Feminism
Feminism
This entry contains the following:
I. AFRICAN (SUB-SAHARAN)
Gwendolyn Mikell
II. ASIAN
Shamita Das Dasgupta
III. MIDDLE EASTERN
Valentine M. Moghadam
IV. WESTERN
Sîan Hawthorne
I. AFRICAN (SUB-SAHARAN)
African feminisms must be identified as post-Cold War phenomena, although many precursors and contributing influences coalesced during the mid-1970s and 1980s, and we have witnessed the florescence of African feminist movements in the post-1995 period. These feminisms have acknowledged African cultures and philosophies that celebrated women's participation in separate but complementary gender arenas, as well as subjected the gender bias within traditional culture to the critiques of modern life.
BACKGROUND
The slow evolution of African feminisms relative to American and European feminism is related to the fact that between 1957 and 1967 most Sub-Saharan African countries were emerging from colonialism, and public attention was focused on drawing the parameters of new state political, economic, and legal systems. Women subordinated gender concerns to nationalist concerns during this period. They played complementary roles with men in the movements that brought about independence, and elite women mobilized their organizations and institutions to support the nationalist parties. However, the fact that women did not receive the recognition that was due them and were increasingly marginalized within post-independence politics allowed a critical activist dynamic to emerge in African women's feminist dialogue.
African women tended to reject Western feminism (as well as the use of the term) in the 1960s and early 1970s because they saw it as a hegemonic force focused on individualism and the "politics of the body." In the dialogues that followed, scholars such as Niara Sudarkasa and Kamene Okonjo emphasized the assymetrical but complementary roles of men and women, and Gwendolyn Mikell focused on how the emerging African feminists blended traditional communal and pronatal concerns with the new strategies for survival within a crisis-ridden state. Scholars such as Oyeronki Oyewumi accused European colonizers and missionaries of creating binary male/female categories that distorted the reality of women's blended public and private roles in traditional African cultures. In general, African women resented the early Western focus on clitoridectomy or "genital cutting" as sensationalist and as a hegemonic attempt to control African women's private realms.
Takyiwaa Manuh and Frances Dolphynne described women's primary concern with addressing the serious social and economic challenges they faced in the 1980s and their resulting determination to craft new laws that created greater equality in property ownership, maintenance of children, and justice for wives given the existence of polygynous forms of marriage. However, during the economic decline of African states and the emergence of economic restructuring programs monitored by the international financial institutions, the devastating increases in maternal, infant, and child mortalities and the increase in HIV/AIDS prevalence rates drew attention to women's health status. Organizations such as Women in Nigeria (WIN) devised strategies to educate women about their economic and political rights, producing documents in local languages that increased knowledge accessibility. Not surprisingly, many African women scholars such as Patricia McFadden began to stress the need to interrogate and transform the conditions facing women in Africa through feminist activism.
THE TRAJECTORY OF AFRICAN FEMINISMS
The United Nations Decade of Women (1975–1985) set in motion a chain of local, national, continental, and global conversations that produced more varied concerns, which crystallized into what scholars call African feminism. Filomina Chioma Steady describes how the 1985 Women's Conference in Nairobi provided an opportunity for African women from all walks of life to share in discussions about "forward looking strategies" to address illiteracy and poverty and the responsibilities that women had to press governments to construct and implement national women's policies. However, with the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Western countries from much of Africa in the absence of a Soviet threat, the challenges for women altered. Into the political void stepped military governments, rebel groups, and informal armies that exploited the natural resources of Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, waged genocidal war in Rwanda and Sudan, and used rape as a tool of war. This violence against women accompanied by the rising HIV/AIDS rates in the 1990s had the effect of clearly focusing African women's feminist mobilization on issues related to the state.
The Fourth Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995 was the major culminating event, after which the language of feminism was widely used across Africa. The African national and NGO delegations that went to Beijing came back with broader ideas about how to implement democratic changes, demand that their countries sign onto CEDAW, provide educational equity for the girl child, and establish goals for the representation of women in politics. African women from different cultural and religious backgrounds, including Muslim, Christian, Traditional, Afro-Asian, Arab, and Swahili, could now discuss aspects of the Beijing platform relating to the family in a way that guaranteed respect for all traditions. In 1994, South Africa, which had moved from apartheid to democratic elections, and Rwanda, which was recovering from genocide, became important sites for feminist discussions. Some of the discussions among women of the African National Congress (ANC) involved women negotiating a percentage of elected and appointed positions in the new government; and this has been replicated in Uganda, Rwanda, and other places. Aili Mari Tripp has emphasized the fact that these local and regional African women's organizations have focused on the elimination of difference and the emergence of a culture of unity within African state politics.
