It was the late summer of 1995 when a 47-year-old woman took to a podium in Beijing and declared: “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” The woman was Hillary Clinton, and in the ensuing years those words would define much of her political agenda and trajectory as first lady, as a senator, as secretary of state, but never as president.
Mrs Clinton’s neo-liberal brand of feminism would be preached from many podiums in the years to follow, at its core her own branding of herself as a feminist icon, at its periphery the packaging of American invasions as wars of female empowerment.
Through the United States’ state department and through the Clinton Foundation, she would fund many more conferences, where white feminists would lead the charge, surrounded by their ever-grateful brown and black sisters.
Now the age of Mrs Clinton and neo-liberal feminism is over. March 8 will mark the first International Women’s Day since her defeat in the US presidential election. The winner, Donald Trump, has promised huge cuts in US development aid, a turning away from transnational cooperation and the very sort of convening and conferencing that has been so central to constructing and proliferating a global feminist agenda.
While the United States has not been the only nation that has put money behind these efforts, investing in dialogue and collaboration as crucial to the global project of women’s empowerment, it has undoubtedly been its chief proponent. Simply because of the global reach of the US, its turning away from this agenda is likely to mark one of the most significant changes in the direction of the conversation on women’s rights since the Beijing Conference in 1995.
That is not an entirely negative development. The whole American-led conception of women’s rights is tainted.
Undoubtedly, the packaging of American invasions of Muslim countries like Iraq and Afghanistan as “feminist” or as aiding female empowerment in those countries was at least problematic and at worst devastating.
The obstinacy with which US women’s organisations, like the Feminist Majority Foundation and others, stuck to the premise that the American occupation was in essence a feminist project meant to liberate Afghan and Iraqi women was misguided in its wilful ignorance and complicit in blinding the American public to the devastation caused by the wars. When American feminism became aligned with American political strategy, it left many out: women abused by the Taliban were heroes, women who lost limbs and loved ones to American bombings were not. Feminism used as war packaging, one could say, was no feminism at all.
If there was no chasm separating reality and theory, the demise of neo-liberal feminism would be a cause for celebration this International Women’s Day.
All those “other” feminists, post-colonial, Muslim, brown and black, could enjoy a bit of respite from the gushing celebrity-studded conferences where they are seen but rarely heard. Reality, however, is predictably distant from the way things are.
Even as the top-down, let me teach you (while I bomb you) feminism of the old and unequal sisterhood was ineffectual, it was the way things were done.
Schools and shelters, women’s clinics and workshops, were funded by grants from this or that transnational NGO or from USAid; simply put, after a lot of fanfare, a lot of lunches and a lot of networking among the cogs of the transnational NGO universe, some good was done.
It is that little bit of good that is now threatened, crushed under the corpse of neo-liberal feminism. In a perfect world, the space evacuated by neo-liberal feminism’s top-down model would be immediately occupied by the other feminisms that were sidelined by its generalisations. New collaborations, driven by more authentic similarities, would emerge: rural working women in Egypt meeting and learning from those in Pakistan or Iran or Bangladesh. Female health workers who have borne the brunt of harassment by the Taliban could join hands with Iraqi women recently liberated from the clutches of ISIL.
Regional powers with resources would promote and provide for these endeavours, recognising in them the possibilities for the future. The bloom of these new directions and conversations would sustain the successes of the past; the shelters and schools would not shut down.
Unlike the top down projects funded from the coffers of faraway countries, these would not be tainted by labels of western illegitimacy, dismissed as borne of a desire for dominance.
If all this were to happen, then the end of neo-liberal feminism would not spell a period of decline for feminism itself.
Muslim feminists, often left out of the conversation, must seize the opportunity provided by the moment.
For much of the past two decades, Muslim feminist efforts have been directed at pushing off critiques that deny the very possibility of coexistence between faith and feminism. Now the focus must change to the task of developing an identity politics based on gender within Muslim societies.
If the qualm of the past was that Muslim feminists were considered the always-lesser sisters, relegated to the margins of feminist discourse, they must now confront the fact that most Muslim women living within the Muslim world never think or vote or write as women first.
This failure of collective consciousness, of the acknowledgement that there is a core similarity in the discrimination they face at the hands of men, has thwarted the development of a Muslim feminist consciousness. Unless ordinary Muslim women, living ordinary lives in ordinary homes but suffering all the while extraordinary prejudice and discrimination, understand the importance of coming together, this chance to develop a grass- roots movement for female empowerment will be lost.
This is not a perfect world, particularly for women who are regularly subject to its perversions. Some hope can be garnered from the origins of International Women’s Day itself.
The day was first marked in 1909 as International Working Women’s Day, and while this did happen in the United States, its founders were not liberal feminists but the Socialist Party of America. They came up with the commemoration not in the banquet room of an upmarket hotel but to mark a strike by the International Garment Workers’ Union from the year before.
In simple terms, the genesis of a day for women began not with elite women gathering their minions for a lesson in liberation, but rather by ordinary working women joining hands with other ordinary women. It is in this titbit, lost in the long speeches and platitudes, that the hope for a post-American sisterhood can be placed.
That the world is still celebrating International Women’s Day so many years after its inauguration suggests at least in some small part the failures of feminisms past, an inability to unite beyond difference, to find common cause.
These truths are often too bitter to invoke amid the celebratory flavours of annual commemorations, planned to spotlight the positive. Yet if the shape of feminisms to come is to be divined, the tragedy of feminisms past must be assessed such that the new does not replicate the failings of the old.
All the feminisms that were pushed to the side by the dominance of one flavour must now gather their resources and their courage and take the podium, develop agendas and speak the truths that were inadmissible under previous arrangements of power.
The slogan for International Women’s Day 2017 is #BeBoldForChange. It is a fitting exhortation, for change is certainly here, and perhaps boldness will come too.
Rafia Zakaria is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan