Organising Grassroots Women in the Caribbean

I’am really delighted to have been invited to Barbados for various reasons. I have to thank Eudine [Barriteau] for spearheading this.

I am very glad to be here in the company of four other distinguished colleagues of mine. To be in Barbados with Andaiye at an event like this is a treat – we work together all the time and she tells me about things that happen in the Caribbean and people and many names but they have no faces and now they’re going to be flesh and blood to me. Margaret Prescod had to come. If we’re going to be here, she had to come home to Barbados and she brings enormous international experience, which I hope you will avail yourself of. Nina López had to come because I was coming from London and because she brings another experience as well – she’s often doing the coordinating work for the Global Strike internationally with me or instead of me. And Wintress White had to come because the grassroots of Guyana had to be represented as they manifest themselves in being the single anti-racist women’s organisation in a situation where racism is rampant, violent and pervasive.

Tell me again the title – I must have the title. “Organising Grassroots Women” is the one I must speak to because whatever the title, that’s the one that lies behind. I want to discuss first of all the various aspects of the title. Let’s start by looking at who are grassroots women. What do we mean by grassroots? I can tell you what we in the Global Women’s Strike mean by grassroots. We mean women who have no independent levers of power. Everybody has levers of power but I am speaking about social power. And you know that most of the women in Barbados do not have social power. Overwhelmingly, in the world, almost everybody in the world is grassroots. Most of it is overwhelmingly rural; most of us live in the village or the countryside. When we say grassroots, we mean those women who have been left out of every consideration of politics by almost every government in the world, without independent social power.

 PANEL by Selma James

What about the women who are housewives, who are married to men with independent power and who live what we call a middle-class life? You know a lot of those are grassroots. And we have to consider that when we say grassroots, we are addressing women like that. What about women who are now jumped-up middle class but who come from the grassroots? I’ll give you an example – one of our women in Ireland comes from the countryside but she’s now a lecturer at the university and a worldwide archaeologist and a whole set of things but her mum is from the countryside.

With the Strike, she has once again become grassroots because she has identified not with where she is, but with where she’s coming from and where she’s going.

Then there are those of us who come from the middle class and higher but who acknowledge that if we are exploited and oppressed and persecuted as women, it is because the grassroots women are. And that has been very difficult for many women in positions of power and semi-power and latent power and a lot more power and the hope of power etc. to deal with. They don’t know that if they are raped coming out of a high-class taxi, it’s because the woman in the barrio, in the favela, in the slum, in the shantytown is raped regularly. That is why when she comes out of that expensive taxi, she too can be raped and unless she deals with the rape of these other women, she will never be dealing with her own rape. So now beginning with that, we have a very wide constituency when we speak about the grassroots. Because once we have acknowledged that our fate as women is dependent on the fate of women everywhere, we are truly headed in the direction of the grassroots and indeed entirely international, multi-racial and multi-aged – and you know class is no longer the barrier that it was when we began our survey of who is grassroots.

Then there is the question of the word ‘with’ or the absence of the word ‘with’. ‘Organising the grassroots’ or ‘organising with the grassroots’? We don’t organise anybody; with any luck we organise ourselves, in my view. If we want to organise with others, beginning at the grassroots, which is how I would phrase it, then we have a responsibility to see what the grassroots is organised to do.

I was very interested in the comment by Margaret Gill who spoke about when women are cursing out men among themselves, that is part of the struggle. I would go further – when women are cursing out men, women are organizing against men. This is my experience. I’ve worked in the usual harem style, waged work places where dozens of women work together. How much else do you think they discuss besides men? And they’re discussing not only what he did to you, but also what you can do about it. And that is political organising; if we have any awareness of ourselves as women, we must admit that that is political organising.

I want to make another case which we have known through the Strike. I want to speak about Africa because we normally work with women in Uganda and a number of countries but particularly Uganda. Nina and another sister and I went to Uganda because we were attending a breast-feeding conference in Tanzania. And what we saw was first of all that there was another problem other than the presentation of African women - and I don’t want anybody to think it’s only African women. I’m giving this particular example of a worldwide situation. The silhouette, the identity, the persona that is presented to us of African women of facing poverty, exploitation, starvation, is so incomplete as to be absolutely and entirely racist. The women in Africa indeed face starvation, face a workload that cannot be completed within 24 hours. They survive in Uganda, in [the area] where our Women’s Strike organisation is, on water that is brown, that you would not wash clothes in, even dirty clothes, but they have to work out how to use it and drink it and give it to their children without them dying. But the women are struggling against every single aspect of their lives every single day.