The debate about whether African feminism should be equated with activism or scholarship by and about women was heated at the end of the millennium. The notion of "'women's rights as human rights'" and the focus on eradicating violence against women began to be thoroughly integrated into the activism of African women's organizational networks such as BAOBAB in Nigeria. Women shared ideas and tactics in subregional conferences in Rwanda and Uganda, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, South Africa, Ghana, and Mali about how to construct a "Culture of Peace" that empowered women. Out of these discussions came support for the notion that in a post-war environment, women needed to transform national security strategies and insert themselves into state, transstate, and United Nations policy initiatives, such that human security gained importance as a balance to militarized security. They were aware that in situations of economic or political crisis, religion could be a critical arena for either local amelioration or conflict resolution. For example, Ayesha Imam and others helped counter the post-militaristic conflict between religious groups in Nigeria by working on equitable treatment for Muslim women accused of ZINA (sexual) crimes under Islam, and these death sentences were overturned. Women such as Regina Amadi-Njoku and Ndioro N'Diaye have helped push these notions of gender inclusion into the dynamics of the African Union and have helped it systematically integrate women into their emerging peace and conflict resolution mechanisms.
Equally as important has been the intellectual mobilization in the formation of African feminist ideas. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie and others have examined women's portrayal of themselves and their aspirations through literature. Then, through the Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, women have analyzed their own conditions and proposed new approaches to African feminist understandings. The journal Feminist Africa became the major tool for women's dialogue about these issues. Through its pages one could see African women examining the scholarly arena with the goal of removing disciplinary boundaries that inhibited gender knowledge and recreating it as a site for feminist imagination and greater gender equity. Over a period of five years, Feminist Africa highlighted the work of groups such as the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) and the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA). The journal explored ways that women's organizations mobilized to transform the African state and thoroughly examined "sexual cultures" (no. 5) and "subaltern sexual-ities" (no. 6). These approaches were considered sufficiently inclusive to encompass new sexual realities, despite the fact that they challenged the binary sexual symbolism of traditional African culture. Rather than occurring in isolation, this feminist intellectual dynamism has also been global, in that African women and American Africanists have shared their ideas and analysis at forums such as the Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association in the United States.
The subtle shift from the pervasive use of the term feminism to the analysis of social conditions related to gender equity is symbolic of the new African perspectives. Certainly, there is a link to traditional predilections to deny a singular focus on women's individualism and urge concern for what is positive for society in general. However, the new focus on gender conditions and experiences is designed to be inclusive and holistic, reflecting the realization that the meanings and contexts of maleness and femaleness have begun to alter in the new global environment. African women pushed for and achieved a new Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (2005) that, although still not acknowledging women's full sexual rights, was a tribute to their activism. In that sense, African feminists have returned to the issue of the body but on their own terms and within the context of historical and cultural change. The scholarly articles in Feminist Africa (no. 5 and no. 6) point this out and that African women are now challenged to respond to and transcend the historical conditions of the region. The new thinking about gender included consideration of the need for scrutinizing African gender hierarchies, especially to counter stereotypes and achieve greater equity in how sexuality and homosexuality play out within African culture.
Most recently, African feminist activists have begun to ask themselves how to think about these transformations and how African women will function as gender stereotypes fade away in the coming period. The book Africa after Gender? edited by Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher, is symbolic of this new period of feminist intellectual questioning. It examines volatile arenas of gender confrontation, forms of women's activism in public spaces, ritual and performative aspects of gender, and issues of masculinity, misogyny, and seniority. In the final chapter of the book, Helen Mugambi raises this issue: Can there be a post-gender question in African studies at a time when women's everyday lives at the local and state levels are still permeated by the gender hierarchies and battles of a post-colonial era? She answers it by proposing that African feminists reject a linear approach to the gender issue in favor of a circular approach that blends history, present challenges, and desired futures into a dynamic, interactive configuration that is constantly imagining, seeking, and addressing equitable treatment for both women and men.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABC News. 2003. Death by Stoning: Justice, Punishment, and Human Rights (Video recording). Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Amadi-Njoku, Regina, and Ndioro Ndiaye. 2002. African Women at the Service of the Union. Geneva: International Labor Organization and International Office for Migration.
Cole, Catherine M.; Takyiwaa Manuh; and Stephan F. Miescher, eds. 2007. Africa after Gender? Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hassan, Shireen. 2005. "Terms of Engagement: South African Challenges." Feminist Africa no. 4. Available from http://www.feministafrica.org/.
Imam, Ayesha. 2002. Islam and Women's Human Rights. John Humphrey Freedom Award.
Imam, Ayesha; Renee Puttin; and Henry Omole, eds. 1989. Women and the Family in Nigeria. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA.
James, Stanlie M., and Abena Busia. 1993. Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. New York: Routledge.
Mama, Amina. 1995. Beyond the Mask: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity. New York: Routledge.
McLaurin, Irma. 2001. Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
McFadden, Patricia. 2005. "Becoming Post-Colonial: African Women Changing the Meaning of Citizenship." Meridians 6 (1): 1-18.
McFadden, Patricia. 1997 "The Challenges and Prospects of the African Women's Movement in the 21st Century." Women in Action, no. 1. HURINet, Available from http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/30/152.html.
Miescher, Stephan. 2005. Making Men in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mikell, Gwendolyn, ed. 1997. African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mikell, Gwendolyn. 2005. "Working From Within: Nigerian Women and Conflict Resolution." Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 6(2): 87-94. (Summer/Fall).
Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara. 1994. Re-Creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Oyewumi, Oyeronke. 2003. African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Pereira, Charmaine. 2002. "Between Knowing and Imagining: What Space for Feminism in Scholarship on Africa?" Feminist Africa, no. 1. Available from http://www.feministafrica.org/.
