Carrying the Load of Civilisation: The Status of Women and Challenged Hierarchies

Introduction

The claim that the status of women is an important measuring rod in international society, constitutive of difference and hierarchy, is at once familiar and foreign to the study of standards of civilisation. Few international relations scholars are likely to disagree with Göle’s claim that ‘no other symbol than the veil reconstructs with such force the “otherness” of Islam to the West’, and the importance of the position of women as a standard of civilisation is regularly mentioned in civilisation literature. ¹ For instance, without much further elaboration, Mazlish states that, ‘in almost all discussions of civilization since its conceptualization by Mirabeau, the status of women has been mooted as the measure of the level of civilization’. ²

And yet this is also a foreign claim, as hardly any international relations scholarship has actually looked closely at the status of women as a standard of civilisation operative in international society. The standard thus remains understudied and undertheorised, as if its meaning and effects are so apparent as not to warrant further thought. To be sure, there is feminist scholarship within history and comparative literature that looks at discourses of civilisation in particular historical and geographical contexts. ³ But in terms of understanding the status of women as a standard of civilisation across particular contexts and over time – indeed, as a standard of civilisation in international society – there is very little work. ⁴

In this article, I will mostly address a basic question: what is this standard? Or, in what ways has the condition of women been articulated together with civilisation? To illustrate and disentangle some of the ways in which the standard has been reproduced but also its transformations, the article focuses on the articulation of the standard by a range of European and non-European political thinkers and political actors in the 19th century and the present, two important periods marked by intense discussions of the status of women and civilisation. Drawing in part on my prior work on this topic, the narrative jumps from Scottish and French Enlightenment scholars, German, Russian and Chinese socialists, Turkish statesmen and Indonesian, Latin American and Philippine women’s rights advocates in the late 18th to early 20th centuries to contemporary political science, feminist scholarship and political actors in Europe, the US, Turkey, Afghanistan and elsewhere. I thus look more closely at a number of texts in multiple contexts that deal with women and civilisation. That said, for a number of reasons that I cannot overcome any time soon, the analysis to some degree privileges Western voices.

While obviously not comprehensive, this analysis nonetheless allows me to draw the conclusion that, at present, this is not a standard that is articulated only or even primarily by so-called ‘Western’ actors. And it has not been for quite some time. Since the 19th century, there seems to have been agreement among many actors across the world that the status of women indicates civilisational belonging and helps gauge the level of advancement of a society. This agreement should not be equated with a lack of contestation about the standard, however. Far from it. In fact, the shared nature of the standard in the abstract enables discord and contestation about its concrete manifestations, so much so that I would claim that the standard functions as an arena of contestation in which alternative visions of a good society are debated. The status of women and the debates on gender relations function to establish and contest civilisational boundaries, civilisational identities and international hierarchies. Thus, it is not an understatement to claim that the status of women is central both to the contested identification of what civilisation(s) is/are and, in turn, to the disputes over what hierarchies these entail.

However, whether the empowerment of women is a particularly ‘Western’ set of values and traditions was much more contested in the 19th century than it is at present. Then, various actors working for the advancement of women within socialist, anti-colonial and other movements challenged the idea of Western civilisation as the source of sexual equality, pointing instead to the empowerment of women within non-Western and ‘primitive’ societies as well as to the liberating potential of socialism. Today a great many contemporary actors, speaking on behalf of or in opposition to ‘Western civilisation’, contend that equality between men and women is a specifically Western tradition and set of values. The links made between ‘the West’ and gender equality have serious implications for feminisms, and the article thus ends with a discussion of the contemporary implications of invoking the status of women as a standard of civilisation for feminisms in different parts of the world. Before it gets there, the article will begin with depictions of the status of women as a standard of civilisation in the late 18th to early 20th centuries.

Late 18th to Early 20th Century Representations

The condition of women has been implicated in the ordering of societies in terms of civilisation since the very emergence of the concept of civilisation in 18th century Europe. A range of European Enlightenment thinkers, as well as state representatives and political agitators, have understood the status of women as a standard of civilisation. ⁵ Although not the first to make the connection, the French socialist Charles Fourier is generally credited with popularising the thesis that the status of women is a marker of progress. In 1808 he argued that ‘the best nations are always those that accord women the greatest amount of liberty; this can be seen as much among the Barbarians and Savages as among the Civilized.’ ⁶ Like now, there was agreement among a range of 19th century actors that societies where women were treated appropriately were superior to others.