And therefore we as women, who are interested in organising with women, have to begin with the presumption that not only are women working very hard but that part of their work is the justice work of refusing the society that is being built upon them. Now unless we are doing that, we don’t know what to organise with because we do not see the organisation that is taking millions of people’s lives every single day, which is entirely hidden from view because its women. And that gives us again an enormously different view of who is the grassroots. The grassroots is exploited but the grassroots is entirely committed to struggling against its exploitation and does so every single minute of the day, partially to stay alive.

I think of the implications also of what is organising; we can say that we have begun to define it. Before I leave Africa and organising and organising with the grassroots, I must say one other thing about Africa, which I’m sure is true in various other parts of the world, including Barbados. We have never seen such organisational imagination as the African women have shown - taking the slenderest, the slenderest piece of power, holding on to it, developing it, bringing women together with it, bringing men together to support them, to push it forward, to drive it forward, to get the tiniest piece of power.

We can discuss it at length and you may have your own experiences of it but please, one thing if we are going to organise ourselves with others, is that we have to give up that male-dominated and, allow me to say it, characteristic view of women as having very little to contribute from day to day. I can only give you the example of the Strike and then I think the discussion can go on. This is what I thought would be useful – a general statement and you will fill in the details for or against but it would be a position which you can argue with.

The Global Women’s Strike began in 2000 with the International Wages for Housework Campaign, which had been functioning since 1972. I was young then. The Campaign had established that women’s work had to be acknowledged, it had to be measured as an economic contribution and it had to be paid for. Most people who were interested in counting women’s work were not accountants, they were not CEOs of large corporations; they were people who worked like hell and said if I am going to count the work, the reason I want it counted is: “Could somebody help pay me for this stuff?” Especially since we were saying what is patently obvious, that is that women make the whole working class, the whole labour force. We also make the other class but we’re not going to discuss that today although we have something to say to those women too. We say we make the whole working class. You count how many profits, you count how many industries - we are the basic industries. And why shouldn’t we be paid? Why is it that we in Uganda have dirty water because you can’t afford a pipe? But you have no problem building the largest military machine the world has ever known. We should be paid from that military budget. That was a starting point for the Strike, a starting point.

The second starting point is that women have to organise independently – we call it autonomous organisation. I don’t care but we will organise for our demands, for our needs, among ourselves and as a result of that, we will make the appeal to the others – that is to women, men and also to children, I might add. When we demand for the military budget and for autonomy, we gain power and it is that power which enables men to relate to us. Men don’t relate to women who are weak; they relate to women who are strong especially who stand together. Then they have to relate.

But among us they are many divisions. Margaret again opened the way for me. We are divided among the races; black and white is one but it doesn’t end there. There are many racial divisions - even going by the archipelago of islands which makes up the West Indies, we know. But in Latin American countries, we know also that there are indigenous women and men who have been the most exploited or at least equally exploited as those of us who are the descendants of African slavery.

We have established, in the Wages for Work Campaign and took it right into the Strike, that those of us who faced particular discrimination and difficulties which always add up to more work and less money, that we have to organise independently of those who have a bit more than we have and do a bit less work than we do. Not only with them but independently of them. So that the Wages for Work Campaign had Black Women for Wages for Housework and still does. Those women hold onto that organisation for dear life and that’s because their lives depended on it. It also has an organisation of lesbian women, which includes now bisexual and transgender women; an organisation of women with disabilities who claim the time and effort of the work that you have to do if you have a disability because society refuses to acknowledge your needs; and an organisation of prostitute women, sex workers – the International Collective of Prostitutes which exists in the US and the UK and from time to time pops up in Trinidad and Tobago. And I was the first spokesperson for the Collective in 1975.

All of that came into the Strike so that the Strike was for the military budget to come to women and the Strike formulated women as the carers because that’s what we’re doing. Women are the carers – we care for each other, we care for the men, we care for the children, we care for the aged, the aged care for the young, we care for everybody. That is first and foremost the making of the society, which we’ve been involved in. And the Strike came with its autonomy. And like the International Wages for Work Campaign, the Strike was international, it was doable.

