Women’s international Democratic Federation,the ‘Third World’ and the Global Cold War from the late-1950s to the mid-1960s

ABSTRACT

This article examines the work of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) with women from Africa, Asia and Latin America. It analyzes their role in the WIDF’s decision-making process and activities during a period marked by decolonization and the intensification of women’s rights activism outside Europe. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the extent to which the WIDF’s official position on support for the rights of women in the Global South was translated into the practical work of organization. The article is based on materials from Moscow archives that have hitherto not been explored in research on the WIDF. It shows that, in spite of the WIDF’s formal anti-colonial stance, women from the Global South were not always given a voice or able to insert their demands into WIDF policy.     

Where angels fear to tread?: ‘Third world women’ and ‘development’

Male Bias in the Development Process, edited by Diane Elson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Pp.viii + 215. £29.95 (hardback). ISBN 0 7190 2555 9

Gender, Development and Identity: An Ethiopian Study, by Helen Pankhurst. London: Zed Books, 1992. Pp.216. £29.95 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 1 85649 157 9 and 158 7

Where Women are Leaders: The SEWA Movement in India, by Kalima Rose. London: Zed Books, 1992. Pp.286. £32.95 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 1 85649 083 1084 X

In debates between feminists from South and North it has been argued that Western feminists implicitly disparage ‘third world women’ by representing them as ‘sexually oppressed’. Further, it has been argued, ‘third world women's’ political struggles are trivialised when these women are discursively homogenised. It is argued here that while there is some truth in these assertions. Southern feminists should beware of cultural ‘fundamentalism’. However, their emphasis on the importance of socio‐cultural analysis is applauded, especially if we are to understand Southern economic contexts. Socio‐cultural analyses do not lead away from economic issues: they provide more explanatory variables and more complex models.     

‘The Injustice of the Woman's Vote’: opposition to female suffrage after World War I

Winning the vote in 1918 for British women over the age of thirty and, in 1928, on equal terms with men, did not mean that the controversy over the legitimacy and soundness of women's suffrage ceased to exist during the interwar period. In the context of the backlash against egalitarian feminism, many men and women remained opposed to women's suffrage. This article presents the views of three individual women, Arabella Kenealy, Charlotte Cowdroy and Charlotte Haldane, who, although they held diverging views on politics and feminism, agreed that female suffrage might have adverse consequences for the future of Britain. They shared the widely accepted views on the disappearance of sex differences and on the danger of ‘race degeneration’, which led them to advance critical views on female suffrage.     

Peasant ‘Participation’, Rural Property and the State in Western Mexico

It is argued here that development studies tend to ignore the ways in which external interventions become embedded within existing fields of power and are influenced by past experiences. This explains to a large extent the failure of many so-called ‘participatory’ programmes. Crucial changes introduced by the Mexican Agrarian Law in 1992 are examined, with particular reference to the impact and grassroots perception of new ‘participatory’ styles of government intervention. The latter process is illustrated by means of peasant–state interaction on an ejido in Jalisco, where ‘local participation’ that is central to government programmes ‘imposed from above’ reinforces stereotypes such as the ‘corrupt’, ‘ignorant’ official and the ‘lazy’, ‘distrustful’ peasant. Accordingly, encounters between state officials and smallholding peasants in the ejido display a combination of trust/distrust and cooperation/resistance.     

Pushing Dualisms and Differences: From ‘Equality versus Difference’ to ‘Nonmimetic Sharing’ and ‘Staying with the Trouble’

Abstract

Critically revisiting the ‘equality versus difference’ dualism that is inscribed in the feminist canon of the last decades is an important task for feminist ethico-political discussions today. The theoretico-political tension between claims of equality and difference still troubles feminist discussions and thus needs to be addressed by contemporary research. Yet, moving beyond the persisting antagonism cannot be done by either moving outside the problematic relation or by choosing one term over the other. It is, as Joan W. Scott noted, impossible to choose between equality and difference, so that other ways of tackling the problem are needed. This article suggests a new line of flight for feminist politics in respect to this founding paradox from a feminist new materialist/posthuman(ist) perspective. Via an affirmative reading of Irigaray's cosmopolitical concern of Sharing the World (2008) and a critical investigation into the structuring ‘anthropological limit’ (Derrida) of her sexual difference thinking, the author pushes the dualistic framework of equality versus difference towards a thought of ‘nonmimetic sharing’ and ‘staying with the trouble’. In her argument, she turns to the differential worldings of Grosz's ‘differing’, Barad's ‘quantum’ and Haraway's ‘terran’ in order to open up ethico-political alternatives to engage difference(s) differently. The article ultimately argues that by affirming all multifaceted (im)material worlding entanglements, significant new insights can be gained for both theorizing differentiality as ethico-onto-epistemological ‘becoming-with’ and for practising this world of/as difference(s) in a more ‘response-able’ manner.     