Steady, Filomina Chioma, and Remie Toure, eds. 1995. Women and the United Nations. Rochester, NY: Schenkman.
Steady, Filomina Chioma. 1981. The Black Woman Cross-Culturally. Rochester, NY: Schenkman.
Sutherland, Addy, and Aminata Diwa, eds. 2005. Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Tamale, Sylvia. 1999. When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Tripp, Aili Mari. 2005. "Regional Networking as Transnational Feminism: African Experiences." Feminist Africa, no 4. Available from http://www.feministafrica.org/.
Gwendolyn Mikell
II. ASIAN
Europeans and North Americans have often been skeptical of feminism in Asia because of instances of women's oppression there such as domestic violence, dowry, and seclusion. Women's activism has a long history in Asian cultures albeit its distinctiveness from European and North American feminism.
The uniqueness of Asian feminism is based on:
- The conception of multiple sources of women's subjugation rather than patriarchy only;
- The recognition of imperialism and colonization as causes of gender oppression;
- A focus on collectivism instead of individualism;
- The rejection of the label feminism as a symbol of European and North American ideological domination.
Asian feminist perspectives are also called third-world feminism as it includes race, class or caste, sexuality, imperialism, gender, and the role of state in analyzing gender oppression. In many Asian societies, the common experiences of feudalism, traditions, colonization, and androcentric social and familial hierarchies reduced women to domestic subservience. Consequently, feminist activism historically concentrated on improving women's lots. Feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, conversely, stressed women's emancipation and empowerment and their entry into the core of national politics.
Feminism in Asia has traditionally been disparate along class lines, with mainly elite women occupying leadership roles. However, conditions of poverty have drawn feminist theorizing to Marxism, whereas the centers of action and debate are located in nongovernmental organizations (NGO) rather than academia.
EAST ASIA—JAPAN, KOREA, AND CHINA
Rapid industrialization after World War II, U.S. occupation of Japan, and the Korean War (1950–1953) shaped the women's movements in the two countries. Japanese feminists utilized their experiences of organizing for suffrage in the nineteenth century to agitate against the occupation and, later, to demilitarize U.S. bases. Simultaneously, women's groups worked to improve health care, food supplies, and social benefits for families. By the early 1950s Korean and Japanese women increasingly entered labor forces and, in 1956, Japan established its first female trade union. Nevertheless, a clash between pro-work and pro-motherhood forces polarized the fledgling Japanese feminist movement. In the early 1990s women regrouped to force the government to pass laws protecting part-time workers and child-care laws to support working mothers. Since then Japanese women's movements have taken up issues such as prostitution, trafficking, sex tourism, reproductive rights, and violence.
In Korea, workingwomen's conditions remained poor and marginalized, particularly in rural areas. In 1983 Korean women pressured the government to establish a special agency for women's welfare, the Korean Women's Development Institute, and in the early 1990s, they worked to pass laws ensuring labor equality. In both Korea and Japan, women's participation in political processes continues to climb.
Feminism in China can be traced back to the 1800s, when many women resisted marriage to live as independent workers. After the revolution in the 1950s, the communist government introduced laws to initiate gender equality in the marriage and labor structures to mobilize women to join the workforce. Most Chinese women's groups were established under the government's auspices. Nonetheless, the Chinese government's one-child policy to reduce population has encouraged violence against women and sex-selective abortions. With rising consumerism and unemployment in the post-Mao era, women are being sidelined in the labor force while traditional gender roles in the family are being resurrected.
SOUTHEAST ASIA—INDONESIA, MALAYSIA, SINGAPORE, THAILAND, PHILIPPINES, AND VIETNAM
Following globalization and growing affluence in Southeast Asia, a new class of urban, professional, workingwomen is exerting significant influence on the market and politics and has begun to scrutinize traditional gender disparity. But these critiques consciously reject European and North American models and position feminism within local cultures. For example, in Malaysia women's organizations such as Sisters in Islam (established in 1988) are engaged in seeking women's rights within an Islamic framework.
Since the 1980s Southeast Asian feminists have been challenging the working conditions of housemaids and women employed in multinational companies, domestic violence, polygamy, inequality within marriage, and lack of educational opportunities. In the Philippines feminists took leadership in ousting U.S. military bases in 1991. Antiprostitution and antitrafficking campaigns have occupied the center stage of women's activism in Thailand.
Vietnamese women's movements carry the legacies of the two Trung sisters (both died in 43 ce), who led an all female army against Chinese invaders in 40 ce, and of Bui Thi Xuan (d. 1802), a peasant-revolt leader in the eighteenth century. The first women's organization in Vietnam was formed in 1930. Vietnamese women played critical roles and held high-ranking positions in the rebellion against the French in the 1940s, in the war with the United States from 1964 to 1973, and against invasions by Cambodia and China in 1978 and 1979. The communist government has actively forwarded women's rights and endeavored to end patriarchal and feudal control. Women's participation has been vital in national reconstruction after the wars, and the government has passed several laws supporting workingwomen, particularly mothers.
