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tortillaconsal punto/dot com
By Karla Jacobs, 9th March 2010
In light of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day it is worth taking a look at the ideological roots behind the creation of the annual celebration in the context of the global and local situation regarding women's rights today and the extent to which the same countries that witnessed a series of triumphs in terms of the liberation of woman during the 20th century, are guilty of obstructing the struggle of impoverished women in other parts of the world today.
The first International Women's Day was celebrated in the US in 1909 following a declaration by the Socialist Party of America stating the importance of the recognition of women's rights as part of a truly socialist process. The next year, during the second International Socialist Women's Congress in Denmark, the German feminists Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxembourg and their colleagues agreed on the need for International Women's Day to be celebrated every year across the world.
Zetkin and Luxembourg, ideological companions of Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilich Lenin, viewed the oppression of women not so much as a gender issue but as a class issue. Like the Socialist Party of America they believed that true female liberation would only be possible as part of the creation of a socialist society.
During Luxembourg and Zetkin's time, the concrete demands of the international women's movement were essentially better working conditions for female workers, universal franchise and other political rights. As Rebeca Madriz points out in her recent article 100 years on, let's construct a socialist future, the demands from that time have been met, at least in legislative terms, in most nations of the world. "However, the complex social reality [of today's world] has diversified the forms of discrimination, subordination, exploitation and submission of women" especially in impoverished regions of the world:
Capitalism, in it's current transnationalized and monopolistic form, has generalized social phenomenons like the feminization of poverty, ... femicide [the murder of women for motives of gender], feminicide [femicide effectively tolerated by the State], and people trafficking mainly of women and children.
Though frequently women's standard of living in the North is far from adequate, on the whole the most basic needs (nutrition, water and sanitation, some form of income, education and basic health care) are met and basic services (transport, communications, electricity, etc) are accessible.
Meanwhile most women from the South are unable to fulfill at least one and usually more of their basic needs while basic services are far from guaranteed in most parts of the majority world.
On top of this, the extent to which violence has become an everyday occurence for women from the South is great. Even relatively conservative statistics suggest that over a third of women in certain parts of the South - Latin America included - are regular victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Meanwhile, the toll in terms of death and injury as a result of armed conflict in the Middle East and parts of Africa, and the femicide rate in certain parts of Latin America have reached epidemic levels.
Ironically, the North's insistence on the formalization of political rights in Southern countries' legislation over the last few decades has, in many cases, artificially and counteractively hurried along social liberation processes, including the empowerment of women. But, simultaneously, the social reality and the situation regarding human and economic rights, especially for women, in those same countries has continued to worsen as a result of the imposition of neo-liberal free market economic policies by Northern dominated international institutions.
There is a sense in which, the artificial process by which political rights and social minded legislation have been achieved in many Southern nations, has actually stunted social progress and specifically progress in terms of the liberation of women. For example, if - as has occurred in many southern nations - the conquest of women's right to the vote is not the result of an organic feminist struggle, many elements, including the awareness-raising element of that sort of struggle, simply never exist.
In their article Death to Patriarchy - but really journalist Jorge Capellán and women's rights activist Maria Söderqvist deal with the tendency towards a problematic North-South division within the international women's movement, something they argue has converted itself into a tendency for women's groups from the North to patronize, even to "infantilize," their Southern sisters - a tendency often exacerbated by the Northern cultures' misuse of the term, "machismo:"
Machismo simply means patriarchy of the type found in the third world, above all in Latin America. The concept [of machismo] is very convenient [because it allows] those who don't want to think of patriarchy as a global phenomenon ... to avoid talking about a world system of oppression of women and instead to talk about the oppression of women taking place only in certain remote and "peripheric" countries.According to Capelán and Söderqvist, this way of understanding and referring to machismo facilitates the concealment of the crucial historic and modern-day role rich country intervention in the South has had in the creation and sustenance of some of the most crippling aspects of machismo in terms of women's rights.
Towards the end of their article the authors argue that, simultaneously, "this ideology about machismo contributes to the [tendency to] infantilize the struggle for women's rights" in the South, given its logic that "women in the third world are nothing more than victims of the local patriarchy" - victims in need of salvation:
[According to this logic] the veiled woman punching her fist in the air and shouting "death to Israel" during a protest in Palestine, is not exercising her right to participate in a political struggle against the occupation that threatens her children's existence - she is simply a victim of Islam. The campesina [rural woman] who shouts "long live Daniel Ortega" during a protest in Nicaragua is not celebrating because, for the first time, she has access to land, credit, medical assistance and education, but is a brain wash victim of the "Ortega dictatorship."Indeed, with regards to the specific case of Nicaragua's FSLN government, it is interesting to note that most international women's organizations from the North have never bothered to acknowledge the very positive advances in terms of women's rights since the FSLN's rise to power in 2007.