‘We are Like the Living Dead’: Farmer Suicides in Maharashtra,Western India

Findings presented here about farmer suicides in Amravati and Yavatmal districts, Maharashtra, are evaluated in relation to Durkheimian theory, which attributes such acts to an historically specific combination of social and economic causes. Lower and middle caste peasant smallholders found themselves trapped between enhanced aspirations generated by land reform and other post-1947 measures, and the reality of neoliberalism (rising debt, declining income). Suicides among large and medium farmers belonging to the higher castes in Maharashtra were occasioned by failures in business, trade and politics. Such cases are consistent with the argument put forward by Durkheim, that suicide is an effect of individualization, a process of socio-economic ‘estrangement’ from agrarian communities experienced by rural producers in the context of rapid economic growth.     

Where angels fear to tread? "Third World women" and "development"

Regarding debates between feminists from the North and South, it has been argued that Western feminists implicitly disparage Third World women by representing them as sexually oppressed. It has also been argued that Third World women's political struggles are trivialized when the women are so homogenized. The author argues that while there is some truth in these assertions, Southern feminists should beware of cultural fundamentalism. She welcomes their stress upon the importance of sociocultural analysis, especially in the interest of understanding Southern economic contexts, and notes that sociocultural analyses do not lead away from economic issues, but provide more explanatory variables and more complex models. Chandra Mohanty's critique is evaluated with regard to the three Zed Press books reviewed.     

‘i pray for the factory to continue earning money’: the familial factory regime of the ‘Sun’ food factory in Turkey

This paper explores the factory regime in the ‘Sun’ food processing factory in Turkey, drawing on participant observation in the factory, informal interviews with women workers and in-depth interviews with the managers of the factory’s ‘gherkin department’ in which I worked. This paper argues that the ‘Sun’ bottling and canning factory is best understood through my concept of the ‘familial factory regime’. By ‘familial factory regime’ I mean a factory regime in which the features of the extended patriarchal family are used to manage the labour force by obtaining women workers’ consent. Indeed, the paper suggests that there is a tendency for patriarchy to be reconstituted in the workplace through the presence of a familial factory regime.     

‘An Unexpected Recruit to Feminism’: Jessie Boucherett’s ‘Feminist Life’ and the importance of being wealthy

In 1859 Jessie Boucherett, the daughter of a Lincolnshire landowner possessed of an independent income, was inspired by press discussions of the need to find alternative occupations for women to make contact with the women who were already spreading this message through the English Woman’s Journal. With their rather grudging support she founded a society, which still exists, to further this aim, the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (now the Society for Promoting the Training of Women). Using the records of this Society, now housed at Girton College, Cambridge, this article looks at the way commitment to this cause allowed a woman from a wealthy, high Tory, landed background to turn herself in six years into the feminist who put up the initial money for the women’s suffrage campaign, and went on to be a leading figure in campaigns to reform the married women’s property laws and against legislation restricting women’s work. It examines in particular the use she made of her personal wealth to direct the strategies of the activist groups to which she belonged.     

Unjustified optimism: why the World Bank's 2008 ‘agriculture for development’ report misses the point for South Africa

The World Bank Development Report 2008 sees agriculture as a crucial instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction. It emphasises the need for a sharp productivity increase in smallholder farming, as well as more effective support to millions of subsistence farmers. However, while admitting that there are challenges in making this goal a reality, the report fails to fully acknowledge the legacy of colonialism and apartheid on land and agrarian relations in South Africa. Contrary to the World Bank's optimism about smallholder and subsistence agriculture, this legacy of inequality and land dispossession discourages farming by Blacks in countries like South Africa.     