CENTRAL ASIA—UZBEKISTAN, KYRGYZSTAN, AND KAZAKHSTAN
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, central Asian nations became independent and began restructuring their governances and economies. The resultant sociopolitical upheavals placed in jeopardy women's rights guaranteed during the Soviet regime. Even under communism the main culture of the region was Islamic, which is being vigorously reclaimed with various traditions affecting women, such as purdah and segregation, making a comeback.
The Soviet administration viewed feminism as socially divisive, and this attitude is prevalent in the early twenty-first century. The burgeoning women's movements are prioritizing issues of violence, reproductive rights, sexuality, and gender equality but have lost grounds in achieving equitable political representation. To dissociate from the past women's movement under the Soviet administration because of its ties to the Communist Party, contemporary women's movements have de-emphasized participation in political processes. Instead, central Asian women's movements are attempting to find a balance between their identities and roles as Muslims and feminists in society.
SOUTH ASIA—BANGLADESH, INDIA, PAKISTAN, SRI LANKA, AND NEPAL
Feminism in south Asia is inexorably linked to nationalism. Although women have historically played prominent roles in socioeconomics of the region, their organized political participation occurred during anticolonial struggles that led to sovereignty in the late 1940s. After independence several powerful women's NGOs operated in each country, such as Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (established in 1970), the National Federation of Indian Women (established in 1954), the Women's Action Forum in Pakistan (established in 1981), the Women's Foundation of Nepal (established in 1988), and the Voice of Women in Sri Lanka (established in 1978), often working simultaneously against repressive governmental policies and instituting supportive laws.
Although influenced by European and North American thought, south Asian feminist philosophies have been deliberately nested in indigenous cultural contexts. Feminist activism has centered on women's inclusion in political processes, economic advancement, issues of violence, and overall improvement of status. The theoretical bases of south Asian women's movements have generally been broad and have stressed intra- and extranational issues such as political repression, judicial insensitivity, law enforcement tyranny, neocolonialism, and globalization. The movements tend to work concurrently on legislative and nonlegislative solutions and redress. For example, mainly because of women's activism India passed The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act into law in 2005, whereas the majority of anti-HIV intervention is being led by regional NGOs. The movements are characterized by their nongovernmental and decentralized status as well as diversity in mass base, structure, administration, and focus.
South Asian nations have generated voluminous and varied feminist writings in indigenous languages and English that range from fiction to theory. The first feminist utopist writing in English, Sultana's Dream (1905), is credited to India's Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932). Susie Tharu and K. Lalita edited a valuable two-volume collection of women's writings from 600 bce to the 1990s in Women Writing in India (1991–1993). Although operating under harsh political conditions, such as civil war, armed insurrection, governmental corruption, theocratic stranglehold, and crushing poverty, women's movements for social and legal equality in south Asia have been vast, radical, and vibrant.
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM
Despite the diverse political situations in each country, feminist organizations in Asia have endeavored to forge regional alliances. Between 1990 and 1992 women's movements in Japan and Korea collaborated on the issue of Japan's exploitation of comfort women during wars. In 1996 Pakistan's Women's Action Forum formally apologized to Bangladeshi women for the Pakistani military's atrocities and rampant rape during the 1971 war that led to the formation of Bangladesh. In the 1990s Naripokkho of Bangladesh (established in 1983) created transnational collaboration among several nations including France, England, Canada, and the United States to facilitate the treatment of girls and women disfigured by acid thrown on them. Asian women's organizations continue to convene conferences and exchange programs to further such collaborative relationships.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Asian Development Bank. 2001. Country Briefing Paper: Women in Bangladesh. Programs Department (West).
Corcoran-Nantes, Yvonne. 2005. Lost Voices: Central Asian Women Confronting Transition. London: Zed Books.
Gelb, Joyce, and Marian Lief Palley, eds. 1994. Women of Japan and Korea: Continuity and Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Jayawardena, Kumari. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books.
Kumar, Radha. 1993. The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990. London: Routledge.
Robinson, Catherine A. 1999. Tradition and Liberation: The Hindu Tradition in the Indian Women's Movement. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Sen, Krishna, and Maila Stivens, eds. 1998. Gender and Power in Affluent Asia. London: Routledge.
Sisters in Islam. Available from http://www.sistersinislam.org.my/index.htm.
Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, eds. 1991–1993. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
Shamita Das Dasgupta
III. MIDDLE EASTERN
Middle Eastern feminism is a discourse and practice of educated and employed middle-class women, some of whom are active in women's organizations. Using a variety of legal and discursive strategies and calling themselves secular, Muslim, or Islamic, Middle Eastern feminists challenge women's institutionalized second-class citizenship and call for change in women's positions in the family, the polity, and the religious community. Feminists and women's organizations are rebelling non-violently against women's location in the private domain and men's control of the public domain. Their principal demands are (1) egalitarian family laws; (2) criminalization of domestic violence and other forms of violence against women, including "honor killings"; (3) nationality rights for women and their children; and (4) greater access to employment and participation in political decision making. The point of reference for Middle Eastern feminism is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), but some also use the Qur'an and early Islamic history to make the case for women's participation and rights. "Islamic feminists" call for women's right to ijtihad, or religious interpretation, and the reform of patriarchal Islamic jurisprudence.
