Every March, Toward Freedom is dedicated to women's issues. Since this will be the last such edition of the magazine in both the current century and millennium, it seemed appropriate to look back while simultaneously offering at least a glimmer of hope for an uncertain future.
This month's pages contain many horror stories just barely tempered by a few grace notes of accomplishment. From India to Tibet to Latin America to Europe to the US and Canada, the world's male-dominated societies have a dismal track record, to be sure.
Yet, "little pockets of light" - to lift a phrase from Louis Malle's 1989 film, My Dinner With Andre - beckon from even such a bleak horizon: An AIDS educator in South Africa, a revolutionary collective in Chiapas, an epidemiologist trying to heal Iraq's long-suffering population, the banning of female genital mutilation in Senegal.
But any publication devoted, as this one is, to "a progressive perspective on world events" must continue ringing the alarm bells as we prepare for another 100 and 1000 years of human history.
A June 1998 article by Barbara Crossette in The New York Times tallies the grim state of things in several global trouble spots - Bosnia, Kosovo, Indonesia, Algeria, Rwanda. She reports that women continue to be prime targets of ongoing warfare in those regions, with "premeditated, organized sexual assault as a tactic in terrorizing and humiliating a civilian population."
And then there is Afghanistan, where crimes against women have an altogether different slant. The Taliban, which fought its way to power in late 1996, is comprised of Islamic fundamentalist tribesmen who have turned back the clock to establish what is essentially a medieval nation. Forget the next millennium; think bygone millennia.
A 1998 study conducted by Physicians for Human Rights, The Taliban's War on Women, cites numerous shocking facts: Women can no longer work or go to school. The windows of any buildings they occupy are painted, so that the women within cannot be seen from outside. They must be covered head to toe with a burqa, a garment that provides virtually no opening except for a tiny bit of mesh over the eyes. On the street, they must be chaperoned by close male relatives or risk beatings by religious police.
After so many years of war, the capital city of Kabul has an estimated 30,000 widows who are now not allowed to support their families. Food supplied by international aid groups can only go to men. For many women, suicide is becoming the only option.
Separate hospital wards for women lack basic equipment and male doctors cannot examine their bodies. Female doctors, of course, are banned from practicing medicine. The policy is really a form of genocide: Women have been dying in labor, unable to have their babies delivered.
Despite this monstrous policy, at least two US companies (and others in France and Germany) appear to be rushing in to make big bucks. Unocal, a California consortium, has proposed building a gas pipeline through Afghanistan. A $240 million contract will allow the Taliban to go cellular, thanks to the New Jersey-based Telephone Systems International in Parsipanny. Although the US punishes the people of Cuba and Iraq with economic sanctions, there are no federal restrictions on companies that want to do business with Afghanistan.
Moreover, officials at the UN apparently have suggested that international recognition might persuade the Taliban to change its ways. Is that a rational assumption, given that Afghan women are even forbidden to wear shoes that make noise when they walk? What a symbol: Total silence in a master plan for gender cleansing. This enforced silence should become a deafening roar for any corporations in the US or elsewhere willing to look the other way to make a few bucks.
In a speech to the Global Tribunal for Women, convened at the UN in December 1998, Zarghuna Waziri - an Afghan teacher now living in Pakistan - had a bleak tale to tell about a visit to a hospital in her homeland seven months earlier: "I heard the cries and screams of women and children. ... I saw the Taliban militia beating women, doctors, and everyone in the room with cables. They started beating me as well. The little sick babies were falling on the floor from their mother's arms. We kept asking, ÔWhy are they beating us? What is our guilt?' But the Taliban kept cursing us and beating us. No one came to help."
Who is coming to help now? Even so apolitical a figure as television talk-show host Jay Leno, prompted by his wife Mavis, has expressed concern and donated money to fight the madness. She is on the board of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which has launched a campaign to assist the Taliban's victims.
Afghanistan today "makes Margaret Atwood's darkest fantasy of The Handmaid's Tale look like a feminist utopia," writes Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman. The brutal insanity of the Taliban ranks with that of the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge, which two decades ago killed Cambodians who wore glasses in the belief they might be educated and therefore a threat to the country's newly established slave-labor economy. In hopes of erasing all evidence of the previous civilization, Pol Pot decreed that 1975 was "Year Zero."
As the high-tech world frets about the Y2K bug that could bedevil computers when the calendar reads 2000, it is already Year Zero for the women of Afghanistan.