I know very well the excitement of each of these countries becoming a nation. I have never shared it but I know people are very excited. But the fact is that if we do things nationally and we do not do things internationally, (I mean why then the four languages which is so vital, which I accept entirely as really important) we will not succeed. It is not possible to meet and beat international military might and viciousness and brutality as formulated by the US without doing it internationally. Falluja tells us what happens to us if we don’t unite internationally. So the Strike was international and spoke to every woman, assuming the definition of grassroots women.

The Strike incorporates the National Union of Domestic Workers in Trinidad; Red Thread in Guyana; another domestic workers’ union in Peru; indigenous women again in Peru; the Housewives’ Union in Argentina; a women’s organisation in Uganda; an organisation of Irish women; an organisation of lesbian women in Spain and a whole women’s centre in Spain; the Chattagua Women’s Organisation in India; three women’s organisations in the US and an international network.

That is where it began in 2000. Since then it has incorporated women from Venezuela. In 2002, there was a coup in Venezuela where the elected government overwhelmingly elected by the people and the constitution, which was made up by the people, were overthrown. The President was kidnapped and the constitution was thrown out. I have to tell you one thing about the constitution – whoever did their homework and lobbying and picketing during the making of this new constitution got what they wanted. Women did it - the women lobbied. And they got, among many other things, Article 88 that women’s work in the home is so valuable and creates special wealth and must be recognised as that and it must be paid for in social security. That’s what the women lobbied for; they were there on permanent picket for four months and they walked away with what they wanted. The indigenous lobbied and it’s an entirely anti-racist constitution, reversing the traditional racism against indigenous people.

I won’t say anything more about it except that it was the women, when this coup took place, it was the women who came out of their homes and insisted on leading the men, when they would be led, to reverse the coup and throw out the copistas. They came down from the hills and they saved the revolution. When we heard that we began to understand a number of things. That this is probably always true. We didn’t know that. I cannot believe that this is the first time that women have saved a revolution, I cannot believe it! Why should the Venezuelan men and women be so different? Except for one thing, that the Venezuelan women had put their fingerprints on the revolution to such an extent that they could not afford to lose it.

The second thing was that the President acknowledged that the women had saved the revolution – now that is revolution. We have related to the Venezuelan revolution and the women of the Venezuelan revolution who are profoundly aware of what they have done and want to do more.

Finally, we relate to Haiti. I know that you in the Caribbean have done very good things in support of those in Haiti who want to reverse that coup against their elected President, Aristide. I have a particular relationship to Haiti. In Barbados, at the Paradise Beach Hotel, I prepared the first edition of Black Jacobins in the re-publication in 1963. And I have lived my adult life with the Haitian revolution. Recently I had occasion to be in the US and I met some Haitians there who had worked with Margaret [Prescod] and others in the Strike in the US trying to find places for women who were being prosecuted in Haiti and had to get away. And working with Andaiye who did so much on the Caribbean women’s statement.

But it was only in the US that I met the people that we were talking about and I discovered a number of things. First of all that the revolution 200 years ago was not dead, much as some people would like it to be. They like the revolution at least 200 years away. Last year, this year – too close, too uncomfortable, too demanding of taking a position which may not be popular with those in power. But those people in Haiti are fantastic and from what I heard, they’re making another revolution which we have some responsibility to.

Finally, the women are playing and have played a similar role in Haiti in this revolution that the Venezuelan women have been playing in Venezuela. I have to tell you that there are not too many areas of the world which can boast two contemporary revolutions. And if you are organising, be with women in this area - that has to be the starting point.

Finally, as a result of our organising autonomously as women and autonomously as women of colour and autonomously as lesbian women etc., we have been able to work and help to build an organisation of men who support us and work with us. And the name of the organisation is PayDay: A Network of Men. And their primary work has been to organise with women and men who have been refusing to go into the military or refusing to fight once they are there. Their web address is www.refusingtokill.net, which works brilliantly with our demanding the military budget and they are demanding it too. And demanding also that they’d rather be carers than killers, not a bad programme especially for men.

That is really all I have to say as a kind of framework for what I think we have to think about if we’re planning to organise with women and with men. Except to tell you a little story. Everybody always likes stories about C.L.R. James and I have hundreds. A friend and I were having an argument about which I can’t remember one thing. But I would say: “You cannot do that” and she would say: “Yes, we can”. We were on our way to dinner – the partner of my son, my husband and I and my son. And when we got to the restaurant, I turned to Nello: “Nello, should she or shouldn’t she?” And he said: “Well, it depends on what you’re trying to do.” I thought that really cuts it because that is really the fundamental question we must all ask when we do something. Whether we’re doing it well or badly will depend on what we’re trying to do.

