The World Split Open (70 page)

For women, globalization proved a mixed blessing, creating many casualties, as well as opportunities. The care crisis and poverty, for example, were certainly not limited to the United States. Forty-nine percent of all international migrants around the globe were women, many of whom left their children with husbands or other relatives, which created yet another care crisis in their own countries. While Americans worried about unemployment and focused on the outsourcing of technical and customer service jobs, they tended to ignore the huge numbers of women immigrants from developing countries who entered the country and worked as low-paid nannies, cleaning women, or nursing attendants. Many of these women felt like indentured servants. But their jobs also made it possible for them to feed their families back home. Coincidentally, their caregiving work also made it easier for well-off and middle-class Americans to ignore the nation's growing Care Crisis.
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Factory work also proved a mixed blessing. The worldwide gender revolution pulled countless girls and women into the manufacturing paid labor force. The conditions of some factories made many young women feel like slaves.
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At the same time, paid work fed their families, gave them access to urban life, and provided young women with new opportunities to achieve a little economic independence, which they increasingly used to avoid arranged marriages and to resist customs that maimed or killed them.
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The spread of global media and the Internet around the world also had both positive and negative consequences. Some television series or films, which portrayed women as leaders of nations, lawyers, soldiers, doctors, or teachers, inspired young women. But these same images often offended their more traditional elders. Those films, television series, and Web sites that broadcast sexualized or pornographic images of Western women scandalized traditional communities. Consumer capitalism—accustomed to using sex to sell nearly everything—outraged religious fundamentalists
and cultural traditionalists who viewed scantily clad or nude women as an insult to female modesty and a threat to male control over women.

In many ways, globalization revealed that women still remained second-class citizens in most parts of the globe. As the world grew smaller, human trafficking for prostitution or labor became pervasive. Promised an education or a job in a foreign city, untold young women—particularly from rural Asia, Russia, and East and Central European nations—found themselves sold as sex slaves or as workers in foreign sweatshops. A few scandals even discovered immigrant maids imprisoned in American suburban homes. International marriage brokers also exploited the hopes and dreams of many young women, who found themselves imprisoned in countries where they could not speak the native language.
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Women and their children, moreover, still made up most of the world's refugees, as well as a majority of the poor, who lived on less than a dollar a day. And for all the discussion of women's rights, girls and women continued to suffer unspeakable violence. In 2004, the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces found that every year 1.5 million to 3 million girls lost their lives from gender-based violence—honor killings, domestic violence, dowry deaths, human trafficking—and from the neglect they suffered in their families.
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In 2005, the Geneva-based World Health Organization studied 24,000 women in ten countries and found that violence against women was pandemic, but “preventable.”
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In 2006, the first comprehensive report on domestic violence in Syria found that one in four married women had been beaten.
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One of the most chilling examples of indifference and neglect was that neither the Bush administration nor the European Union stopped the genocide of whole villages and the rape of women in the Darfur region of Sudan.

But globalization didn't just cause casualties. It also created global feminist networks that helped spread the idea that “women's rights are human rights,” words formally articulated and embraced at the U.N. Conference on Women at the 1995 meeting at Beijing.

Since the 1990s, growing numbers of women and human rights activists around the globe had used the language of human rights to fight against all forms of violence against women and girls, to improve their labor conditions, and to win greater participation in the economic and political world in which they lived. In 2001, an international court—for the first time in history—indicted soldiers for war crimes because they had raped women. In 2005, women in Colombia used the language of
women's rights when they fought to make abortion legal. In the same year, fifteen African nations agreed upon a comprehensive protocol on women as part of their African human rights charter. True, such conventions, protocols, and treaties were often ignored. But they did create a moral compass by which behavior toward women could be evaluated.

A shrinking planet also promoted ideas about women's right to health care and reproductive choice. As satellite television broadcast images of small and prosperous Western families, growing numbers of educated and working women began to seek out and use contraception. As the infant mortality rate fell, they became more confident that their babies would survive. In 2002, demographic experts began to notice that both rural and urban women in many developing countries, including Brazil, Egypt, India, and Mexico, were having fewer babies. “Whether they live in villages or high-rises,” explained Cythnia Steel, at the International Women's Health Coalition in New York, “women have always known what's best for them and their families. Now we're seeing the result of their own choice to have fewer children.” As it turned out, there was no great mystery about how to control the world's population. The problem was that the solution—ensuring women's access to education and reproductive choice—was rejected not only by the United States, but by many local communities as well.
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For three decades, American feminism had greatly influenced global women's rights movements. Challenging and transforming women's health care had arguably been one of the most significant achievements of the American movement. In 2005, the National Women's Health Network celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. For three decades, it had acted as women's domestic and global watchdog, cautiously warning women to take control of their own health and carefully scrutinizing drugs that might harm their bodies or babies. One of the American movement's classic books,
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, published by Boston health activists in the 1970s, had long educated American women about reproduction, contraception, exercise, nutrition, and sexuality. By 2005, it was published in eighteen nations, in seventeen languages, and in Braille, and had become a basic health text across the globe, addressing the specific health problems of women in different societies.

