Charlotte Bunch

Charlotte Bunch is a North American activist, theorist, teacher and speaker who has been organizing feminist activities since 1968. The following extracts come from "Bringing the Global Home: Feminism in the 80s" (Antelope Publications, 1985), a pamphlet based on a number of speeches she has given in the United States since 1979.

One of the most exciting world developments is the emergence of feminism all over the globe. Women of almost every culture, color and class are claiming feminism for themselves. Indigenous movements are developing that address the specific regional concerns of women's lives and that expand the definition of what feminism means and can do in the future.

This growth of feminism provides both the challenge and the opportunity for a truly global women's movement to emerge in the 1980s. But a global movement involves more than just the separate development of feminism in each region, as exciting and important as that is. Global feminism also requires that we learn from each other and develop a global perspective within each of our movements. It means expansion of our understandings of feminism and changes in our work, as we respond to the ideas j and challenges of women coming from different perspectives. It means discovering what other perspectives and movements mean to our own local setting. Any struggle for change in the late 20th century must have a global consciousness since the world operates and controls our lives internationally already. The strength of feminism has been and still is in its decentralized grassroots nature, but for that strength to be most effective, we must base our local and national actions on a world view that incorporates the global context of our lives. This is the challenge of bringing the global home.

Leadership vs. Control Over Women

Global feminism is emerging as part of a process in which women everywhere are beginning to perceive themselves in new ways. Women are demonstrating a growing determination to be actors who participate in shaping society rather than to remain its primary victims. While this process does not always lead women to become feminists, it is at least partially a result of feminist initiatives and consciousness-raising in society generally.

As women's potential as a newly activated constituency is recognized, more groups are competing over who will lead or, all too often, control - women's political energies. Governments, political organizations and parties are seeing the usefulness of organizing our support for their politics, much as the right-wing in the U.S. has mobilized women to maintain and do the work for its power bases at the local level. The patronizing attitude of male powers who view women as needing to be "directed" is reflected in manipulative expressions such as "mobilizing" women's votes or "harnessing" women's labor power. Still, many male-dominated groups are well-organized and successful in offering a direction for women's energies and frustrations. If feminists do not provide leadership that can activate large numbers of women on our own behalf, we will find that women will be, as we so often are, separated by existing male-defined political divisions.

This situation has been clearly demonstrated throughout the United Nations Decade for Women. It is important to note here, for those who might have missed the news, the U.N. gave women a decade from 1976-85 during which governments were supposed to work to improve women's lives. Unfortunately, in this time period, advances for women at political levels have been token at best and the reality is that women are an ever-increasing percentage of the world's poor. Nevertheless, the Decade has produced some useful initiatives, including three World Conferences for Women, the last of which was held in Nairobi, Kenya in July of 1985.

A Plan of Action with measures to improve women's status was passed at the first Conference in Mexico City, but the whole thing was not taken too seriously by male power structures. By 1980 however, when the U.N. held its Mid-Decade Conference on Women in Copenhagen, the mood had changed. Not that governments were now pro-feminist - none of the existing patriarchal powers are feminist to any real extent although some certainly treat women better than others. The difference in 1980 was that they no longer considered it amusing for women to talk together about politics. They saw it as potentially threatening.

Therefore, governments sought to keep this second conference under very tight control. At one point, the preamble committee was discussing sexism - a word that appeared in the final report as only a footnote describing what some countries saw as one cause of women's oppression. When word got out about this discussion and that a few women were talking-as women-across traditional political lines, governments sent their most loyal delegates into that committee immediately to seize control and re-establish those traditional lines. Most government officials and many U.N. bureaucrats see their political, economic and social power, their jobs and their lifestyles, as dependent on maintaining the existing divisions in the world. They are not about to let a bunch of idealistic women get out of hand and shake up the way they rule. They were determined that this would not happen in Copenhagen, and indeed, at the government level, it did not. Yet this is precisely what feminists must do if we are to alter the destructive course of the world today.

In Copenhagen at the 1980 NGO Forum, the conference newspaper came out with a quote-of-the-day from a Western feminist which read: "To talk feminism to a woman who has no water, no home, and no food is to talk nonsense." Many of us felt that the quote posed a crucial challenge to feminists. We passed out a leaflet, "What is Feminism?", describing it as a perspective on the world that would address such issues, and we invited women to a special session on the topic. Over 300 women from diverse regions gathered to debate what feminism really means to us and how that has been distorted by the media and even within our own movements.

