The first day of deliberations was Women’s Day in Guatemala, and participants at the Nobel Women's Initiative conference had awoken to the sound of firecrackers in Antigua celebrating the role of mothers and the sight of a local volcano erupting ash, apparently an every day occurrence. Naomi Tutu as the first moderator deftly appropriated the motherhood theme, which she said needed renovating, to give an undertaking on behalf of participants: we were going to be gestating a new definition of democracy capable of celebrating women’s achievements over recent months and years. Many of these definitions were offered during the next eight hours of discussion, though none perhaps so pithy as Mairead Maguire’s emphasis on ‘empowering people where they live – giving them dignity and hope’.
The problem of definition is that it is either as wide as the horizon, or it fails to encompass the range of activity that the many participants who are heading up active international women’s organisations can report on from many parts of the world today. Democracy has advanced since the French Revolution through a constant play of liberty and equality in which each emancipation has knock-on effects not only for the next claimant, but for society as a whole, where everyone already lined up on its crowded bench gets moved along and settles down into a new, slightly different position. These knock-on effects are hard to put into words and the language of rights doesn’t do them justice.
For example, women fighting at the intersection of gender and other forms of discrimination have expanded the meaning of democracy for men too. Women’s social movements fighting against social and economic justice, corruption, or the degradation of the environment, all have their impact on placing the market place under new forms of scrutiny. This extends the meaning of democracy. Feminists fighting for sexual and reproductive rights may begin by preventing pregnancy-related deaths or pregnancy-related arbitrary redundancy, but they have also helped expand democracy to include the interests of gay and lesbian and other sexual minorities. Each of these extensions involves new forms of government protection - governments are obliged to take care of children, the infirm and the elderly in new ways. To be sure, if you go far enough down this path, ultimately democratic governance has to prove that it has the will and the independence from economic and religious fundamentalisms to fully defend the reproduction of the human species. This is the kind of mothering that conference participants are interested in – the ‘mother of all democracies’.
But it doesn’t stop there. And it produces a new kind of ‘feminist activity’ according to Alda Facio from the United Nations Latin American Institute for Crime Prevention, Costa Rica – Las Petateres - a new type of action watch to monitor what is arguably the far more important consequence of this process: the weaving of new types of political and social structures in democratic societies themselves.
Hence Srilatha Batliwala’s conclusion to her panel presentation, “It is important for us to distinguish between the democratisation that is achieved by women’s participation in formal or institutional politics from the democratisation that occurs through women’s participation in other transformative processes, and that is what I call deep democracy. Women have deepened democracy far more effectively outside politics than they have through the formal processes. But that political participation in these processes is rarely recognised as political or as democratisation.”
There was one objection from the floor, from the Director of a Women’s Resource Center in Sudan, who felt that it was hard to imagine any of this connecting with the rural women she works with. But the speaker, with her own 35 years’ experience as a grassroots activist, gender equality advocate, women’s studies teacher and researcher in India and internationally, was swift to ‘fundamentally disagree’. We might not yet have found the words to explain how this democracy works, but Srilatha was convinced that nothing mattered more to these women as well, than the possibility of new processes of ‘governance’ and decision-making in institutions at every level, within the household, the community, within faith communities, within the state and within the market.
So it was with the intention of putting this process into words, that the conference turned next to look at some case studies of women’s struggles for democracy from outside the institutions of governance and power. Monica Aleman from the International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI) in Nicaragua asked what could be learnt from the organising strategies of indigenous women across the Americas; Hope Chigudu, from HopeAfrica and JASS, Zimbabwe looked at women’s organising in Somalia, Rwanda and Southern Africa, and Lena Maeri at the Institute of Women’s Studies in Birzeit University, Palestine, explored ‘women’s participation in the context of colonial Palestine and in Islamic movements.’ But before this session began, Srilatha wanted to tell people about the amazing case of ‘the female Jamaat’ in Tamil Nadu – of which more soon.
