Changing Their World: Concepts and Practices of Women's Movements

This 70-page report provides an umbrella of context and analysis for the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID)'s Building Feminist Movements and Organisations (BFEMO) initiative. Launched by AWID as part of its 2006 strategic plan, BFEMO is an effort to advance the understanding of feminist movements in the current global context, and to apply that understanding to strengthening the capacity of women's organisations to better catalyse, support, and sustain movement building. In order to work toward this goal, AWID undertook several pursuits:

1. Clarifying AWID's concept of movements, and especially of feminist movements - The first chapter of this document explores questions such as: What actually distinguishes movements? What is the difference between an organisation and a movement? What are their respective roles and relationships? What distinguishes feminist movements from other social movements?

• For AWID, movements are distinguished by these characteristics: a visible constituency base or membership; members collectivised in either formal or informal organisations; some continuity over time (i.e., a spontaneous uprising or campaign may not be a movement in itself, though it may lead to one); collective actions and activities in pursuit of the movement's political goals; use of a variety of actions and strategies - from confrontational, militant actions (including violent protests), or peaceful protest/non-cooperation, to public opinion building or advocacy strategies; and clear internal or external targets in the change process.
• To answer the second question - what is a feminist movement? - AWID re-formulates what feminism itself means in the world today, in the light of recent history and present reality. On pages 12-13, author Srilatha Batliwala presents a prototype that she says feminist movements should aspire to emulate.
• Asking why movements matter leads Batliwala to highlight their capacity to create sustained change at levels that policy change alone cannot reach. Figure 1 (page 14) places the different dimensions of change needed for a sustained, lasting change in women's practical needs and strategic interests, in a diagrammatic form. Figure 2 illustrates the many hurdles women must cross in order to access their rights, most of which lie in the informal domain of cultural norms and socialisation. "So while feminist advocacy may have resulted in pro-women policies, laws, and resource allocations, unless women themselves, and their families and communities, are able to break the hold of tradition and taboo, these positive gains have little meaning. Constituency-based movements, using consciousness-raising, political awareness and other strategies that challenge the power and practice of patriarchy, are far better able to tackle and bring down the barriers to women's equality in the sites where they are most deeply embedded."
• Next, the author distinguishes between the ideas of building feminist movements and feminist movement building. She notes that several factors have weakened and fragmented feminist movements, particularly over the past 10-15 years, and argues in the following section that they act in complex and inter-linked ways.
• Based on the argument that we need a new theory of change - that is, a clear sense of what is required to achieve a broader gendered social transformation - Batliwala begins to establish the basis for building a common feminist agenda. Her first step is to develop a typology of organisations to clarify how "member-serving" as opposed to "other-serving" organisations stand in relation to movements and movement-building work. A key point to emerge here is that organisations should not be placed in a hierarchy wherein only those claiming to be movement-building organisations are valorised, and those providing critical services - shelters and safe houses, child care, community kitchens, crisis loans, legal assistance - to women or their communities are devalued. Nor should the value of individuals in strengthening movements be ignored, Batliwala argues.
• This analysis informs the author's construal of the key elements of a feminist process in the context of movement building. The discussion here focuses on:
  • consciousness-raising/awareness-building;
  • organising a mass base into units that could then link up and amplify their voice, vision, and struggle;
  • exercising a collective power and action in pursuit of a shared political agenda that has been generated through bottom-up processes;
  • sustaining a dynamic, learning movement consisting of mobilisation, organisation, theory-building, agenda setting, strategising, and critical reflection and regrouping;
  • building and sharing knowledge in forms that do not privilege the written word (e.g., oral traditions, street plays, art, or music) and that may use modern technologies of documentation and communication, but that resist exploitation and expropriation of that knowledge;
  • emphasising changes not just at the formal institutional level but at the informal level; and
  • building new models of power and leadership within the movement's own structures and processes.
• Batliwala concludes this chapter with a discussion of the life cycle of a movement, which the literature often describes as having 5 stages: imagine & inspire; found & frame; ground & grow; struggle & learn; review & renew.