But what did an appropriate condition for women entail? And why were the best nations those which treated women appropriately? In turn, what did the status of women say about which nations were ‘the best’? On these points, there were and continue to be major disagreements. In the 19th century, ‘civilisation’ was largely articulated in singular and evolutionary terms, as one advanced final stage of a continuous spectrum of political, intellectual, moral and technological development. Savagery and civilisation were conceived as the beginning and end points of human evolution, a journey that was imagined to originate in a state of nature. The civilising process was thus understood roughly as the process of transcending the presumed givens of ‘natural’ existence. There was furthermore great interest in understanding relations of domination in the state of nature and in the subsequent civilising process. As the relations between men and women were conceptualised as relations between the strong and the weak, the status of women took on significance as a means not only to set out claims about appropriate relations between ‘the sexes’ but also to indicate civilisational progress. A great many thinkers, public figures and political activists asked themselves these questions: what did relations between the strong and the weak sex look like in the state of nature? What would happen to that relation during the civilising process? What, in turn, did the status of women say about the advancement of a society? As I will show below, there were great disagreements about the answers to these questions.

One predominant interpretation was that women suffered oppression by men during the primitive stages, an oppression which lessened with the advancement of a society. A number of French (e.g. Denis Diderot) and Scottish (e.g. John Millar) Enlightenment thinkers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries used the state of nature to make arguments about a shared human history of female subjugation. In a state of nature, these thinkers contended, human interactions were neither governed by law nor subject to restraints from a government. Brutality and sheer strength were allowed free reign, leading to the submission and exploitation of women as the physically weaker sex. John Millar, a professor of civil law at the University of Glasgow, devoted an entire chapter to this theme in his influential The Origins of the Distinction of Ranks, an important work of empirical moral philosophy and one of the major products of the Scottish Enlightenment. Analysing authority relations by comparing progressive historical stages, Millar claimed that women ‘are degraded below the other sex, and reduced under that authority which the strong acquire over the weak: an authority, which, in early periods, is subject to no limitation from the government’. ⁷ Here, the degradation of women was linked to ‘savagery’, a primitive stage beyond which the Europeans had allegedly progressed with the development of law and government. And if women were oppressed in civilised society, their lives were still believed to be infinitely better than in primitive life. Similar ideas were expressed by French Enlightenment philosopher and influential encyclopedist Denis Diderot: ‘If women are subjugated in civilized nations, they are under complete oppression in savage nations and in all barbarous regions. Entirely occupied with meeting his needs, the savage has time only for his safety and his subsistence.’ ⁸ By the mid-19th century, it had become a matter of established fact among many of those discussing the civilising process that ‘the condition of woman has always been the most degraded the nearer we approach to a state of nature, or, rather, the less we are raised above the level and mere animal characteristics of the brute creation’. ⁹

A shift away from primitive life towards civilisation was thus represented as beneficial for women by a number of French, British and US scholars and political actors. And since the general premise was that the civilising process elevated the status of women, the status of women could be used to gauge the advancement of a society. At this juncture, it is important to consider what sort of female condition was represented as ‘advanced’ in these renderings. For starters, the maintenance of distinctions between the sexes was considered civilised, and societies ranging from the Chinese to some in Africa and native America were disparaged as less civilised or savage for not maintaining separate spheres. ¹⁰ Informed by upper-strata notions of femininity and domesticity in France and Britain, women performing physical labour were considered particularly appalling, and stories about the treatment of women as ‘beasts of burden’ in savage societies circulated widely. Politics was also represented as too onerous for women, another burden they should not bear, for during the 19th and early 20th centuries a number of Europeans claimed women should be spared political responsibilities and public office. Societies in Africa, Asia and North and South America wherein women had a political role were thus belittled as uncivilised. ¹¹ The meaning of the ‘elevation’ of women in 19th century and contemporary Europe is thus quite distinctive.

