ABSTRACT
Throughout history women have struggled to make inroads into maledominated arenas where decisions regarding the future of their societies, the well-being of themselves and their loved ones are made. This has been an uneven and, at times, contradictory process. The history of women’s political struggles is not a linear movement from submission to political power. In some cases “modernization” or “development” actually reduced whatever political power women had exercised. In other instances hard-won victories, such as suffrage or an abortion act, did not bring an end to other forms of women’s subordination. Women’s struggles at the turn of the 19th century centred on citizenship rights. The vote formed the major demand of both the socialist and the “bourgeois” women’s movement. Yet women soon came to realize that enfranchisement did not lead to full equality with men. The present wave of the women’s movement was largely fuelled by women’s resentment that the acquisition of legal rights had not effectively placed women’s issues on the agenda of parliaments, political parties, trade unions and other political bodies. The end of the Cold War has transformed the traditional divide between the “radical” and the “socialist” wings of the movement and redrawn the theoretical map. New forms of solidarity are being forged, based on “affinity” [Haraway, 1991] rather than on ties with a labor movement or on appeals to a global sisterhood. Respect for women’s contradictory and multiple identities, complexity and situatedness are at the centre of contemporary feminist debate [Braidotti, 1994; Haraway, 1991].
