Cynthia Cockburn’s Speech

Cynthia Cockburn was the chair of the Reports from the Global Women’s Movement panel at Feminism in London 2010. This is the text of her introduction and closing remarks.

The purpose of this panel is to broaden our feminist horizons, bringing into view the problems – the subjection, the violence, the exclusion – faced by women in other countries and continents, far from here, and the inspired activism with which women face those problems.

I want to suggest that to broaden our horizons in this way is simultaneously to deepen our feminist analysis, to make it more profound, by putting more matters on our agenda than those that are thrown up by our own daily lives, and by showing us how they connect.

My work involves a lot of travelling, a lot of meeting and talking with feminist activists worldwide. And everywhere I go I find lively, courageous and inspired women and women’s organizations confronting appalling realities that represent a huge and varied challenge to their activism. Most of them call what they do feminist action, they have a feminist agenda.

You know – very often white women, feminists, in Britain tend to say: feminism is a Western invention and it isn’t necessarily relevant to women in the Global South, we shouldn’t be trying to “export” it. I think it’s an attempt at being sensitive, trying not to be imperialist. But my experience totally contradicts what they are saying. What I’ve seen, over and again, is a feminism that’s been invented, and is daily being invented, by women everywhere, drawing on a wide range of experiences, using a variety of slogans, but everywhere validating women and women’s understanding of the world they live in, everywhere conscious of connectedness, and taking inspiration from each other.

When women in relatively rich Western countries say, complacently, “women have gained so much, the struggle is really won”; or when they say, despairingly, “the movement is needed but it’s dead”…I want to say “look overseas, look to the very poorest countries, the ones penned in by the razor wire of US bases, the ones where transnational corporations are ripping up the land to get at the minerals, and where climate change is killing the cattle, that’s where there’s action we can learn from, that’s where feminist leadership and inspiration are available”.

Feminism in London conferences are the joyful result of a rebirth of feminist activism in the UK in the last few years among a new generation of women. It is SO welcome, so important. It makes me, as a feminist of the 1970s generation, ashamed that we somehow managed to allow ourselves to be driven into a corner for one, two decades. A lot of us went on doing our feminist thing during that time, but we were incapable of overcoming the post-structuralist, post-modernist, post-Berlin Wall decades of inertia and denial, and to keep a lively movement in existence that could draw in, and be renewed by, the generations of young women that emerged into adult life between 1985 and 2005. There was nothing there for them.

What has happened now, I think, is that the new feminism of the London Feminist Network and other groups has raised with great and good effect one particular scandal – the scandal of the exploitation and abuse of women’s bodies right now, and right here around us in London, in Britain. It’s put it squarely on the agenda, it’s building a movement around it.

But there are, at the same time, a lot of women working with a feminist analysis in other contexts addressing other scandals … and we are somehow not joined up, not yet renewing the connections.

I’m thinking of poverty, for instance. The ‘feminization of poverty’ is an expression coined about the global south. But it’s here too, as we’ve seen in the selective effect on women of the current spending cuts, particularly working class women and those needing state benefits for themselves and their dependents. There are feminists working on this issue.

I’m thinking of militarism and war -  the dire link between masculinity and gun ownership, militarization, and violence of all kinds. Some of us are out on the London street every week protesting as feminists against these things as they affect both women here and women in war zones.

I’m thinking of outrageous exploitation by transnational corporations – women’s sweated labour at minimal wages in production for export worldwide. And destruction of the environment – women’s ever longer daily walk for water and firewood.

Our panel on global feminism is going to bring to today’s conference some of these issues, some of this analysis, and in particular to bring to this hall feminist voices from other countries, that’s the point of it. And hopefully it’s going to elicit contributions from the floor from those of you who work on these varied issues here in the UK. I hope we shall begin to see more clearly the connections between the patriarchal abuse of women, the capitalist exploitation of women and the racist exclusion of women.

I hope it will build stronger links between the many components that together add up to a “full spectrum feminism”, broad, deep and unstoppable.

And now I’d like to introduce the first panellist….

1   Nadje Al-Ali, is Professor in Gender Studies, and Chair of the Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is president of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies and a member of the Collective that produces the journal Feminist Review. She’s well known for a lot of really valuable in-depth research on women, gender and feminism in the Middle East. You can find details of her publications on the SOAS website, but let me just mention three books she’s published in the last three years that are key reading for anyone interested in global feminism:

• What kind of liberation: women and the Occupation of Iraq came out last year.

• The year before, she published, Iraqi women : untold stories from 1948 to the present.

• And this year a book came out that she co-edited with Nicola Pratt called Women and war in the Middle East: transnational perspectives.

Nadje’s currently helping to introduce women and gender studies at several universities in Iraq. She is also well-known to antiwar activists in London as a key actor in the group Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq, which brings together Iraqi women and other women in London. Act Together have been a guide to a lot of us on how best to act here against western aggression and occupation in Iraq and how best to support women and feminism in that country.

2   Tsitsi Matekaire is a programme manager at Womankind Worldwide. In case you aren’t familiar with Womankind I should tell you that it’s a UK charity, the only one devoted to enabling women in developing countries to lift themselves and their families and communities out of poverty so that they can become a powerful force for change. Womankind work with partner groups in 15 developing countries.

