Feminists & Fundamentalism

By Contributor | March 18, 2011

The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), an international feminist organization, hosted a panel at this month’s Commission on the Status of Women entitled “Toward a Future Without Religious Fundamentalism.” This event coincided with the release of AWID’s newest publication in a series that focuses on feminist strategies of combating fundamentalism.

The publication admits that “religious fundamentalism” is difficult or impossible to define, and that “the only issues on which [the different fundamentalist groups] agree are those related to restricting the exercise of sexual rights on the part of women.”

Of the 18 case studies presented in the publication, 14 tell the story of groups and individuals who fought the Catholic Church for the right to abortion. The few remaining cases seem like a mere nod to other serious situations such as religiously-sanctioned domestic violence and prohibitions on inheritance.

The focus of these feminists is clearly access to abortion as part of sexual and reproductive health services. This is made even clearer by the fact that the publication, while unable to define religious fundamentalism, was able to pinpoint its first manifestations at the international level. It explained that fundamentalist actors began to agitate at the UN conferences of the 1990’s- conferences at which abortion and sexual and reproductive health issues came to the forefront of international negotiations.

If the only commonality among the fundamentalist in the publication is an opposition to abortion, and the main focus of the feminist activists is access to abortion, then the fight seems to be between advocates and opponent of abortion – not between feminists and fundamentalists. This reality is best seen in AWID’s portrayal of women who participate in, or promote these “fundamentalisms.” Women who fight for the fundamentalist cause are routinely dismissed as chess pieces of the patriarchal society in which they live, they are merely “puppets” of sexist men.

However, a vibrant, or at least functional, feminism would be forced to take into consideration the views of other women who stand in disagreement- thereby acknowledging their beliefs and their choices. The fact that this series summarily discounts the women who work on the side of the “fundamentalists” belies the vacuous nature of these feminists’ own self-identification. Rather than fighting for the rights and dignity of women, they are fighting specifically for their own concept of what a woman should want or have- that is, access to abortion and other sexual and reproductive health services. If that alone is both the reason for and the definition of their feminism, one questions whether they deserve the name.

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