The notion that the status of women indicated the advancement of ‘civilisation’ was prevalent but also highly contested in the 19th century. Thinkers and activists working in a socialist tradition used the status of women to critique what they termed bourgeois civilisation, arguing instead that the status of women in European societies showed the detrimental effects of capitalist advancement. Sharing a view of history as a set of stages, and sharing the notion that the status of women could be used to gauge the advancement of a stage, primitive society was upheld as a form of primitive communism, often characterised by matriarchy, wherein women prospered. For instance, in The Holy Family (1844), and drawing on Fourier, Marx and Engels portrayed European civilisation as a low point in the relations of the sexes, a retrocession from primitive society rather than a stage of advancement for women. ¹² Such notions were to be developed by a range of others in the following decades. In a mammoth, 560-page work on evolution from savagery to civilisation published in 1877, US anthropologist and social theorist Lewis Morgan advanced the thesis that primitive society rested on the institution of the matrilineal clan rather than the patriarchal family. ¹³ Women were thus believed to hold a more central position of power in savage societies. August Bebel of the German Social Democratic Party elaborated this point in his groundbreaking and highly influential Woman and Socialism in 1879. ¹⁴ Influenced by Morgan’s work, Bebel attempted to lay bare ‘the entirely different relation of the sexes at an early period of human development from their present relation’, insisting on the economic roots of the oppression of women. ¹⁵ And his assessment of this early period differed considerably from the thesis that women suffered more oppression the more primitive a society:

In present day bourgeois society woman holds the second place. Man leads; she follows. The present relation is diametrically opposed to that which prevailed during the matriarchal period. The evolution from primitive communism to the rule of private property has primarily brought about this transformation. ¹⁶

Five years later Friedrich Engels was to publish another landmark socialist text confronting the woman question, in the 1884 Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. ¹⁷ Also drawing on Lewis, Engels argued that:

One of the most absurd notions ever taken over from eighteenth-century enlightenment is that in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man. Among all savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to a certain extent the upper stage also, the position of women is not only free, but honorable. ¹⁸

To Bebel and Engels, and to the many socialist agitators speaking for the cause of women, such as Clara Zetkin and Aleksandra Kollontai, the situation of women was viewed as a clear indicator not of the advancement but of the miseries of ‘civilised society’. Capitalism and Christianity were identified as the central cogs of European civilisation, and they were represented as the two prime causes of the contemporary oppression of women. Capitalism produced a number of institutions necessary for its maintenance that subjugated women to a greater extent than men. Most important of these were the creation of women as property, be that found in relations of sex, both familial and commercial, and of labour, be that familial or commercial. Women were thus oppressed as sex beings, prostitutes, housewives and particularly exploited workers. These social institutions were embedded in the very fabric of the bourgeois state. Rather than liberating women, the bourgeois state and its legal framework, the epitome of European civilisation, were held to exploit and oppress women in this interpretation. Christian morality and the reactionary influence of the clergy on women did not help matters. Women, as being most heavily under the influence of the Catholic Church and enduring the most difficult effects of capitalism, became a symbol and the very embodiment of the backwardness of the civilised world. ¹⁹

The emancipation of women would a few decades later also become a means for the Russian Bolsheviks to challenge the society of civilised states and the language of civilisation. The Bolshevik Party, established in 1903 and coming to power through the 1917 Russian revolution, later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Bolshevik and later Soviet criticism of the oppression of women in ‘civilised countries’ was in fact relentless. In a rather typical speech, Nikolai Bukharin argued in 1919 that the advancement of women under socialism would help tear ‘the benevolent mask off the real barbarian – the capitalist regimes of the most “advanced” and most “civilized” countries’. ²⁰ From the Russian revolution onwards, the ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ treatment of women was routinely used to demean bourgeois ‘civilised’ states and demonstrate the superiority of socialist statehood. In a 1919 speech entitled ‘Soviet Power and the Status of Women’, Lenin argued that:

In the course of two years of Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe, more has been done to emancipate woman, to make her the equal of the ‘strong’ sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, ‘democratic’ republics of the world taken together. Education, culture, civilization, freedom – all these high-sounding words are accompanied in all the capitalist, bourgeois republics of the world with incredibly foul, disgustingly vile, bestially crude laws that … give privileges to the male and humiliate and degrade womankind. ²¹

While European, Russia was positioned uneasily between East and West and had long had a vexed relationship with ideas about a ‘civilised West’ and a ‘less advanced East’. ²² The status of women helped the new Soviet society not only to challenge the civilised status of the western states of Europe but also to distance Russia from the East, as more advanced and more liberated. Claims were time and again made about the barbarity of the colonial powers, which had not only degraded European women but also retarded the social development of ‘Oriental peoples’. Evidence of this was consistently found in the alleged oppression of women in the East, whose colonised situation was seen as even more dire than that of European women. The indictment of Europe as barbaric and backward thus failed to release the colonies, and particularly the East, from being understood as backward as well, even if colonial Europe was represented as the primary cause of this standing. ²³

