Reorganizing the Women’s Movement for the Next Steps Forward
Women’s insights form the range of human experience and enable the construction of a fuller picture of reality.
Governance at the international level will require new systems and structures that are more suited to the challenges facing humanity today. But advances in the operation of those systems — the way we human beings function within them — will be equally important. This was central to the vision of systematic progress laid out in the Baha’i International Community’s statement, A Governance Befitting. “Deliberative processes will need to be more magnanimous, reasoned, and cordial,” it suggested, “motivated not by attachment to entrenched positions and narrow interests but by a collective search for deeper understanding of complex issues.”
This is as true in the international women’s movement as anywhere else. While ideals of solidarity and universal sisterhood were central to its emergence and, indeed, its power and many accomplishments, the path to social change has increasingly come to be defined in terms of opposition, conflict, and a readiness to fight. Such methods have indeed played a role in bringing attention to structures of oppression, and countering specific acts of injustice. Yet time and again, those who are agreed in opposition to something — a policy, a law, a leader — have found that they have little consensus about what should replace it, nor about the root causes that gave rise to it. To build a more gender-equal world — and not just dismantle a gender-oppressive one — it becomes clear that modes of functioning will need to develop the capacity to channel far more robustly the generative power of cooperation, reciprocity, shared endeavor, and unified aspiration.
The need for change can be seen with particularly clarity in the experience of those laboring within the women’s movement. A simple fact confronts every fair-minded observer: the inherent nobility of working to advance the cause of gender equality does not, in itself, protect the women’s movement from the pitfalls of division and adversarialism. This may be painful to admit. Yet too many of us have seen the bitter fruit that such disunity inevitably yields: feminists bullying and criticizing one another; activists competing against one another for funding, recognition, power, and access; actors of all kinds advancing their own interests at the expense of others.
This is not the world we aspire to. Thankfully, alternatives based on justice and generosity, respect and reciprocity are readily available. The work ahead lies in instilling the necessary values into the architecture, machinery, and day-to-day mechanics of the women’s movement. The ways we come together to discuss our issues, make our decisions, and carry out our plans must reflect and engender a growing sense that we are one in purpose, action, and aspiration — this in full celebration of the vibrancy and importance of our diversity.
What does this look like in practice? This is a question that will need to be explored on a case-by-case basis, in light of the circumstances unique to any given arena of activity. Processes of deliberation, for example, often suffer from a model of representation in which advocates operate at the international level but are obliged to report back to their headquarters on advances made for their specific organization. This breeds, in collective spaces, an atmosphere of activists talking past one another, each focused on advancing her own agenda and priorities, or worse yet, actively working to undermine or outdo one another.