With nearly 500,000 teenagers giving birth nationwide each year, most are unmarried and not ready for the emotional, psychological, and financial challenges of parenting, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Under federal welfare reform, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, the bulk of control over federal assistance for such families has been given to the states, with incentives such as bonuses for reducing teen, out-of-wedlock births, estimated at 76 percent of all teen births in 1994, compared to 15 percent in 1960.
Social services professionals have voiced their concern that by giving states considerable flexibility in designing programs for teens, states may differ substantially in their long-term priorities toward aiding teens and their children. Punitive priorities - such as an emphasis on enforcing statutory rape laws or no benefits for additional children vs. education on pregnancy prevention and sexual abuse, and prenatal care for expectant mothers - could adversely affect certain ethnic groups more than others in the long term.
While birth rates for teens overall have dropped significantly over the past 30 years, rates for the Hispanic community have remained about the same. The rate for all ethnic groups combined dropped from 96.3 per 1000 women aged 15-19 years in 1957 to about 54.7 in 1996. The greatest reduction rate was in the African American community, where it fell to the lowest rate ever recorded - 91.7 per 1000 - leaving the Hispanic community with the highest birth rate among teens of all ethnic groups, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The Hispanic birth rate hovered between 100 to 112 per 1000 from 1990 to 1996.
"There isn't enough discussion about these issues in our community and it's killing us," says Edna Garcia (D-Bridgeport), Connecticut's first female Puerto Rican state senator. "There's a double standard culturally, a Ômachismo' that's embraced, but when teen girls become pregnant, they are often thrown out of the home."
The Census Bureau reports that in 1996, over one-third of all Hispanics are under the age of 18 and one-fourth of all Hispanic families live below the poverty level. In the last three decades, the percentage of unmarried teenage mothers has more than tripled to 84 percent. Among older teenage mothers, the figure for unmarried teens was 71 percent - nearly eight times that of 1950 (9 percent). According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, the trends are paralleled by lower educational attainment rates for teen parents, lower infant birth weights, greater medical care costs, and greater risks rates for abuse and neglect of the children.
Only one-third of teen mothers complete high school while nearly 80 percent of the unmarried mothers end up on welfare. A national study by the Urban Institute Press found that sons of adolescent mothers are 2.7 times more likely to be incarcerated than sons of mothers in their twenties.
The birth rate for teen mothers seems to have an proportionate correlation to educational attainment when viewed by ethnicity: the higher the birth rate among teens, the lower the educational attainment level. In 1997, 55 percent of Hispanics 25 years and older had a high school degree; 10 percent had a bachelor's degree, according to the Census Bureau. More than 42 percent of the Asian and Pacific Islander population aged 25 and over were college graduates; for Whites, it was 25 percent and for African Americans, 13 percent. Asians had the lowest teen birth rates, about 28 in 1000 in 1996.
"Even though many teen parents do well, we haven't set up a system to support them as a society," says Tamara Kreinin, director of state and local affairs at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. All services on the issue of teen pregnancy have become more fragmented after welfare reform, she observes, particularly as each state designs its own programs to match their priorities.
One example of the emerging gap between punitive and supportive policy-making is being demonstrated through the issue of birth rates for adolescents aged 11-14. Studies have shown that in about 66 to 75 percent of these cases, the teen has a history of being sexually abused and that there's a greater difference between the male's age and the female's, according to Kreinin. The younger a sexually experienced teenaged girl is, the more likely she is to have had unwanted or non-voluntary sex. Close to four in 10 girls who had first intercourse at 13 or 14 reported it was either non-voluntary or unwanted.
"Some states for example, have chosen to focus on punitive steps with the passage or stricter enforcement of statutory rape laws, whereas I would contend that's not where we need to focus our energy," says Kreinin. "We need to focus on education about the effects of sexual abuse, and educate young men and women in a supportive way." Hispanic and Black women, for example, were less likely than White women to use contraception during their first reported premarital sexual intercourse (32 percent and 58 percent, versus 70 percent).
Another example is the variance between Connecticut's priorities for teen mothers and that of its neighbor, Massachusetts. The Greater Bridgeport Adolescent Pregnancy Program - which operates in an area where over half of the state's minorities reside and 18 percent of all births are to teens in minority neighborhoods - reports that an astonishing 60.4 percent of Connecticut inmates are the children of teen parents. Yet, Connecticut, with the nation's highest per capita income, has one of the shortest welfare aid time limits - 21 months.
And although federal law exempts the time-limit to pregnant teens and teen parents who stay in school and live with family or in a supervised environment, Congress has yet to provide federal money for minor parents who cannot live at home due to physical or sexual abuse. That puts the burden on states to provide funding for "second-chance homes" for abused teen parents.