And I’ll leave you with what we in the Strike are trying to do. We’re trying to remake society from the ground up. Not because it’s sexist and racist but because it suits none of us and we as human beings are capable of a great deal more. So we begin by saying that society must invest in caring not killing and we begin organising with women.

 Panel by Andaiye

Maybe the most useful thing I can do is to be personal and to say why I’m in the Global Women’s Strike and why Red Thread is coordinating the Global Women’s Strike. Lots of you in the room know me in other places, which I have left. I first left the leftwing movement for a lot of reasons but one of them was that I was tired of women being invisible and subordinate in that movement. But the problem that I’ve developed over the years with the women’s movement and the feminist movement in the Caribbean is that in those movements it seems to me that class has become invisible and the class struggle has disappeared off the horizon.

I’m indebted to my friend Peggy Antrobus. When I was screaming one day she said to me: “Well, some of us are dealing with gender identity”. And I said: “That’s it”. I never wanted to deal with something called gender identity. I never wanted to deal with anything called gender justice. I don’t know what you can mean by gender justice in a world which is created on what Selma James calls a global hierarchy of work and wealth in which there is no justice. Why are you talking about something called gender justice? It doesn’t make any sense to me.

There are particular changes that you can fight for – changes in laws and so on. But it seems to me that unless you are talking about undermining in order to overthrow that global hierarchy of work and wealth, you’re not talking anything. And therefore it does not help as far as I’m concerned to move from the left-wing movement. Many of you in the room are people who once were in the Caribbean left and you hated the Caribbean left because it was full of leaderism, it was full of careerism, it was full of all of those things. But it seems to me, with respect, that all those things have been imported into large parts of the women’s movement. The careerism, certainly; the leaderism, certainly; and the exclusion. Now we don’t exclude women because we’re women, but we exclude working class women and, as Margaret pointed out, we’re not so hot on the race question either. It’s not only that we’re very few with the Indo-Caribbean women but I don’t know if I ever saw an Amerindian woman in any regional women’s movement in the English-speaking Caribbean. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one.

The reason then that we started to work in Red Thread to transform it from the NGO that it was, is because we began to recognise this – that NGOs in this region and globally are being used for something that some of us are conscious of and some of us are unconscious of but if we stay there we are complicit in something that is extremely destructive. As far as I know the analysis that people have wrestled with so far is simply the one that came from years ago - that the international financial institutions and agencies are using NGOs and women’s groups and women in households and so on to fill the gap left by their insistence on curtailing the public sector.

But we have to update that. Something far worse than that is taking place. It is clearest to me when I sit in Guyana and look at the fact that in a country in which I have to spend five or six years begging for a road (and I live in what is called a middle-class area); in a country in which working class women cannot afford to pay for their privatised water, their privatised electricity, their privatised everything; in such a country there is money for two sets of things: what they call HIV/AIDS and what they call governance and social cohesion. And what they’re pushing behind that is this – the very notion of civil society, we should vomit when we here it. Because civil society is about bringing together different sectors of people with different levels of power with opposing interests and placing them under the control of the sectors which have the most in order that they can make invisible and defeat the struggles of those who have the least. That is the job that they are doing. And it is that job (speaking from Guyana and from Red Thread) that we’re refusing.

And I think that as long as we allow ourselves to conceive of ourselves as this poor NGO – I know the trap. It’s the same trap for all of us – we’re doing something, we need money, this is what they giving money for, so you try to take the money and don’t use it to kill people. But that’s not what the money is for. You take the money and you think that as I am a nice person, I will use the money well. You’re actually using the money to do their work. And all of those governance projects and social cohesion projects are really about that.

Taking energy for this business of training up some women to put in these parliaments in these political parties, it just doesn’t work - certainly when I look in Guyana. It’s about the party system; it’s not about the women. The party system does not function for us, it does not function for poor people, it does not function for grassroots people. You can’t take women and train them to go in there and think that they are going to do something opposite to what they are being paid to do.

So out of all of those things comes what is Red Thread’s present route, which is this. Our major decision was to coordinate the Global Women’s Strike in Guyana and to be an active part of the Strike at the global level. Our second major decision was to try to ensure that the work that we do, never to conceive of that work again as projects but always to conceive of it as part of the political work. And with the help of the Global Women’s Strike, as it is organised in London and so on, try to find the money that permits you to do what you were planning to do as distinct from turning yourself into what they want you to be.