In contexts more clearly positioned as non-Western, the status of women was also debated as a matter of civilisation. And here as well there were disagreements over whether civilisation entailed advancement or a set-back for women. I will use illustrations from several parts of the world here, beginning with discussions in Chinese political circles at the beginning of the 20th century. The Chinese Empire had dealt with Europeans according to principles expressed in the language of a Chinese standard of civilisation for centuries. ²⁴ By the tumultuous end of the 19th century, when Japanese and Western imperialists were scrambling for concessions in China, distressed reformers and revolutionaries looked for ways to transform and strengthen the new Chinese state. The status of Chinese women, articulated in terms of the relation and rivalry between ‘European’ and ‘Chinese’ civilisations, was found to be one of the problems sapping China of strength.

In the first decades of the 20th century, many members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) approached the empowerment of women as a matter of modernising China in terms of overcoming Confucianism. Chen Duxiu, co-founder and the first secretary-general of the CCP, had long been active in the debates on the woman question. ²⁵ In a 1916 article in Xin Qingnian on ‘The Way of Confucius and Modern Life’, he argued that:

The movement of women’s participation in politics is also an aspect of women’s life in modern civilization. When they are bound by the Confucian teaching that ‘To be a woman means to submit,’ that ‘The wife’s word should not travel beyond her own apartments,’ and that ‘a woman should not discuss affairs outside the home,’ would it not be unusual if they participated in politics? … In today’s civilized society, social intercourse between men and women is a common practice … In the way of Confucian teaching however ‘men and women do not sit on the same mat’. ²⁶

In this rendering, embracing modern civilisation entailed doing away with Confucian teachings on proper relations between men and women. The nationalist Kuomindang Party (KMD), CCP rival after their 1927 split, also linked the status of women to civilisation but argued that the road ahead required salvaging some of the Confucian heritage. KMD spokeswoman for women, the educationalist Dr Zeng Baosun, contended in 1931 that the Chinese woman

is at the cross-roads; it is difficult to say which road she will take. Will she revert to the old as the pendulum swings back? Or will she throw over all her heritage and become a totally new person unknown to her land and alien to her civilization? Or will she retain what is best in China and supplement it with the best from the West? The third alternative is naturally what we want. To achieve this it is necessary for the modern Chinese woman not to be denationalized, but to have such a thorough knowledge of the culture and civilization of her own country that she will personify what is best in them. For then, and not until then, will she be able to re-evaluate and make the best use of those desirable old Chinese ideals such as maternal love and wifely devotion. With a foundation like this she can build a superstructure of Western training in arts, science and philosophy, or anything else she chooses. ²⁷

In this context of widespread Chinese concern with the woman question, then, the advancement of women was often discussed as linked with modern, Western civilisation. Whether such a path was appropriate for China appears to be one main point of contention.

These terms of debate had some parallels with then-contemporary Latin America. Among Latin Americans involved in the debates on women’s emancipation in the first decades of the 20th century, the historical origins of the advancement of women were almost exclusively located in the civilised world and Europe, in stark contrast with later representations that were to emphasise pre-colonial traditions and sex relations. 28 In the early 20th century, however, it was proclaimed that ‘in the whole civilised world, in secular Europe as well as in young America and the transformed Japan, the feminist movement is developing with an incomparable force’. ²⁹

A prevalent set of representations located ‘young America’ as less advanced on the scale of social evolution. The low status of women was widely represented as an effect of lagging civilisational development and lack of cultural progress in Latin America. ³⁰ ‘It is well known’, Peruvian journalist and social activist María Jesús Alvarado Rivera stated in 1911 before a gathering of the cultural elite in Lima, ‘that in our fatherland as in almost all the Latin countries, with slight variation, erroneous medieval ideas and prejudices about the culture and condition of women still prevail.’ ³¹ ‘We find ourselves lagging far behind the peoples who dominate the world today,’ acclaimed Brazilian zoologist and leading feminist Bertha Lutz similarly argued about the political status of women in 1918. ³²

