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Encounter with American Feminism: a Muslim Woman's View of Two Conferences

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Encounter with American Feminism: a Muslim Woman's View of Two Conferences City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Women's Studies Quarterly Archives and Special Collections 1980 Encounter with American Feminism: A Muslim Woman's View of Two Conferences Leila Ahmed How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/wsq/440 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] feminism is inseparable from other movements for social justice, so hastily wipe out the centuries of history that had forged the in America and elsewhere. However, they might disagree about Black woman's collective experience. One evening, a play about the necessity of banning AID as a Convention exhibitor, or as a Calamity Jane, who was a racist even according to the play's source of travel money that might bring Third World women to author, proved a torment for many in the audience. America to the NWSA or that might send NWSA representatives A fourth and final purpose of Bloomington was to offer abroad. Ultimately, the Third World Caucus offered a resolution women a place in which to cultivate common ground. An NWSA that suggested that AID involvement with NWSA violated that meeting initiates and deepens conversations, friendships, and section of the NWSA Constitution that pledged the romances. It lets a woman who might be thought to be impolitic, organization's support of the well-being of Third World women. impolite, and freakish in her home community see human The resolut1on also asked NWSA to study AID and to suspend images similar to her own. She is no longer a solitary feminist or any link with it until that research was completed and discussed. opponent of nuclear energy or lesbian. She has colleagues and It was important that the Third World Caucus should play peers. The Convention is both exhilarating and a profound relief. such a role. The actual number of Third World women at the Organized around the idea of change, the Convention Convention was small. Of the 796 people who handed in the participants displayed their own signs of change. The phrase demographic data cards, 23 said they were Black; 17 Hispanic; "women of color" entered the language of many. The sub­ 15 Native American; 9 Asian. Yet the Third World was a strong, stitution of "wimmin" for "women" attracted some. Lesbians palpable force. The Delegate Assembly happily learned that a were a vigorous, vital group, but more men seemed to be "woman of color" would be a Coordinator of the 1981 Con­ wearing badges in Bloomington than in Lawrence, Kansas, and vention, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and that little boys lived in the dormitories and rode elevators that central themes would be race, racism, and the contributions of otherwise forbade men to be in them after 10 PM. One cannot Black women. have the comfort of illusions about the degree of change that Less happily, the Convention still showed the en­ NWSA has brought about in the world beyond its gatherings. tanglements of feminism and racism. During a workshop about We are still marginal, if illegitimately so, to many educational the chances of "sisterhood" between Black and white women, institutions and projects. We must still devour our dreams for one of about 20 formal sessions on Third World matters, a Black sustenance. We still have our contradictions, unexamined ac­ woman asked if white women were prepared to Jet Black women tions, and bouts of pettiness. Yet we do educate. We do dream. lead them. She was never fully, honestly answered. At the same Despite our frailties, we are energetic and alive. Bloomington place, a white woman called for a "humanistic feminism." She was a part of the process of the creation of our history, even as said that "hu" was "hue," and that we were all women of color. other organizations, which may ignore or mock us, slouch Her pun insensitively ignored the years of effort within feminism toward obsolescence. to acknowledge the reality of differences among women, the consequences of race and class and sexual preference. Calmly, Catharine R. Stimpson is Professor of English at Douglass with patient courtesy, a Black woman told her that she could not College, Rutgers University. richness and general manifoldness to it­ Encounter with American Feminism: and a sense too of the manifoldness of A Muslim Woman's View of Two Conferences feminist stances in America. My own interest being Third World Leila Ahmed women, I attended the workshop on "Class By and Race Issues in Women's Studies." Angela Jorge , treating the topic ex­ April 1980. The Barnard Conference, "The self-consciously dismantling the rigidities of perientially, described experiences of the Scholar and the Feminist"-my first direct tradition; being aware of the responses of a Black Hispanic community and related them as opposed to page-mediated encounter with highly-and diversely-responsive audi­ to Puerto Rican culture, and Florence Howe American feminism. And then it came home ence; straining to catch verbal short­ then outlined relevant developments in to me: how simple the one-dimensional cuts; sometimes clearly missing nuances women's studies. Offered concurrently was experience of reading; how easy, ordered, that relied on a depth of American ex­ "Perspectives on the Black and Hispanic and amenable to order it makes things perience: all this makes it impossible to Family," and, another I was sorry to miss, seem-coherent and amenable to respond to the conference as a coherent "Defining the Erotic" from a lesbian coherence. Sitting in that hall, listening to event-not because it was incoherent, perspective. papers that often clearly drew on the obviously, but precisely because there was Of course it is only in the academy, for­ rhetorical strategies of an oral tradition, such a sense of vitality, ferment, such a mally, that the discussion of such topics, quite different from those in scholarly relations between women, the erotic be­ writing, even in that feminist scholarship tween women, is new. Women have been Women's Studies Newsletter VIII :3 (Summer 1980) 7 discussing such topics among themselves excluding notion of Africa, a funny-shaped world hasn't always been backward com­ down through the ages, discussing them at shrunken continent-no Egypt, Morocco, pared to the West. But from then on the least in that vast array of nonverbal ways Sudan); third, it could mean a Third World claims made for Islam and what a generally that we have of "discussing" things that had achieved visibility through nice "feminist" religion it was seemed to (gestural language being only the most revolution, as in China or Cuba. me to grow more and more absurd. Divorce, obvious). I have a particularly vivid sense of The women who seem to be excluded by they said, had had to be bitterly fought for in this because in the society in which I grew these definitions are the Muslim women of the West; in Islam it has always been up-in Cairo-elaborate understandings, the Third World-these are most par­ available. (Available for men, they should "statements" about how women related to ticularly the invisible ones. When we are have said, since it deprives women of their women, were never made verbally but were seen, it is always as Other, although no children and can deprive them of shelter. signaled in an infinite number of ways: by culture is more directly continuous with the Divorce is still bitterly fought for, for silence sometimes, or by the kind of Judeo-Christian than the Islamic, no part of women-in those countries where Islam is language with which we surround a subject. the world closer to the (older) Western not too implacable even to permit a fight.) My sense too is that much of what was thus world. We all know that Jerusalem is sacred Panelists also said that in Islam women conveyed was oblivious to, disregarding of, to Christian, Jew, Muslim. But do we allow and men are equal. But women inherit half even running counter to the dominant ourselves to become aware of the cultural what men do; two women must testify for culture. Thus, it remained inarticulate, implications of this? That if one could lay the every one man; men can have four wives­ "hidden," not dangerous. blueprints of cultural ideologies one over the the list of inequities is interminable. They other-Christianity, Judaism, Islam-the said Islam was a feminist religion because it Then the NWSA Second National Con­ lines would most often merge? ls it this banned the murder of girl-infants and, in vention at Bloomington. Here too I headed submerged resemblance, I wonder, this permitting four wives, it was actually being for sessions on Third World women. mirroring back in different cultural idiom of restrictive, previous custom allowing more. "Teaching about African Women": Brenda all the inbuilt injustices to women in­ All this is standard Muslim apologetics that Berrian (University of Pittsburgh) showed stitutionalized in their own societies, in­ we Muslims grew up with. What's always that comparisons could be made between ternalized in themselves, that makes it so left out when we hear ''how it improved the women in Africa and Third World women in necessary for us to be Other-makes dif­ condition of women" is that it improved it in America by looking at women in parallel ficult, such an uneasy thing, this looking at Arabia. How can I, how can any Egyptian situations-moving from rural to urban Islam? with any notion of Egypt's pre-Islamic settings.
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