Multicultural and Global Feminism

Common to all the feminisms discussed in the foregoing is a desire to view women as somehow the same. There is a problem with stressing women’s sisterhood and solidarity, however. Not only are women different from men, they are also different from each other. Women’s class, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and so forth are not uniform. This point about women’s differences, and not confusing one kind of woman (white,Western, middle-class) with all women or women in general, is the core conviction of both multicultural and global feminism.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of “cultural diversity” captured the attention of major institutions in the United States, and multicultural feminism emerged as part of this celebration of diversity. Gender is neither the only nor necessarily the main cause of many women’s oppression, according to multicultural feminists. As they see it, depending on her race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexual orientation, age, health status, and level of education, one woman’s oppression may be another woman’s liberation. Just because college-educated housewives in suburbia seek release from their domestic duties so they can get jobs in corporate America, it does not mean that female assembly-line workers do not yearn to be stay-at-home wives and mothers. More generally, just because many women find that matters related to their sexuality and reproductive capacities and responsibilities play the greatest role in their oppression, it does not mean that all women find this to be the case. For some women, not sexism, but racism, ethnocentrism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, and/or ageism are the major contributors to their low status.

884———Feminist Theory Multicultural feminists replace discussions of sexism and androcentrism with discussions of interlocking systems of oppression (gender, race, and class) and women of color’s and other marginalized women’s multiple jeopardizes. Although a privileged white woman may hit her head against a glass ceiling or two in her lifetime, she will not have to face the kind of obstacles a Native American woman with limited education opportunities, severe diabetes, intermittent depression, and an alcoholic husband has to face.

Nor will she have to contend with the kind of hardships that an undocumented Mexican woman in the United States accepts as her lot—as the price of admission to a better life for her children. As multicultural feminists see it, sexism, racism, classism, ableism, elitism—indeed all the “isms” that divide people—interlock and choke whomever they catch in their grip. Oppression is a many-headed beast capable of rearing any one of its heads depending on the situation. The whole body of the beast is the appropriate target for multicultural feminists who wish to end its reign of terror, and, depending on her situation, each woman must pick and choose her battles. Global feminism differs from multicultural feminism because it focuses not on women in any one nation-state but on how the condition of women anywhere in the world affects the condition of women everywhere else in the world. Agreeing with multicultural feminists that feminism cannot ignore women’s cultural differences, global feminists nonetheless strive to create alliances among women worldwide. They have two goals in common. The first is to convince all nations to honor women’s right to make free choices about matters related to their reproductive and sexual capacities and responsibilities. Without the ability to control their own bodies, women cannot feel like full human persons. The second, coequal goal of global feminists is to bring women (and men) together to create a more just social and economic order at the international level as well as the national level. Global feminists are activists as well as theorists; they are bent on creating a world in which all people, no matter where they live, have enough food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education to live full human lives.

Global feminists claim that women must forge strong international networks to eliminate the disparities that exist between the world’s wealthy people and the world’s poor people. For them, universal sisterhood is not a natural state of affairs but an ideal to achieve. Because of their nations’ condition, women in developing nations are often much more focused on economic, social, political issues than on the sexual and reproductive issues that have tended to preoccupy the interest of women in developed nations. As a result of women’s different national priorities, however, women’s conversations at international conferences have sometimes degenerated into shouting matches. In fact, at each of the three international women’s conferences the United Nations (UN) sponsored during the International Decade for Women (1975–1985)—in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), and Nairobi (1985)—problems emerged among women who were variously identified as First World,Western, Northern, or from developed nations on the one hand and women who were variously identified as Third World, Eastern, Southern, or from developing nations on the other. By the 1995 women’s conference held in Beijing, however, global feminists had helped women resolve some of their cross-cultural differences and to appreciate some of their commonalities. This conference was pronounced a success by its participants, who forged a strong women’s human rights document at it.

Global feminists are proud of women’s international agreements, but they realize that women need to do more than talk about women’s human rights to create a just and equitable social order. Privileged feminists must, they say, be prepared to forsake some of their material luxuries so that disadvantaged women can secure the food, clothing, and shelter they and their families need to survive. Emphasizing that material goods are not in infinite supply and that scarcity of goods and services is increasingly the order of the day, global feminists claim that feminists must take the lead in living more simply and frugally so that life on earth can continue through this millennium and beyond. Unless privileged feminists stop being part of the world’s maldistribution system, they cannot in good conscience represent themselves as true opponents of the forces that coconspire to create and maintain systems of human domination and subordination.

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