Introduction
By Hester
Eisenstein
The issue of gender and globalization has received
increasing attention in recent years, as courses, books and articles
have proliferated. But most of the literature on globalization
continues to be androcentric, ignoring the centrality of women
to the economic restructuring of the years since the mid-1970s.
Even excellent, invaluable texts from a left perspective like
those by William K. Tabb and Michel Chossudovsky either overlook
gender, or mention it only in passing (Tabb 2001, Chossudovsky
2003), although-to be fair-Chossudovsky added a short chapter
on "The World Bank and Women's Rights" to the second edition
of his book (2003: 65-68). There is some justification, then,
for publishing more material on this subject.
For the purposes of this section, we define globalization
as the contemporary form of the capitalist world system, produced
by the restructuring of the U.S. and the world economies in the
years since the economic slowdown of the mid-1970s. The term
globalization, introduced in celebratory mode by the bourgeois press
after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the years after
1989, refers to the neo- liberal "Washington consensus" being
imposed around the world, rolling back social gains in the rich
countries, and restructuring the economies of developing countries
for unlimited exploitation by capital.
The impact of these changes on women is particularly
intense, and there is now a considerable literature on this phenomenon:
women as the workers of choice in free trade zones for their
cheaper labor and "nimble fingers," women as major participants
in the growing "informal" sector, women as victims of the downsizing
of government services, both as employees and as primarily responsible
for the health and well-being of families, and last but not least,
women as activists in the struggle for global justice.
The globalization of the world economy coincides
with the expansion of feminism in the 1970s. Both these forces
have drawn women into public life around the world. This is a
mixed blessing. As the processes of "enclosure" and proletarianization
spread inexorably to new parts of the globe, women are drawn
from peasant agriculture into industrial production, although
under extremely exploitative conditions. Some feminist writers
argue that the integration of women into market economies is
an inevitability, and, indeed, represents a form of liberation
from traditional patriarchal constraints (for more on this point,
see Eisenstein, 2004). We are left to conclude that the task
of the left should be merely to ameliorate the worst effects
of these changes. But is corporate globalization in its current
incarnation inevitable? I want to suggest that this is too timid
an approach, and that those of us who are committed to socialism
and democracy should be actively supporting struggles that seek,
not simply to curb the power of corporations and governments,
but to change the direction of the process fundamentally.
The articles in this section lay out some of the
issues in this debate, and we hope that this will contribute
to an ongoing dialogue.
In her article, Jennifer Disney compares the 1970s
revolutions in Mozambique and Nicaragua, and their legacies for
women in the 1990s. She examines the land reforms and other agricultural
policies that were intended to overcome the harmful effects of
colonialist and imperialist regimes in the two countries. Both
governments- Frelimo and the Sandinistas-were conscious of the
need to incorporate women in their process of social change
and economic development. They both placed the issue of women's
emancipation high on their revolutionary agendas. But in practice,
the agricultural changes
they instituted ignored the realities of women's work in subsistence
agriculture, and resulted in an overall in increase in women's
responsibilities for labor, paid and unpaid. This was a form
of liberation that left women stuck in both productive and reproductive labor, with men increasingly
underemployed. She suggests that attempts at social change, whether
implemented by revolutionary regimes or by neo-liberal globalization
strategies, will fail as long as they ignore
the age-old divisions of labor between men and women.
Tammy Findlay's article criticizes the literature
of the left on globalization that assumes the growing irrelevance
of the nation-state. On the contrary, she argues, it is the nation-state
that fundamentally carries out the process of globalization,
on behalf of corporate interests. She shows that much of contemporary
international feminist organizing makes this same mistake, as
happened in two international conferences she describes, where
the expansion of globalization was assumed by many speakers to
be both inevitable and an opportunity for feminist international
organizing. (In a case of internal
dialogue, Findlay criticizes Disney's work in this context.)
Findlay sees the appropriate locus for political organizing at
the level of the nation-state. She focuses on Canada, a state
where neo-liberalism has begun to erode many of the democratic
gains of past decades. She points to the literature on democratic
administration and, more recently, "femocratic" administration,
as a form of politics that moves us away from globalization and
toward greater economic justice. She concludes with an example
of what she calls, following Angela Miles, "feminist local globalism."
Martha Gimenez enters the debate over global feminism,
with a call for a new Marxist feminism of working women. Rejecting
the now widespread "trilogy" of race, class and gender as a conceptual
tool, she points instead to the universality of women's impoverishment under globalization. This common experience at the macro-
economic level has different effects on the ground, as it encounters
the particularities of local and national traditions that make
up the texture of women's lives. The relevance of Marx to globalization
is that in the zero-sum game of the capitalist world system,
the operations of corporate capitalism at the macro level encounter
the manifold elements of social formations-political, social,
cultural and ideological-at the micro level, and it is within
this dialectic that women respond and organize. She shows that
the call by Western feminists for universal human rights is the
product of advanced Western capitalist societies, and that the realization
of such rights for the world's women is impossible within
the framework of the current world-system.