2. Analysing the experiences of strong and vibrant women's movements in different parts of the world, and understanding how they evolved, strategised, and made an impact - Between July 2007 and February 2008, BFFEMO undertook a series of 10 case studies from different regions of the world that had mobilised women to make a difference.

• For AWID-prepared summaries of these case studies - highlighting their origins, political goals, key strategies, organizational structures, and achievements - see Chapter 2 of the document.
• For summaries prepared by The Communication Initiative (CI) that hone in on the communication-related elements of these movements, please see the "Related Summaries" section, below.

3. Gleaning a preliminary set of insights emerging from the information in the cases - The third chapter, "Lessons to Learn", is organised into 8 broad areas: overarching insights from the cases; actors constraining or fragmenting movements; how movements originate; the evolutionary pathways of movements; some relationship patterns between organisations and movements; their strategies; their structures and governance; and their influence and/or achievements so far. To cite an excerpt from only the latter subsection of this final chapter, here is a list of the impact and influence of the movements (which closely mirror the strategies they have pursued, but go beyond them as well):

1. "Organizing affected masses of women to challenge, resist, and transform the socio-cultural, economic, and political processes that have exploited, marginalized, or violated their rights in different ways.
2. Building an organized mass-base of women with growing levels of political consciousness, consciousness of their own power and agency, and enabling them to become primary actors in the changes they are seeking to make.
3. Advancing / reframing discourse - such as what are feminist issues, what is feminism, what is violence, what are religiously sanctioned rights of women, etc.
4. Enhanced space, voice, and visibility - especially for groups who had little presence or influence before the movements began.
5. Changes in laws, policies, development paradigms - reshaping labour laws and policies, challenging dominant interpretations of religious codes, ensuring family-friendly urban planning, self-help approaches to home-based care for the ill or child care, women controlling and managing unemployment subsidies, approaches to customary land and natural resource rights, etc.
6. Accessing justice for women - not only formally, through courts, but transforming public perceptions of the nature of violence against women, and the invisibility of some forms of violence - such as the stigmatization and legitimization of violence against lesbian women, Dalit women and girls, or the subtle forms of violence inherent in the deprivation of inheritance rights and rights over children for women widowed by AIDS or wars and conflict.
7. New bodies of information and knowledge - the surveys, data collected, and knowledge-building by some of these movements has challenged not only dominant / mainstream constructions, but even feminist understandings. Domestic work as labour, rethinking the role of family and traditional culture and practices, the high levels of militancy of the piqueteras and their ability to generate jobs and increase production in businesses abandoned by entrepreneurs, the creation of a new framework linking sexuality, violence and poverty, - list of knowledge increments and transformations is impressive.
8. Claiming and gaining concrete new resources and assets for women - including collective spaces like the mothers centres, inheritance rights and land and property for women widowed by AIDS, access to health and other services, livelihoods and incomes, etc.
9. Creating new skills and capacities for women - the range of leadership and other capacity and skill-building approaches of the movements has created an entirely new form of power and personal and collective capital for their members.
10. Changes in customary practices and power relations - the achievements of the Dalit, Roma, Kenyan and Indigenous Women are all examples of how culture has been reclaimed but also transformed in particular ways, and where real changes have occurred in resistant areas like caste-based or ethnic-based exclusion and discrimination.
11. Challenges to and sensitization of other social movements - this is a key achievement of several of the movements, which have not only transformed (with some resistance) the larger male-led movements of which they are a part, but also the movements with which they have allied themselves.
12. Increased public awareness and sensitization - many of the movements have, in the process of their mobilization and action strategies, gained a high profile, media attention, and implicitly, some degree of sensitization of public opinion to an alternative viewpoint of important issues like rape, sexual orientation, the power and agency (rather than victimhood) of poor or marginalized women."