HISTORY OF ISLAMIC FEMINISM
Middle Eastern feminism has existed since at least the early twentieth century, often in conjunction with nationalist or other progressive social movements. However, in the latter part of that century feminist activities became more focused on women and gender issues and more organized. That process arose in the context of sociode-mographic changes (urbanization, increased female educational attainment and salaried employment, declining fertility, the predominance of the nuclear family), political developments (the spread of fundamentalism as well as a gradual process of political liberalization in some of the countries in the region), and the global women's rights agenda.
Whereas the period from the 1950s to the 1970s saw women involved almost exclusively in official women's organizations or charitable associations, the period since the third United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985 saw the expansion of many types of women's organizations. State conservatism in some countries forced women's organizations and feminist leaders to assume a more independent stance than they might have taken in previous decades. For example, the preamble of the 1986 report of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association called on women "to unite, to close ranks and become a political and social force able to effect changes in prevailing systems, laws and legislation that will be beneficial for women and for all the people." A recommendation of the political committee was for the "release of general freedoms, particularly the freedoms of expression and organization; for respect of human rights for men and women; for a greater participation by women in political decision-making, and for an equal share with men in the authority exercised both in the state and the family" (cited in Toubia 1988). The first meeting of Arab women's nongovernmental organizations in Amman, Jordan, in November 1994 made similar recommendations.
ISLAMIC WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS
Women's organizations include the traditional charitable or service organizations, professional associations, women-in-development (WID) nongovernmental organizations, research centers and women's studies institutes, women's auxiliaries of political parties, and women's rights or feminist organizations. All are contributing to the development of civil society in the region, although the feminist organizations perhaps are doing this most consciously. For example, Moroccan feminist organizations such as l'Union d'action feminin and l'Association démocratique des femmes marocaines launched a campaign in the early 1990s to reform the patriarchal family law, the Moudawana, in the face of state lack of interest and organized Islamist opposition. In the latter part of the 1990s a more conducive political environment enabled a feminist-state alliance that succeeded in legislating a more egalitarian family law in 2003.
The Lebanese League for Women's Rights runs candidates for political office, and the Beirut-based Women's Court launched highly visible campaigns "to resist violence against women" in 1995, 1998, and 2000. North Africa's Collectif 95 Maghreb Egalité was the major organizer of the "Muslim Women's Parliament" at the NGO Forum that preceded the fourth United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in September 1995; later it formulated an alternative "egalitarian family code" and promoted women's political participation. North African feminist action also is concerned with the social rights of working-class and poor women. Turkey is home to the Association to Support Women Candidates (Kader), Flying Broom, Women for Women's Human Rights, the Foundation for the Support of Women's Work, and Anakultur (a feminist organization for rural women). Palestine's Legal Aid and Counseling Center lobbies against family violence. The Jerusalem Center for Women promotes women's rights and peaceful solutions to the conflict with Israel. Birzeit University's Institute of Women's Studies seeks to produce new generations of feminist leaders in the Middle East.
Middle Eastern feminism also may be seen in literary and cultural efforts such as the publication of books, journals, and films. Feminist publishing houses include Cairo's Noor (which organized the first Arab Women's Book Fair in 1995), Morocco's Edition le Fennec, and Iran's Roshangaran Press and the Cultural Center of Women, along with journals and magazines such as Morocco's 8 Mars, Iran's Zanan [Women], and Turkey's Partisi. The quarterly feminist journal Al-Raida is published by the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World at the Lebanese American University. The Women's Library in Istanbul contains research and documentation on women and gender issues. Skillfully circumventing censorship, Iranian filmmakers, male and female alike, have produced internationally acclaimed films with feminist themes.
Well known in their own countries as well as in international feminist circles, Middle Eastern feminists include Algeria's Khalida Messaoudi and Boutheina Cheriet; Iran's Shahla Lahiji, Noushin Ahmadi-Khorassani, Parvin Ardalan, and Shadi Sadr; Jordan's Haifa Abu Ghazaleh and Rana Husseini; Lebanon's Lamia Shehadeh and the late Laure Moghaizel; Morocco's Latifa Jbabdi, Rabéa Naciri, and Nouzha Skalli; Palestine's Hanan Ashrawi, Zahira Kamal, and Souheir Azzouni; Tunisia's Bochra Bel Haj Hmida, and Esma Ben Hamida; and Turkey's Sirin Tekeli and Pinar Ilkaraccan.
GOALS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Campaigns for women's rights have succeeded in effecting legal reforms and policy changes. In Iran, as a result of a well-publicized case of a girl's death at the hands of her brother and father, feminist lawyers and activists challenged the automatic granting of child custody to the father in the aftermath of divorce. In 1999 Egyptian feminists secured the reversal of Article 291, which exonerated rapists who married their victims. Egyptian feminists and public health activists also have formed or worked with coalitions against female circumcision. In December 2001 the Jordanian cabinet approved several amendments to the Civil Status Law, raising the legal age for marriage to eighteen for both males and females and granting women legal recourse to divorce. An amendment to the penal code makes perpetrators of honor crimes liable to the death penalty. However, judges are allowed to commute the sentences of the convicted, and the practice continues, with families using underage men as the perpetrators of the violence.