The second challenge we saw in the quote was that if it were true and feminists did not address such issues, then we would indeed be irrelevant to many women. We therefore discussed the importance of a feminist approach to development - one that both addresses how to make home, food, and water available to all and extends beyond equating "development" with industrialization. Terms like "developing nations" are suspect and patronizing. While we need to look at the real material needs of all people from a feminist perspective, we can hardly call any countries "developed." For this reason, while I find all labels that generalize about diverse parts of the world problematic, I use here "Western" or "industrialized" and "Third World," rather than "developing" and "developed."

Recently at a meeting in New York, I saw another example of confusion about the meaning of feminism. Two women who had just engaged in civil disobedience against nuclear weapons were discussing feminism as the motivating force behind their actions, when a man jumped up impatiently objecting, "But I thought this meeting was about disarmament, not feminism." It was the equivalent of "to talk feminism in the face of nuclear destruction is to talk nonsense."

Such attitudes portray feminism as a luxury of secondary concern and thus both dismiss female experience as unimportant and limit our politics. They fundamentally misconstrue feminism as about "women's issues" rather than as a political perspective on life. As a transformational perspective, feminism is not simply a list of issues, which can easily become a new version of women's sphere of influence, or what are considered "appropriate" activities for women. Feminism is an approach based on women's experiences that questions patriarchal modes of domination in all areas of life.

But feminism is not a politics "for women only." It is a perspective born of women that any man concerned with fundamental change can and should explore just as I, a white woman, can seek to have anti-racist perspectives. Nor is it about adding a few women into positions of power without also changing the oppressive character of most institutions. Feminism is defined by the struggle for change in institutions and values, and not by the shifting of power from one individual to another.

Seeing feminism as a transformational view is crucial to a global perspective. But to adopt a global outlook does not mean, as some feminists fear and male politicos often demand, that we abandon working on the "women's issues" for which we so often fought to put on the political agenda. Nor does it imply setting aside our analysis of sexual politics. Rather it calls for the opposite. It requires that we take what we have learned about sexual politics and use feminist theory and experience to analyze and expose the connections between the "women's issues" and other world questions, not because these are more important but because they are interrelated. In this way, we demonstrate our point that all issues are women's issues and need feminist analysis. For example, we must show how a society that tacitly sanctions male violence against women and children, whether incest and battery at home, rape on the streets, or sexual harassment on the job, is bound to produce people who are militaristic and believe in their right to dominate others on the basis of other differences as well, such as skin color or nationality. Or we can point out how the heterosexist assumption that every "good" woman wants to and eventually will be supported by a man fuels the economic policies that have produced the feminization of poverty world-wide. This refusal to accept a woman who lives without a man as fully human thus allows policy-makers to propose such ideas as keeping welfare payments or even job opportunities for single mothers limited since they "contribute to the destruction of the family. "

Since feminists have limited resources for global travel and communication, it is even more vital that we learn how to be global in consciousness while taking action locally. For this, we must resist the tendency to separate "international" work into a specialized category of political activity that is often viewed as inaccessible to most women. This tendency reflects a hierarchical patriarchal mode in which the "world level" is viewed as above the "local level." While I think it vital that people who work globally have had concrete local experiences in the past. I do not think it useful to view the international sphere as a higher level to which you graduate. To do any global challenge today is developing effective ways for local women to act with a global perspective and to be linked throughout the world to other grassroots feminists.

For those whose work focuses primarily on the global aspects of issues, the challenge is to not lose touch with the local arena on which any effective movement is based. For those whose work focuses locally, the challenge is to develop a global perspective that informs that local work. For all of us, the central question is to understand how the issues of women all over the globe are interrelated and to discern what that means specifically in each setting.

To work locally with a global perspective does require stretching feminism, not to abandon its insights but to shed its cultural biases, and thus to expand its capacity to reach all people. In this process, we risk what seems certain at home by taking it into the world and having it change through interaction with other realities and perceptions. It can be frightening. But if we have confidence in ourselves and in the feminist process, it can also be exciting. It can mean the growth of a more effective feminism with a greater ability to address the world and to bring change. If we fail to take these risks and ignore the global dimensions of our lives, we lose possibilities for individual growth and we doom feminism to a less effective role in the world struggle over the direction of the 21st century.