“Women’s history is not only about subjection, it is also about subjectivity. Women develop their strategies and agenda as they go along.” – Amrita Basu in “The Challenge of Local Feminisms.”
Nanette Funk suggests that there are two models of women’s movement. One is characterized by a change in the totality through a transformation of the particular, as has taken place in the second wave of the US women’s movement, where the movement of women, blacks and gays transformed the society. In contrast, in eastern and central Europe and the former USSR, it was the transformation of the totality that created the possibility for a transformation of the particular.
The Future Of Women’s Movement
Chinese women scholars and activists look beyond gender issues. They are concerned about the success of economic reform – because they feel that the fate of women is bound up with that of the nation and society.
Another ‘blind spot’ that the women’s movement needs to address is women working ‘outside the system’.
To understand this, one must also look at the international context of women’s work whereby inter-imperialist rivalry has been relatively suppressed for some years, with the emergence of the United States as a sole super power and the increasing willingness of its government to use military might to perpetuate its dominance. However, this is changing. For some time now, the US has not been able to fulfill effectively the responsibilities of a global economic ‘leader’, because of its own dependence on large capital inflows from the rest of the world, and recent instabilities in its own markets that have been reflected in increasing volatility in different markets across the world.
The increased economic role of certain developing and transition countries such as China, Brazil, Russia and India is also changing global economic equations, even if to a limited extent. This suggests that the capitalist world economy is entering a phase of greater instability because of the absence of a clearly dominant leader able to set the terms of international economic activity. Such instability has both positive and negative implications for developing economies (Jayati Ghosh, ‘Never done and poorly paid’).
It is in this economic instability that the women’s movement’s concern for economic reform lies, the future of women’s movement lies!