WOMEN’S RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION AND EXPLOITATION
Lessons from the past, challenges for the future
presented by
DOLORES CHEW
[please acknowledge if quoted]
to
MONTREAL INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S CONFERENCE 2010 -- August 13-16, 2010
2nd Plenary 14th August 2:30-3:30pm
INTRODUCTION, THANKS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Good afternoon! Sisters, friends, comrades. It’s been an amazing gathering since last evening, with
participants arriving from around the world with shared dreams and hopes, and our common
commitment to resist oppressive and exploitative systems and regimes. We want to build a world of
justice and equality for all. It is exciting, moving, inspiring, and energizing to meet one another and hear
about each other’s issues and struggles – from the grassroots. Meeting and learning of one another’s
struggles and the gains we have made, small or large, inspires us, gives us strength and energy to go
forward and continue, to know that we are not alone, that our issues are not unique to our own context
and place, that these are shared concerns and struggles and that there is real solidarity out there and
commitment to assisting each other wherever we are. This gathering, exchanging, debating and
discussing in itself is very much part of long traditions of resistance that we carry with us into this
conference.
Ever since that day in 1910 when the first international women’s conference was called for by Clara
Zetkin and focussed on women’s right to vote, we have seen the efficacy and the importance of these
international gatherings of women involved in real change.
At this point I want to thank very much my fellow members of the 8 th March Committee of Women of
Diverse Origins (especially since I have been mostly an absent participant in everything this time), the
Program Committee and the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly and with great dedication and
commitment to bring us all together for these days in order to make this conference possible, with all its
detail.
What I will do in the allotted time, is to highlight some lessons from our past resistance experiences,
to identify some hazards that challenge us as we resist and to point to areas that require attention and
that we need to focus on for the future. This is a fraught task because in this gathering we represent a
wide spectrum of women who live in different economic situations and different political and social
contexts. As a middle-class woman of the global South, who lives in the global North, I am all too aware
of my privileges of class and location and I am also very aware of how much I do not know. I do not want
to diminish by oversight or oversimplification the complexities, nor do I want to get into generalizations
in such a way that nothing actually gets said.
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WHAT’S UNIQUE ABOUT WOMEN’S PARTICIATION?
It really requires no repetition that the participation of women in movements of resistance to
oppression and exploitation has always been crucial. What is unique about women’s participation in
struggles against oppression and exploitation is that our gendered experiences facilitate a wider
appreciation and a deeper understanding of oppression and exploitation; it’s not academic. We feel it
directly -- how the oppressions of racism impacts on the family and successive generations, how the
oppressions of colonialism have displaced and denied dignity, how the exploitation of neo-liberal
policies have a direct affect on families, children and future generations, how wars result not just in
military casualties but take a huge civilian toll that cannot be underestimated, how the imperatives of
providing for the family put us into principal breadwinner roles while we are still expected to continue
to accept subordinate status.
I want to share with you the ending to a powerful story by the Indian author, Mahasweta Devi, that
could be a narration of the lives of many women like the protagonist. By this point in the story,
Draupadi, an indigenous woman has been caught in the forest and raped and tortured for a long time
for information by the police, in a so-called counter-insurgency operation. She is not part of any political
organization and it had seemed that the circumstances of her life where she had been routinely
exploited both as a woman and as someone belonging to her class and ethnicity – indigenous (tribal) -these experiences had not politicized her. And then comes the ending of the story, when she is
brought before the police chief:
Draupadi comes closer. Stands with her hand on her hip, laughs and says, “The object of your
search, Dopdi Mejhen. You asked them to make me up, don’t you want to see how they made
me?”
“Where are her clothes?”
“Won’t put them on, sir. Tearing them.”
Draupadi’s black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that
Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed as she begins laughing. Draupadi
wipes the blood on her palm and says in a voice that is as terrifying, sky splitting, and sharp as
her ululation, “What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again?
Are you a man?”
She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak’s white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at
and says, “There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me.
What more can you do? Come on, kounter me–come on, kounter me–?”
Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is
afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid.
(Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi”, translated by Gayatri Chakravorthy Spivak)
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Like Draupadi our experiences have politicized us.
LET US REMEMBER EARLIER STRUGGLES
I remember how astounded I was when I read for the first time, writings of Buddhist nuns dating from
the 6th century BCE – they are among the earliest known texts by women. The voices coming to us from
almost three millennia ago eloquently demonstrate how these women were conscious of the oppression
of the household and dominant and violent husbands. But what is relatively recent, is the awareness
that for us, the daughters of Eve, Draupadi or other foremothers, gender oppression is not primordial, it
is not our prescribed lot in life, we will never accept it and we can work to change things. We owe this
knowledge and awareness to women who have gone before. Women who fought to prove their
humanity and demanded to be treated as equals. Women who recognized that it was the patriarchal
impositions of religion, society and state that kept them subordinate and second class. We are their
legacy.
THE LAST 100 YEARS
Early period
We inherited the fruits of the struggles of women of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries. And this is
where history becomes so important. Awareness of gender oppression goes back a long way.
Women have participated actively in political movements for a long time. And more recently in the of
the last 100 years women have been struggling because they were committed to freedom,
independence and autonomy for their people – revolutionary struggles, anti-colonial struggles, antifascist struggles, national liberation struggles, anti-apartheid struggles -- The Mexican revolution which
began in 1910 and continued till 1920 for land and liberty, the Chinese republican revolution of 1912 for
opening up of political space, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 which saw women on the streets
demanding peace and bread, the struggle against European and US colonialism in Asia, Africa and the
Caribbean from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the anti-fascist struggles especially in
Spain, Italy and Germany in the mid-twentieth century, the Chinese revolution of 1949, the antiimperialist wars in Indochina, revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggles in central America and all over
Africa, the Iranian revolution – and subsumed within some of these larger political struggles were
smaller, more localized revolutionary movements and struggles for autonomy -- struggles against
racism, against poverty, by landless sharecroppers for a small share of the harvest which they brought in
with their labour but all of which went to the landlords -- in Nepal, poor peasant women joined the
revolution to counter extreme feudalism and deprivation, and yes, to improve their lives. The word
might ‘feminist’ might not have had a familiar ring for many of the women involved in these
movements, but the promise of change in their lives was what attracted them -- all these were political
movements and revolutions for bourgeois democratic states, socialist states for freedom from
colonialism, or just to be seen as human . But gender specific demands and programs were rarely
present.
If there was some gender consciousness it was assumed that the larger victories would usher in change
and reform in the status of women. Often questions related to gender inequality were seen as
distractions. Oral history narratives are replete with women being denigrated as “mice in the
movement” – spoken by a Front de Liberation Nationale/National Liberation Front leader in Algeria –
being ordered to sublimate their maternal instincts – experienced by a woman in the Telengana struggle
in India who had to abandon her new-born child whose crying might lead to the detection of the
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fighters, and so on. There might have been some exceptions. For example, struggles that challenged
feudal classes and by extension, gender specific feudal oppressions like the so-called ‘right of the first
night’. Was it because in many of these revolutions, anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements, the
majority of women were not on the so-called ‘front lines’, or in decision-making positions? Was it
because they inhabited the more gendered private sphere – more often taking care of families through
times of danger and deprivation, providing shelter, carrying messages , but seldom bearing arms? In
many instances, it was only when the men were absent – killed or imprisoned, that women stepped in
and ensured these movements continued.
The specifics of gender-based oppression was not a primary pre-occupation. In revolutionary and
radical circles, the ‘woman question’ as it was referred to, was seen as part of the general oppression of
the subaltern classes and it was argued, that revolutionary change, would bring about class and gender
equality. There might have been recognition that women historically had been treated as objects,
chattel. But patriarchy was seen to be a product of private property, and it was presumed that
elimination of private property would result in the demise of patriarchy. Unfortunately time and time
again, with each successive struggle, including those that ended in radical social and political change,
gender equality was left far behind and those who espoused change in this area were often marginalized
and side-lined. Also the Euro- Western-centric aspects of the dominating ideologies often ignored
indigenous and culture-specific realities where strong traditions of gender equality had existed before
the ferocious onslaught of colonialism. And here we need to recognize the perniciousness of western
patriarchal colonial impositions that coopted native leadership to the point of abandonment of
indigenous ways. As Marilyn from Barriere Lake reminded us as recently as last evening, the struggle to
assert indigenous ways of doing is difficult and arduous when white paternalistic colonial policies
persistently obliterate autonomy. History showed us how caste and ethnic particularities did not
necessarily crumble with the coming of independence from colonialism or with revolutionary political
change.