So we decided then, as a grassroots women’s organisation, that there are plenty things that we could do in Guyana right now but that the single biggest thing that was standing in the way of grassroots women moving forward was the racial division of two kinds: the racial division between Indo and Afro on the coast, and between Indo and Afro on the coast and the Amerindians in the interior. And therefore with the exception of the services we offer at our centre called “Cross Roads Women’s Centre: Office of Red Thread and the Global Women’s Strike”, everything else we do has to do with our anti-racist and anti-violence work.

And everything we do also is done both on the coast and in the interior. And on the coast it is done both in African and Indian villages. Not easy, because people own them; these are fiefdoms and they’re owned by the leaders and so on and sometimes the difficulty is to get in but what we’ve done in fact is we contact whoever we have to contact in order to be able to get into a village where they don’t want us to go.

Just to tell you some of the things we’re doing. We just finished a time-use survey, which was not a survey. The purpose of the survey, which we did among Indian, African and Amerindian women was for grassroots women to discover their own work and to discover the value of their own work and to discover the value of work of other women like them but who seem not like them because of race. And where it is supposed to end, which we haven’t done yet, is an anti-racism conference involving women across the three races beginning with the women who did the time-use.

The two things we’re doing at the moment are both located mainly on the East Coast of Demerara, which was and still is the epicentre of the present racial violence on the coast. So in one of those two, what we’re going to be doing is working with women to document the use of sexual violence in the racial violence in Guyana. And you have to do that because one of the things is that African women in Guyana are not standing up against sexual violence against Indian women because race is bigger than anything else. And it has the inevitable result that after something like two years in which the sexual violence was directed against Indian women, it is now of course directed against African women. And any fool could have worked out that this would eventually happen.

We’re also doing something between the two main villages – Buxton and Allendale – which are now completely at war. I should explain that in this epicentre on the East Coast of Demerara, the violence has been organised from inside a particular village, which is African, called Buxton. And Buxton is now a destroyed community with child soldiers and daily rapes both inside the village and across villages. We’re going to be working there, with some trepidation - but you have to go, you have to go.

I want to say a couple things in closing. Part of the cost that we’re facing for the fact that the class struggle disappeared and the fight against capital disappeared and so on, and some of you know that I feel this because I emailed you about it, is that [they] could destroy Dominica and this apparently was not our business. We didn’t do anything. They destroyed the Dominican economy in a flash and this was apparently not our business. Anymore than we have shown, I think, except for little pockets of us, any real or consistent solidarity with the grassroots women of Venezuela or Haiti.

But I do that work, not because I’m nicer than you; I do that work because of one thing that I did learn from Selma James and the others. That is that if you do not hold on to the grassroots women where you live, if you do not hold on to the grassroots women attempting to make revolution where they are, then the only place you can fall is into the rut in which we all have been suffering since Grenada. From the time the Grenada revolution collapsed or was destroyed, from the time the Americans entered Grenada in 1983, this entire society, particularly the English-speaking Caribbean - but I think not only - has been in a rut. But that a serious conversation between me and Eudine and me and whoever is to say: “Girl, wha ya gine do?” You say something exciting and the other one says immediately: “But it ain’ going work.” Because that’s the lesson that we took from Grenada that anything we do fails and we’re not going to do anything anymore.

If we do not hold on to the grassroots where we are, the grassroots making revolution where they’re making revolution, there is nowhere else to go except a rut and I would suggest we come out.

 Response by Ana Riviera Lassen

Nelcia [Robinson] asked me to respond to the presentations but I may say something about the struggle in Puerto Rico in order to put some of our history or “herstory” in the discussion. Margaret pointed out the lack of inclusion of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and other Caribbean countries in some of our discussions in our papers when we’re talking about the Caribbean. So there’s no one Caribbean; there’s a Caribbean that is multiple in many ways. Then she talked to us about the other thing that there is no one woman who represents all the women. Who are we the women? Who are we the Caribbean? She also put a challenge to us – the notion of difference – who are we? So we have to recognise that when we say it from that point of view, we are challenging the norm. Who are the "we" that we say we represent? If we recognise that the women we say we represent are the norm, then we have to see who the others are. We have to recognise who are the women who are the norm and we have to recognise who the others are.

