Reflections on the recent work of Sheila Rowbotham: women's movements and building bridges

Monthly Review, Nov, 1996 by Vinay Bahl

While pointing both at the international links between women's movements and the interaction of ideas, Sheila Rowbotham also brings to our attention that the development of ideas itself is an integral part of the movements. One cannot develop without the other. The relationship between collective action and women's emancipation is of special significance because a lone voice claiming liberation is no threat. Sheila is aware that none of us can know exactly how new struggles will emerge, what interpretations will be given to women's movements, or what ultimate form they will take. Women join collective actions for different reasons at different times and places. Many women have participated in social protest action due to historical reasons particular to their own situation, and not simply in response to ideas taken from the outside. In this process of struggle each group of women developed their own strategies, and their own interpretations of the questions of equality. Moreover, all women do not use the demand of equality in the same way. In many cases "women demand peace sometimes as 'mothers,' sometimes as 'human beings.'"(5) The process of liberation is obscured when mothers can be at once revered and marginalized as happened in the mobilization of women in nationalist and sometimes in socialist movements. These various factors that color women's actions and the nature of their demands is a reason why many women's movements are not revolutionary as normally understood. It is a continuous and central insight of the work of Sheila Rowbotham that even when these womens' movements are not revolutionary, the demands they make require such a fundamental change in society that they are completely inconceivable without revolution.

Sheila Rowbotham's work emphasizes the relationship between the making of feminist theory and women's life experiences, because theories evolve in the process of interaction between these two. It means there cannot be one theory only or any universal model for women's movements to follow. "Thought of a social movement is not packaged neatly between two covers.... Anyone who has been an active participant in politics knows people do not sit solemnly reading a book and then march off to make strategies and programmes."(6) Earlier, Sheila wrote on this issue that every new movement assumes a different shape and in the process women's movements all over the world look as if "thousands and thousands of women were busy making a gigantic garment in which they all borrow themes from one another but create their own patterns."(7)

These specific "patterns" in women's movements emerge due to the specific social, cultural, political and economic conditions of the countries where these women live in a particular historical time. For example, modern inventions in information technology have been used to create a large pool of women workers in the developing countries. This is a phenomenon that cannot be understood at a journalistic glance, but requires study. Each region is incorporated in the global economic network as a specific component of the international division of labor. Sheila Rowbotham and the Indian scholar Swasti Mitter have explored this phenomenon in the recent anthology they edited, Women Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of Employment in the Third World (London; New York: Routledge, 1995). In raising the issue of the impact of technology the editors are able to challenge the existing definition of the term "Third World" as including only the underdeveloped nations. These studies include as subjects non-affluent communities and nations and immigrant groups residing in technologically and economically developed nations as well, while continuing to use the term "Third World." This strategy allows the possibility of an alternative perspective that links the struggles of poor people from different regions of the world, in the context of the links that integrate their regions in global capitalism.