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Book looks at women's lives around the world
Archived article from Oct 5, 2001
By Joni Scanlon
In south India, women speak with brutal frankness about a closed patriarchal society that tacitly condones the murder of newborn baby girls. On the other side of the world, female clerical workers at Yale University overcome class and racial differences to improve their mutual working conditions.
To Marianne DeKoven, a professor of English on the New Brunswick campus, these are not unrelated stories about oppressed women oceans apart but filaments of an intricately woven new feminism that is at once local and global in its perspective. DeKoven is the editor of "Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice" (Rutgers University Press), a collection of 14 essays that allows women to share their very different stories and find common ground.
"My purpose in this book is to show that third-wave feminism must go beyond the dualisms of global and local and of theory and practice," says DeKoven, who distinguishes "third wave" feminism from the Western-focused second wave of feminism that emerged during the 1970s and also from the first wave of feminism defined by the women's suffrage movement of an earlier century. "I wanted to show -- and not in some mediating, peacemaking way -- that inevitably you can't see these dualisms as opposing. You have to view them as mutually dependent, mutually informing."
The collection is based on scholarship presented at the Institute for Research on Women during DeKoven's tenure as its director from 1995 to 1998. Contributors include Rutgers faculty members whose diverse backgrounds and research interests are reflected in their discussion of women's issues.
For instance, Anne C. Bellows, a geographer and postdoctoral associate in the department of nutritional sciences at Cook College, explores the concept of "foodwork" -- the daily struggle, largely undertaken by women, to provide food for their families in communist and postcommunist Poland. Bellows argues that because those who carry out foodwork are unpaid, the political and economic importance of their role goes unrecognized.
In another essay, Radha S. Hegde, formerly a Rutgers assistant professor of communication and now at New York University, writes unflinchingly about a south Indian woman bitterly disappointed when her efforts to commit infanticide are thwarted: "She saw herself not as a criminal plotting a murder but rather as a liberator. The daughters were not to suffer as she had."
Leela Fernandes, an associate professor of political science and women's studies, also turns to India to explore how that society rigidly constricts the roles of women in an attempt to maintain the traditional social order in the face of an encroaching world economy.
These various glimpses of the condition of women in diverse cultures leads Charlotte Bunch, director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership, to view third-wave feminism not as a unified movement with a single set of goals but, rather, as a loosely linked network of local individuals working to improve women's lives in a variety of settings.
"Given the ways in which geography, ethnicity, race, culture, sexuality, class and tradition shape what it means to be a woman and the specificities of local and national politics, it is important not to conceive of women or the women's movement as singular and coherent entities," Bunch says.
While the essays explore weighty and often tragic subjects, DeKoven sees "Feminist Locations" as presenting an essentially optimistic vision of the future. "I see the future represented as very hopeful," she says. "Women are talking to one another now. Without losing the strength of local traditions and culture, they are able to articulate common goals."
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