The Americas were thus characterised as a distinct, ‘new’ or ‘young’ part of the civilised world, in contrast with the ‘old’ civilised world. With Spain as the madre patria, feminist activists of ‘Spanish America’ saw themselves as carriers of a European cultural heritage of which civilisation was a central component. This youth was sometimes represented as the source of new and progressive thinking, placing the Americas at the apex of modern civilisation and making ‘the lack of suffrage and civil rights inexplicable’, to cite Peruvian feminist Aurora Cáceres. ³³ Opposition to women’s rights then became characterised as ‘antiquated’ and something attributable to the ‘old world’, inverting the more prevalent representations of the relation between the status of women and civilisation. ³⁴

There were, then, prevalent representations linking the advancement of civilisation with the advancement of women, in Europe, China, Latin America and elsewhere. However, the claim that women were oppressed in areas labelled as ‘savage’ and that European civilisation entailed the elevation of women was also fiercely resisted, as we saw in the discussion of European socialist ideas above. The claim also met resistance in non-European areas. A 1902 speech in the US by Philippine patriot and feminist Clemencia López serves as a good illustration. ³⁵ Speaking at the end of the Philippine–American War, López was responding to what she considered a misrepresentation of the situation of women in the Philippines. She argued:

You will no doubt be surprised and pleased to learn that … mentally, socially, and in almost all the relations of life, our women are regarded as the equals of our men. You will also be surprised to know that this equality of women in the Philippines is not a new thing. It was not introduced from Europe … Long prior to the Spanish occupation, the people were already civilized, and this respect for and equality of women existed. ³⁶

Her challenge invokes the evolutionary ideas about civilisation and she, too, discusses the situation of women in terms of the hierarchy between savagery and civilisation. However, she objects to the positioning of the Philippines as ‘savage’ and points to equality between men and women as support for the claim about the civilised status of the country.

Indeed, a number of early 20th century initiatives and movements for the elevation of women claimed to draw inspiration from non-European traditions rather than European civilisation. ³⁷ For instance, the Kemalist elites enfranchised Turkish women in 1934 in an effort to bring Turkey, in the words of Turkish nationalist leader and first president Kemal Atatürk, to the ‘level it deserved in the civilized world’. ³⁸ However, women’s suffrage was not represented as a form of Westernisation or an effect of European civilisation. Instead, it was defended as a Turkish tradition reaching back to the pre-Islamic Turkish culture which had been interrupted by the Islamic-Ottoman period. ³⁹ Suffrage was thus one of the markers that brought Turkey into the fold of ‘civilised society’, while simultaneously allowing Turkey to remain distinct, with a tradition of its own. Ziya Gökalp, influential intellectual and ideologue who figured prominently in the development of Kemalist Turkish nationalism, proclaimed that ‘Old Turks were both democratic and feminist’. ⁴⁰ As prime minister Inönü introduced the suffrage bill to parliament, he claimed that ‘the Turkish nation prospered and pervaded the whole world with its power and civilization only when its women had occupied their just and prestigious place along with men and worked together with men in the complicated and difficult tasks of their country’. ⁴¹

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, then, the status of women figured as a shared standard of civilisation among a range of actors across the world. Many of these actors relied on the categorisation of peoples and societies as civilised, barbarous and savage in making arguments about the situation of women and progress. However, as should be clear from the discussion above, the very shared nature of this claim also enabled a great deal of contestation over which states were in fact more advanced. There was no general agreement that sexual equality should be approached as a European invention or as a trait distinctive of European civilisations. Such assertions were in fact disputed.

Status of Women and Contemporary Discourses on Civilisation

Fast forward a century. Since the end of the Cold War, the ties made between the status of women and civilisation seem to have intensified. This may be due to two important and interlinked developments of the 1990s: the intensified mobilisation around women’s rights and the re-emergence of the language of civilisation. However, the status of women and civilisation are articulated together in new ways. First, the status of women has now become a marker of putatively distinctive cultures that are not necessarily evolving along the same path. In contemporary discussions of the status of women, civilisation is no longer primarily represented in evolutionary and singular terms. This is not to say that evolutionary ideas about the status of women have disappeared, but these have largely morphed into discussions of ‘development’ where the express terminology of ‘civilisation’ is not generally used. ‘Civilisation’ in contemporary discourse on women is instead articulated in the plural, with civilisations as multiple, fundamentally distinctive and primarily cultural value conglomerations. Rather than pointing to a shared future through the evolutionary process, civilisations in this rendering are firmly anchored in past values and traditions and their present reproduction.

