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Government professor Valerie Sperling and undergraduate Devon Tarmasiewicz shared an interest in the intricacies and global impact of events in eastern Europe and Russia. Sperling traveled to Russia to investigate women's activism and Tarmasiewicz explored documents once belonging to the American Communist Party. |
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Constructing Global Feminism*
Sperling, Valerie, Myra Marx Ferree, and Barbara Risman, "Constructing Global Feminism:
Transnational Advocacy Networks and Russian Women's Activism," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26(4): 1155-86.
Reprinted from Signs published by the University of Chicago Press, copyright 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair use provisions of US and international copyright law and agreement, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.
Abstract
Social movements in civil society are increasingly taking on a global form.
Transnational advocacy networks constitute a central part of this
globalizing civic activism. Using data from a set of U.S.-funded seminars
aimed at fostering women's movement activism, and run by a joint
American-Russian team in several cities across Russia, we show that
transnational organizing is not unidirectional. Reciprocal benefits accrue
to both local and extra-local activists and organizations; ideas and
resources flow "in" to local movements from abroad, but also "out" into the
transnational arena. The seminars also suggest three conceptual insights
that may be applicable to transnational women's movement organizing in
general. First, civic activism is the "housework" of politics. Unlike
"high" politics, it is low-paid, low prestige, and often female-dominated;
moreover, despite the fundamental contributions it makes, it is often
unacknowledged as being a significant aspect of politics. Second,
activists in transnational advocacy networks act as both "diplomats" and
"entrepreneurs," roles that support enhanced communication and new
understandings of feminist concepts, but also create conflicts of interest
and give rise to organizational and interpersonal tensions. Third,
reliance on transnational resources, while fostering otherwise unaffordable
activism, also carries unintended and undesirable side effects, including
jealousy, fragmentation, exclusivity and organizational hierarchy. We
conclude that, despite the complexities and inequalities inherent in
transnational organizing, the globalization of the women's movement creates
opportunities for local activists, giving them voice beyond their local
arena.
Recent scholarship on social change emphasizes the importance of
transnational advocacy networks and a globalizing civil society, in which
borders between states become permeable to international political activism
(Keck and Sikkink 1998; Della Porta, Kriesi, and Rucht 1999; Tarrow 1999).
Such transnational organizing has blossomed within the women's movement, as
elsewhere, and has affected the types of resources and discourses available
to activists. Efforts to produce change in gender relations can now rely
heavily on elite and expert social networks, in which women's organizing
has become increasingly professionalized and "NGO-ized" (Alvarez 1997; Ray
1999; Silliman 1999). Local feminist activists now participate self-consciously in
international forums, share a common discourse, and construct a women's
movement understood as being both local and global (Bystydzienski and
Sekhon 1999). This change in political activity has occurred at
the same time as a global decline in women's mass mobilization and in the
use of contentious forms of public protest (Freeman and Johnson 1999).
In this article, we examine the nature and meaning of the transnational
mobilization of women's movements, using as a specific case study a set of
seminars sponsored by U.S. women activists and intended to support women's
political activism in Russia. Our main argument is that transnational
organizing is not a unidirectional process. At the point of intersection
between the local and the global, where these seminars take place,
resources and discourses become objects of struggle, which neither the
Russian nor the American women's movement activists unilaterally control.
Moreover, reciprocal benefits accrue to both local and extra-local
activists and organizations; ideas and resources flow "in" to local
movements from abroad, but they also flow "out" into the transnational
arena. Assuming complexity in the interactions between global and local levels of
women's movement activity, our research asks how feminism as a global
movement, expressed through the medium of specific transnational advocacy
networks, affects the development of local women's movements in Russia in
the mid-1990s. We look at the negotiated process out of which Russian
women's activism emerges and at the shared values and discourses that are
constructed with the advice and material support of American activists. By
looking at how these specific transnational encounters actually operate on
the ground, we connect abstract concerns about the globalization of civil
society to the concrete political practices of women working for change.
We begin this discussion with a definition of our terms, being
particularly concerned with how transnational advocacy networks are related
to social movements, what our use of the labels feminism and women's
movement convey to the reader, and how resources are understood. For
background to this case, we then offer a short description of the situation
faced by Russian women in this decade and their recent history of
mobilization. After presenting an overview of the seminars from which we
draw our data, we use this case study to explore the interaction of Russian
and American activists' ideas and resources. Our data illustrate three
patterns we then suggest can apply to transnational women's movement
organizing more generally -- namely, the practical challenges posed by
civic activism's position as the housework of politics, the conflicts of
interest produced by activists' diplomatic and entrepreneurial roles, and
the unintended organizational and interpersonal effects of reliance on
transnational resources.
Defining terms
Transnational advocacy networks and social movements.
A transnational
advocacy network is a set of "relevant actors working internationally on an
issue who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse and dense
exchanges of information and services. . . . Activists in networks try not
only to influence policy outcomes but to transform the terms and nature of
the debate" (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 3). Transnational advocacy networks
typically identify themselves with social movements, such as
environmentalism or feminism, as a means of naming the values, discourses,
and objectives that bind them together. Some would even consider them
social movements (e.g. Della Porta, Kriesi, and Rucht 1999). This
identification with social movements hides certain of their distinctive
features. Whereas social movements have traditionally been characterized
as involving mass mobilization, contentious and confrontational tactics,
and efforts to carry politics out of conventional venues into the streets
(Freeman and Johnson 1999), advocacy networks mobilize smaller numbers of
individual activists who use more specialized resources of expertise and
access to elites. Such networks offer new information to political leaders
and reframe issues for elites in an attempt to gain the support of powerful
institutions for their ideas (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 30), rather than
relying on demonstrations of mass public support and overt confrontations
with authorities. Such tactical distinctions are important.
However, like social movements, transnational advocacy networks are
principled actors committed to social change -- that is, they are bound
together by a common set of values and objectives that challenge the status
quo. In this regard they differ from other international actors such as
governments and transnational corporations (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 30), and
they often work in and with broader-based social movements that share the
same principles. Any given social movement may contain a transnational
advocacy network within it; in turn, transnational advocacy networks
contain formal organizations, informal grassroots associations, and
individuals who, at times, may also engage in more disorderly forms of
politics. While there is an important conceptual distinction between social
movements and transnational advocacy networks based on their tactics, there
is also a commonality between them based on their goals. In practice, the
line between them is necessarily fluid, since one important persuasive
resource that advocacy networks can use is the threat (actual or implied)
of their members' recourse to more contentious tactics.
Women's transnational advocacy networks organized around principles of
challenging gender hierarchy and improving the conditions of women's lives
have been among the earliest and most influential of such global
mobilizations. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, in their influential
account of the growth and significance of contemporary transnational
advocacy networks, look to women's international mobilizations for suffrage
and against the practice of footbinding in China as important historical
precedents to current developments. Women's suffrage, protective
legislation, violence against women, and reproductive rights are just some
of the issues for which women's international nongovernmental organizations
and specifically feminist transnational advocacy networks have mobilized
effectively (Berkovitch 1995). Transnational advocacy networks, organized
in the early twentieth century around struggles for peace and women's
suffrage, provided organizational legacies that were influential in the
remobilization of an international women's movement in the 1970s (Rupp
1997; Ferree and Gamson 1999).
"Feminism" and women's movements.
Paradoxically, while feminism as a
term identifies a shared principled commitment to challenging gender
hierarchy that defines activist networks mobilized around specific issues,
feminist is itself one of the most contested terms within and among these
networks. Indeed, many women who mobilize to contest social arrangements
that they find oppressive do not conceptualize their activism as "feminist"
for a variety of reasons (Basu 1995). For analytical purposes, we need to
make the principles underlying our own usage of this label explicit.