Then Margaret talked about absolute power to question democracy. What is democracy? What is democracy in our own organisations? And our need to challenge our notion of power and our ability to change the way we do our work in our organisations at the country, national and regional levels.

Then she spoke about the male backlash. In this case, we’re talking about shaking convention. But we’re shaking our foundation, because that foundation that we’re trying to change is our foundation too. When we speak about the male backlash, it becomes those people that we identify like the males who are benefiting from that foundation are the most against the changes that we’re trying to make in our society. I think she pointed out more than that. She’s talking about sisterhood and she’s talking about brotherhood. She’s talking about a universal notion of women, the sisterhood. She’s talking about the universal notion of men, the brotherhood, saying that there is no one man representing all men, no brotherhood at all - maybe. And there’s no one woman representing all women, so there is no sisterhood – maybe.

When Margaret talks about the instability of nation states, I think that part of the presentation should be read by the government because we have very good positions of the platform of where we are right now in the discussion of the rights of women. CAFRA is an idea trying to cross limitations and I think this is our challenge in many ways.

But when we were trying to understand what Margaret was saying, then Selma James came. And when we believed that sisterhood had died, was dead, Selma James came and took those differences and brought them alive in the name of the grassroots. But then she questioned that also. Who are the persons, who are the women who control the grassroots? We are all in the grassroots in many, many ways. So the sisterhood is alive in many ways. But different from the 70s or 80s; it is a sisterhood that recognises the lack of power at the point that comes together to give us that sense of sisterhood. In that point of view, not only poor women are part of the grassroots but also housewives and middle class women and rich women – the point is the lack of power.

I think that she said something about the grassroots that is very important – solidarity. We have to fight nationally and internationally but we have to fight in solidarity. We have to fight in our countries and we have to fight also with other countries; for example, we have to fight also thinking about what is happening in Venezuela, in Haiti, in the whole Caribbean, in the whole world. And that is another way of seeing sisterhood. Another issue we have to address in solidarity is the issue of investing in caring not killing.

And then came Andaiye. And she also took the issue of sisterhood, to question it. And she posed the issue of class because she said that class is invisible when we take out sisterhood, if we don’t have enough consciousness to be aware that we have to address these kinds of differences - the differences that are not necessary, that are not mentioned in what Selma James said. But Andaiye wants to point it out more. She wants to say that in these days, in our countries, the USA is trying to make civil society invisible, to bring together civil society not to give them more power, but to make them invisible; to give the money to the NGOs to do the job that they want. That is what Margaret Gill also said but I think this is a backlash. This is a backlash that comes from the States.

Andaiye also talked about racial and sexual violence. All of this is to talk about the necessity of solidarity to begin to fight. But that solidarity, she said, has to begin to fight in the roots.

I want to share with you some things about the Puerto Rico experience. The formal name of Puerto Rico is the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. We are not an independent country so when you talk about the post-colonial countries in the Caribbean, there are still a lot of colonial countries in the Caribbean. We are citizens of Puerto Rico but also of the US. So our international citizenship is that of US but not the one from Puerto Rico. It is very complex and very strange to speak about.

Puerto Rico was one of the last colonies of Spain. In 1898, the US won the Spanish American War and also won Cuba, the Philippines and territories like Puerto Rico, which is still their territory. Officially in 1952, the UN recognised the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as a new kind of political arrangement. This allowed Puerto Rico to elect its own government, its decision-makers, appoint its own judges and make our civic government. But the US kept authority over our postal services, our money, and defence. So we have women and men in Iraq as part of the US military force. We do not vote for the US President or Congress but we have a representative in Congress, elected by the Puerto Rican people.

When North America came to Puerto Rico, they did not make many changes to the laws but they did something very important. They divided Church and State so divorce was allowed and integral in Puerto Rico. The Civil Code from Spain is still the basis of our civil law with some measures from the Commonwealth. We have more or less the same civil law traditions as the rest of Latin America but with some measures of the Commonwealth tradition of the US. In many ways, we are still fighting with the patriarchal vision of the society that came from the time of being a Spanish colony but also with the patriarchal vision of the US system.

In 1917, US citizenship was given to us, or imposed, depending on your point of view. At that time only men could vote in Puerto Rico and the US. In 1920, when US women won the right to vote, this was not recognised in Puerto Rico. Our citizenship was therefore not the same. We won the right to vote because there was a women’s movement that kept fighting every year until 1929 when the vote was given to women who could read and write. In 1935, it was given to all women. So that political right was won by the women’s movement in Puerto Rico. In 1952, when the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was created and our constitution was made using the model of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it said that it was illegal to discriminate against women but we all know that that was only a legal solution.