Woman/Nation
We need to also recognize that in resistances and struggles for national liberation, past, as well as ongoing, where women’s participation is key, women are often iconicized -- the heroic woman, woman
as mother, woman as symbol of the nation – these are the images that are valorized. There is a
conflating of the protection of the honour of the nation with that of woman. We have learned of the
inherent danger of such emblematic use of women because it dances around gender-specific forms of
oppression and exploitation, it puts us on pedestals and denies us agency on our own behalf. When we
are slotted into moulds like this, there is limited emancipatory scope . In fact the inherent patriarchal
presumptions of conflating national honour with the honour of women is highly dangerous and a threat
to equality for women. The flip side of the coin is that women are also used by the oppressor – sexual
violence or the threat of sexual violence is routinely used by agents of the state, in war, and as an act of
genocide. The flyer young women working on solidarity with Tamil refugees, were giving out this
morning, begins with the chilling statement, by Gotabhaya Rajapakse, Sri Lanka’s defence secretary and
brother of the president Mahinda Rajapakse, “Make the Tamil women the feast of our army, while
letting the men’s blood drip into a red sea”, said.
In time, it became clearer for those, especially women, who were living through these changes but
finding dissonance between rhetoric and reality that there were deeper issues at stake. That historically
the exclusion of women from public space and their relegation to the private sphere excluded them
from decision-making. And that this continued even after revolution and independence. In fact those
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women who had participated very actively in revolutionary and anti-colonial movements in Algeria, in
India, in Nicaragua, and in so many other places, were ushered back to their hearths and homes, denied
abortion rights, shunted into social and child welfare ministries -- our proper place! Now that change
had been achieved, the men would take over once more. Thank you very much!
This has been very unfortunate because even in very progressive movements that combined national
liberation with the liberation of women, we have been sidelined. Removing the veil, unbinding feet,
welcoming women into public space was not just about liberating women, but also liberating countries
and societies from cultural and colonial oppression and exploitation. Educate a woman and you
educate a society. However we must be cognizant of class distinctions and remember that toiling
women never wore veils or had their feet bound. And for them, bourgeois revolution and independence
from colonial rule meant little change in their daily lives, and it was the same for indigenous women and
their communities. Nominally they might have won the right to vote along with all women, but while
not discounting the power of the ballot box, substantive change was a long way off.
In smaller, less spectacular, more de-centralized structures and situations also, women have found ways
to resist oppression and exploitation. Like women in other struggles, their efforts were not necessarily
directed to their own emancipation or liberation, but the protection of their families and communities,
who they wanted to keep safe and secure. In the ‘70s, the Housewives’ Association of the Siglo veinte
Tin Mine in Bolivia which started up as a self-help group to improve nutrition for their families, took on a
leadership role that eventually saw them facing off against the Bolivian state. When their husbands, the
tin miners went on strike, the Housewives committee took charge, ensuring the strike did not get
broken and that families could survive. They were repaid with brutalization, arrests and torture. Many
of us learned of their struggles from the amazing oral chronicle of one of their leaders, a very small
woman who came from deep poverty, but who a very large impact -- Domitila Barrios de Chungara
In many parts of the world, women’s committees of agricultural workers, or urban workers employed in
the informal sector, rural women’s anti-liquor groups that were formed in response to their husbands’
violence and squandering of family resources, women’s committees in unions, ordinary women,
grassroots women, coming together in many places to improve their lives and those of their families by
collective actions like collective kitchens, the indigenous women on the barricades in Canada, those
working with Lillian Villanueva of Montreal North whose son, Fredy was shot dead by the police and
whose other son, Dany, a witness to the shooting is now under threat of deportation – have all taught us
from their resistances. Yet the evidence overwhelmingly shows that if there is no political visioning, on
gender, on how to situate such mobilization in larger political contexts, such actions and such
organizations, while ameliorating some lives are either short-lived, get coopted, or refrain from
solidarity actions in other contexts . It is the balancing of the political with the other stated agendas,
and recognition that gender inequality is linked to socio-economic realities, that distinguishes those that
are able to usher in more lasting change and have a greater impact.