We see women's movements as the broader category of activism, which
includes all mobilization of women as social and political actors that
invokes and reflexively creates the politicized identity of "women."
Organizing women as women, for any number of possible political goals,
creates women's movements. Within this broader context, we define feminist
action as that in which the participants explicitly place value on
challenging gender hierarchy and changing women's social status, whether
they adopt or reject the feminist label. In our view, then, feminist
groups are those organizations that say they are concerned with gender
relations as a target of social and political change. These groups are but
one part of the larger women's movement.
No "traveling discourse," or set of terms, values and ideas, feminism
included, is received and used in identical fashion everywhere it goes (Gal
2001). Indeed, "global" (often "Western") ideas are not themselves
homogeneous or abstractly Western but anchored into their own
national-historical and class-specific contexts. White, middle-class,
Western feminism is not one idea or program of change. Not only are
feminist ideas characterized by tensions and contradictions within every
country, be it India (Ray 1999), France (Jenson 1990) or the United States
(Ferree and Hess 2000), but the focus of feminist movements can differ
dramatically across Western countries, as shown in an earlier study (Ferree 1987) for the United States and West Germany and as Vappu Tyyskä (1999) shows for Canada and
Finland. In addition, certain types of political systems, such as state
socialism, may produce a similar set of effects on feminism in highly
diverse national settings. Prejudging the uniformity of Western or
third world or eastern European feminist values and issues erases the
actual complexity that is being negotiated in transnational advocacy
networks, where multiple versions of feminism are present and where
contradictions arise within as well as between groups defined by
nationality.
Every transnational feminist network event is thus simultaneously an
encounter between two (or more) specific and concrete types of local
feminism and also about constructing something that is new, different, and
self-consciously more globally framed than either was initially (see Rupp
and Taylor 1999). This is a process of mutual transformation, not on a
basis of equality and not without conflict. Outside actors will probably have more resources than local ones, and definitions of what is
important to challenge about hierarchical gender relations, of the
most effective tactics to use to do so, and of the other as "not feminist" will probably produce controversy. Yet it is not just ideas from
outside that strike a chord and mobilize local participants (an outside
agitator model), nor is transnational feminist organizing a process in which indigenous ideas and organizers simply recruit support from outsiders with funds in order to do what they would do anyway (a resource mobilization model). We argue that the
importance of transnational feminist organizing lies precisely in the fact
that imported ideas and practices constructively interact with local
contexts and emerge significantly altered.
Resources for activism.
An overly narrow view of resources as merely
financial may also distort the picture of how transnational organizing
works. Resources certainly include money, but also may include access,
reputation, influence, and other intangible benefits. Resources for
transnational organizing also flow in two directions: the "West" provides
money and ostensible expertise; the "East" provides opportunities for
"feminist moral entrepreneurs" to work for change in the way their
principles lead them to want to do and to build careers in the process. We
define moral entrepreneurs as those who contribute to building
organizations and discourses that have moral implications.1 Their work is
targeted at changing political principles, and in the process they develop
a greater or lesser degree of international prominence and credibility. As
Keck and Sikkink (1998) point out, because transnational advocacy networks
are based on principles and values and are organizationally decentralized
and flexible, individuals committed to a cause to "make a difference" have considerable latitutde within the amorphous
realm of transnational political action. Achieving a reputation as
effectively exercising influence is itself a resource that activists can use to
leverage action and material benefits from others in the future. Local
activism provides an arena in which transnational advocacy networks can
achieve an "international profile" and thus contribute to their own
organizational growth.
In addition to furthering their own interests, in many cases transnational
advocacy networks also foster the development of local movements. In some
cases, they may spur and subsidize grassroots mobilization, offering
opportunities for consciousness-raising experience and networking as well
as models for effective local action (Subramaniam 2000). However, in other
instances, the elite-focused tactics of the network may conflict or compete
with alternate local strategies that seek to develop grassroots
mobilization or protest activities instead.2 Thus, resources injected by
the transnational network may support elite-based tactics at the expense of
developing a more mass-based movement for social change.
The set of seminars analyzed in this case study offers insight into the
complex ways in which feminism as a global movement interacted with the
development of the Russian women's movement in the mid-1990s. Below, we
explore several of the ways in which Russian and American activists shaped
each other's ideas and provided each other with resources within a
transnational context. Our data illustrate the multidirectionality of
influence within a transnational advocacy network and shed light on the
dynamics of transnational advocacy in general. We turn first, however, to
an overview of the Russian activist setting.
Russian feminism in a transnational context
The Russian women's movement is a good example of a local movement that
has seen many of its activists and organizations become part of a
transnational advocacy network. The feminist transnational advocacy
network includes sister-to-sister feminist organizations such as the
Network of East-West Women (NEWW); "joint-venture" civic organizations that
serve as channels for foreign funding, such as the United States-Newly Independent States (US-NIS) Women's
Consortium; local groups that are funded in part by foreign foundations
(such as the Moscow Center for Gender Studies); as well as feminist moral
entrepreneurs such as Shana Penn (NEWW), Martina Vandenberg (Women's
Consortium), and Elise Smith (Winrock International Institute for
Agricultural Development) (see Hrycak 1999). These and other feminist
advocates have positions in American foundations, universities, and
government, and they direct their expertise and other resources toward
women in Russia. They have become deeply involved in Russian feminist
politics, spending a great deal of their individual time and energy engaged
in Russian issues, and in the process developing extensive local networks
as well as ties with American and international funding organizations.
Transnational feminist networks have no shortage of issues on which to
focus their attention. Indeed, the problems of postcommunist societies are
gendered, whether or not they are successfully framed as such. Research on
women in post-Soviet Russia consistently shows that the transition to a
market economy has exacerbated gender inequality in the labor market.3 In
1992, 74 percent of unemployed people with a higher education were women
(Zdravomyslova 1994). Indeed, women's unemployment is often ideologically
justified by claims that women's emancipation was an aspect of communist
ideology that should be replaced with traditional nationalistic values,
including the notion that mothers should stay at home rather than go to work outside the home (Posadskaya 1994). Other gendered problems
include a decline in social services (including low-cost child care), an
emphasis on childbearing as creating families for the nation, the
heightened "machismo" of men released from the control of the tutelary
state, and advertising that offers Western sexist stereotypes as a pattern
of gender relations to be emulated.4 In short, post-Soviet women are
facing a situation in which much of the market for their intellectual or
manual labor has evaporated, while the market for their commercially
sexualized bodies has boomed.
These negative consequences of the transition toward a market economy have
been accompanied by an increase in political opportunities and democratic
freedoms. Under the Soviet regime, there was only one legal forum for
women's organizing: the Soviet Women's Committee, designed to serve party
goals, and its local branches (zhensovety). The population widely
viewed these organizations as "window dressing," and they did little to
improve women's status in Soviet society. Attempts to broaden the spectrum
of women's organizations met with defeat, and women concerned with their
own freedoms had nowhere to turn (Buckley 1989). But in the late Gorbachev
era, glasnost and perestroika swiftly altered the opportunities available
to women who wished publicly to express dissent over their treatment as
women in Russian society. Under Gorbachev's new policies, it became legal
to assemble in public, to organize groups, to register such organizations
with the state and then open bank accounts for them, to publish newsletters
and journals, and even to start independent political parties.
