framework shown in Figure 1.4—also contribute to strengthening women’s agency, voice and participation.
Women’s organizing and women’s movements
Significant advances in women’s formal rights have been achieved particularly where women’s movements have been present, organized and broad-based. However, to build inclusive and effective movements, women have to confront tenacious hurdles stemming from gender-biased governance structures as well as the many cleavages that divide them—whether based on ethnicity, race, class or sexual orientation.147 For example, in Latin America legislative progress to strengthen the rights of domestic workers, who are often from disadvantaged ethnic and racial groups, has frequently stalled as a result of foot-dragging in national parliaments. This resistance has, at times, come from female legislators who are able to participate in politics only because their domestic workers put in long hours to sustain their households. In some contexts, including the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Brazil and Chile, however, domestic worker organizations have been able to overcome such resistance and gain legal reforms by combining sustained autonomous movement pressure and
strategic alliance building with progressive parties as well as labour and indigenous organizations.148 In addition to organizing through their own movements and organizations, women have played a key role in mobilizing for women’s economic and social rights within broader labour and social justice movements. Such movements can generate deep and lasting transformations. However, women’s rights and gender equality have not usually been high on the agendas of ‘mainstream’ social movements even when women are active members.149 Around the world, women have too often worked alongside men towards shared goals—independence, democracy, labour rights and redistribution—only to experience their needs and interests as women being sidelined and postponed.150 But there are also more sanguine experiences that illustrate how progress can be achieved by and for women within broader movements and organizations (see Chapter 2 on recent changes in trade unions). For example, women’s specific concerns have come to the fore within Via Campesina, a transnational agrarian movement that campaigns for rural people’s access to land, territory, food, water and seeds within a human rights framework (see Box 1.6).
BOX 1.6
Challenging male dominance in agrarian movements: The case of Via Campesina
Formed in 1993, Via Campesina is made up of over 160 grassroots organizations representing peasants, smallholders, agricultural workers, migrants, youth, indigenous groups and landless people in more than 70 countries.151 At its International Conference held in Txacala (Mexico) in 1996, as a result of women’s collective organizing within the movement, gender issues were identified as central to Via Campesina’s internal functioning. After the conference, Via Campesina women started to meet in autonomous spaces to define a common agenda. In the words of one observer: ‘as women spoke from their own experiences of working within peasant and farm organizations, a real sense of camaraderie, sharing of insights, and respect for one another permeated the discussion of potential models and plans for work within Via Campesina’.152