The Sixties...
Back to the historical narrative ... It is really with the ‘60s that some of earlier discomforts that had been
articulated by individuals as politically diverse as the early Indonesian feminist Kartini, Rokeya Sakhawat
Hossain, now claimed by both Bangladeshi and Indian feminists as a foremother, Soviet woman
Alexandra Kollontai, the anarchist Emma Goldman, the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir
and many anonymous women who have participated in revolutionary movements around the world,
began to echo in the concerns of younger women who, assuming they had inherited a world of freedom
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and independence began to feel the rub when it came to political organization and combining the world
of work and family. Here bourgeois feminists and left feminists did find common ground, though the
long-range projection for social and political change meant diverging trajectories. It became clear that
as long as the world of ‘politics’ and the world of the ‘domestic’ were seen as occupying two separate
and unrelated spheres, there was little hope for the liberation of women. And as long as women’s
merits were assessed in purely masculine terms – gun-toting heroic fighters and liberators – there was
little hope for true equality. ‘The personal is political’ expressed the frustration, the hope and the
demand of this new era of women. This of course brought many women into direct confrontation with
male leadership and unfortunately in many cases their denouement. In the latter days of the Soviet
Union, women often preferred to remain single. From its earliest days, the revolution, needing workers
to create the industrial miracle envisaged for the emerging Soviet state, had encouraged women to
participate as equals and created the material conditions (elaborated in detail this morning by Liza
Maza)to do so. However the ideology and the culture of patriarchy had remained intact. Decades later,
the evidence showed Soviet women preferring to remain single rather than carry the double burden of
work outside the home and work inside the home for husbands who sat down with their vodkas.
Cubans who have achieved so much with so little in the areas of education and health care despite
embargoes, will be the first to admit to the continuing prevalence of deep-set machismo. In the current
economic miracle climate of China, where there are even some women billionaires, most women in
rural China are now “holding the whole sky” – not just half of it. We have learned that attempts to
eliminate class differences in order to create equality, does not eliminate patriarchy and more
importantly, the culture of patriarchy. Patriarchy is like a stubborn and crafty virus that morphs,
reappears and reinvents itself. And those who benefit from patriarchal privilege, even if radical or
revolutionary, often do not see the inherent contradiction in its continued or reformulated incarnation.
Political change for a just world must include change for gender equality. Struggles for justice that do
not take into account the specifics of gender discrimination and gender subordination and the long
history of patriarchy, cannot erase the exploitation of women.
DOUBLE STANDARDS
As progressive feminist women engaged in mobilization and action for grassroots change, for political
change, against repressive systems of imperialism and war, we are involved in addressing inequalities
that encompass gender as well as the socio-economic realm. There is no division or dichotomy. We do
not privilege one over the other. And it is this unique perspective that makes the way we work on
situations of oppression and exploitation different from many others.
For many women of my
generation, our feminism was born as we participated in political movements in support of democracy,
rights and national liberation, yet found that gender specific inequalities were ignored. As women we
were often marginalized within organizations. Sexual double standards with regard to childcare,
housework, food preparation, and sexual relationships resulted in hierarchies of power and status. And
like women abolitionists of an earlier age who found themselves relegated to a curtained off balcony at
anti-slavery conferences and recognized the profound contradiction in what they were there for – the
ending of slavery -- and the contradiction with their own subordinate status, we became aware that the
personal is political. Today, for younger women who have inherited the fruits of earlier resistances, the
trajectory has been somewhat different.