In this new political context, women's ability to share experiences of
oppression and express anger at being treated as second-class citizens
grew. In the late 1980s, the seeds of this dissidence took root and
flourished in tiny feminist organizations, especially in Moscow. In the
early 1990s, a wave of women's organizing took place impelled by the
growing economic crisis and rapid reduction in the social welfare benefits
women had come to rely on during the years of Soviet power. A vast number
of self-help groups and employment-training organizations formed, trying to
fill the gap that the collapse of the centrally planned welfare state
created. One atypical, highly placed woman working as the director of an
Institute in the Russian Academy of Sciences, Natalia Rimashevskaya,
created a small niche for feminist research in her Institute of
Socio-Economic Population Issues, putting Anastasia Posadskaya and
Valentina Konstantinova on its payroll. Both were involved also in the
autonomous feminist group, LOTOS, or League for the Elimination of Social
Stereotypes. The Moscow Center for Gender Studies, the name given to this
small research group, became a key activist organization as well.
Partly through its leadership, in March 1991, the first independently
organized women's conference was held, bringing together two hundred women
representing over forty new women's organizations. Called the First Independent Women's Forum, the conference slogan was "Democracy
Minus Women Is Not Democracy." In 1992, the second such conference hosted
five hundred women from nearly seventy groups and was funded by a
combination of domestic and international sponsors. By 1995, hundreds of
women's organizations were operating in Russia, many of them actively
engaged in attempting to raise women's social, economic, and political
status. These organizations ranged from small, local groups to larger
national organizations with regional subdivisions; they also included
several national level networks of women's groups headquartered in Moscow.
The activists leading these women's organizations described themselves as
part of a small, emergent women's movement, advocating on women's behalf.5
As all these accounts demonstrate, this emergent movement did not develop
in isolation. Indeed, contacts with foreign women and their organizations,
the availability of Western feminist literature, a plethora of
Western-sponsored seminars for women, the growing knowledge of
international laws and standards regarding discrimination against women,
the appearance of Western funding for women's organizations in the 1990s
and Russian activists' opportunities to travel to the West, and
participation in international conferences on women's issues all fed into
the development of the Russian women's movement, including its feminist
organizations. Significantly, the Russian women's movement, in its
struggle to frame issues of discrimination, adopted the language of
international documents, such as International Labour Organization (ILO) and
UN resolutions. This use of international human rights and discrimination
language offered the women's groups and their demands a certain amount of
legitimacy with the Russian government, a classic example of what Keck and
Sikkink call a "boomerang" effect (1998, 12). By taking up language that
already had credibility with international organizations, Russian activists
could use the respect and recognition that the Russian state accorded to
these international actors to apply leverage on their own country (Sperling
1999).
Had Russia's Soviet-style near absence of contact with Western and
international organizations and documents persisted into this decade, a
completely different contemporary women's movement in Russia would have
developed, if one had emerged at all. Our argument is not, however, that
Russia lacked a women's movement or awareness of feminist issues until
these contacts with the West. On the contrary, the Russian women's movement
at the turn of the last century was a very strong and viable one that has
received considerable scholarly attention in the West (Stites 1978;
Clements 1997). Its history, however, is only just beginning to receive
attention in Russia, along with attention to early Russian feminists and
their work. This rediscovery - a process of research and reevaluation that
is not unlike the recuperation of feminist texts and foremothers in the
United States and Western Europe in the 1970s - is also part of a struggle
about whether feminism is "Russian" or "foreign."
The current wave of Russian feminism is occurring in a global context
quite different than that which existed for any women's movement in the
early 1970s. Feminist organizations are now active in many countries.
Transnational feminist advocacy networks already have put gender issues on
the agenda of the United Nations via recurrent conferences and non-governmental organization (NGO) forums.
With such globalization, the emergence of feminist grassroots organizations
and activities can not be seen as isolated events nor merely as local
developments. An earlier study (Sperling 1999) shows that many Moscow-based women's
organizations found support for their activities from abroad very early in
their development, from private foundations and governments eager to
support manifestations of civic organizing. Jane Gottlick (1999) describes a
similar process in St. Petersburg. We now turn to a closer examination of
this transnational process in the case of one series of U.S.-sponsored
training seminars for Russian women activists.
Case study data: Seminars for women activists
In 1994 we began a study of women's activism in Russia in conjunction with
a series of three-day seminars for women activists organized by an American
self-identified feminist and her Russian colleague. The American organizer
had extensive previous experience in the Washington, D.C., women's lobby
and had been doing other work as a feminist moral entrepreneur in Russia
for several years when the seminars began. The Russian seminar leader had a
history of involvement in the zhensovety but had reformed her organization
into an autonomous women's group. In each seminar an expert team
consisting of two American women's movement activists, the Russian seminar
leader, and four or more Moscow?based women's movement activists took part.
Some of the seminars included additional invited speakers, either American
(e.g., activists and employees of various funding agencies) or
Russian (e.g., politicians and political analysts). The purpose of
the seminars was to develop a "woman's agenda" in each region that could be
implemented by a coalition of women's groups. The techniques discussed in
the seminars involved conducting media relations, lobbying elected
officials, and building coalitions.
These seminars, funded by the Eurasia and MacArthur Foundations, were
organized by a joint Russian-American team. With the cooperation of this team, in
fall 1994 we developed an attitude survey and biographical data form to
administer at the seminars and had observers (usually both a Russian-speaking American and an English-speaking
Russian) at each seminar take field
notes. These observers also conducted focus groups with participants on
the participants' understanding of feminism and women's status. These seminars and
focus groups provided the basic data for our case study, supplemented by
interviews with the seminar leaders and two of the site coordinators.
The data on participants were collected at eight seminars in 1995 and
1996. Three were in the Moscow region (two at Zhukovsky and one at Obninsk)
and five in more outlying areas: Ekaterinburg in the Sverdlovsk oblast,
Cheboksary in the Republic of Chuvashia, Novocherkassk in the Don region,
Tver in the Tver oblast, and Izhevsk in the Republic of Udmurtia. The
seminars in Zhukovsky and Obninsk gathered together women from various
Russian regions; the regional forums were just for women living in those
regions. In each region, local site coordinators recruited other
participants who were either already involved in parliamentary politics as
elected officials or candidates, leaders of formally organized women's
associations, or influential in informal women's networks actively
concerned with women's status.
The seminar participants were a highly educated elite of predominantly
professional women (in engineering and physical sciences as well as social
sciences and medicine), representing over fifty organizations. Some
organizations were quite large and had chapters in different regions, but
others were as small as the three people present in the seminar. The types
of women's organizations represented varied dramatically, ranging from
umbrella organizations (e.g., Ural Association of Women), local autonomous
women's groups (e.g., Women's Light in Tver), zhensovety (e.g., Union of
Women of Sverdlovsk), autonomous groups that stem from zhensovety (e.g.,
Prologue), explicitly political groups (e.g., Women for a New Russia in
Tver), and academic feminist groups (e.g., Moscow Center for Gender
Studies). There were representatives from at least eight different
chapters of the Russian Association of University Women, twelve charity and
social services groups (ranging from the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers to
the Popular Movement for Sobriety), six business-focused groups (including
several Federations of Business Women from different regions), as well as a
sprinkling of other types of women's organizations (e.g., an ecology
group, the Society of Book Lovers in Tver, and a youth group in
Ekaterinburg). The participating groups were part of a Russian "women's
movement" in that they were all self-consciously mobilizing women as women,
but only some of the groups targeted changes in gender relations as their
objective and thus were what we are labeling feminist.
There were differences between the regional seminars, in part reflecting
differences in the extent of Western influences (e.g., substantial
in Tver, minimal in Chuvasia), as well as differences between women with
histories of involvement in the zhensovety (who described themselves as
"long-term activists in the women's movement") and the women who were
active in more recently formed autonomous groups. The latter were the only
ones to describe themselves as "feminists," although not all of them did
so. Katherine Hyde's (1996) quantitative analyses of our survey data and a
nationally representative sample of Russian women suggests that the seminar
participants held less conservative views toward gender than did a random
sample of Russian women. The seminar participants differed in the extent
to which they saw women as adding a distinctive, maternalist tone to
political action. The belief that women had a special, natural
responsibility for children was prevalent, but it was not connected to an
expectation that this should limit women's participation in the labor
market or in political activity (see Ferree et al. 1999). These mixed
attitudes toward gender issues are consistent with those found in a random
sample of families in three Russian cities (Vannoy et al. 1999).
As reported in an earlier study (Sperling 1999), seminars were a common form of women's
movement action in mid-1990s Russia, and the differences she found between
Moscow-based activists and those in other regions make the breadth of
recruitment for these particular seminars an advantage. The seminars also
offered the advantage of involving Russian activists at all levels of
prominence in the movement: some had established international reputations,
some were respected regional leaders, and some were grassroots organizers.
In addition, many participants were recruited from successors to the
traditional Soviet women's organizations (zhensovety) as well as from the
newer types of autonomous women's groups, several of them more directly
dependent on Western funding. This diversity among Russian activist women
made the seminars a place where we could observe different visions of
feminism and activism being directly negotiated among Russians as well as
between Russians and these particular Western feminists.
Observing feminism and movement goals in negotiation
The very term seminar evokes an image of hierarchy, with the women from
the United States teaching their Russian "students" to understand feminism
in a particular way and to develop a particular model of change in gender
relations. While this dynamic was clearly present in some of the structure
and process of the seminars, other crosscurrents were also visible. The
American seminar leader repeatedly insisted that the the participants' own experiences had to inform the issues raised
and discussed. More
experienced Russian activists also had leadership roles in the seminar and
explicitly invoked the American 1970s "consciousness-raising" group as a mod
el of self-discovery. The discussion was structured
to insure that all participants had a chance to speak. Every person taking
part in the seminar spoke in turns about herself and her own experiences,
and formal presentations from "experts" (both U.S. and Russian activists)
were mixed with actively participatory sessions, such as making lists of
priority issues in the region. While from an American perspective (as
evidenced by consistent comments in the fieldnotes from our research team)
the seminar form seemed considerably more hierarchical than the organizers'
rhetoric claimed, from the viewpoint of the Russian participants it was a
dramatic step away from the hierarchical and bureaucratic Soviet model of
public organizations, such as the zhensovety.
The definition of the seminar as a nonhierarchical process was itself a
political argument in the Russian context. Some participants came to the
seminars with feminist identities and already defined themselves and their
organizations by contrast to and in rejection of the "old-style" women's
movement run by the state during the Soviet era. These new-style activists
were openly disparaging of the zhensovety, which they saw as "top down"
groups, and had deliberately created new organizations "without hierarchy"
in opposition to them. The participants from the "old-style" groups were
in the minority except in Cheboksary, but seminar leaders supported their
participation. One important dynamic of local tension was the extent to
which a local seminar really achieved a mix between new- and old-style
activists as well as the degree of explicit conflict between them.
One of the participants in the Cheboksary seminar
who was new to activism, was asked if there was anything hindering
cooperation between local women's groups. She responded: "Possibly the
influence of the older set of women activists [i.e., from zhensovety], which
might hinder the establishment of a principally new kind of organization.
If the people who are already in power positions enter this [new]
organization, it won't come out ahead, maybe. Though it's hard to say.
They'd end up making the organization like all the others have already
been." Nora Jung (1999) suggests that in Hungary, this rivalry between new- and
old-style activists is often misperceived or overlooked by Western
feminists, who are more easily able to recognize themselves in the new
groups (which call themselves feminist, cite Western feminists, and endorse
values such as antihierarchical organizational structure that are drawn
from Western models). These new-style feminist organizations intentionally
mix scholarship and activism. As an "expert" from the Moscow Center for
Gender Studies put it during the seminar in Tver, "My life during the past
four years has been the life of an activist. . . Instead of being a
researcher, I became a professional revolutionary!"
The new-style groups often developed in academic contexts, since Western feminist writings already circulated before
1989 in these privileged circles. One of the local site coordinators, a professor as well as a
self-identified feminist activist, told us that she had been allowed to
write a dissertation on women's history and was profoundly influenced by
American feminist writings. But she also found information on the Russian
women's movement in her university archives that helped her to "understand
that these feminist ideas weren't exclusively foreign," and she said that
it was "a very empowering feeling of having such a history behind you."
While she was proud that Russian women had been involved in first-wave
feminism, she also spoke with pride about her experience with Western
feminist literature since "the West" was often seen as advanced and
emancipated on gender issues. She provided the justification for a local
new-style summer school project she had organized this way: "In the
feminist movement there are advocates . . . of the idea of [a] human being's
totality. . . . It means equality of difference and difference of equals.
In conclusion, I'd like to quote from Shulamith Firestone's book: 'Nature
has made a woman different from a man, society has made her different from
a human being.' To overcome this inequality was the purpose of our summer
school." Whether she means to quote Firestone or Simone de Beauvoir is
unclear, and her framing of the issue as "equality of difference and
difference of equals" is hardly specific to any one feminist author.
Instead, the citation seems more designed to legitimate her perspective on
gender relations by invoking a Western "authority."
While the self-identified feminists stressed the appropriateness of
nonhierarchical interaction, the other participants drew the
most benefit from these participatory aspects of the seminars. The
experience-sharing mode of the seminar provided a consciousness-raising
experience that the women with less prior exposure to feminist ideas valued
highly. As one participant put it: "To fight alone, to think about
something alone, to organize something alone, is very hard. I realize
this. I was struggling for three years in order to comprehend this in two
days. Therefore, it would be very nice to have more of these seminars, many
more. . . . Because when you feel this real support, you really want to
work and live." Also speaking to this need for self?knowledge, another
woman commended the seminar form by saying, "for me, a value re-evaluation
took place. If before there was something . . . somewhere in the back of
my mind, now it's come forward. That is, I re-evaluated my values . . . In
a sense, I have re-evaluated myself."
Although our fieldnotes indicate that participants often recognized some personal stake
in challenging gender expectations, they did not share the
feminist identity that some brought to the seminars. In postsocialist society the word feminism is contested
terrain. For many women active in challenging gender relations in eastern
Europe, feminism means only what they perceive to be a specific western
European version of women's emancipation, and they would rather say that
they are not feminist than embrace this self-definition (Tatur 1992;
Siklova 1994; Grünberg 2000). The need to affirm men as fellow citizens
(who have also been exploited by the state), anger at the one-sided
emphasis of state socialism on "productive labor" (wage work), and sheer
exhaustion with their double shift (working full time and doing all domestic labor) have made many women skeptical of fighting
men for the declining number of paid jobs. One participant in the
Cheboksary seminar, for instance, shared her frustration on the subject in
response to a survey question: "Anything can be written on paper, but if a
woman in our Russian society . . . has to be a multi-machine operator, and
is run off her feet at home and at work, like a squirrel in a cage, then
equal opportunities are out of the question. A woman can achieve something
at work or in her social life only at the expense of neglecting her own
health, her personal time, and her home and family." Thus, Russian women's
movement participants, like those in eastern Europe, do not necessarily
define employment as liberation, as they often perceive American feminists
to do (Havelkova 1993, 1997; Gal and Kligman 2000).