The United States, however, was no longer in the forefront of improving women's lives. In 2004, Harvard University's “Project on Global Working Families,” found that the United States's family policies lagged behind most developed and developing nations. As early as 1983, Australia had required a “gender budget statement” or “gender audit” that
analyzed mainstream public policy—including legislation that dealt with regulations, allocations, taxation, and social projects—in order to increase gender equality. By 2006, both Chile and England floated proposals for giving those who cared for families credit toward future pensions. In the same year, more than fifty nations conducted some kind of “gender audit,” sometimes with the help of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The United States was not among them.
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Growing numbers of countries also began to recruit women into the political process. Some African nations, for example, not only used affirmative action, but even mandated quotas to ensure greater female political participation. By 2006, the Rwandan parliament was 49 percent female and one-third of the parliament members in Mozambique, South Africa, Burundi, and Tanzania were women.
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In 2005 and 2006, countries on three continents—Germany, Liberia, and Chile—elected their first female heads of states.

Most important, nearly all industrialized nations offered the kind of universal health and child care and paid parental leaves that American feminists had dreamed about for more than thirty years, but never achieved. Eighty-four other nations capped the working week, so that parents could care for their children. Thirty-seven other nations guaranteed parents some kind of paid leave for when their children were ill. The United States, by contrast, did not limit mandatory overtime; nor did it offer lengthy paid leave to parents.
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Around the world, women activists increasingly viewed the American government's rightward political turn as a major obstacle to the advancement of women's rights. At the 2005 U.N. Beijing Plus Ten conference, members once again reaffirmed the expansive 1995 Beijing Platform of Action, but they also argued that President Bush's conservative global policies prevented them from improving women's education and reproductive health. They nevertheless vowed to insert and mainstream gender into all global policies, including those that affected development, trade, macroeconomics, and environmentalism.

Although the Bush administration attacked women's rights at home, the president opportunistically deployed the rhetoric of women's rights to advance his foreign policy goals. After the 9/11 attacks, the language of women's human rights suddenly slipped into the lexicon of American foreign diplomacy. The Taliban's brutal treatment of women became one of the justifications for toppling the government in Afghanistan. “The rights of women of Afghanistan will not be negotiable,” said Secretary of State Colin Powell. First Lady Laura Bush then used the weekly
presidential radio address to promote the rights of Afghan women in shaping a post-Taliban society. A few days later, the president's advisors pressured the Afghan delegation to include women in the councils that would create a new government.

Distracted by the Iraq war, Bush never provided sufficient funds for women's education or health or for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Still, the language of women's human rights had entered American foreign policy discourse. Once such words are uttered, they can take on a life of their own. “Consider it a window of opportunity,” said Kavita Ramdas, the CEO of the Global Fund for Women, a San Francisco nonprofit grant-making foundation that seeds small women's organizations ultimate groups all over the world.
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At the 2005 U.N. International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Secretary-General Kofi Annan felt compelled to declare, in words that pleased many human rights activists:

Violence against women remains pervasive worldwide. It is the most atrocious manifestation of the systemic discrimination and inequality women continue to face—in law and in their everyday lives—around the world. It occurs in every region, country, and culture, regardless of income, class, race, or ethnicity. Gender-based violence is also damaging to society as a whole. It can prevent women from engaging in productive employment, and girls from attending school. It makes women more vulnerable to forced and unprotected sex, which plays a key role in the spread of HIV/AIDS. It takes a deep and enduring toll on the entire family, including and especially the next generation.
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Violence against women, of course, did not stop because the Secretary General condemned its practice. Yet he did publicize how violence threatened women's health, even their survival, and helped change the terms of global debate about the obstacles that kept women from attaining gender equality.

Even as American feminists struggled to defend the accomplishments they had achieved during the last three decades, they also dared to dream of a different future.

Decades earlier, at the highly publicized 1970 Women's Strike for Equality march down New York's Fifth Avenue, an event that turned women's liberation into a household word, women activists had settled on three core goals to improve their lives: the right to abortion, equal pay for equal work, and universal child care.

A generation later, women activists knew how far they were from achieving these goals. The stalled revolution had not transformed the workplace or the family. Abortion was under serious attack; one-third of American women no longer had access to an abortion provider in the county in which they lived. Equal pay for equal work did not address the fact that women still worked in different sectors of the economy; a female college graduate employed as an elementary school teacher, for example, earned half as much as a male high school graduate who labored in a unionized construction job. Even women who did the same full-time work earned less than men.
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And child care, for all practical purposes, had largely disappeared from the national political agenda.

Goals proposed in 1970, in any event, were no longer sufficient for the new century. And so, even during these bleak, politically conservative years, many women activists were already plotting and planning for a brighter future.

If women really mattered
, they asked, how would we change public policy and our society? Or, as the author of one “stay-at-home mom” article put it, “So what would the brave new world look like if women could press reboot and rewrite all the rules?”
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First, American women would have to vote in their own interest. Ironically, President Bush's conservative policies had, in fact, mobilized several generations of women to protect their reproductive rights—a feat not matched by feminists for more than thirty years.
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But he had not changed their electoral choices. Although more women than men voted for John Kerry in 2004, they did not repeat their astonishing role in helping to elect Bill Clinton in 1996. The gender gap shrank to only 7 percent, partly because of widespread fears of terrorism and concern for national security and partly as a result of a “marriage gap.” Seventy-one
percent of married women, whom Republican political analyst Kellyanne Conway described as concerned with “marriage, munchkins, mortgages, and mutual funds,” went to the polls and tended to vote Republican. In contrast, only 59 percent of “women on their own”—those who were unmarried, divorced, and widowed—bothered to vote at all. Yet these women, because of their economic insecurity, traditionally tended to vote for Democratic candidates.
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