In Munich, Germany, a poster printed for Women’s Day on March 8, 1914 demands the
right to vote for women.
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Beijing Plus Five
Five years after a historic women’s conference
in Beijing that gathered some 30,000 participants from 189 countries, the United
Nations General Assembly will be holding a special session in New York from June
5-9, 2000. The goal of the meeting, entitled “Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development
and Peace for the Twenty-First Century,” is to take stock of progress made in implementing
the Platform for Action adopted in 1995. Divided into 12 areas of critical concern,
this set of commitments calls for economic opportunity and security for women, quality
education and health care, full political and economic participation and the promotion
of human rights, among others. Meanwhile, women are on the march to demand an end
to poverty and violence. Launched on March 8 by the Fédération des
femmes du Québec, the World March of Women gathers some 4,000 groups from
153 countries. The initiative culminates at the United Nations in New York on October
17, 2000, the World Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
• www.un.org/
womenwatch/daw
• www.ffq.qc.ca
• Changing
the World Step by Step. Mosaic
in Tribute to Women’s Struggles Worldwide.
A collection of empowering experiences published by The World March of Women
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For a long time I have hesitated
to write a book on women. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it
is not new.
Simone
de Beauvoir,
French writer (1908-1986)
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Women fought for their
rights throughout the twentieth century. In the past several decades, their struggle
has truly become global, but all is far from won
 We often hear that this will
be the century of women, in light of the tremendous strides that have been made in
the past thirty years or so. Although it is far too soon to confirm this prediction,
it can safely be asserted that the twentieth century was marked by their struggle
to leave the home, where they were confined by the ancestral division of roles along
gender lines. Around the world, women have campaigned to win the rights they have
been denied and to build, side-by-side with men, the future of the planet.
True, such struggles had already been waged in the past, although they were deliberately
shunned in official historical accounts. But the brief revolts of this special “minority”,
which accounts for over half of humanity, did not change the place of women in their
societies. They may have ruled the roost, sometimes enjoying undeniable respect,
but nevertheless they were still born to serve men and bring their husbands’ descendants
into the world.
Education:
their first struggle
Yet, at the
start of the twentieth century, the traditional distribution of roles, seemingly
legitimised by every religion and frozen in a “natural” order, began to crumble under
the two-pronged assault of modernisation and women’s struggle for their collective
emancipation. They waged many battles to gradually obtain, despite setbacks, a change
in their status—which is still far from achieved.
The first struggle of the twentieth century was for education. In 1861, a young woman
graduated in France with a baccalaureate, a highschool leaving exam, for the first
time. In 1900, the first female university was founded in Japan. The same year, girls
won the right to secondary education in Egypt and the first girls’ school opened
in Tunisia. Young women who could made the most of these new educational opportunities,
not only to become better household managers and good educators for their children,
as the main discourse of the period suggests, but also to do something unprecedented:
to enter the forbidden spheres of public life, to exercise citizenship and to participate
in politics.
Throughout the twentieth century, women waged a battle on two fronts: by fighting
for their own rights and taking part in the major social and political emancipation
movements. In 1917, the Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontaï became the world’s
first woman cabinet minister. African American Rosa Parks triggered the civil rights
movement by refusing to give up her seat to a white man on an Alabama bus in 1955.
Djamila Boupacha was a heroine of Algeria’s war for independence. Women were entirely
committed to the goals of these movements but seldom received anything in return
for participating in them. Once their countries’ new masters took power, they often
found themselves sent back to the kitchen. But they continued fighting for their
own rights, and it is on this front that they achieved their greatest victories.
The earliest feminist movements, which first appeared in the West in the late nineteenth
century, focused on workplace and civil rights issues. Industry needed women’s labour,
which was underpaid in comparison with that of their male counterparts. ‘Equal pay
for equal work!’ demanded American and European women, who began setting up their
own trade unions and organizing strikes. They made unquestionable strides, but after
more than one century of struggle, most women around the world still earn less pay
for equal work.