In these seminars, the use of the word feminism was problematic, but it
did not separate those with a commitment to challenging gender relations
from those with interests in mobilizing women's activism for other goals.
In Zhukovsky, one Russian sociologist brought in as an "expert" argued
against the use of the term feminism because of its negative connotations,
saying: "Other words need to be used . . . Feminist should be avoided."
Yet even in avoiding the word, she argued for a feminist definition of
issues: "From my point of view the main priority is to change the
stereotypes of social consciousness which still push women to the back of
social and political life, and which do not allow them to take a single
step. That is, we are dealing with a vicious circle. Breaking it is the
main task, the main priority."
Not all groups chose challenging gender relations as the purpose of
women's mobilization as women. In fact, we observed several quite dynamic
and successful negotiations between the Russian seminar attendees and the
American-led experts about the goals of the groups. In Novocherkassk, the
Russian and American "team leaders" wanted to follow their usual model of
having participants develop a prioritized list of local "women's issues,"
but the attendees resisted. Insisting that their sole priority was "to
organize the women in the Northern Caucasus against the war in Chechnya,"
they successfully redirected the seminar time to focus on that one task.
This redirection shows dramatically that the relationship between local
movements and transnational activists evolves through a negotiated process
rather than in a unidirectional fashion, where "global" ideas are imposed
at the local level. Other shifts, less comprehensive and dramatic, unfolded
in other seminars.
Community activism and politics in civil society
The decision to focus on feminist or other goals was rarely a serious
point of conflict between the seminar leaders and participants. Both
leaders and participants defined general economic issues; care and
financial support for mothers, children and families; and the overall
breakdown and insecurity of society as appropriate concerns, and they
took a broad view of "women's issues."6 However, the American
co-leader of the seminars tended to see a "women's agenda" as more family policy and
employment centered as well as more specific and immediately achievable
than the Russians in the seminar did. The Russian participants framed
their concerns more in terms of a wider community. For many women at the
seminars, the endemic economic and social disorder was something that women
needed to confront from the grassroots up. As one activist argued, "the
point is to create a basis for the rule of law . . . Without solving this
problem, without constructing a law?abiding state, women's social problems
cannot be solved, but the goal is so big that in the nearest future it
cannot be attained . . . We should look for and take the first steps in
this direction." Thus these women mobilized a political identity as women
in order to build voluntary organizations at the local level that would
address a variety of needs (combating alcoholism, promoting peace, cleaning
up environmental hazards). This broad and inclusive scope of women's
mobilization as women defined women as having special needs and
competencies in constructing a more just society in general and thereby
assigned women and women's movements a particular role in building "civil
society."
In this regard, their self-definition accorded well with that of many
funding organizations active in Russia and eastern Europe. International
networks fund this "civic" level of activism with the idea of
"strengthening civil society." Such activism is typically defined as
"apolitical" because it is often nonpartisan, based in local voluntary
organizations, and encourages grassroots participation rather than party
growth. We suggest that it is not coincidental that such transnational
support often flows to women's groups, because civic activism is a gendered
form of politics. Civic activism, whether in Russia or elsewhere, is
political activity, although participants (whether funders or activists) do not necessarily define it that way. This reflects the fact that
politics itself is defined on a gendered basis. Institutional politics,
dominated by men and organized in and through male gender relations, is
often the only type of activity that counts as political. Unless politics
is carried on in and through such formal institutions as legislatures,
courts, and government ministries and agencies, it can slip from view
entirely. In that sense, community activism is to politics as housework is
to work. Because it is female dominated, it tends to be devalued and
rendered invisible, despite being important, necessary, and honorable work
(Ferree 1997).
Recognizing this directs our attention as analysts toward the forms of
nonstate politics that, as Linda Christiansen-Ruffman argues,
are "closeted" (91995, 386) -- do not openly claim an identity as politics --
because they are not part of state institutions. Indeed, women in many
countries have long occupied spaces at the boundaries between public and
private, spaces that have now begun to be recognized by acquiring the name
civil society. Yet it is also important to note that women doing this
political work do not usually name it as politics, just as many women doing
housework have long said, "I don't work, I'm home with my kids." The
mothers on welfare and ethnic-Acadian women that Christiansen-Ruffman
(1995) studied in Canada, the grassroots activists in the "war on poverty"
that Nancy Naples (1998) interviewed in U.S. urban neighborhoods, and the
women dissidents in the former East Germany that Ingrid Miethe (1999)
studied all say emphatically, "I don't do politics; I work for my
community." Based on her interviews with women's movement activists in St.
Petersburg, Gottlick similarly notes that "when these women leaders
talk about politics, however, they generally define political behavior much
more narrowly and even deny the politics of their own work" (1999, 246).
Women, especially women in some degree of opposition to their governments,
do not always see their local, practical resistance as politics. Just as
housework is made invisible as work even to its own practitioners, civil
society's practical grassroots politics is made conceptually invisible as
politics, even though it may be the very fabric from which democratic
politics is constructed.
The question of whether institutional politics or grassroots community
activism was the best route for women's activism was answered differently
in each region. The seminar leadership gave mixed messages on this, on the
one hand emphasizing the value of lobbying, making concrete demands on
specific elected officials, and campaigning for office, while, on the other
hand, also encouraging participants to form local organizations, chapters of
national organizations, and informal networks of activists at the community
level. In Tver, the seminar group readily accepted the leaders'
encouragement to focus on making demands on the state, perhaps because a
number of stable groups already populated their local movement. By
contrast, one of the seminar groups in Zhukovsky clashed with the trainers
and rejected their argument that institutional politics should be an
important focus, seeing this approach negatively as too state-centered and
putting their emphasis more on consciousness raising at the local level.
Transnational activists, with their predominant focus on elites, then, may
come into conflict with activists' goals at the local level where community
organizing and grassroots mobilization may have a higher priority.
In general, the participants most often criticized the American "experts"
for not sufficiently comprehending how little infrastructure existed in
Russia, a lack of understanding that, without competent formal
institutions, the strategies for political activity under discussion were
impractical. Participants often reminded the visiting experts and seminar
leadership how rarely laws were actually implemented, how pointless it was
to lobby politicians who lacked the power to do what was requested of them,
and how little access to the media meant when no one trusted its output.
As one Russian participant put it, in America "the bicycle is already made.
But somebody (in Russia) would have to begin to make the bicycle from the
beginning" before anyone could learn to ride it.
Nonetheless, the participants saw the seminars as teaching them how to
build an infrastructure for democratic participation, the "bicycle" they
needed for their work. Indeed, the main benefit of the seminars, mentioned
in every location in slightly different words, was in teaching participants
what one site coordinator called "the technology to unite us." This
technology included techniques for speaking in groups, listening to each
other, forming networks around a concrete issue, and thinking strategically
at the grassroots level about specific actions. These skills are perhaps
unrecognized as such in Western societies long accustomed to self-organized
local groups and, like the invisible skills called for in doing housework,
may be naturalized as simply "something women are good at." The American
seminar leaders, however, clearly understood that such skills could not be
taken for granted in this context and actively set about teaching them.
This was generally appreciated. As one Russian participant stressed, "if
you speak about [changing] the social and economic situation of women in
general, the feedback you will get is, 'tell us how.'"