A brief summary of those advances was given in an article by the Special Commission on Women and the Fight Against Poverty in their article From rhetoric to practice - women lead the fight against poverty in Nicaragua which links the FSLN's gender policy to the 12 key points of the1995 Beijing Declaration about the human rights of women.
As well as the well known government programs "Zero Hunger" and "Zero Usury" which exclusively benefit women and which between them have provided over 120,000 rural and urban women with the tools and training they need to produce food (rural women) or start a small business (urban women), the government, in just three years, has also:
- constructed and rehabilitated infrastructure to provide virtually free, quality childcare for over 90,000 children of working single mothers
- given out over 50,000 land titles to impoverished families previously living with legal uncertainty regarding their living arrangements
- reduced the illiteracy rate from nearly 30% to under 5%
- dramatically increased the number of girls and boys from impoverished communities to enroll and remain in school - reducing the school desertion rate to 6% (a historic low) thanks to, among many other things, the introduction of free school meals
- transformed and modernized the national curriculum for
primary and secondary education introducing transversal themes like
gender equality and the protection of the environment
- increased by 122% the amount of medicine available as part of the public health system
- increased by 68% the number of specialist consultations within the public health system
- reduced the maternal mortality rate by 25.6%
- reduced the neo-natal mortality rate by 17%
Interestingly, of the 19 female deputies and 15 female supplement deputies in the National Assembly (Nicaragua's legislative body), 90% are FSLN representatives.
These outstanding social advances for women have been completely ignored by the majority of feminist and pro-women and human rights organizations in the North. The same organizations, however, have put great emphasis on the controversial ban on therapeutic abortion in Nicaragua. In itself this emphasis is more than justifiable, but the fact that everything else to do with the FSLN gender policy is consistently omitted dramatically reduces the moral authority with which these organizations condemn the Nicaraguan government:
- Human Right's Watch, which describes itself as
"one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to
defending and protecting human rights," wrote
in 2008 that "until recently, Nicaraguan women had something to
celebrate on ... International Women’s Day. ... But today, instead of
building on ... hard-won protections, Daniel
Ortega’s government is chipping away at the very laws that put them in
place."
- Radical Women, which describes itself as an "international socialist and feminist organization," in a public letter to Daniel Ortega regarding therapeutic abortion issued in response to a call for support by the Movimiento Autonomo de Mujeres (an organizations which itself forms part of the political opposition alliance, MRS), wrote, "Mr. Ortega, you once participated in one of this hemisphere's most inspirational revolutions for social and economic justice. Now, your government has turned the gains of the Nicaraguan people's revolution on their head."
- AWID, the Association for Women's Rights in Development, which describes itself as an "international, multi-generational, feminist, creative, future-orientated membership organization committed to achieving gender equality, sustainable development and women's human rights," published similar arguments in an article entitled The government's war on women's rights in Nicaragua.
- The Women's
Justice Center, a California based outfit, and the London based
news outlet Womansphere
were among a number of other feminist and pro women organizations in
the US and Europe to publish a derogatory article about Ortega and his
wife Rosario Murillo entitled "Ortega vs. the Feminists."
In fact, if one googles the words "Daniel Ortega" and "women's
rights" it soon becomes apparent that among Northern feminist circles
Ortega and his government are commonly refered to as "anti-feminist."
One will also soon become aware that it is practically impossible to
find information in English about all the ways in which Ortega's
government has actually been responsible for dramatically improving the
chances of women being able to exercise all the rights they have on
paper, but not often in practice.
At the same time, though, it is hard to believe that activists and other progressives in the North would be unable to get their hands on information about all the successful government programs should they so desire.
With this in mind one is lead to believe that, at least regarding Nicaragua, Capellan and Söderqvist are right to identify a tendency for woman's organizations in the North "to impose their own agendas on the women of the rest of the world."
As previously stated, the main objection to the FSLN government by woman's groups in the North is the ban on therapeutic abortion which was passed by the three main parties (FSLN, PLC and ALN) in October 2006. When analyzing different approaches to this issue, one must bear in mind the fact that the women's movement in the North is in a logistically strong position in terms of the fight for and conquest of significant advances regarding abortion rights. One should remember that there is a long history of public debate as well as a relative lack of church interference in political decisions on this sort of issue in the North.