Ironies of Emancipation: Changing Configurations of ‘Women's Work’ in the ‘Mission of Sisterhood’ to Indian Women

On her arrival in Travancore in 1819 Mrs Mault, as wife of the new missionary, immediately set about establishing a school for convert girls and a ‘lace industry’ to employ convert women. Her actions reflect that pattern of activism and organization historians of gender and imperialism have identified as the ‘mission of domesticity’ conducted by European and North American Christian missionary women to their non-Christian ‘sisters’ in the colonial empires being established by their respective nation-states throughout the nineteenth century. Mrs Mault was herself among the first generation of missionary women to pioneer this specifically female branch of colonizing endeavour, designed to ‘emancipate’ Indian women in terms of the norms of metropolitan ideologies of femininity and womanhood.Drawing on a case study of the London Missionary Society's activities in South Travancore, South India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that this ‘mission of domesticity’ was not a straightforward transfer of conventions of marriage and motherhood to the colonial context. On the contrary, the project was from the start caught in a complex and contradictory web of agency and discourse which ‘remade’ not only convert women but missionary women as well. Central to this process of refiguring femininity on the imperial fulcrum were changes to the meanings of ‘work’ in relation to both ‘home’ and womanhood, articulated through a religious idiom and framework of action. The consequences of these processes, the article argues, were somewhat contrary. On the one hand, the Indian Christian woman is reconstructed as a wife, mother and worker, while on the other, the missionary women are bifurcated: the missionary wife increasingly viewed as an amateur appendage to her husband, firmly secured in the domestic sphere, while the single woman attains a new status as a professional worker.     

Gender,Culture and the Law: Approaches to ‘Honour Crimes’ in the UK

This article examines the debate on whether to analyse ‘honour crimes’ as gender-based violence, or as cultural tradition, and the effects of either stance on protection from and prevention of these crimes. In particular, the article argues that the categorisation of honour-related violence as primarily cultural ignores its position within the wider spectrum of gender violence, and may result in a number of unfortunate side-effects, including lesser protection of the rights of women within minority communities, and the stigmatisation of those communities. At the same time it is problematic to completely dismiss any cultural aspects of violence against women, and a nuanced approach is required which carefully balances the benefits and detriments of taking cultural factors into account. The article examines the issues within the context of the legal response to cases involving honour-related violence, arguing that although the judiciary has in a number of cases inclined towards viewing ‘honour’ as primarily cultural rather than patriarchal, in some cases they have begun to take a more gender-based or ‘mature multiculturalism’ approach.

‘The Worst Job in the World’: Reform,Revolution, and the Secret Rebellion in Florida's Cane Fields

Governments around the world are embracing guestworkers as a flexible labor force. The untold story of 1960s-era strike wave among Caribbean sugarcane cutters in Florida shows how the longest-running US guestworker program – the H2 Program – has functioned. The program, which began in 1942 and continues today, provided Florida's sugarcane industry with its sole source of harvest field labor, and became all the more important in the 1960s as the Cuban Revolution and the embargo that followed it caused Florida's industry to expand exponentially. Expropriated Cuban sugar moguls adopted the labor practices pioneered by the US Sugar Company, importing mostly Jamaican peasant farmers as temporary workers and deporting those who refused to accept their terms. Federal efforts to mitigate growers' exploitative practices only encouraged worse labor abuses. Cane cutters defended themselves with frequent strikes but deportations made insurgency's gains ephemeral.

‘No ebery ting wha got sugar a sweet’.

Jamaican proverb 1 1. Frank Cundall 1924 Cundall, Cundall. 1924. Jamaica in 1924: A Handbook for Visitors and Intending Settlers with Some Account of the Colony's History, Kingston, Jamaica: The Institute of Jamaica.  [Google Scholar]: 56].      

China's creative approach to ‘union’ organizing

The development of industrial relations in China is moving into a critical period in which capitalism has become the dominant form of social organization. Official unions have sought to adapt to the changing environment through a range of initiatives through each level of their organizational structure. This paper explores the inherent problem in official unions by examining a period at the end of the 1990s when decline in the traditional organizing base was addressed by significant innovations in organizing methods and establishment of new forms of unions. Although many new unions were simply fictitious, unionization has increased. Nevertheless, owing to problems in the method of establishing unions, most notably the absence of worker involvement, unions are extremely weak. When the opportunity to reform arose, official unions lacked interest in initiating genuine representation, and in consequence have become increasingly irrelevant to China's unfolding industrial relations system.