Thus, while the label feminism is a controversial import from Western
discourse, the transformation of self through consciousness raising in
small groups and the "technology" of facilitating such interaction and
doing grassroots community organizing were both imported ideas that found a
warm reception in Russia. The confluence of funders' interests in
"strengthening democracy" and participants' desires to mobilize as women to
confront a variety of community problems posed a challenge to the American
organizer's and experts' tendency to think of "women's issues" in family
policy or employment terms. At later seminars, the American organizer
increasingly put her focus on technology transfer rather than promoting a
particular set of projects. Local conditions thus spurred a modification
in the original "Western" plan.
While such shifts show that the Western influence on the local women's
movement is not wholly unidirectional, this fact does not suggest that the
distribution of power between the Western activists and their Russian
counterparts is an equal one. The West remains the source of the funding,
and, to a great extent, the existence and priorities of such projects are
still largely determined in the West, even if influenced by interactions
with local activists over time. While the participants could and did debate
the nature of the women's agenda, the idea of having such an agenda at all
was not open to discussion.
Significantly, the seminars provided an opportunity to explore the extent
to which challenging gender hierarchies was a priority issue in the Russian
context. Discussions at the seminars revealed differences in emphasis
between American and Russian participants on this topic, but they just as
importantly exposed a division among the Russian participants themselves
over the degree to which an agenda of challenging gender relations (whether
or not it was labeled as feminist) reflected their priorities. It would be
simplistic and misleading to cast the Americans as feminists and the
Russians as rejecting feminism, when many of the Russians put a higher
priority on consciousness raising around gender oppression than the
Americans did. Also, the American leader's encouragement of women claiming
support for their work as women (via family or employment policy) was not
necessarily any more (or less) directed at challenging gender relations
than the Russian women's interest in peace or crime reduction. On the
whole, the organizing agendas that emerged from the seminars reflected
Russian local priorities, albeit expressed through a format (a women's
agenda) provided by the Western-funded seminar leaders. The seminars also
expressed a transnationally shared but contradictory definition of
community activism as both "not politics" and "fundamental to politics"
that reflects its gendered position as the housework of politics.
Examining transnational advocacy networks on the ground provided us an opportunity not only to explore how local and imported ideas and priorities
combine to produce new syntheses, but also to examine the multi-directional
flow of resources and their effects on organizing. It is to this complex
series of interactions that we now turn.
The paradox of resources
With the structural change in the Russian polity and economy at the end of
the 1980s, not only ideas but material resources could and did flow across
borders. Money for building civil society in Russia and the other
countries of the former Soviet Union began to flow in, and women's groups
tapped into this stream. For example, between 1994 and 1996 the Ford
Foundation granted $250,000 to the Russian Inform Center of the Independent
Women's Forum; $200,000 to the U.S.- NIS Women's Consortium; $75,000 to the
Moscow Center for Gender Studies, which held a summer school for the
purpose of developing a gender studies curriculum; and $50,000 to
Ecojuris-WLED (Women Lawyers for the Environment and Development). The
Eurasia Foundation (created by the State Department and funded through
USAID) awarded grants totaling approximately $900,000, for working with
Russian women and women's organizations, between May 1993 and May 1996.
Feminist transnational advocacy networks also reached into Russia, not
only to contribute their money and organizational resources to help
mobilize local activists but also to bring local activists out of Russia to
speak to and participate in the transnational movement. Resources coming
from the West could be vital for Russian activists' own personal survival
as well as for their success in getting an organization off the ground.
Similarly, experience and involvement in Russia could serve to build the
institutional profile of specific Western individuals and organizations
involved in feminist transnational advocacy networks. Thus there was a
process of moral entrepreneurship on both sides in which principled actors
built careers and organizations via a process of transnational interaction.
Several of the Russian activists involved in these seminars were part of a
growing network of internationally experienced actors. Several of the site
coordinators had been invited to the United States for conferences under
the auspices of organizations such as the League of Women Voters, the
American Association of University Women, Zonta International, and the
International Federation of Professional and Business Women. Others had
experience in the United States or western Europe that had come through
invited lecturing tours, visiting professorships, collaborative research
grants, or grant-supported travel to conferences (such as the Berkshire
Conference on Women's History) and research meetings sponsored by
universities and academic consortia.
On the one hand, the Russian activists functioned in these roles
essentially as diplomats; that is, they represented women of their country,
their issues, and their movement to a foreign audience in order to create
understanding and alliances across the differences of nationality and
experience. The American activists sometimes took a similar diplomatic
role in Russia, explaining their own personal understanding of feminism and
describing what they perceived to be the contours of the American women's
movement in general to a curious Russian audience. One context in which the
diplomatic role was particularly stressed by Russian activists was in their
participation in the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Forum associated
with the United Nations' 1995 Beijing conference on women. Although
Western funds allowed these Russian women's movement activists to attend
the Beijing conference, they were very conscious of representing their
country and their movement. One activist who attended the Beijing
conference complained that there were only two hundred Russian women
activists participating in Beijing "but 10,000 Americans." In articulating
her desire for more international recognition and representation for
Russia, she was both claiming a place on the world stage and advocating
abroad on behalf of Russian women, which Keck and Sikkink (1998) describe
as key work of transnational activists. While the Americans who are
frequently in Russia working on developing the infrastructure of women's
activism there are indubitably transnational activists, they are not the
only ones in this role. The Russians who travel abroad frequently are themse
lves transformed into transnational activists, and they are already adding
their version of feminist thought to the international mix.
On the other hand, the Russians involved in transnational advocacy
networks also act entrepreneurially -- that is, they both import and export
the resources, ideas, and strategies that they see as valuable for women in
their countries, their organizations, and their own careers. The Russian
activists we observed were very aware of their own entrepreneurial role and
its obligations. They used the seminars in part to look for opportunities
to identify new resources for their groups as well as to find a means to
ensure their own economic support. What seemed relatively trivial amounts
of support to the Western organizers and some of the better-established
Russians, such as the meals provided at the conference site or a modem for
continued communication with the organizers afterward, were important to
the seminar participants. The economic collapse in Russia in the 1990s has
meant that many academics and professionals lead a hand-to-mouth existence,
and the connections established to Western groups make a vital difference
in activists' ability to meet basic survival needs.
Not only as individuals but also as leaders of local organizations,
Russian participants were dependent on finding a source of support in the
West. There is no routine state subsidy for these organizations and no
domestic tradition of "checkbook activism" to support voluntary
associations and their work. In fact, over half of all the women's groups interviewed in Moscow received foreign funds as of mid-1995,
and few received any type of local funding. Domestic funding was more
prevalent in remoter regions, such as Ivanovo and Cheboksary, than in
Moscow (Sperling 1999). While American movement entrepreneurs can and do
look to domestic funding collected in small amounts from many individuals
to build mass membership organizations (Staggenborg 1988), this type of
entrepreneurship is alien to Russian activists. American organizers
encouraged the Russian activists to do both domestic and international
fund-raising, as Gottlick also found true of the women's movement in
St. Petersburg. She discusses how Russian activists there saw American
seminar organizers as teaching them to overcome their perception of
fund-raising as "humiliating" and to see it instead as "a positive and
necessary part of organization." She cites one Russian activist as saying,
"We realized that no one would give us something for nothing, so we got
licensed to do international work, to organize cooperation. We can sell our
knowledge and earn the money ourselves." (1999, 254). Knowing how to do
such entrepreneurial fund-raising is both a skill that global conditions
now demand of local Russian movement activists and also a skill that is
transmitted transnationally.