Connecticut, with 3600 teen pregnancies annually, has only one state-funded home for teens. Massachusetts, with 4000 teen pregnancies per fiscal year, has 22 programs funded by the state, serving 110 teens who cannot live at home. Only five states - Maryland, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Iowa, and Michigan - provide state funds to operate group homes for mothers with young children.
Garcia has recently submitted a bill to the state legislature for funding second-chance homes which would have medical, psychological, and support services. The city of Bridgeport has donated a building, which requires renovations, and a $250,000 operating budget to care for six teens and their infants at a time, serving up to 30 a year. The building, originally scheduled to open in January, is still boarded up from lack of funds.
"There isn't enough discussion about these issues in our community and it's killing us," Garcia says. A second-generation teen mother of two by age 16, Garcia fled a violent relationship with a man 10 years older than her. Although welfare was "humiliating," she acknowledges that it was the support she needed to get through years of college while she worked and raised her children. She eventually earned a master's degree and has been teaching in the Bridgeport school system.
"I named this program Mi Casa (My Home)," she says, "because it is the home I did not have, a place for young girls like myself to live so they will not be living alone, in the streets or in a bad situation."
Twenty years ago, I was coming of age as “second-wave feminism” was hitting its stride. A national Equal Rights Amendment seemed like a do-able accomplishment and helped galvanize activists. The UN had recently declared International Women’s Year, and women were empowered by participating in a movement whose numbers seemed to swell every year.
Feminism was revived. The “first-wave” feminists had achieved passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote. But the voting public was still largely middle- and upper-class, and didn’t produce the revolutionary change that socialist suffragists had sought. And since so much effort had been focused on suffrage, once it was obtained, activism dwindled until it was all but non-existent.
In the 1960s, Women’s Liberation burst onto the scene. Women broke codes of silence, talked among themselves, and protested their continued second-class citizen status. A decade later, the movement was in full bloom. In March 1978, Ms. magazine reported on the National Women’s Conference (NWC) held the previous year, announcing that “feminists are everywhere ... we are a populist, majority movement.” Not so in the 90s when people describe themselves. “Feminist? No, I’m not one of those,” most say.It’s possible that the label itself was a misnomer, which led the public and the movement itself astray. Although “egalitarian” doesn’t roll as trippingly off the tongue as “feminist,” it’s really more to the point. While feminism promotes equal rights between men and women, egalitarianism seeks equal rights for all.
As the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women declared from Beijing: women’s rights are human rights. While bringing women’s rights into special focus, the NWC platform adopted in 1977 contained broad-ranging demands for human rights and better living conditions for all. These included comprehensive programs for the disabled, improved child abuse prevention and intervention, a national health security program, guarantees of indigenous Americans’ tribal rights, culturally sensitive education, innovative elder housing, an end to discrimination based on sexual preference, and increased funding for Social Security, welfare, and other “income-transfer” programs.
Whatever you call the political ideology of this platform - egalitarian or feminist - its goals have by no means been fulfilled. An entire generation of people has been born and grown up, including my own daughters, but women still aren’t really equal to men, classism and racism persist, and the US government often acts like a mad scientist conducting draconian experiments in social Darwinism.
More women work outside the home than ever before in our society, yet work done in the home - that backbone of living itself called childrearing and homemaking - is still not economically valued. Unless you pay someone else to do it for you. The NWC called for “covering homemakers in their own right under Social Security.”
Neither has violence in the home been eliminated. Men far outnumber women on state boards and commissions, and in corporate offices and the federal government. “Traditional” women’s jobs still pay less than “men’s” jobs, and federal law doesn’t mandate equal pay for work of equal value. “Workfare” - which the NWC denounced as “work without wage, without fringe benefits or bargaining rights, and without dignity” - is now a reality.
And, while we have a patchwork of laws aimed at ending gender discrimination, hopes for a federal ERA died on the vine long ago.
Second-wave feminism went the way of the first wave. Despite protestations to the contrary, powerful feminist organizations such as NOW remained largely an interest of the usually White middle-class. Volunteer work didn’t grant you membership: your annual dues did. In Vermont, the state ERA committee preferred pricey dinners to potlucks for fundraisers. It threw gay rights overboard in an effort to pretend that the amendment wouldn’t grant homosexuals the legal protections of marriage. This sop to the right-wing backlash got us nowhere. The movement splintered and foundered.
Clearly, there is still a great deal for activists to do. The problems haven’t gone away and the groundswell can build again. It may appear that we’ve lost the interest particularly of the younger generation. But times and consciousnesses do change with the right inspiration. To paraphrase something an older woman once told me in the mid-1980s: What we need to do for non-feminists is screw in the lightbulb of feminism, so that later they can turn the light on.