The
right to vote
The second
objective of the twentieth century’s pioneers was participation in public life, which
hinged first and foremost on having the right to vote. The struggle was long and
sometimes violent, as shown by the British “suffragettes” who demonstrated in the
streets or Chinese women who made their demands heard by invading their country’s
new parliament in 1912. Everywhere, the fierce resistance of the political world
progressively yielded to determined women’s movements.
Scandinavia is where women first won the right to vote and to run for election, with
Finland leading the way in 1906. The First World War thrust them into the forefront,
with most European women winning the right to vote in 1918 and 1919, although French
and Italian women had to wait until after the Second World War to at last be recognized
as citizens. Outside the West, women also organized to demand their rights. Groups
were founded in Turkey, Egypt and India. In 1930, the first congress of women from
the Near and Middle East gathered in Damascus to demand equality. Throughout this
period, women everywhere declared that, outside of motherhood, they had the right
to be just like men, and that men could not deny them this right.
Control
over their own bodies
For a while,
women’s rights movements took a back seat to the Second World War and liberation
struggles in the European colonies. The fight against fascism and, after 1945, colonialism,
mobilized all their energy. Women distinguished themselves in these struggles, but
that did not suffice to establish their rights as a gender. However, the world continued
to change. With independence, many women in the South won access to schooling, salaried
employment and, in a few exceptional cases, the closed world of politics. In Western
countries, the post-war period saw them enter the work force on a massive scale.
The gap between social reality and the discriminatory laws defended by exclusively
male power structures grew wider.
In the West, the second generation of feminists emerged in the wake of the libertarian
movements of 1968. Picking up where their elders left off, they broadened the scope
of their demands, for late-twentieth century feminists no longer aspired to the right
to be “just like men”. Challenging the claim of the “white male” to represent universality,
their goal was to achieve equality while remaining distinct as women. The women’s
liberation movement that first emerged in the American middle-class claimed the right
to control one’s own body. Feminists fought for contraception and abortion rights
in many countries where one or both were against the law, and for autonomy and equality
within the couple. “The personal is political,” proclaimed women inspired by Marxism
and psychoanalysis. “Workers of the world, who washes your socks?” chanted demonstrators
in the streets of Paris in the 1970s. In France, the Veil law legalizing abortion
unleashed emotional debate in 1974.
Many Third World women could not identify with the struggles being waged in the West
and insisted on leading their own battles at their own pace. However, these Western
feminist movements breathed new life into the cause. Recognizing the changes and
proclaiming their intention to accelerate them, the United Nations declared 1975
“international women’s year” and organized the first international women’s conference
in Mexico City.
Already proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, sexual equality
was reasserted in 1979 by the Convention on the Abolition of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women, which became a precious emancipation tool in the North as well as
the South. At UN conferences in Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in
1995, women from both hemispheres found common ground, demanding the right to “have
a child if I want it, when I want it,” rejecting Malthusian principles and claiming
their place in political bodies that until then had decided the world’s future without
them, struggling against religious fundamentalism that jeopardizes their modest gains.
Misogyny
of the political class
Of course,
the struggle of Kuwaiti women against those who have denied them the right to vote
or Indian women against the forced abortion of female fœtuses is not the same as
American women’s battle against their own fundamentalists or French women’s campaign
against the misogyny of the political class. Women’s movements take different approaches
depending on the continent and do not necessarily have the same priorities, but the
struggle has nonetheless become global during the past several decades. In the last
twenty-five years, women have gradually increased their presence in public life,
although it can hardly be said that the doors are wide open for them. From Africa
to Asia, women’s organizations have multiplied and acquired experience.
But their victories remain incomplete and the future is uncertain. From the nightmare
of Afghan women to the ways in which equality is resisted in the so-called most advanced
countries, the obstacles show that there is still a long way to go. Will women see
the end of the struggle in this century that has just begun, the one which supposedly
belongs to them?
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