanding the budgetary allocations and institutional mechanisms that create resources, and we are clear that we have the right to participate in government, and hold decision-making positions. She too pointed out that despite the significant progress that has been made - despite these various achievements - women’s struggles are far from over.

Williams went on to define accountability as both a principle and a methodology. She noted that the first level of accountability rests with the women’s movement; this is our most precious method of keeping ourselves on track with the gains we’ve made as a movement. It is also critical for us to continue to advocate for the implementation of the Platform of Action because it helps deliver what has been promised by governments. In this respect, we must also advocate for the ratification of CEDAW and the Optional Protocol, the latter of which has only been signed by Senegal, Namibia, and Denmark. These international treaties are important, Williams explained, because where domestic courts are unable to present remedies for women’s human rights violations, women are able to appeal to something beyond their national governments. We must also agitate for some degree of economic accountability, especially as governments become weaker.

Lastly, Williams addressed action, and especially action within the United Nations system. With less than 24 hours to complete the document that assesses and advances the Plan of Action, it is critical that we push our delegates to make sure that whatever comes out does not roll back the progress made at Beijing. “Perhaps the way to continue to carry forward,” she stated, “is to remember that we are participating in an explosion from the base. We have been changing the world, and are able now to move a tremendous energy forward. We can continue to transform the world through research and action.”

The DISCUSSION following the speakers’ remarks centered around action strategies to counteract the major challenge globalization presents the women’s movement - the weakening of governments in the face of stronger multinational corporations. Many participants asked panelists to outline some of the strategies they felt would successfully deal with this shift in power. Dessima Williams emphasized gathering as much information as possible that would help us understand the ways economic power has really shifted. She also advocated that women’s organizations support the call for a Code of Conduct for multinationals that is consistent with UN standards to encourage corporations to be socially accountable. Thirdly, she suggested we use projects such as Women’s Eyes on the World Bank as models for keeping economic watch, and that we support the Tobin Tax - a proposed tax on global financial speculation that is to be used for social development. Eleanor Smeal said that it is important for our government’s humanitarian aid to go to helping women’s groups locally around the world rather than to governments. She also noted that in October, the World March of Women will take place in New York in front of the UN, and in DC in front of the World Bank. This march, she said, will also take place in a number of other countries. Finally, Seiko Hanochi revealed that at the end of July when the G7 meetings occur, an alternative G7 feminist meeting would be conducted. Hanochi also argued that women in industrialized countries have more responsibility and accountability.

Another audience member related her experience of working in an organization that was designed to monitor multinationals. She found that it was very difficult to mobilize women themselves to deal with this issue, because most of the women’s organizations were directed toward domestic violence and family issues, dealing with a traditional patriarchal system. “It seems difficult,” she said, “to persuade women that the IMF and the WTO should matter to them,” and she asked for suggestion. Ellie Smeal explained that one of the ways the U.S. women’s movement has been able to address macroeconomic issues has been through making links with the labor movement since most unions have Women’s Caucuses. They’ve also created links with those who are mobilizing for a decrease in military spending, with the environmental movement (the green movement), and with the consumer movements. “Essentially,” Smeal said, “it is useful to be in loose coalitions with progressive organizations.” Dessima Williams concluded by saying that there is no one way to help women to become aware of themselves and their situations. “There are all sorts of cultural variations,” she said, “and all sorts of catalytic moments for understanding the power of taking charge of our lives as women. The task is to figure out what is going to be most effective, and then just to do it.”