In some countries feminists are contributing to national dialogues and political debates on democracy and human rights, and women's organizations are building coalitions with human rights organizations to expand civil society and citizenship rights. Algerian feminists not only are active in the struggle for modernization of family law and against religious extremism but also have formulated a position on democracy that is based on their experience with the violent Islamist movement of the late 1980s and the 1990s.
OBSTACLES AND CHALLENGES
Feminism in the Middle East continues to confront obstacles and challenges. In addition to the resource constraints of many women's organizations, feminism faces unreliable or patriarchal governments, societal conservatism, the preoccupation of Islamist movements with women's appearance and behavior, and cultural debates about "authenticity" versus westernization. Nevertheless, domestic and global developments have produced women's movements that challenge popular understandings and legal codes regarding the public sphere and the private sphere and that demand more access to the public sphere, full and equal participation in the national community, and full and equal rights in the family. Those gender-based demands not only would extend existing rights to women but also broaden the political agenda and redefine citizenship in the region.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Afary, Janet. 1996. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, & the Origins of Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Al-Ali, Nadje. 2000. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women's Movement. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Arat, Yesim. 1994. "Toward a Democratic Society: The Women's Movement in Turkey in the 1980s." Women's Studies International Forum 17(2/3): 241-248.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. 2006. Special issue: "Women and the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa," guest editors Valentine M. Moghadam and Fatima Sadiqi. Vol. 2, number 2.
Mernissi, Fatima. 1987. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Moghadam, Valentine M. 2003. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. 2nd edition. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner.
Toubia, Nahid, ed. 1988. Women of the Arab World: The Coming Challenge. London: Atlantic Highlands.
Valentine M. Moghadam
IV. WESTERN
The term Western feminism is controversial because the appellation Western is ambiguous—does it name a geographical place, a political or ideological hegemony, or a state of cultural, historical, or racial homogeneity? Does it preserve imperialist divisions between the "West" and "the rest," enabling a series of exclusive and exclusionary valuations along axes of superiority/inferiority, civilized/uncivilized, and developed/underdeveloped? Is it the enabling fiction of racially white global dominance in the fields of politics, culture, law, and economics? Are Western and white analogous? Who is included in the category—second- and third-generation immigrant populations with complex forms of national identification, resident nonwhite populations, people of mixed race? What implications are there for its use in a postcolonial context in which the terms Western and Eastern have been rigorously critiqued? And what of the differences between the countries that are conventionally considered to be Western? Yet the term may have some valency insofar as it now necessitates the kinds of qualifications suggested here and thus recalls its specific history. The term feminism is also problematic insofar as it suggests a homogenous political movement through time and space. The history of feminism, however, indicates a multiplicity of feminisms that offer significant differences of emphasis, context, and motivation however much they share the common goal of female emancipation and equality.
Bringing the terms feminism and Western together raises yet another series of difficulties, not least that some feminist approaches have been explicitly opposed to the liberalist frameworks of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment within which the West was established as the dominant global power. Nonetheless, Western feminism is both created by and resistant to the form of post-Enlightenment individualism that established the autonomous, rational individual as the basis upon which the basic rights of citizenship might be secured. Western feminism, in addressing the unequal status of women, has necessarily aligned itself with the emancipatory discourse of Western liberalism, which has proved to be a powerful tool for feminists seeking to establish gender parity. It has also required, however, acquiescence with the principle of the sameness of individuals, and this has often been at the expense of the specificity of a more plural understanding of women and the differences between them. Further, some feminists believe that Enlightenment individualism inscribes patriarchal values and is thus of limited worth. Consequently, Western feminism invokes a complex history of both complicity and resistance, and if it has any definitional utility it is with regard to embodying and clarifying this tension.
Western feminism also names a specific set of discourses that have historically been promoted as universal. To recognize some forms of feminism as Western, therefore, is to acknowledge the particularity of feminist programs produced within the West and to resist both the imposition of a homogenous narrative of feminist achievements on non-Western contexts as well as the assumption that Western feminist analyses and objectives are shared with non-Western movements. At the more localized level, however, the term is unsatisfactory inasmuch as it obscures the huge regional and political differences between the feminisms that operate in the countries that constitute what is, at least in everyday use, understood to be the West. Moreover, it appropriates those forms of feminism that are critical of the ethnocentrism of Western feminism and may identify as Western but are nonetheless produced in dialogue with Western intellectual and political environments. For the purposes of this entry, therefore, the term Western feminism will refer to those feminist discourses that are inscribed within or conducted with reference to liberalism and that operate within those regions conventionally considered to be Western, namely western Europe, North America, and Australasia.
There are two main approaches to discussing the development of Western feminism and delineating between the various feminisms that constitute it. The first offers a chronological treatment of Western feminism from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, while the second offers a system of classification of the main forms of feminist thought and activity within Western feminism.
THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN FEMINISM
The historical development of Western feminism is generally discussed in terms of three main "waves," each of which constitutes a stage in the form of feminist activity. The chronology and thematic organization is somewhat loose, however, and each stage overlaps with the others.