In a climate of growing private investment and free trade worldwide, combined with shrinking international foreign assistance budgets, women have more reasons than ever to understand and be concerned about macroeconomic development. So says Ritu Sharma, director of the newly organized Women’s EDGE: The Coalition for Women’s Economic Development and Global Equality. A revitalization of the former Coalition for Women in Development, Women’s EDGE was started in Washington, DC, last March to take on global macroeconomics. As Sharma explains, “We felt that it was important as a women’s community to essentially put our mouths where the money is. And the money is in private investment and trade.”
Global trade isn’t new. As traders of goods and services across national boundaries for many years, women know this well. But recently the number of rules, laws, and treaties governing it have increased. All of the acronyms being bandied about - GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs), WTO (World Trade Organization), Fast Track, NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) - are basically sets of rules governing trade and investment. Together, they speak to a trend that can profoundly affect the environment and context of women’s lives.
Take the worldwide increase in the number of “export processing zones.” These zones crop up because countries want specific places where tariffs are low and tax structures allow foreign corporations to easily invest, produce goods, and export quickly with a minimum of financial barriers. Businesses in such zones tend to employ a mainly female labor force: in some places, 80-90 percent of all workers are women. That makes the trend very much a women’s issue. As consumers of household goods, Sharma points out, women “have a lot of power to change the behavior of corporations. We are also more directly affected by such things as pesticides in foods, exposure to chemicals, and so on. We need to be engaged.”
But the issues are complicated. While exploitation, long hours, and low wages are rampant in export processing zones, many women still want the jobs - even if labor and safety standards are lacking. The jobs provide them with an economic outlet, some power and autonomy through earned income, and, occasionally, improved access to health care and education. “It’s not a zero sum game,” says Sharma. “That’s why Women’s EDGE doesn’t only look at the negatives of global trade on women. We also consider potential benefits.”
One of the issues facing the organization is the domination of trade agreements by the Group of Seven, or G-7, the richest nations in the world. Sharma notes, “These agreements are just being handed to developing countries with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Take the MAI as an example. It is a new treaty that governs investment (movement of capital) rather than trade (movement of goods). When a group of nations tried to negotiate this agreement within the WTO, which incorporates many more countries than the MAI, developing nations said, ÔWe’re not ready yet. We want to protect certain sectors of our economy from foreign investment. We need the income, the profits, the investment here for our own development.’ So, the wealthy countries said, ÔOkay, have it your way. We’ll negotiate this in the OECD (Organization for European Cooperation and Development) and you can sign on or not.’
“After such a negotiation, developing countries would not be able to influence the agreement,” she continued. “If they don’t sign on, it’s like saying to foreign investors, ÔWe don’t want your money; just go away.’ If they do sign on, it gives carte blanche to foreign investors in their countries. It’s obviously an incredible gap in power and that’s one of the things that Women’s EDGE as well as many other women’s organizations have objected to in the process of negotiation with this agreement.
“Very few organizations have been able to voice their concerns or to participate, with the exception of the US Council for International Business, a lobby of 500 of the largest multinational corporations. They’ve been at the negotiating table while citizens’ groups, labor groups, environment groups, and women’s organizations have not had the same opportunity.”
Women’s EDGE is working closely with other groups such as the Women’s Eyes on the World Bank Campaign to dialogue with institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In addition, it networks and communicates with various women’s organizations around the world to ensure that its positions aren’t detrimental to women. Although careful to avoid the perception that US women are dominating or speaking for “third world” women, Sharma points out that it’s important to have a US presence on international women’s issues. After all, she notes, “the US does tend to throw its weight around pretty heavily on issues of global trade and macroeconomics.”
The short-term goal of Women’s EDGE is to educate the public, particularly women, about MAI and other trade issues. Considerable education is needed, its leaders point out, because many women’s organizations still haven’t heard of the agreement, don’t understand how macroeconomics affect their constituencies, and haven’t yet realized that macroeconomics is a women’s issue. In the longer term, however, they plan to link organizations and individuals concerned with gender and economic issues in both the domestic and international arenas. The objectives are to engage leaders in discussions about the policies and programs of the US government, incorporate gender issues into major international trade negotiations and intergovernmental conferences, and create a larger and more diverse US constituency in support of women’s advancement. Sharma invites input from all interested parties.
Elayne Clift, a consultant on women, health, and development, is a regular TF contributor. Women’s EDGE can be reached at:
Women's EDGE 1255 23rd St. NW Ste. 400 Washington, DC 20037 USA.