In countries like Nicaragua, however, this is not the case. While the pro-choice struggle does exist and should be supported, the social, political, economic and religious correlation of forces is such that any advance on the issue of abortion has not, so far, proved itself a realizable goal. One of the main factors to be taken into account here is the dominant cultural attitude towards abortion - as part of a poll carried out in 2007, 58.5% of Nicaraguans said they did not believe an abortion should be carried out even if the mother's life was in danger as a result of her pregnancy, while 68.7% said they didn't think an abortion should be permitted if a pregnancy is the result of rape.
These statistics serve to demonstrate the extent to which cultures differ. Those dedicated enough to the struggle for women's rights in Nicaragua to attempt to influence the current cultural mentality regarding this issue need to keep in mind the fact that sustainable and long-lasting processes of progressive social transformation necessarily evolve with and from the cultural beliefs, spiritual needs and day-to-day experiences of the society itself.
Unquestionably one of the greatest obstacles in the way of creating a more positive cultural attitude towards women and women's rights in Latin Amercia is the corporate mass media's insistence on almost permanent, mind-numbing violent and degrading programming which, when it isn't normalizing violence, serves to reinforce the most conservative of the Catholic Churches ideas about society. From Mexican and Colombian tele-novelas and US action and war movies to nota roja style TV news coverage, corporate TV channels communicate virtually non-stop, degrading subliminal messages about women and the rest of society.
And yet, so far, all attempts by progressive Latin American government to oblige the media to act with greater social responsability have been jumped on by Northern governments, the international corporate media and a number of Northern NGOs with claims about disrespect of freedom of speech. A classic example is the Venezuelan RCTV case:
After the channel ignored numerous government warnings to verify consistent breaches of national legislation regarding programming timetables and the veracity of sources used in news reporting, Hugo Chavez' government decided not to renew RCTV's public license. Among other anomalies committed by RCTV was the broadcasting of pornography during the day. The move to cancel RCTV's license was condemned by governments, NGOs and other institutions throughout the US and Europe, though the details behind the case were seldom, if ever, made available for discussion.
In terms of confronting the troubling increase in femicide and feminicide, a phenomenon particularly present in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the effective implementation of much stricter rules and regulations for the media would be an enormously positive first step.
As psycologist Monica Zalaquett, (Director of the Center for the Prevention of Violence in Nicaragua) explains to journalist Giorgio Trucchi in an interview published in 2008, a major factor in the ongoing increase in domestic violence and femicide in the region is the high rate of male un- and under-employment in recent years and the simultaneous increase in female employment (both results of neo-liberal economic policy) which has resulted in what she identifies as a crisis of machismo itself:
When you take away a man's purchasing power you are taking away part of his masculine identity, an identity intrinsically associated with work and the role of provider. At the same time this role [of provider] has gradually been adopted by more and more women. ...Zalaquett concludes by emphasizing the importance of focusing on education and media and of including men in attempts to resolve the troubling situation regarding domestic violence and femicide.
In other words, a change in terms of the traditional power relationship has been imposed, but at home women are still totally unprotected, they are trapped in no man's land where impunity and family dictatorship reign. ... Taking away a man's purchasing power is a detonant for violence - violence which is used to restitute the power men feel is taken away along with their ability to provide. ... We have masculinized women without feminizing men.
From the grinding reality of extreme poverty and the soul-destroying daily routine of violence and danger to the social and moral oppression of reactionary religious, economic, political and social de facto powers, women in the South face major obstacles in terms of the realization of their rights, even when their country's legislation recognizes those rights. This is not an excuse, however, for progressive organizations in the North to view them as victims, or to arbitrarily use their own power and influence to provide false or incomplete information about governments and organizations working to promote a pro-woman agenda at a grass roots level.
The concrete results of the FSLN's commitment to empowering women are outstanding and yet, at the same time, given the crude and depressing reality, effectively constitute only the tiniest step forward in terms of actually overcoming the desperate situation faced by Nicaragua's women. Women's organizations in the North should revise their attitude towards the FSLN government and spend more time studying the effects of their own country's colonialist past and neo-colonialist present before attacking left wing and socialists governments in the South.
The FSLN's commitment to and prioritization of the empowerment of women within the overall struggle to overcome age old inequality in Nicaraguan society is the result of the same logic used by Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg when they defined gender struggle as an integral part of class struggle.