First-wave feminism is usually dated from the mid-1850s to the beginning of World War II and was characterized by its liberalist stance insofar as it sought, through political activism, the full citizenship rights of universal suffrage, self-determination, access to higher education, and ownership of property.
Second-wave feminism, often considered synonymous with the women's liberation movement, refers to the reemergence of feminist activity in the aftermath of the World War II until the 1990s. Significant developments in the first half of the twentieth century prepared the ground: Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex (1949), reinvigorating debates regarding the status of women rendered dormant during World Wars I and II; women's suffrage had been achieved in most Western countries; and women's participation in higher education had also undergone a period of rapid expansion.
Like the first wave, the second wave was largely defined by its liberal agenda, but expanded its focus to include a vision of female solidarity; demands for equal pay; interventions in the spheres of reproduction, sexuality, and cultural representation; and the more substantial theorization of patriarchy. Many of the forms of feminism outlined below emerged during the second wave, but as Elizabeth Weed (1989) argues, "for all the varieties within the [feminist] movement … the 'second wave' … was inscribed within the liberal system of individual rights … and the various strains of feminism have had to engage in one way or another with the terms of that inscription. It is in this sense that 'liberal feminism' is the mainstream feminism" (p. xii). Several defining features and concerns of second-wave feminism rapidly emerged. First, all feminists, regardless of their particular approaches, agreed that in societies that divide the sexes into binarized cultural, economic, or political spheres, women are less valued than men. Second, key concepts such as patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny were formulated as ways of theorizing about the purportedly universal oppression of women. Third, autonomous female identities were suggested in which women's bodies and conventionally "feminine" activities were prioritized and represented as positive in contrast to the centuries-old portrayal of femininity as a source of danger, impurity, and evil. Finally, feminists acted on the principle that women could consciously and collectively change their social position and identity whether through advocating for equal employment, reproductive, and sexual rights, or by challenging and resisting male violence against women, pornography, sexual exploitation, unequal domestic arrangements, and all other forms of gender-based discrimination.
Despite broad agreement regarding the assessment of the position of women, considerable disagreements began to emerge among feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminists of color, who confronted both sexual and racial discrimination, and lesbian feminists challenged the movement; both groups argued that second-wave feminism was dominated by white, middle-class, and heterosexual agendas that failed to address the multiple axes of oppression in the intersections between class, race and sexuality. The failure of the leaders of the women's liberation movement to take up the concerns of their fellow feminists resulted in the splintering of the movement. If feminism was losing its identity as a unified political movement, however, it was beginning to make its presence felt in universities as feminists recognized the powerful role of educational institutions in shaping cultural values and meanings and the importance of critiquing their exclusion of women's contributions. Women's studies departments and programs were established in universities starting in the late 1960s, and by the early 1980s the field had been an established discipline for approximately a decade. It was the combination of the critiques of feminism on the grounds of racism and heteronormativity and its increasing academicization that contributed to a decisive shift against the movement's liberalist roots and produced what is now referred to as the third wave.
The emergence of third-wave feminism in the 1990s was the result of an explosion of theoretical perspectives informed by poststructural, postcolonial, and queer theory, each of which problematized the dominant (European) liberal presentation of individualism as homogenous and universal. Because of its roots in liberalism, feminism was by no means exempt from these critiques. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991), for example, offered a powerful criticism of the "colonialist move" in some Western feminist scholarship on women in the "Third World," particularly insofar as it appropriated the "production of the 'third world woman' as a singular monolithic subject" (p. 51). She was particularly critical of the presumption in Western feminist scholarship of a conflation between women as historical subjects, and "woman" as a homogenous category of analysis on the basis of presumed shared oppression.
While many of the concerns of the second wave have continued to be important, Western feminist activity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries marks both a self-reflexive turn and a mature phase in feminist activity as it seeks to address the previously hegemonic assumptions of the second wave. It registers a shift in the common preoccupations that have informed debates between feminists. Most notably, there has been a movement away from the denunciation of gender inequalities toward the poststructural theorization of discursive constructions of gender. In addition, third-wave feminists advocate a sustained examination of hegemonic representations of masculinity and a more nuanced understanding of the often-significant differences between women in the contexts of class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and economic status.
TYPOLOGIES OF FEMINISMS
Western feminism is generally divided into six main types—liberal, Marxist, socialist, radical, psychoanalytic, and poststructural—each identified on the basis of their central approach (see Tong 1998 for a thorough survey). Before discussing the ways in which these types differ from one another, it is important to note that the various categories regularly overlap and that they all share in common a concern with the causes of the oppression of women and suggest means through which it might be overcome.
Liberal feminism is committed to the full equality of women and men, arguing that this can be achieved through legislation and social reform. It assumes the fundamental sameness of men and women on the basis of the Enlightenment universal individualism and proposes the reformation rather than the dismantling of social systems and institutions that have hitherto discriminated against or excluded women. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is considered to be the classic expression of the liberal feminist perspective. The liberal feminist tradition was continued during the 1960s and 1970s by feminists such as Betty Friedan, who in 1966 founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in order to campaign for women's rights.