Kimberly
Earles examines the case of the Swedish welfare state, long considered
to be the leader in providing universal social services and high
employment within a capitalist framework. Some argue that this
system is now being eroded, by a process of deregulation. But Earles
prefers the term "reregulation," arguing that the shifts to privatized
childcare, the cuts to the welfare sector, and the abandonment
of a commitment to full employment are all decisions taken and
implemented by the state itself. Thus the application of neo-liberal
doctrine in Sweden, under pressure from the European Union, multinational
corporations, the political right, and local manufacturers, is
the work of the state, rather than a product
of the "hollowing out" of the state as some have argued. The turn
away from universal welfare provisions particularly affects women,
as receivers of services and as public sector employees. Earles
raises the question of whether these erosions can be reversed through
political struggle, by feminist activists and their male allies.
Bina Srinivasan contributes an interpretation
of religious fundamentalism, based on her searing experiences
of the communal violence in the state of Gujarat, India. She
argues that religious fundamentalists are reacting to the ravages
of globalization, as an extension of colonialism, by creating
an imagined past in which the disruption to kinship and community
systems is repaired. For this, they need an "us" and a "them," with
the "them" in the role of dangerous disrupters who must be defeated.
In this imaginary but powerful scenario, women have a central
role as the defenders of cultural norms. Their purity guarantees
the integrity of "us," and the impurity of the women of the "other" represents
part of the danger. In this context, Indian and other Third World
feminists find their struggles for women's human rights interpreted
as dangerous, foreign intrusions, with fundamentalists outbidding
them for the loyalties of women, who are given an important role
with the forces of reaction.
Finally, Carol Barton offers an overview of the
dilemmas confronting feminist activists who participate in the
global feminist movement, in an era in which mass-based revolutionary
movements have been largely replaced by non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) funded by the rich countries of the North. Women placing
their energies with NGO-led projects run the danger of collaborating
with the strategy of downsizing government services and pacifying
local populations by offering poor women micro credit and the
chance to become entrepreneurs in the informal sector. Focusing
on the United Nations-as many feminist activists did during the
decades that followed the first UN conference on women in 1975-now
seems futile, as events under the Bush administration have
sidetracked the United Nations in favor of U.S. unilateralism.
And feminists continue to struggle within the World Social Forum,
a major voice of the global justice movement, to make women's
issues central rather than marginal. But Barton sees encouraging
signs in the strength of women's organizing, in the acknowledgement
of gender issues on the world stage, and in the increasing attention
by women's groups to issues of economic justice for women.
Bibliography
Aguilar,
Delia D., & Anne E. Lacsamana, eds. 2004. Women and Globalization.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Beneria,
Lourdes. 2003. Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics
as if All People Mattered. New York & London: Routledge.
Chow,
Esther Ngan-Ling, ed, 2003. "Gender, Globalization, and Social
Change in the 21st Century." International Sociology,
special issue, Vol.18, No. 3 (September).
Chossudovsky,
Michel. 2003. The Globalisation of Poverty and the New World
Order. 2nd ed. Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global Outlook.
Eisenstein,
Hester. 2004. "Feminism and Corporate Globalization: A Dangerous
Liaison?" Science & Society (forthcoming).
Rowbotham,
Sheila, & Stephanie Linkogle, eds. 2001. Women Resist Globalization:
Mobilising for Livelihood and Rights. London & New York:
Zed Books.
Tabb,
William K. 2001. The Amoral Elephant. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Wichterich,
Christa. 2000. The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of
Inequality. London & New York: Zed Books.
I thank
George Snedeker, Sociology Department, SUNY/College at Old Westbury,
and member
of the Editorial Board of Socialism and Democracy , for
his gracious assistance in gathering material for this section.
My sincerest thanks also to Patricia Ticineto Clough, Director
of the Center for the Study of Women and Society and the Women's
Studies Certificate Program, The Graduate Center, The City University
of New York; Linda Basch, Director, The National Council for Research
on Women; and Kristen Timothy, Research Scholar at NCRW, who organized
the seminar in which Carol Barton, Bina Srinivasan and I participated
(the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship Program, 2002-2004: "Facing
Global Capital, Finding Human Security: A Gendered Critique").
Finally, my thanks and appreciation to Victor Wallis, General Education,
Berklee College of Music, and co-managing editor of Socialism
and Democracy, for his meticulous editing and his enthusiastic
support for this special section.
