July 2021 by Le Monde diplomatique

Author:Le Monde diplomatique
Language: fra
Format: epub
Publisher: Le Monde diplomatique
Published: 2021-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

‘This cooperation helped’

Although relations could sometimes be strained, women did build new transnational networks. The Zambian feminist Lily Monze, a former member of the official Zambian delegations to Copenhagen and Nairobi and later ambassador to France, attended her first international women’s conference in Moscow. When I interviewed her in 2012, she reaffirmed that the Eastern bloc countries had provided a wide variety of support for African women willing to stand up against western imperialism: ‘This cooperation helped. For instance, provision of scholarships for some of the women here to go and study, exchange visits; sometimes they would pay for our attendance at these conferences.’

The activism and material support provided by the socialist countries forced the US government to fund liberal feminist organisations (concerned mainly with sexual equality) in the global South. So, whether their country was aligned with the Soviet Union or the US, women in the South benefited financially from the rivalry between the major powers and were able to attend a wide variety of international events during the Decade for Women.

When I began researching the international women’s movement in 2010, I had no idea how far history had been skewed in favour of American feminists and their allies in the West. Given the influence of the coalition of socialist and communist women from the Eastern bloc and the global South at the UN, and the enduring reverberations of their international exchanges, how is it that their stories have been erased?

Part of the answer lies in the brutal transition from communism to ‘democracy’ and free markets. The women I interviewed in Bulgaria between 2010 and 2017 were subsisting on tiny pensions of roughly €200 a month. Even if they had saved for their retirement, they lost everything when the Bulgarian banks collapsed in the mid-1990s. And even if they had cash under a mattress, its value evaporated during the hyperinflation that followed. Public services disappeared, the healthcare system collapsed, and the prices of prescription medicines skyrocketed.

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