Women Resist Globalization: Mobilizing for Livelihood and Rights

by Sheila Rowbotham (Editor), Stephanie Linkogle (Editor)

Globalization has intensified the pressures on poor women. They have resisted in both the North and the South in movements that are exclusively female and in others where women play a significant part.

This book brings together scholars and organizers to record and analyze women's grassroots activism in two key claims to livelihood and human rights. Through cases ranging from the British miners' strike to making gender central to the Guatemalan peace process, the book documents activists challenging the boundaries of prevailing assumptions of work, environment, reproduction, community, democracy and indeed politics. It contributes to the ongoing debate about the scope of women's movements, while demonstrating how women's activism around needs and rights is a crucial element in the global struggle for equality and justice.

Essential reading for students and academics in women's studies, development, politics, sociology, geography and labour studies - as well as for activists everywhere.

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Sheila Rowbotham is a British socialist feminist theorist and writer.

Rowbotham was born in Leeds (in present-day West Yorkshire), the daughter of a salesman for an engineering company and an office clerk. From an early age, she was deeply interested in history. She has written that traditional political history "left her cold", but she credited Olga Wilkinson, one of her teachers, with encouraging her interest in social history by showing that history "belonged to the present, not to the history textbooks".

Rowbotham attended St Hilda's College at Oxford and then the University of London. She began her working life as a teacher in comprehensive schools and institutes of higher or Adult education. While attending St. Hilda's College, Rowbotham found her syllabus with its heavy focus on political history to be of no interest to her. Through her involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and various socialist circles including the Labour Party's youth wing, the Young Socialists, Rowbotham was introduced to Karl Marx's ideas. Already on the left, Rowbotham was converted to Marxism. Soon disenchanted with the direction of party politics she immersed herself in a variety of left-wing campaigns, including writing for the radical political newspaper Black Dwarf. In the 1960s, Rowbotham was one of the founders and leaders of the History Workshop movement associated with Ruskin College.

Towards the end of the 1960s she had become involved in the growing Women’s Liberation Movement (also known as Second-wave feminism) and, in 1969, published her influential pamphlet "Women's Liberation and the New Politics", which argued that Socialist theory needed to consider the oppression of women in cultural as well as economic terms. She was heavily involved in the conference Beyond the Fragments (eventually a book), which attempted to draw together democratic socialist and socialist feminist currents in Britain. Between 1983 and 1986, Rowbotham served as the editor of Jobs for Change, the newspaper of the Greater London Council.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Ava Cairns · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope you don't feel hesitation to read this book because it was published in 2001.
It is only increasingly relevant, and the organizations, people, concepts, and history mentioned in this book, I believe, are important to learn about.
Also, I recommend searching all of these brilliant authors (and organizers mentioned) up!
The chapters, after the introduction, are as follows:
Facets of Emancipation: Women in Movement from the Eighteenth Century to the Present by Sheila Rowbotham
Uncommon Women and the Common Good: Women and Environmental Protest by Temma Kaplan
Women, 'Community' and the British Miners' Strike of 1984-85 by Meg Allen
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Women's Self-Mobilization to Overcome Poverty in Uganda by Sylvia Tamale
Adithi: Creasing Economic and Social Alternatives by Viji Srinivasan
New Roots for Rights: Women's Responses to Population and Developmental Policies by Navtej K. Purewal
Nicaraguan Women in the Age of Globalization by Stephanie Linkogle
Sexual Politics in Indonesia: From Soekarno's Old Order to Soeharto's New Order by Saskia E. Wieringa
Creating Alternative Spaces: Black Women in Resistance (Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters interviewed by Paminder Parbha)
Individual and Community Rights Advocacy Forum: Campaigning for Women's Rights in Papua New Guinea by Orovu Sepoe
Implementation of the Gender Demands Included in the Guatemala Peace Accords: Lessons Learned by Clara Jimeno
So, what does it mean to say that women 'resist' globalization? It means a number of things.
Part of it stems from how:
"limited concerns about public welfare have always been under global capitalism, the extension of the market economy to virtually every remote atoll or mountain village has revealed the ties governments have to multinational corporations. Neoliberalism, the most recent form of global capitalism, has confronted notions of the public good with plans for privatization of all productive resources" (pg. 30).
To explain why the privatization is something many women resist, here is a statement from the Third World Women's Conference against APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation):
"Privatisation of health care is a violation of women's basic human rights to total well-being by denying them access to safe, appropriate, affordable, high quality preventative and curative health care. It also commodifies reproductive health needs. The population control policies and methods together with the dumping of harmful and experimental contraceptives have increased the risk to women's lives" (pg. 102).
Globalization has also further constrained "women's contributions to the subsistence economy" ~Maria Mies (1986), pg. 103.
Globalization has "extended the reach of capitalist institutions and secured the hegemony of the 'market'" (pg. 118).
However, the parts of the book that I wish to focus on have to do more with "women's resistance and reconstruction" than globalization. After all, the resistance to globalization from women's movements should remind us that these women are living and acting in spite of globalization. They are, for example, micro-financing, leading in their local communities, and participating even within a society that believes in their passivity.
In the US, for example, back in the spring of 2000, anti-racism environmental justice was the purpose of the Mothers Organized to Stop Environmental Sins (MOSES). Starting in Winona, Texas, and led by African American women, the group marched "from one contaminated community to another across the USA" (pg. 28).
But, as the authors point out, the "relationship between popular concepts of 'environment' and 'justice'" came long before the 2000s (pg. 38). In the 1980s, in Warren County, North Carolina, a group of low-income Black Americans "resisted a government plan to put a toxic waste dump in their district." Soon, white working-class people in the North connected with this group over the issue of PCB. The story then follows that toxic waste remained in the roadways. To find out how individuals like Dollie Burwell resisted this contamination, go to Chapter 3 in this book (by Temma Kaplan).
I highly, highly recommend this book. Although the writing may be regarded as inaccessible, this book stands apart from other academic books because the book is in direct conversation with organizers, such as Pragna Patel. And the book, in my opinion, pays more attention to the disenfranchised women in rural communities than to the women in NGOs, who, depending on the NGO, may not even be from the country the NGO is based in.
I will say, however, there are some NGOs mentioned in this book that seem to be locally run, such as in Nicaragua.