Marxist feminism disagrees with the liberal analysis of both the causes of women's inequality and the means for overcoming it. Instead, it suggests that the cause is capitalism, in particular the ways in which it promotes private ownership of property and the means of production by a relatively small number of men, in turn producing the class system and ensuring women's social and economic inequality. The solution proposed is the replacement of capitalism with a socialist system with the effect that women would achieve an economically equal status with men. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), in which she identified "sex class"—the condition of women as an oppressed class—is an early classic of Marxist feminism. Other well-known Marxist feminists include Michèle Barrett and Christine Delphy.
Radical feminists are critical of both liberal and Marxist perspectives, arguing that the analysis of and solution to women's disempowerment must be more far-reaching than either the liberals or Marxists suggest. Rather than capitalism or institutional sexism, it is patriarchy—understood as a complete and universal social system that places men as hierarchically dominant—that lies at the root of women's oppression, and it must therefore be completely dismantled. For many radical feminists, liberalism and socialism are simply different expressions of patriarchy, and thus to adopt any one of these perspectives is to fail to address the fundamental cause of women's oppression. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) is an exemplar of radical feminist analysis in which she examines patriarchy as a socially conditioned belief system that masquerades as the natural order, showing how patriarchal attitudes and systems have penetrated such areas as literature, philosophy, and psychology. Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, and Catharine A. MacKinnon are also considered to be influential proponents of radical feminism.
Socialist feminism emerged in response to the Marxist prioritization of the proletariat struggle over that of women. It offers a synthetic analysis of the causes of women's oppression combining elements of the Marxist perspective with the radical feminist view that sexist oppression is endemic in society. Alison M. Jaggar (1983), for example, argues that it is necessary to interrelate the complex forms of women's oppression rather than focusing on a single cause, and she uses the Marxist concept of "alienation" in order to show that within capitalist systems the various roles demanded of women lead to their oppression rather than their full integration within society.
Psychoanalytic feminism attributes the root of women's oppression to the Oedipal crisis suggested by Sigmund Freud, whereby individuals are created as gendered selves as a result of their induction into the world of regulated cultural discourses through the intervening force of their fathers, a movement requiring the negation of the mother. From a feminist perspective psychoanalysis offers a compelling explanation for women's secondary social position within patriarchal societies and indeed for the existence of patriarchy (see Mitchell 1974). Some feminists argue that patriarchy is shown by psychoanalysis to be a product of the male imagination and is therefore open to challenge and transformation (see Mitchell 1974). Others, such as Sherry B. Ortner (1975), Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976), and Nancy Chodorow (1974), argue that if some form of Oedipal crisis is inescapable then its values and meanings can be realigned more positively toward women through dual parenting and women's greater participation in the workforce, leading to those characteristics traditionally associated with weak and dangerous femininity becoming meaningless. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis has tended to validate essentialist and universal gender idealizations, aligning femininity with passivity and negativity and masculinity with agency and normativity. It is thus a dangerous tool for feminists to wield without undertaking critical adjustments to its core propositions, a task that has been undertaken by Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, and Elizabeth Grosz.
Each of the feminist approaches discussed above shares a liberal provenance in common. In particular, each provides a unified account of women's oppression and suggests total solutions that mark them out as modernist in orientation. The final school of feminist thought—poststructural feminism—is distinctly at odds with modernist approaches insofar as it refuses to offer a metanarrative of women's oppression but rather suggests that there is no single cause for women's subordination, and that, therefore, there can be no unified approach toward overcoming it. Poststructural feminists are expressly critical of liberalist feminism, suggesting that its efforts to provide unified accounts of women's oppression instantiate phallocentric modes of thought. They also claim that sexual and gender identities are not inherent properties of individuals but are rather constructed through (phallogocentric) language. As such, poststructural feminism derives much of its own account from the intellectual strategies of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, and to some extent, therefore, it too can be charged with taking up the discourse of the "fathers." By far the most influential proponent of feminism in this vein is Judith Butler (particularly in her 1990 book, Gender Trouble [2nd edition, 1999]).
Poststructural feminists also argue that the promotion of any feminist project on the basis of the assumed commonality of women's experiences is unfeasible because it ignores differences between women rooted in the intersections of race, class, and sexuality. Here they share much in common with those feminists who identify the ethnocentric bias within much Western feminism, where whiteness is figured as both normative and invisible. Hazel Carby (1982), for example, has argued that Western feminism has not included an awareness of the different nature of black women's experiences and that consequently many of the feminist insights regarding the sources of women's oppression are inadequate. She suggests, however, that a supplemental inclusion of non-white perspectives in feminist work would not solve the problem but rather that "the process of accounting for [black women's] historical and contemporary position does, in itself, challenge the use of some of the central categories and assumptions of recent mainstream feminist thought" (p. 213).
Poststructural feminism in turn has been strongly criticized for overemphasizing differences between women and suggesting that the category "woman" is merely a product of phallocentric discourse and thus an empty signifier. As Naomi Schor (1987) has argued, "Whether or not the 'feminine' is a male construct, a product of a phallocentric culture destined to disappear, in the present order of things we cannot afford not to press its claims even as we dismantle the conceptual systems which support it" (p. 97). Perhaps the defining feature of Western feminism, therefore, is likely to remain for the foreseeable future a productive struggle between the claim for the common identity of women and the respect of difference.
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Sîan Hawthorne