The issue of our political situation divides our people. Almost half of our population wants independent status and the other half wants to be part of the US as a state. The women’s movement in Puerto Rico has to deal with that every day. Women were used for the development of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico; we were used for the incorporation of new industries. Puerto Rico was organised as a welfare state but that status is coming down. So we are now at the end of the welfare state.

The other issue was that the government started a campaign for the mass experimentation of women. And we were used for the experimentation of pills, contraceptives, and medicines in many cases. So Puerto Rican women were used and then they sold the pills to the rest of the world.

In the 1970s, women began to organise a feminist group outside of the political party. The socialist party during that period believed that feminists were not good for the Puerto Ricans; they had a lot of prejudice against feminism and a very nationalist position. In the first feminist organisation formed in 1932, women did not belong to any party. But in some other organisations in that decade, some women belonged to both and had a lot of problems. In fact, most of them had to choose between one organisation and the other.

In that decade, another issue that feminists were fighting for was family reform to give women the same rights as men in marriage and over children. When the women’s movement was pressuring for these things, it was both a point of conflict and joint work between government and civil society. Sometimes we have to work with the government and sometimes we have to maintain our autonomy from the government.

During the 1970s, abortion on demand was legalised in the US by the case of Roe vs. Wade and this was applied to Puerto Rico. Abortion was legal in Puerto Rico before but only to save the woman’s life. The Socialist Party in Puerto Rico and pro-independence groups believed that women should not access it because it was a US imposition. So there was a clash between women’s rights position and the pro-independence groups.

In the 1970s, it was believed that there was only one model of feminism and this was an issue for feminists also. We won family reform, which was a very useful tool to gain acceptability as a political force.

In the 1980s, we fought for approval of the domestic violence and sexual harassment laws. We began to accept that we don’t have to be in the same organisation and that we could work together from different organisations.

In the 1990s until today, we are still fighting on the issue of violence against women. Sometimes it looks like our only agenda is domestic violence. We are trying to address all the differences like sexual orientation, race, economic position and age. We are trying to work together from these differences, not to avoid them but to try to work together. Personally I believe that the Puerto Rican women’s movement is coming to a dead end if we cannot move to new agendas or if we cannot look for new visions of old agendas.

We have a big problem. Feminist organisations are recognised as political pressure movements; we are also targeted as dangerous organisations by both the Puerto Rican and US governments. Part of our political situation is that the two governments started to make dossiers of all the people they considered to be subversive only because of their ideology and the feminists were included in this.

Our organisations are not growing; they are very few new members. The members are getting old and the organisations cannot appeal to younger women. The women’s movement in Puerto Rico has problems with international financial aid – we do not receive this in most cases. We have autonomy in many ways because we don’t get money from international organisations. But on the other side, many times we are isolated. The organisations participate as civil society in many UN conferences but not our government. We are not part of the US women’s movement but we have to fight to be included in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Puerto Rico and the rest of the region, we have to look for linkages between gender, women and other things; for example, environment and gender; the environment, gender and race; and the Internet. We have to recognise our achievements and our failures. We should not do this with a vision of stratification but we have to have another vision of how to build with the changes. In my case, I’m trying to understand that in many cases that I can only speak for myself.

In terms of class, we have to deal with the issue that many of our organisations are from the middle class and we recognise that. Nevertheless, we address all the issues – the issues of poverty, disadvantage, etc. We work with workers’ unions and women’s organisations inside the unions. This is another issue because that is more popular now than it was in the past. It is not important whether those organisations recognise themselves as feminist or not; the issue is that they are working on women’s issues, working with women and on issues that affect all women. For example, in the case of Viejes, we fought side by side with the organisations of women of Viejes to make visible that the problems that women have there are the same as many other countries with conflicts of war. These kinds of linkages are the only way to survive.

Two other issues that are going to be addressed with more force in Puerto Rico are race and sexual orientation. There are more groups visible now trying to address with more pressure these two issues and they are asking and demanding feminist groups to include these issues on their agendas. Now we are addressing these and trying to look for a specific agenda to take it out to the movement that we have to address the issues of race and sexual orientation more specifically. We have to develop transverse speech with gender and women’s perspectives but at the same time we have to do it with introspection and diversity.