Feminist Mobilisation and Women's Movements

There are diverse types of feminism and women's movements in the world today'. Discuss with reference to specific examples of feminist mobilisation and women's movements



There are diverse types of feminism and women's movements in the world today'. Discuss with reference to specific examples of feminist mobilisation and women's movements.

Introduction

The Women's Movement has always been internationally oriented. From the very start during the second half of the 19th century, victory in one country, for instance access for women to the university or winning the suffrage, was soon reported to and used by the movement in other countries. International connections were assets to the movements in their fight to persuade their national governments and parliaments. Information came through newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, not seldom carried from one country to the other by committed (and rich) movement participants. During the new wave of feminism in the 1960-80s, ideas and organisational models also flew from one country to the another, increasingly through individuals and groups travelling around, but also through pamphlets and magazines and not least through extensive mass media coverage (Staggenborg & Lang, 2007).

Today, mutual inspiration is not sufficient. Even if many political decisions and most public debates are still concentrated within the framework of the nation state, new arenas of decisions-making are evolving at regional (that is, often continental) and global arenas like IMF, World Bank, WTO, European Union, NAFTA, ASEAN as well as the UN. Moreover, the politics of deregulation and structural adjustment programmes have removed decisions away from the elected politicians to the invisible marked forces and large international corporations (Skeggs, 2008).

Yet, new international arenas for public deliberation and discussion have not been developed to any similar extent. And even if that was the case, what resources will it take to participate and influence the global discourse? Apart from the one-way communication of CNN, MTV and some other Western media, global fora for public discussion among citizens and between decisions-makers and citizens are scarce. This poses a general problem for democracy today. Elitist decision-making and lack of accountability to any body of citizens might be the result. The Internet, however, represents a new opportunity.

Globalisation does not have the same effect for all countries nor for different groups within each country, as many scholars not least from Third World countries have pointed out. Does globalisation, to put it very generally, represents a threat to democracy as we know it today, but also, at the same time, a threat to dictators all over the world. Internationalisation, so difficult to grasp, represents a challenge, not only to the women's movement, but also to all social movements - and in fact to social movement theory itself (Mohanty, 2003).

Does internationalisation empower or disempower social movements? Are some movements able to benefit from internationalisation while other types of movements do worse? The concept of opportunity structure has been attached to comparative studies of movement influence on the nation state, preferably using a comparative ...