Feminism

After the mid-1980s, documentation of women's resistance movements in non-Western societies further deepened understandings of women's liberation globally. Historical reconstructions of women's movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Asia (India, Sri Lanka, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan) and elsewhere (Egypt, Turkey, and Iran) established that women had played significant roles in the national liberation and revolutionary movements of their countries. Feminist struggles had progressed along varied, sometimes interrelated trajectories, all of which contributed to the growth of feminist consciousness. This challenged the view that feminism was a "foreign" ideology being imposed upon Third World countries and asserted that, like socialism, feminism had no ethnic identity.

In the 1990s further documentations of feminist struggles in the postcolonial nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America challenged the omissions in the existing literature. They also interrogated two other predominant Eurocentric tendencies: (1) to link women's movements with modernization and development, and (2) to assume that feminism grows out of a linear process of social change. Regional data revealed that poor women in India, Brazil, Chile, and Peru had been at the fore-front of many local struggles involving issues of work, wages, and environment and that, since women's movements in India and the Philippines were stronger than in the more industrialized Japan and Russia, it could hardly be assumed that "development" and "modernity" were prerequisites for women's movements to flourish.

Thus, similarities and divergences within feminism(s) have become more starkly visible. In Africa and West Asia there appear regional similarities because feminist struggles have been intertwined with movements of national liberation and state consolidation. In Latin America, on the other hand, women's movements have been closely connected to democratization movements against authoritarian states. Women's movements in Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and Russia are characterized by much more diversity.

Such documentation of global feminism(s) has further refined the understandings of women's movements in relation to state control and how that shapes or restricts feminist engagement, as in the cases of Russia, China, South Africa, and Palestine. For instance, although erstwhile Russia and other communist states in eastern Europe curtailed the growth of independent women's movements, they passed labor laws, legalized abortion, and created employment for women and supportive public institutions to reduce some of women's domestic work. China is one of the countries where state-affiliated women's organizations form the backbone of the women's movement. Rural women support the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) more than they support women's groups.

Regimes of colonial domination provide important illustrations of how women's movements have had to think of race and gender simultaneously and how colonial domination facilitated women's entry into nationalist struggles and therefore into public spaces. In many postcolonial societies (India, for example), women did not have to struggle for suffrage; they gained the right to vote alongside the men when their countries were declared sovereign. Contemporary India has an active women's movement encompassing a range of issues—work, environment, ecology, civil rights, health. Abortion is legal and accessible. However, feminists are alarmed at the use of reproductive technologies (sex-determination tests) to selectively abort female fetuses despite legislation in 1994 banning such testing. Campaigns are underway to lobby for a Women's Reservation Bill, giving women 30 percent reservation in Parliament (Menon, 1999).

In the South African context, given the history of apartheid, feminism has been in intimate dialogue with the political movement. Unlike in the United States, where scholars have had to develop a feminist knowledge in the absence of a mass feminist movement, South African women have been theorizing within the context of an ongoing liberation politics—addressing apartheid as well as struggling for agency within the antiapartheid movement. In Islamic societies struggles for women's rights have involved campaigns against conservative gender-discriminatory interpretations of Islam, particularly in relation to the use of the veil, women's right to education, and for more favorable provisions in marriage and divorce laws. Women's movements in Iran and Turkey have histories of activism, and Egyptian women have made considerable progress in creating spaces for women in civil society as professionals, activists, and politicians. Even in Afghanistan and Palestine, where women have long suffered under militarization, women's groups have continued to run girls' schools and support groups to aid medical and other relief projects for victims of war and insurgency.

However, there have been destructive implications for women when ethnic and religious nationalisms have become xenophobic. In the name of preserving a cultural national identity women have been put behind the veil by fundamentalist regimes such as the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Kashmir (India), as militancy grew in the 1980s, Muslim women felt pressured to cover their faces, although veiling was not a widespread practice in the region. Women's movements have often been challenged by caste and religious affiliations that compel women to defend oppressive cultural practices as part of asserting loyalty to religious (rather than gender) identities. Veiling in Islamic societies and female circumcision in parts of Africa are classic examples, yet it is important to appreciate regional women's viewpoints. Feminists also have been concerned about the appropriation of feminist discourse by right-wing political forces—as by the Hindu Right in India (1990s) and by neoconservative elements in U.S. politics.

However, critiques of women's status within conservative Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism ultimately lead many scholars of religion to argue that while orthodox religious practices may be relentlessly misogynist, more in-depth examination can help revitalize deeper, more ancient egalitarianism in most religions. Thus feminists in the 1990s examined religious theologies pointing to both the contradictions and the spaces for subversions within religions. Such understandings can provide tools to subvert existing gender hegemonies within orthodox religions.