Resources

For Negra Jho, a hairdresser whose salon lies in the heart of the old centre of the city of Salvador - where more than 80% of the population are black - beauty is politics. In a context in which centuries of racism have shaped ideas of beauty, the politics of our hair gains new significance. Brazilian society has privileged images of white women as icons of beauty. Black women have grown up being told that their hair is ugly, and that beautiful hair is straight and smooth. …

This paper is based on a three‐year research project entitled Minority Women Negotiating Citizenship. Conceived of in the aftermath of Gujarat 2002, the project studied 75 life‐history narratives of Muslim women survivors of communal violence in Gujarat, Hyderabad and Mumbai, in order to map their everyday experiences of negotiating survival, marginalisation and exclusion. While analysing our material we found that our preliminary organising or analytic categories – victim, agent, Muslim, woman, class, location – could not contain the negotiations and fluid ‘subjects’ of the narratives. The most useful analytic concepts and tools were those being used by the women themselves in their narratives, such as bahar nikalna and sambhalna. …

Lydia Alpı´zar Dura´n was invited to address the annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). She shares her reflections as someone who joined the women’s movement in the midst of the Beijing preparations as a youth activist. She discusses the importance of the development community focusing on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and going beyond the Millennium Development Goals. She presents key insights from the work on advancing women’s rights and gender equality over the last 15 years along with a review of some relevant current trends and concludes with a set of action-oriented recommendations. …

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA), celebrated by feminist activists as a triumph for women's rights, is 20 years old. The world that it once described has changed profoundly in some respects, and yet in others remains surprisingly similar. This IDS Bulletin reflects on those changes and continuities, tracing the trajectories of the Beijing conference in different policy arenas, national settings and domains of practice. …

Twenty years after the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action it is worth looking at the achievements regarding Chapter K ‘women and the environment’. The complexity of the links between rights (inter alia women’s rights), social dimensions and sustainable development is a remaining challenge that has so far not been addressed adequately. This article aims at identifying this interdependence from a grass-root perspective. Women in Europe for a Common Future’s (WECF) project work with grass-root women in Tajikistan provides an insight into the challenges related to the links between ecologically sustainable development and gender equality when looking at the realisation of the right to land and natural and productive resources. …

In Nigeria, within marriage, women are expected to pleasure their husbands, and preparation for marriage focuses on teaching the girl how to do so. In contrast, non-married women were expected to enjoy sex with their boyfriends. Yet, what emerged from research by Aken’Ova’s organisation INCRESE (The International Centre for Reproductive Health and Rights) was women’s deep lack of sexual pleasure in their relationships, married or not. Some men mistakenly believed they were giving great pleasure to their lovers, and had not discovered the truth due to lack of communication. …

In as much as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be ‘path dependent’. They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilisation organisations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. …

On the 29-30 May 2014 a group of feminist scholars, activists, and media and communications professionals met at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex to celebrate and interrogate learning from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Consortium (Pathways). This was an opportunity to look at the trajectory that the consortium had taken since its early days in 2005, consider how Pathways research could shape the post-2015 development agenda, and strategise about future directions in work on women’s empowerment. …

This pack contains relevant background and current information on the post-2015 discussions about gender. You may wish to read the documents in preparation for our discussions at the conference. You will find a list of the readings contained in the pack along with short summaries to assist you with navigating through the information.  Hyperlinks to the documents have been provided where possible in the summary text. …

Sonia Alvarez reconsiders what she had earlier labelled ‘the Latin American feminist NGO boom’ of the 1990s. She offers reflections on how and why, at least in that region of the world, we may be moving beyond it. Alvarez revisits the notion of NGO-ization, then reviews the crucial ‘movement work’ performed by NGOs that was often obscured by that notion. She proposes that Latin American feminisms and other social movements may be moving away from the particular organizational forms and practices – actively promoted and officially sanctioned by national and global neo-liberalism – that characterized NGO-ization in the past. …

The paper will examine some of the critical issues raised by the women's movement in India on the violence experienced by women both within the family and through modes of development initiated by the state in India and the manner in which the state has sought to both counter feminist critiques as well as co-opt them through state initiated policies. It will particularly examine literacy and micro-credit programmes to argue that the rhetoric of empowerment functions as a new 'mantra' which does little to even dent the violence of women's everyday lives especially when they are poor and located on the social margins. …

In preparing for the twenty-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action on women’s economic empowerment, both formal policy documents and media coverage in developed countries such as the Netherlands resonate with the rhetoric of choice between work and care. In this article, my central argument is that framing the combination of work and care as a matter of personal choice stands in the way of economically empowering women. For policy makers to take responsibility in these matters, both policy documents and media coverage should promote win-win instead of zero sum solutions in combining work and care, for both men and women. …

This article offers some reflections on how the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) theme of women and decision making power came to be translated into a set of policy directions, and what their implementation suggests in terms of their potential to challenge power hierarchies. The article draws on work from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme on voice and constituency building. The article argues that the policy focus of the BPfA, after the introduction of MDG 3 in particular, became one of redressing gender disparities in representation in legislatures. Twenty years later, we are at a critical juncture in which we need to ask ourselves whether we need to go beyond numbers in parliament as a proxy for political empowerment, and probe into: what kind of politics, through which pathways, in relation to whom, to achieve what? …

Report in Bangla on the research which interrogated the significance and relative impact of donor funding on women organising at global, national and local levels. The researchers did not assume that successful organising by women required external funding, but rather sought to clarify the conditions under which external financial support to women's organisations and groups had a positive impact on women's empowerment as well as the conditions in which successful mobilising is achievable without such support. This was a comparative research with Ghana, where one of the components examined the role of international development agencies in supporting women's organisations. …

The women’s funding movement has contributed to and been a product of women’s rights movements around the world for over 30 years. This article looks at the history of Mama Cash, the first international women’s fund, to chart how the effort to mobilise resources for women’s rights activism has been going – before and since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The many advances by feminist movements include how we have resourced our movements and ourselves to do this work. Reviewing Mama Cash’s efforts to continue to support and sustain feminism/ists reveals lessons about the role that resources and processes of resourcing play in organising by women, girls and trans* people, as well as what types of resourcing support women, girls and trans* people to build movements that are responsive, effective and resilient – and ultimately successful at securing the various changes we seek in the world. …