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

Monthly Review, Nov, 1996 by Vinay Bahl

Sheila Rowbotham has taken pains to remind us that "women studies after all had its origin not only in the desire to extend what was studied but to transform the power relationship in how knowledge was constructed and communicated."(10) To this end our attention must focus on the question of organization for collective action. Rowbotham and Mitter have developed their ideas on the process of organization and collective action in a second recent collection entitled Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Organizing Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First (London; New York: Routledge, 1994). This book is a valuable effort to open as an area of inquiry the new kinds of organizing emerging among poor women around questions directly concerned with the process of production. But the actions and consciousness of poor women workers of the Third World, generally unable to use traditional methods of labor organizing in the teeth of fiercely repressive local regimes, cannot satisfactorily be explained under narrow and constricted definitions of class consciousness and resistance. These workers are creating novel democratic organizing processes in the most varied contexts in the poor countries, with consequences in the Western countries as well. The accounts in the book reveal the true interconnection of class with gender and race by insisting on the basic Marxist notion of situating work and class centrally within social existence as a whole, while also subverting the assumption that new cultural forms and their theorizing originate only in the North. Again by including studies spanning both Third and First Worlds, the editors are able to challenge the prevailing separation between studies focused on "women and development" issues in the Third World and work done on the economic and social circumstances of class, gender, race, and ethnicity in the First World.

This division of scholarly inquiry obscures the importance of multinational capital, which does not fail to exercise influence over "women's studies" in line with its influence in society more generally. We are then diverted from the task of finding patterns in the multiple forms of global events affecting women. Our problem is that these patterns are complex, variable, and far from readily predictable in their development. Instead of giving up efforts to find commonalities amongst working women, our aim must be to understand these complex patterns by starting with inquiry into what is happening. This is the only way we can assess the odds which are stacked against poor working women. For example, one can find patterns in the history of nineteenth century textile mill women workers in Britain and the United States, and in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan, which are parallel with conditions within the modern Free Trade Zone (FTZ) found in the Third World. For instance, the employers in all these cases sought influence over the attitudes of the new mostly female work force through providing accommodation. The historical study of these lodging houses showed interesting unintended effects when women by sharing living space with other women were also able to share their experiences at the workplace as well, and derive strength from one another, which frequently, developed into militant consciousness. The study of women's current parallel experience in the FTZs is the type of task that Rowbotham and Mitter rightly demand be taken up by the feminist scholarship of today.