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

Monthly Review, Nov, 1996 by Vinay Bahl

Various accounts in this volume show that a consequence of urban employment in the new technology is to give women social power and control (albeit contested) over their fertility. This is an instance where the contest itself is proof of a progressive change. Most of all, women all over the world are able to become aware of their connection with one another by means of the same information technology. The editors urge that women need to use this awareness of their connection with other women in the world to share experiences and to collect data about common problems and issues. For instance, very little is known about the effects of new technologies on the health of women workers. Most of the concerned governments give priority to the question of creating jobs and economic growth, but little or no attention to the issue of the health hazards in the new work environment.

Postmodernist discourse has tended to be an obstacle to taking up the research that might best serve to promote internationalism in matters of women's economic empowerment. The editors write that "in our current intellectual climate, women of the Third World have become the subject of research in connection with the 'other.' It is the 'differences' rather than the issues of economic liberation that has assumed a central position in academic analysis."(8) Postmodernist discourse of "Eurocentric bias" has had the odd result of discouraging the interest of women academics in the developing world in research that deals with the life and work of women with different heritages than their own. The work in this collection explains that this trend coincided with the ascendant ideologies of the 1980s which fetishize the market mechanism and glorify self help and individual entrepreneurship. In such an atmosphere people will readily shun collective responsibility for vulnerable or marginal groups even within the boundaries of their own nation, let alone beyond the boundaries (cultural or political) of their own community. The problem is compounded by those Ecofeminists who consider research on new technology and its impact on women to be irrelevant and unproductive. According to such Ecofeminists, technology itself incorporates and reproduces values harmful to the poor people of the world. With logical consistency but little sense, they promote the goal of the subsistence economy. This entire volume argues that appeals for subsistence economy are a diversion from the central question of how to alter the material conditions that determine relations of power both nationally and internationally.

The editors argue persuasively that both postmodernist and Ecofeminist approaches lead to the erosion of any belief in the power of collective action, of course without in any way diminishing the rate of feminist publications. One can find "shelves and shelves of poetry and fiction, books about sexuality, about race, about health, about housing, about violence, about psychology." But the very few books that attempt to put these concerns in the context of women's changing economic relation with technology are "heavily outnumber[ed] by 'how to' books about computing."(9) It seems that feminist attention has shifted away from the previously central concern of women's economic place in the system and of women's work, both paid and unpaid. This change in the focus of feminist academic attention is linked to a radical shift of emphasis from the collective to the individual. Rowbotham and Mitter point out that the "language of 'difference,' and antimodernity ironically gives the politics of exclusiveness and Eurocentrism a new lease of life." The feminist critique of the Enlightenment devalues the different needs of women of non-European origins which are best expressed in precisely those same despised universal Enlightenment values of equality, reason, and autonomy.