The oppression of heterosexism
The ‘60s was also the time when the oppression of patriarchy got recognition for being responsible for
the denial and negation of sexual identities that did not conform to the hetero-patri-normative norm.
Same sex, transgender and intersex identities could finally be asserted, and even though the struggle for
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recognition has been painful and difficult and there is still a very long way to go in terms of recognition
and acceptance, it is feminism, feminist struggle and the promise of personal and political liberation that
feminism intrinsically holds, that has opened up space for women and men who do not accept that
oppressive systems that take biology as destiny.
Feminism and intersectionality
Feminism as a liberationist ideology that challenges oppression is also responsible for bringing
recognition to what has come to be referred to as intersectionality -- the intersections of various
conditions of existence that for historical, socio-economic or other reasons contribute to oppression,
exclusion and marginalization – race, class, caste, age, ability. It is feminist experience and scholarship
which has pointed to the futility of a purely ‘equal rights for women approach’; that without
consideration and attention to other factors that contribute to inequality, there can be little progress.
Beware the badge of respectability
At the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century, where as a result of a lot of feminist activism,
governments and international organizations have been forced to acknowledge gender inequality, what
we are seeing is how the radical consciousness of the ‘60s and then the ‘70s in terms of gender
awareness, which did so much to bring everything out of the closet and forced governments and
institutions to recognize serious national and institutional omissions, got mainstreamed. There is
nothing more effectively counter-revolutionary than co-option and trivialization. What the ’60s and
‘70s brought to light was that theoretical equality, even the right to vote did not ensure substantive
equality and that concrete steps were needed to narrow the gender gap and ensure complete equality;
that equality often meant not just sameness but equity and that governance structures and institutions
by virtue of their coming into existence with majority male participation ignored or were oblivious to the
realities of women’s lives. Thanks to struggles and campaigns the omissions began to be rectified.
However as we close the first decade of the new millennium we find that gender mainstreaming has
been de-politicized. It “has moved from a process of transformation to an end in itself” and has “blurred
the distinctive focus on transforming unequal power relations between the genders developed by ...
national and transnational women’s movements.” (Mukhopadhyay, p2.) What has resulted is the
subverting of the possibilities for real change by paying lip-service to issues . As if to say, “See, we’ve
heard what you have been saying and we are doing something about it.” But bureaucratically ticking off
the appropriate boxes in a gender questionnaire in order to meet prescribed targets, or to complete a
gender inventory, is safe and does not rock the boat. Patriarchal structures and imperatives are hardly
threatened.
Nexus of anti-feminism, capitalism, globalization, imperialism and feminism
Opportunistic moments make for strange bedfellows. We live in what can be called post-feminist times.
Not because there is no need for feminism. Now more than ever all indicators demonstrate widening
gender gaps across the world, and in all classes. Demographic data, reproductive health data, statistics
of unequal gender representation in government, institutions, the world of work, in the area of pay
equity, etc. Women in every part of the world, if they are paid for what they do, earn less than men –
we are fed myths that women do lighter work, less skilled work they do not earn the family wage, they
are not as strong as men, they can deal with the ego issue of a smaller wage (unlike men); women work
longer hours because they still do the majority work of family care no matter what else they do; in
situations of poverty and deprivation it is women and girls who eat last and eat less, and are still
expected to do the back-breaking work they do from pre-dawn when the men and boys are still asleep
to post-dusk when the men and boys have gone to bed; who are passed over when choices are made
about education and healthcare. It is shocking that pregnancy and childbirth are the leading causes of
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death and disability for women in developing countries. However with token reform it is claimed that
things are progressing favourably and it is only a matter of time when equality will be reached. (In
Canada, the Harper government’s decision to eliminate the long form for the census is a prelude to
making such sort of claims – after all, when you don’t have data that disproves, you can claim almost
anything, including that the gender gap has closed!) This has created a sense of security in some circles
where ‘choice’ is touted as the marker of a closing gender gap. But urban India and rural India which
were always quite different, are today even wider worlds apart. For many in urban India the seductions
of consumer society are distractions that reel them in, while for many in rural India, the basic
necessities of life are absent. But for capitalism and globalization the bottom line is what matters most.