Tsitsi in particular works with the partner organizations in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, on programmes aimed at eliminating violence against women and increasing their civil and political participation. Before she joined Womankind Tsitsi was Director of Women in Politics Support Unit in Zimbabwe, where she was born and spent most of her life till coming to Britain in 2006. The Unit’s work is to provide technical support to women in parliament and local government and to campaign for their increased representation. She led the organization’s ‘Vote for a Woman’ campaign during the 2003-2005 elections. Tsitsi is passionate about women’s rights and would like to see a better world where women’s voices are heard, and in which they are part of the decision process.

3  Leila Alikarami is a lawyer. She practises law in the field of media, women’s rights and children’s rights, and she’s a member of the Iran Defenders of Human Rights Centre. She’s active in One Million Signatures, which is a campaign by women in Iran calling for the repeal of discriminatory laws.

Leila has conducted legal training and teaching to raise awareness as well as defending campaigners who’ve been arrested by the Iranian government. The campaign has received three prizes: the Feminist Majority’s Global Women’s Rights Award; also Reach All Women in War’s Anna Politkovskaya Award; and the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom.

4  Marie Claire Faray-Kele comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She’s the mother of two daughters, and a working research scientist in infectious diseases here in London. She’s very active in the voluntary sector, campaigning for peace, for human rights and women’s rights, and for women’s greater participation and representation in the decision-making arena.

I know her best as an activist in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which is a very old organization – it dates back to the First World War. WILPF is still active on an international scale, and Marie Claire is a Vice President of the UK Branch where she’s done a huge amount to bring in younger women and to create an active movement of solidarity with women in DR Congo and elsewhere in Africa, coordinating the UK WILPF Voices of African Women Campaign and working on the ‘road map’ of actions for the African Women’s Decade which stretches from this year to 2020 – and promoting the Maputo Protocol on the rights of women in Africa. She’s an active member of the executive committee for Common Cause UK, the platform of Congolese women in the UK, and a member of the Million Women Rise coalition that I know some of you are part of.

5  Katherine Ronderos is a Colombian woman based in the UK, where she’s the Programme and Advocacy Co-ordinator of the Central America Womens Network (CAWN). She co-ordinates the project Challenging violence against women in Honduras: Identifying the Links between reducing Poverty and promoting Women. She holds an MSc in Development Studies from the London South Bank University in the UK, and a BSc in Economics from St.Thomas University in Colombia. Katherine has focused her work in supporting local organizations in capacity building, women’s political participation and income generation projects for women, minority and ethnic groups in Colombia and the UK. She has been campaigning to address the rights of Latin American women in terms of gender equality, empowerment and participation in peace-building processes. She’s advocated for the development and implementation of policies for women to exercise their right to live a life free of violence in many international forums, including the UN and the European Union. She’s currently a trustee of the Latin America Womens Rights Service, and, like Marie Claire, she’s a member of WILPF.

Katherine thinks of herself as a ‘Feminist in Resistance’. Last year during the political crisis in Honduras, Katherine’s campaigning and advocacy work reached not only the UK government but also the mainstream media, such as the BBC Word Service, Women’s Hour and the Guardian. She made visible to the UK public the reality of the struggle and oppression that women faced in protesting for their rights in Honduras, something that was permanently ignored by the international media.

Winding up…

I’d like to thank very warmly this impressive panel of speakers for coming to present their thoughts and work to us.  And thanks to you all for your participation and engagement.

I want to end by saying just two things. First, it’s important not to feel that these issues they have raised:  war, poverty, exclusion, exploitation, democracy and representation, are “global feminism” issues, global “South” issues, and that therefore if we are to engage with them, with matters beyond the other topics of today –things like  parenting, reproductive health – that we are failing to address our own issues and doing something “altruistic” for women in some other place, a kind of charity.

The issues that women have raised on this panel are right here too, they affect us, in our own lives. And the second thing is, there’s so much scope for engagement, for feminist activism.

We have to address poverty not only because women “over there” are poor but because a lot of women right here in poverty while our rich are the ones that create poverty for all of us who experience it wherever we live. And there are feminists doing feminism in socialist groups and parties, and community struggles, in trades unions – sure, they have a tough time, they have to wage a dual militancy there, but they stick with it.

We have to address democracy and representation not just because women in Africa can’t use their vote, or because Iranian women are excluded, but also because the democracy Britain and the USA purport to export is a travesty here as well. There are women working here for feminist democracy – and this isn’t just ‘liberal feminism’ as ‘rights activism’ is sometimes written off. If women’s rights had not been invented we would obliged to invent them.

We have to address war not just because women in Afghanistan and the Congo are suffering it but because we are too: we export war. War begins in Europe, it begins in NATO, it begins in Britain. And there are organizations to join. It’s possible to strive as a feminist in CND and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. And it’s possible to be active in feminist antimilitarist organizations like WILPF and Women in Black. And incidentally if any of you are interested in participating in some colourful street action we’re planning against NATO next month we could do with a few more – so please see Diane and Marion at that table over there.

And there are many more women’s campaigns yet to be born. A lot of them will start from you, in this room today. Thanks for coming!

Cynthia Cockburn, 23 October 2010