The Impact of Contemporary Women's Movements in Multicultural Europe

Beatrice HalsaaSenter for tverrfaglig kjønnsforskning

Universitetet i Oslo

Foredrag på Kvinnekonferanse 2013 - 100 år med rett til å stemme

Universitetet i Tromsø 28-30 august

The FEMCIT project 2007-1011:

www.femcit.org financed by the EU 40 researchers comprehensive research in 13 European states,

covering the North, East, West and South covering the period from the late 1960s

Modest statements:

But there is no indication that as yet, despite its enormous growth, the organized women’s liberation movement can claim more than nuisance value

Women’s liberation movement is, in concept and organization, the most public revolutionary movement ever to have existed. It is able to make the most revolutionary statements in public without anyone seeming bothered

Juliet Mitchell (1973): Women’s Estate

The impact of women’s movements:• underresearched • challenging:

• women’s movements change, and do not have porous borders, • women’s movements are not the only actors, thus • impact cannot easily be separated from the impact of other social

movements, of media, public policies etc. • it matters if you assess short or long-time impact, and • movement impact is related to political opportunities, timing, and

last but not least specific issue.

Impact on everyday life and women’s self-esteem matters.

Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own:

"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. (…) That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. (…) How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?"

Women’s movements are underresearched

Hilde Danielsen (red.) 2013 (When the personal became poltical. The new women- and men’s movement in the 1970’s)

Runa Haukaa, author of «Bak slagordene», about the new women’s movement in Norway, from 1982.The first and only comprehensive discussion of the «new» movement until 2013Foto: Nina S. Strand, (Kampdager, KILDEN)

FEMCIT: Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: The Impact of Contemporary Women’s Movements 2007-2011

comprehensive comparative research

Demands, practices and impact of women’s movements activism6 dimensions of citizenship: intimate, bodily, multicultural, social, economic and political21 sub-projects on selected feminist issues ethnicity/racialization as a cross-cutting issue

Contemporary Women’s movements: Citizenship claims and practices

Cross citizenship dimension analysis:Reconsidering core concepts, sensitising questions, close cross-WP readings,.

Women’s movements, gender and diversity as common threads

Remaking Citizenship:New understandings, overall assessments, policy input and recommendations

SocialCitizenship:

Issues:- child care- parental leave

Cases:Czech Rep.FinlandNorwaySpain

Political Citizenship

Issues:- quotas- being repr.-female repr.

Cases:MacedoniaPolandSwedenUK

EconomicCitizenship

Issues:- employment- elderly care

Cases: FranceNorwayPoland

Ethnic and ReligiousCitizenship

Issues:- violence- faith

CasesNorwaySpainUK

Bodily andSexualCitizenship

Issues:- abortion- prostitution

Cases:Czech Rep.NetherlandsPortugalSweden

IntimateCitizenship:

Issues:-partnership- repr. rights- sexual identities- sexual violence

Cases:BulgariaNorwayPortugalUK

Example: violence against women

Examples of critical acts:• Shelters for women• Crimes against Women:

International Tribunal in Brussels, 1976

• 1981 Activists mark Nov. 25

Examples of impact:• 1993 UN Declaration to Eliminate

Violence against Women• 1997 EWL Observatory on Violence

against Women• 1999 UN declares Nov. 25

International Day against Violence against Women

Example from Spain: Law 1/2004 on Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence

Result of the feminist movement’s efforts since 1993

A 'pioneering' law: • defines gender violence as a problem of gender

inequality: 'the most brutal symbol of gender inequality' (the Preamble), defined as result of patriarchal structures,

• direct consequence of unequal power relationships between men and women

• Special Courts for the hearing of cases of VAW, and a special prosecutor for crimes against women

Impact on law and policy – a continuum:

Access impact: new voices are being listened to: YES

Agenda impact: new demands on the political agenda; YES

Policy impact: adoption of legislation or policy in line with demands; YES

Output impact: measures to ensure the new legislation – ??

Full impact: when/ if the underlying hardships are removed or lessened - NO

FEMCIT has explored

– women’s movements mobilisation and organizations

– women’s movements claims and frames

– women’s movements impact/ resonance/ transformations

• for individual citizens; civil society, policy-making• on selected issues in selected countries

FEMCIT opening conference

FEMCIT PhD course in Prague

Bodily citizenship: prostitution

Bodily citizenship

Abortion rights advocates gather in Smith Park in Jackson, Mississippi, to rally support for a woman's right to an abortion, Saturday, July 15, 2006. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

Economic citizenship• a core demand of feminist movements –

• this demand has obviously been influential

• Western democracies have aligned themselves to the normative models of women’s economic citizenship that were prevalent in many of the ex-Soviet countries prior to 1989

Measures to reduce the “double burden” that limits women’s access to full economic citizenship have been largely predicated on the “activation” of women workers through the “commodification” of care services to households with (elderly) care needs. - the family 'going public' (Hernes, 1987:135)

A “win-win” scenario of the “de-gendered” universal citizen worker paradigm?

Or producing new forms of segregation between “minoritized” and “majoritized” women on the labour market?

In all of the countries studied in FEMCIT economic citizenship group (France, Poland, Norway), migrant and “minoritized” social groups face a series of obstacles in gaining access to economic citizenship rights on the same basis as majority groups

Intimate citizenship

• Gay pride, Oslo 2013

• Lesbian mothers’ section

Minority ethnic women – indigenous, Roma, migrant women

Social citizenship

From an art exhibition, Holsmbu, Norway

Political citizenship

The legacy of women’s movements:

• Transformations of culture; everyday life– new norms and practices of mothering, parenting, intimacy– new notions and cultural expressions

• Access for women - procedural changes– access to employment, to political and religious institutions,

education etc.

• Policy changes - substantive changes– gender equality policies, mainstreaming, quotas, abortion on

demand, gender research etc.