So objectifying and exploiting the female body on billboards to sell whatever, or tacitly moving female
migrant workers through legal or illegal means into the global North, can all be put down to choice.
Women choosing for themselves – how to be represented, how to make a living. The perniciousness of
this perspective is that ‘choice’ becomes a decoy for what is really happening – maximizing of profits for
corporations, with little thought for the lives and implications of those whose hard labour makes these
profits. We are living in times where the paradox is that the uncovered female body elicits little
complaint, but the fully covered female body raises a hue and cry. ...
TRAFFICKING, MIGRATION, GLOBALIZATION
The issue of trafficking, of which we hear a lot, is an example of how de-politicized philanthropic activity
devoid of understanding and solidarity, can actually harm and hinder. When one hears about trafficking
it is usually about the women and girls who are sold into sexual slavery. This is not to suggest that this
does not occur. However, the outcry around this highlights the love for saving ‘victims’, without the
same concern for those who are the ‘victimized’. Women and children as sex slaves fit a narrative of
victimhood that denies agency of those who are determined to take their destiny into their own hands
and try to duck racist and unequal migration policies. The focus on trafficking for sexual purposes is the
thin edge of the trafficking wedge, and the huge attention it gets is predicated on sensationalism and
moral outrage. There is funding for this work; it is a ‘safe’ issue. It draws in religiously observant people
in anti-trafficking coalitions. While there might be some overlap with social justice issues within these
organizations, for others it is an almost exclusive focus on trafficking for purposes of sex enslavement.
The amount of energy does not match the statistics, however fuzzy. And it begs the question about why
similar efforts are not put into challenging racist immigration and refugee laws? Or imperialist wars that
create refugees, that put women and children at risk and potentially into the hands of traffickers? Or
concerns about human rights violations that Canada is complicit in or stridently attempts to muzzle, as
with Palestine or Sri Lanka. (And today we hear the hysteria that is being drummed up about the boat
full of Tamil refugees on the west coast of Canada – “queue jumpers, not real refugees, terrorist Tamil
Tigers” and we remember another boat, the Komagata Maru in 1914 which was not allowed to dock in
Vancouver, while the local media drummed up hysteria with headlines of Hindoo revolutionaries, or the
S.S. St. Louis which carried Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany which was also refused permission to
dock in Canada and had to return to Germany) It is the connections that are not made that are
problematic. To feel for victims and have moral outrage comes easily. But questions and challenges
that shake up one’s own comfort zone ideologically, or that might put us outside the status quo, are
harder to deal with. But it is resistances that question and challenge, that have historically brought
positive change.
The challenges of today
When Clara Zetkin gave the call for women around the world to organize on 8th March each year, the
demand was for suffrage, for voting rights for women. A very radical idea at the time. Getting the vote
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empowered women to make the change they wanted. Today, in most parts of the world women do
enjoy the right to vote, despite the various complications and problematic aspects of local situations and
questions of access. Yet we have seen that it has not been enough. Anti-colonial struggles that had as
the objective the building of new societies have not resulted in the creation of exploitation free
societies. With the privilege of hindsight we see and learn that achieving these objectives is not as
straightforward as they appear. That the resistances and struggles in which women engaged along with
men or on their own to build new societies of equality, free from war, with some economic equality,
while bearing some fruit, have a long way to go. And today the challenge is that the waters are
muddier.
There are some challenges and questions to which we have no straight answers. In Afghanistan which
sees more deaths daily now more than ever, it is believed that with the departure of international
troops, the Afghan government will be unable to prevent a Taliban takeover. This would be disastrous
for all Afghans, but especially for women and girls. In this context an anti-imperialist stance is one which
would usher in the Taliban. RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, and
the fearless young Afghan parliamentarian, Malalai Joya all say that the people of Afghanistan need to
determine their future – no foreign troops, no Taliban, no Northern Alliance. However the country has
been so embattled and foreign intervention over decades has strengthened fundamentalist and
reactionary forces, that it is hard to know what can be done. As the Palestinian people continue their
heroic resistance to Israeli occupation, Hamas – a religious fundamentalist organization - has emerged
as a leading force. Without going into the genesis of Hamas, it needs to be reflected on how support for
the Palestinians might also mean support for the government they, including a lot of women, have
chosen, a Hamas government.