Second, the empowerment of women is now widely represented as a ‘Western’ value and tradition. And this assertion is much less contested than the 19th century claims about the status of women being an indicator of the advancement of (Western) civilisation. Indeed, in many contemporary contexts around the world, the empowerment of women is represented as a particularly and even uniquely Western phenomenon with roots in the cultural values of the European Enlightenment. One can see this clearly among political actors speaking on behalf of ‘the West’ and to whom the idea of a cohesive and distinctive Western civilisation appeals. For instance, it is apparent among a number of political leaders in Europe, particularly on the right. Dutch right-wing populist parliamentarian Geert Wilders has used gender equality arguments to slow or halt non-Western immigration and to legitimise cultural assimilation policies. The Swedish right-wing populist party the Sweden Democrats has likewise worked for a ban on the wearing of burkas in Swedish schools, as this is ‘irreconcilable with Western values’ and ‘does not correspond with Western views on democracy and gender equality’. ⁴² The party has also attempted to halt the construction of mosques with the argument that Muslim congregations ‘do not fulfil the demands of gender equality and democracy posed by a civilised society’. ⁴³ Gender equality is identified as a ‘Western’ value and tradition, contrasted with other cultural traditions.

The claim that the empowerment of women is uniquely Western also appeals to extremist xenophobic movements, which use the status of women to construct and mobilise Western nationalities against non-Western civilisations, and particularly Islam. Here, the status of women is used to symbolise the threat that Islam allegedly poses to Western civilisation. For instance, the Party of the Swedes and the Swedish Resistance Movement, the two largest neo-Nazi organisations in Sweden, both raise the spectre of Islamisation in their recruitment campaigns and use the sexual integrity of women to rally opposition to non-Western immigration. Hate pages on the internet run a large number of articles with claims about rape epidemics by ‘non-Western’ and particularly Muslim rapists and Western victims. A slew of such articles have emerged in Norway, with allegations that ‘Muslims have created a “rape epidemic” in Norway’. ⁴⁴ One article contends that ‘the rape epidemic in Norway is caused by Muslim sexism and violence. Muslims are the perpetrators of 95% of all rapes against Norwegian women. Many blond, Norwegian women now color their hair black to avoid being raped.’ ⁴⁵ In these interpretations, ‘Islam’ is made out to be a cohesive monolith with patriarchal values at its core. Allegedly unable to control themselves, driven by misogynist values and a hatred of the West, Muslim men are portrayed as prone to sexual violence and the subordination of women. If purged of Islam, Western society would remain a sanctuary for women according to this view.

It would be a mistake, however, to attribute the contemporary linking of the empowerment of women with Western civilisation simply to extreme-right movements. More mainstream political forces also rely on the status of women to draw civilisational boundaries. In the lead-up to NATO’s invasion of Afghanistan in November of 2001, for instance, the suffering of Afghan women was used as evidence of the barbarity of Taliban rule and to legitimise the war by civilising forces. Laura Bush, wife of US president George W. Bush, delivered a much publicised speech to garner support for the invasion: ‘Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror – not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.’ ⁴⁶ (Lest anyone be fooled, the US had promised 43 million dollars to the Taliban regime six months prior, with no strings attached in terms of women’s rights.) ⁴⁷ US political pundit Robert Tracinski recently phrased the matter in very plain terms on the website RealClearPolitics: ‘This is why women’s rights matter: they help to clarify and reaffirm what is good about our civilization, and to clarify the evil of the enemy, both for ourselves and for the populations the Islamists seek to control.’ ⁴⁸ His reasoning is worth quoting at some length:

Women’s rights and the treatment of women are a profound measure of the progress of a civilization, for a reason that modern feminists will not necessarily acknowledge: because women are the weaker sex. I mean that women are physically weak relative to men, who are on average much larger and stronger, with a far more developed musculature. Thus, the treatment of women in a society is a revealing measure of that society’s attitude toward physical force.

In a society where might makes right, where the rule of brute force has been thoroughly unleashed, women are always the first victims. Even the poorest and meanest man, the guy on the lowest rung who is oppressed by others above him who are bigger and stronger – even he can find one person he is still able to dominate and oppress: a woman, whether it is his mother, his wife, or his daughter. And he will oppress her – if the oppression of others by force is the accepted norm of the society he lives in. For examples, look to the Muslim world with its “honor” killings, arranged marriages, sexual segregation, and special restrictions on the travel and attire of women.