The American organizers of the seminar series also found themselves
frequently in an entrepreneurial role, writing grants and persuading
foundations to support their activities, continually concerned with
demonstrating to funders (as if to stockholders) that their performance was
strong. Their personal credibility as well as the institutional profile of
the organization sponsoring their work rested on their successes in
"strengthening democracy." These successes were largely indirect, in that
the organizers relied on the Russian activists whom they were supporting to
go home and do the work of organization and coalition building that would
reflect well on them as trainers. Thus there was some pressure from the
American side to tie support to performance, create standards of
accountability, and monitor the effectiveness of the Russian activists on
their own home ground. The Russian participants sometimes resisted such
demands, leaving some of the Americans involved feeling, as one said, as if
she were a "cash cow" being milked to support individual Russians and their
organizations.
However, because of the gulf in standard of living between the Americans
and the Russians, the local participants sometimes suspected that they were
the ones being milked to build the foreigners' careers, including the
research careers of academic women such as ourselves. Although the
Americans involved reaped only minimal financial rewards from their
participation in the seminar process, they certainly gained increased
credibility among sponsors and reputation building that could be
transferred to their own related activist or academic enterprises. When
resources are not understood merely as narrowly economic, it is easier to
see that the career- and organization-building effects of such
transnational involvements are typically reciprocal.
A large share of Western money goes toward funding conferences, training
groups and seminars such as the ones we observed. As noted in an earlier study (Sperling 1999), women's movement conferences were a constant feature of the Russian
landscape in the mid-1990s; indeed, networking at conferences has been one
of the only opportunities for Russian women activists to meet each other,
exchange information about their projects, and develop further joint
activities. Conferences financed by foreign grants can afford to bring
activists in from cities located a considerable distance from Moscow, who
would otherwise be stranded and isolated. Participants in the Zhukovsky
seminars, for example, came from areas as distant as Siberia and the
Caucasus. Without Western funding, the frequency and reach of such seminars
and conferences would be considerably smaller, and networking and
information exchange would be even more restricted.
Although Western resources are vital for individual support,
organizational growth, and cross-regional networking, they also produce
problems. The ability to use seminar participation to get connected to
Western resources led to competition and controversy among the Russian
participants themselves. There were recurrent, sometimes literally tearful,
struggles over which local organization was more legitimate or deserving of
Western funds as well as over which particular individual could be said to
be the president or secretary or other formal representative of a specific
group. One such struggle occurred when an American involved in one of the
Zhukovsky seminars expressed an interest in starting local branches of an
international women's organization. She had a small grant available to
help the launch the Russian affiliate organization, which would take the
form of an umbrella organization. Two branches of the incipient
organization, one in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg, knew generally that
certain resources were available, but not exactly what or how to access
them. A portion of the seminar broke down into recriminations over what
money might have been spent on organizing activities for a third group and
whether the first two groups would now be left out of the loop. The anger
and enmity were palpable.
In effect, the presence of scarce and valued resources fosters jealousy.
For this reason, women's groups that succeed in obtaining foreign grants
are often accused of trying to monopolize or hoard their Western contacts.
An activist interviewed in a wider sample in Moscow expressed
the logic behind such sentiments: "Various groups are in competition with
each other for the same Western funding. If the Western foundations
support MY idea, I'll get funding for it. People end up saying, "We're
more worthy than THEM - fund US!" This creates competition and disunity,
which is exacerbated by the conditions of poverty." Animosity related to
competition for funding is a feature of any social movement; the mutual
suspicion that grows under such circumstances has clearly hampered
cooperation between women's organizations in this case. Other side effects
of the transnational resource base, observed in an earlier study (Sperling 1999) in the
wider movement, include organizational fragmentation, exclusivity in
membership, and external control over organizational rules. These issues
could be seen in the composition and dynamics of the seminars as well.
Fragmentation is the most obvious outcome of depending on extra-local
resources, despite some granting agencies' efforts to mitigate this effect
(Sperling 1998, 1999; Richter 2000). With the exception of travel and
research grants, foreign funders in Russia give grants to organizations,
not to individuals. Since usually only the leaders of the recipient
organization receive a salary from the grant, the logic of the situation
demands fragmentation into myriad small organizations, each with its own
leaders who can draw an individual salary. This complicates the
movement-building process, since it is clearly in the interest of groups to
maintain an individual identity rather than collaborate with other groups
and risk being absorbed. Despite the seminar organizers' urging local
groups to form networks and coalitions at the local level, this reluctance
was evident in some of the seminars, as was the existence of tiny (three-
or four- person) organizations in all the seminars.
Another problem is exclusivity. When networking between women's groups and
activists occurs, a frequent critique is that odni i te zhe (the same old
people) appear at each conference and seminar. Familiarity with particular
Western funders or organizers creates an inside track to support, and
outsiders have a hard time breaking into these circles. The word-of-mouth
recruitment procedures that characterized the seminars we observed, along
with the competitive atmosphere for funding, encourage activists to remain
in small and closed networks rather than bring in new and more diverse
participants.
Finally, a third problem for the local movement is that structural rules
may encourage organizational hierarchy. We do not deny the existence of
formal hierarchy between extralocal funders and local recipients, as
Western government and foundation funding was, especially initially, given
to Western women's movement organizations to manage on behalf of their
Russian "partners." However, we particularly note how hierarchy is
encouraged within individual Russian organizations, as funders demand
accountability in a way that presumes more bureaucratic structures, such as
formal office holding and budgets. Indeed, funding agencies make similar
demands on social movement organizations within their own borders.
Bureaucratization is not without its local supporters, who see it as a
pragmatic necessity that does not demand more than a superficial
compliance, and local opponents, who see it as transforming the goals and
processes of the movement in fundamental and undesirable ways. Similar
conflicts emerged within the American anti-rape and battered women's
movements as granting agencies pressed for formal budgets and leadership
hierarchies (see Ahrens 1980; Matthews 1995). In Russia, such conflicts may
feed back into the tensions between zhensovety veterans and "new-style"
organizations discussed earlier.
The problems of funding sources and the strings they attach are
complicated in the context of transnational advocacy networks, but it
should be clear from the above case that the transfer of resources is not
just a one-way street. Rather, it is an interaction between indigenous and
foreign activists and organizations out of which emerges a relationship in
which benefits and costs are debated on an ongoing basis, within as well as
across nationality lines.
Conclusions
By using this case study to look closely at the dynamics of interaction
between transnational feminists and local women's movement activists in
Russia, we see how a global advocacy network operates on the ground. Such
transnational issue networks have become a central forum for women's
movement activism and a major vehicle through which not only feminist ideas
but also feminist practices and organizations travel around the world.
While there are beneficial consequences of the ease and frequency with
which such transnational connections are forged, there is also an increased
controversy about women's movement priorities and competition over
resources into the entire global system. In the transnational realm of
women's movement ideas, feminism is a much disputed term, but
consciousness-raising about women's oppression and learning to facilitate
participatory group processes are highly valued practices. In the realm of
material infrastructure, supporting activists, building local
organizations, and facilitating regional and national networks are clearly
beneficial consequences, but jealousy, fragmentation, exclusiveness, and
hierarchy are costs associated with the influx of transnational resources
that we also observed at these seminars.
We particularly want to highlight three potentially general aspects of
transnational women's movement politics that we saw in this
Russian-American case that bear further investigation in other contexts:
the ambiguous status of grassroots community organizing as the "housework"
of politics; the combination of diplomatic and entrepreneurial roles taken
by activists; and the paradoxical effects of resources in building advocacy
networks while perhaps undermining mass mobilization.