In other arenas, also the ‘enemy’ is not so clearly definable. It is hard to convince a young woman that
she is being exploited by an economic system that only sees her value as either a consumer or a pliant
and pliable producer. She has been hegemonized into believing that she has ‘choice’ and that what she
does and doesn’t do, the life she lives, the choices she makes are all entirely down to her – the
onslaught of media persuasion and the emphasis on acquisition for self-gratification (“if you’re
depressed, go shopping”) seems deceptively neutral . There is apathy and passivity. However, she is
enjoying the fruits of the victories of earlier struggles, so she sees the world as her oyster and believes in
her ability to do and get what she wants. Until she may decide to have a family and encounters the
prejudice and marginalization that may occur – the loss of salary, the increased workload. And yet the
global reality is that today more than at any other time in world history the movement of people has
never been greater, because of wars, the manipulations of neo-liberal policies and ecological disasters.
Today those at the top rake in obscene profits and live lifestyles that are hard to imagine because of the
grotesquenss of their opulence. And among classes and in contexts where deep deprivation makes the
exploitation clearer, the total vulnerability to institutions, governments, employers, migration and
border laws plus the exhaustion caused by working multiple jobs and long hours results in an inability to
take action, while those who are conscious and work to make change get demonized and have to
struggle against the wall of media propaganda to assert their right to struggle for justice – label
someone a ‘terrorist’ or a ‘Maoist’ and you can do just about anything to them. After all, aren’t we all
afraid for our lives and don’t we want to be secure? Resistance to entrenched power has never been
easy, but the massive surveillance and intelligence sharing of today, coupled with corporate sponsorship
of state violence and terror makes this even more challenging. This demonizing is because they are
afraid when we speak truth to power -- that we might actually shake the foundations of oppressive
systems.
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CONCLUSION
The lessons we have learned teach us that until the oppression and exploitation of women continue s
there will be no justice and peace. The situation of women is the litmus test for a culture and society.
Building a global anti-imperialist women’s movement that respects autonomy, that has a clear gender
analysis, that can launch solidarity actions and give actual or morale support is much needed in this day
and age where media controls and media blackouts can made the difference between life and death for
peoples and their struggles. It can ensure that alternative versions of events get out. This is so
important in a world where struggles for rights and dignity and survival are today labelled ‘terrorism’
and ‘threats to the state’ and then get crushed with impunity. Taking lessons from the past, what can
we bring to build resistance to imperialism and to the building of an anti-imperialist women’s
movement? Each situation and context is different. But we have repeatedly seen that struggles carried
out in tandem without subordinating gender to other priorities are those that ensure greater gender
equality and less parochialism. The ideology that guides these struggles must have a political
perspective. If politics is absent, these struggles can be undermined, co-opted or eliminated. And by
politics in this case is meant an analysis of causes, rather than a mere addressing of symptoms.
I would like to end with the words of a Zapatista woman, that carries with it the pain of the history of
colonial and racist oppression and the pain of the betrayal by an earlier revolution, but also the strength
of the indomitable spirit to struggle, to strive and to resist in order to achieve that world of justice and
equality.
“My name is Esther... I am a Zapatista. “...the country we Zapatistas want ... we want Mexico to be:
Where indigenous will be indigenous and Mexican.
Where respect for difference is balanced with respect for what makes us equals.
Where difference is not a reason for death, jail, persecution, mockery, humiliation, racism.
Where formed by difference, ours is a sovereign and independent nation, and not a colony where lootings,
unfairness and shame abound.
Where in the defining moments of our history, all of us rise above our differences to realize what we have
in common. ...
Our hour, the hour of the Mexican indigenous, has come. ...
I am an indigenous and Zapatista woman.”
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