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PUBLIC LECTURE
’Feminism in a neo-liberal age’
‘Women around the world are organizing in a common effort to end
poverty and violence against women. What could be more important?’
Judy Rebick, Canada.
Read the Transcripts:
Lecture - Judy Rebick
Response - Eva Cox
Discussion
About Judy Rebick
Judy Rebick is one of the best-known feminist socialists in Canada.
She is a regular broadcaster for the Canada public broadcaster, the
CBC. For years, she co-hosted a daily CBC television show called 'Face-off'
(a hockey term): a half-hour of debate between leftists and rightists
on current events. She is best known for her commentary on the status
of women, and on alternatives to economic rationalism in Canada. Currently
she publishes the web-based news service – ‘Rabble’
– a lively forum of critical politics. The magazine brings together
a range of columnists, including Naomi Klien and Michele Landsberg,
challenging mainstream media.
Rebick was previously President of NAC, the National Action Committee
on the Status of Women, when it was a vibrant umbrella group of over
600 women's organizations. She came to the NAC from the pro-choice movement
, working with medical doctors, some jailed for their efforts, to establish
abortion clinics in Canada.
Judy Rebick is also an academic. She lectures on Women's Studies at
the University of Toronto and in 2002 became the first CAW Sam Gindin
Professor of Social Justice at Ryerson University, Toronto - a professorship
funded by the Canadian Auto Workers trade union and named in honour
of the economist and activist Sam Gindin.
In her book, Imagine Democracy, she draws on her experience in activism
and politics to show how a democratic society can work. She analyses
globalization's assault on democracy, the feminization of politics,
the media and politics, the loss of idealism among activists, and a
truly democratic electoral system. She is currently working on an anecdotal
history of feminism in Canada.
On the new feminism
Rebick’s CBC contributions often address feminist issues. Analysing
the upsurge against corporate globalization, in Seattle in 1999 and
since, she finds a ‘fire of youth rebellion’ ‘now
raging around the world’. Women are at the centre of that rebellion.
Against claims in the mainstream media that feminism is dead, ‘that
the women's movement has two feet in the grave’, she speaks of
a ‘new wave’ of feminist organizing and action. Rebick sees
women on the march the world over. This unprecedented wave of feminism
reflects a worldwide feminisation of poverty.
For her, neo-liberalism is the prime culprit. Government cut-backs
and privatization directly attack the status of women. As she argues,
‘What women have gained in legal rights over the last 20 years,
they are losing through ham-fisted economic and social policy. The gap
between rich and poor is growing and the face of the poor is overwhelmingly
female. Cuts to health care, education and public services hit women
hardest as they are the majority of workers in most sectors as well
as the unpaid workers who take up the slack when public services fail.
Cutbacks to shelters and rape crisis centres, as well as the cuts to
social supports, are making it more difficult for women to leave violent
situations.’
The story is familiar, and shared across many contexts. She highlights
the resulting feminization of poverty, in Canada and worldwide, ensuring
that women now make up two-thirds of the poorest of the poor.
For Rebick, the solution is in the hands of women. In Canada, the womens
movement improved the lot of middle class women, but had little impact
on poor women. The ‘new wave’ of womens movements, she argues,
is focused on poverty.
The Women's March Against Poverty, which took place in Quebec in 1995,
was a source of inspiration. Organised by the Quebec Women's Federation,
‘850 women marched for 10 days from Montreal to Quebec City to
win nine demands related to economic justice. Fifteen-thousand people
greeted them at the end of the march.’ The Quebec march inspired
the World March for Women, held in 2000, which saw the Canadian Labour
Congress and the NAC marching with the Quebec Women's Federation to
the national capital in Ottawa. The World March culminated at the UN
building in New York, a highly symbolic action by over 3000 womens organisations
from 145 countries, demanding an end to womens poverty.
For Rebick, the World March invigorated feminist politics, creating
‘an enthusiasm and energy that I haven't seen for 20 years in
the women's movement’. At the time she quoted Gloria Steinem saying
that ‘Seattle is the women's movement’, arguing the World
March of Women bore this out. For her, the March signaled ‘a global
struggle to put the brakes on a system of savage capitalism that is
leaving the vast majority of women and children of the world in its
wake.’
On fundamentalism
With the ‘War on Terror’, Rebick has made a direct connection
between opposing corporate globalisation and opposing fundamentalism.
In her ZNet article, ‘Anti-Globalization | Anti-Fundamentalism’,
she refuses the choice between corporate globalization and fundamentalism.
She argues both are ‘devastating for women’, charting ‘a
third path, based on equality, democracy and respect for diversity’
– demanded by women in 1995 at the UN conference on women in Beijing.
For her, neo-liberal globalisation creates the preconditions for fundamentalism.
It removes economic stability and undermines cultural autonomy. Markets
and Westernisation are confronted by theocracy and Fundamentalism, ‘whether
Moslem, Hindu or Christian’. One anti-Women orthodoxy replaces
another.
The third option though, is also on the agenda, brought alive by anti-globalisation
movements ‘in the belly of beast’, and by the World Social
Forum (WSF) process in Porto Alegre, Brazil. As the WSF addresses poverty
feminisation, reproductive rights and violence against women, it becomes
a vehicle for this agenda.
Yet the alternative path is fraught with dangers. The media abuse that
confronted Sunera Thobani – former NAC president – when
she criticized US foreign policy post-September 11, shows how the new
strong-arm politics has closed down the possibility of dissent, especially
for women, but most especially for women of colour. But this is also
a sign of possibilities. As Rebick notes: ‘The vitriol aimed against
Thobani was a sign of how dangerous an anti-fundamentalist, anti-neoliberal
women's movement, integrated with the anti-globalization movement, is
for the powers that be.’
A vision for our times
Perhaps the best example of Rebick’s vision is her article on
International Womens Day that appeared in Rabble in 2003. Railing against
the new militarism, she offers a feminist vision for today.
‘Disarming won't be enough. We need a regime change. Men have
held on to the levers of power long enough. Their continuing monopoly
on power is the biggest threat to world peace, environmental sustainability
and, in fact, the survival of the planet. There is no alternative. We
will not relent until they step down so that women can take over.
‘The feminist movement set its sites on overthrowing the patriarchy
back in the 1960s. We understood that the rule of men over women may
have been maintained by economic domination and myths of romantic love
and male superiority but, ultimately, it was held in place by the threat
and the reality of violence. The same violence, economic domination
and myths of racism maintained the rule of European countries over their
colonies. All domination is rooted in violence and the threat of violence.
That is why war is fundamentally a feminist issue…
‘On this International Women's Day, let's celebrate the centuries-old
women's struggle for peace and against male domination. And let's make
sure this anti-war movement practices the politics of non-domination
and anti-oppression. Because as long as any of our relationships are
based on domination, we will never end the most extreme form that domination
can take and the one that lies beneath all the others.’
Sources
ZNet:
CBC:
Rabble:
Summary by James Goodman, Research Initiative on International
Activism, UTS. Judy Rebick is also speaking at an ALP forum, on 'Reclaiming
Democracy', with Doug Cameron from the Australian Manufacturers Workers
Union, at the LHMU, 187 Thomas Street, Haymarket.
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