First, just as housework is often not recognized as work at all, so too
community organizing is rarely recognized as politics, because it occurs
outside of formal, male-dominated economic and political institutions.
Community organizing may appeal to women who reject the values of the
dominant system while simultaneously providing a marginalized and
precarious means of participation in that system. Through such
participation, the groundwork of "civil society" is constructed, making
women's civic activism an integral part of democracy building. The interest
of transnational funders in civil society and its role in strengthening
democracy in post-socialist countries has allowed women doing grassroots
community organizing in Russia to find unusual access to recognition and
funding for their work.
Feminists involved in transnational advocacy networks were influential in
making the connection between Western funding sources interested in civil
society and Russian women's interest in community activism. These
transnational feminist moral entrepreneurs often saw Russian women's
organizing activities as a step toward building a specifically feminist
social movement in Russia. While we see evidence that there are feminists
and feminist organizations in Russia, we also think the support channeled
to other women doing grassroots organizing as women is important for
building a broader women's movement. In this movement, organizations
challenging gender relations are only one part. By supporting women
organizing as women, transnational resources help to produce a politicized
identity for women and to recognize community activism, "the housework of
politics," as a gendered activity, even when the issues raised are not
directly about gender oppression. In this way, all women's movements, even
non-feminist ones, subvert gender hierarchy.
Second, the influences and opportunities afforded to activists in the
transnational system are reciprocal. The assumption of such widely
influential arguments as that of Maxine Molyneux (1985) is that activists
from outside bring higher-level, strategic considerations into the local
situation. We argue instead that transnational encounters enlist both
local and extra-local activists in diplomatic and entrepreneurial roles and
that their influence on each other is reciprocal, albeit unequal. As
diplomats in the transnational system, both the Russian and the American
activists represented their own versions of women's identities and needs to
the participants in other countries. This happened when they traveled
abroad, participated in conferences, and wrote books and articles about
their experiences. Russian women who are active in transnational politics
thereby expand the definitions of feminism, activism, and other concepts
circulating within the transnational advocacy network. Additionally, in
this diplomatic role, activists from each country may have an interest in
presenting their movement favorably, possibly downplaying internal
conflicts, and in having their local definitions of the situation be
recognized and valued internationally.
Transnational activists in both countries often also take an
entrepreneurial role. For American activists, convincing funders of their
success in "training" and supporting the development of local organizations
is a means to legitimate claims for future support and to secure a
reputation for effectiveness that can serve to further the development of
their own careers and organizations. For Russian activists, securing
transnational funding can be a matter of individual as well as
organizational survival. In these entrepreneurial interactions, a
competitive struggle within each national arena as well as between donors
and recipients occurs. As social movement entrepreneurs, the activists on
both sides deal in the import as well as export of ideas, strategies, and
practices that they find helpful to their organizations.
The entrepreneurial role is an essential one, since someone has to do the
work of actual movement building both domestically and transnationally, and
identifying and consolidating resources for organizational development is
inevitably part of this task. Russian participants valued such skills and
saw building participatory organizations as important work for which they
wanted to import the techniques as well as the funds. Thus it is too
simple to see globalization as merely fostering elitism at the expense of
grassroots mobilization. But the competitive struggle for resources is also
a major source of suspicion and disunity both within and between countries.
Thus, the entrepreneurial role also undercuts the kind of internal
solidarity and transnational understanding that, in their diplomatic role,
the participants wish to construct.
Nonetheless, our analysis of the paradoxical effects of resource transfers
may help explain some of the shift toward transnational issue advocacy
networks and away from mass mobilization and contentious politics observed
in the feminist movement today. The effects of transnational funding that
we saw in Russia were both positive--to build local organizations and to increase
regional and national networking--and negative--to fragment organizations, foster
jealousy and exclusiveness, and encourage bureaucratization. Certain types
of domestic funding produce similar effects in more affluent countries as
well, even if perhaps they are not as starkly apparent as they were in this
case. Resources inevitably carry donor intentions and limitations,
recipient meanings, and strategic implications such as a desire for formal
structures of accountability and competitive pressure to demonstrate
effectiveness. Resources that come from above, whether domestic or
transnational in origin, may diminish rather than enhance grassroots
participation (see Piven and Cloward 1992), even when both local and global
organizers would prefer otherwise.
In sum, the interaction of Russian and American women's movement activists
in Russia in the mid-1990s provides a useful window not only on how the
global context affects the local movement in this particular case but also
on the dynamics of how transnational networks and women's movement activism
develop globally. Transnational movement interaction always involves
encounters between two or more specific movements, but it is also an arena
in its own right. In this arena, the give and take across national borders
has consequences for the development of movements across the globe. By
paying attention to the ways in which mutual influence was exerted in this
one case, we identified several issues that we expect can be found more
generally. Although we have particularly highlighted the significance of
community organizing as the housework of politics and the tensions produced
by multiple roles and competitive struggles for resources, we stress that
such issues arise in a context in which both sides of a transnational
exchange are active and thoughtful participants with diverse interests that
vary within as well as between countries.
Despite the inequalities of such exchanges, we contend that, through the
process of globalization, local movements learn from and build on each
other's successes. They value the opportunities and ideas -- not only the
material resources -- that transnational organizing makes available to
them. Especially in situations of social disorganization, such as
contemporary Russia, women may seek out "the technology to unite us" and
foster grassroots community organizing as the first steps toward
accomplishing their own transformative goals. Thus, to regard
globalization as a solely top-down process paints local activists in such
encounters as more homogeneous, powerless, and silenced than we found them
to be. As the Russian co-leader of the seminars put it, "We understand that
we need to learn from the world's experience, and the world also needs to
learn something from us. But to find a way to do this is very hard." More
research on the similarities in the organizational issues confronting all
feminists who work in the transnational arena, as well as the differences
in their goals and ideologies, could be helpful to all who are navigating
this perilous but potentially productive terrain.
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*The authors express their gratitude to the editors of Signs and to the
anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. The authors have contributed equally in the production of
this paper. The order of authorship is rotated on different articles
being produced from the larger project, of which this article is but one
part.
1. Moral entrepreneurship is a term widely used to describe the framing of
public issues by interested parties. For the social construction of policy
problems by moral entrepreneurs in general, see Best 1989; and for the
application of this perspective to feminist policy debates in particular,
see Bacchi 1999. Return to text.
2. For international cases, see Nelson and Chowdhury 1994; Basu 1995; Alvarez 1997; Bystydzienski and Sekhon 1999; Silliman 1999. Return to text.
3. See Lapidus 1993; Waters 1993; Posadskaya 1994; Zdravomyslova 1994; Sperling 1999. Return to text.
4. See Einhorn 1993; Funk and Mueller 1993; Moghadam 1993; Watson 1993;
Posadskaya 1994; Sperling 1999. Return to text.
5. For discussions of these groups and their leaders see Posadskaya 1994; Racioppi and See 1995, 1997; Lipovskaya 1997; Gottlick 1999; Sperling 1999. Return to text.
6. Western feminist organizers vary in the issues they regard as priorities. Some, for instance, prioritize combatting violence against women or
trafficking in women, and some Russian organizers share that agenda. Other
Russian activists criticize such priorities; as one seminar participant
noted, speaking generally about Western funding, "Our so-called
independent, autonomous women's movement is dependent on Western funding.
They finance what they understand, not necessarily what we really need.
Right now crisis centers are popular. How do we as a Russian women's
movement evaluate that?" Return to text.
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