This is a complete contrast to the kind of society in which force is subordinated to morality. A society in which a woman can do whatever she wants without fear is a society in which the physically weak can rely on being protected from the physically strong. In fact, in a civilized society the physically weak feel safe because of the physically strong. The mark of such a society is a sense of chivalry – the idea that a man’s superior physical strength is properly used to protect rather than to dominate, to serve the cause of justice and freedom rather than to assert arbitrary power over others. ⁴⁹

Notably, the ‘Muslim world’ is made out to be distinguishable and clearly distinctive from ‘civilised society’ and the status of women becomes a potent marker of this distinction. And note that there are no ambiguities, and no recognition of the profound problems with making such distinctions given the intertwined and partially shared histories of the geographical regions the author is referring to, the enormous diversity within what is here neatly labelled ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’, the contemporary context of cultural hybridities and hybrid identities, and so on. Instead, the status of women is once again used in an attempt to create clear differences and as a resonant signal of moral superiority, and to garner support for activities and policies in the name of ‘the West’.

Representatives of ‘the West’ are not alone in using the status of women to construct and draw boundaries between civilisations, however, or in linking the West with women’s empowerment. I will use representations by some speaking in the name of ‘Islam’ as an illustration of this point, although women are also used by representatives of ‘Hindu civilisation’ to mark out difference and superiority. ⁵⁰ Among some of those speaking on behalf of Islam, proper gender relations are represented as key to resisting ‘Westernisation’. As an example, various versions of political Islam rely heavily on the veiled bodies of women not only as a religious practice but also as a symbol to mark out difference from the West. Among a number of contemporary veiling advocates, such as among participants in the Turkish veiling movement of the past decades, the veil is advanced as a symbol of women’s active acceptance of female obedience to men as part of their faith. In such renderings of Islam, the veiling of women does more than maintain boundaries between the sexes and female submissiveness to male authority, however; veiling also expresses Islamic identity and rejection of Western civilisation. Göle has argued in a study of the Turkish veiling movement of the past decades that ‘difference from the West is among the primary concerns of Islamist movements in contemporary societies. This is why the Islamic order, which “wants to see Muslim people not as imitators of other people but as honorable in themselves”, assigns importance to veiling.’ ⁵¹

Extremist interpretations of Islam also rely heavily on the status of women as a mechanism of resisting the West. For instance, Taliban clerics and rulers have articulated a close link between the empowerment of women and the West. During formal Taliban rule, the official and often violent subordination of women to men became one set of state measures held to differentiate Taliban Afghanistan from the despised West. As an illustration, in 1998 a young Afghan woman was given one hundred lashes at the Kabul sports stadium for an alleged act of adultery. Her persecutor is reported to have cried out before the 30,000 spectators: ‘Thanks to the Taliban, the army of god, that we can protect the honor of our people … thanks to God that we are followers of God and not the West.’ ⁵²

Standards of Civilisation as a Challenge for Contemporary Feminisms

Not surprisingly, the discourse on the empowerment of women as a Western tradition and set of values exerts a powerful pull on feminism. A number of contemporary feminists have succumbed to the force with which the conceptual unity of women’s empowerment and Western civilisation is presently advanced. To use some academic illustrations, Professor Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Professor Pippa Norris of the University of Harvard have called gender equality the source of ‘the true clash of civilizations’, attributing the empowerment of women unequivocally to Western values and traditions. ⁵³ The rhetorical question and title of renowned political philosopher Susan Okin’s widely read essay Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? likewise points to her anxiety, and that of many others, about the presumed conflict between non-Western cultural practices and sexual equality. ⁵⁴ Some of the research on honour killings reproduces similar boundaries between Western and non-Western cultures, once again tying the liberation of women to the West. ⁵⁵ In these renderings, the empowerment of women clearly demands adaptation to Western values and practices.

However, other feminists have been some of the most vociferous critics of ‘Western’ feminism, arguing that gender equality is foreign to ‘non-Western cultures’ and that attempts to advance equality constitute cultural imperialism. In an article entitled ‘The White Woman’s Burden’, Syed and Ali (2011) argue that ‘Western feminism’ is part of a ‘colonising and “civilising” agenda for the “uncivilised” non-white people and cultures in Asia, Africa, Australasia, and North and Latin America’. ⁵⁶ Allegedly sharing ethnocentric and universalist pretensions, ‘Western feminists’ are made out to be blind to the fact ‘that cultures affected by colonialism are often vastly different and should be treated as such’. ⁵⁷ Although these authors hardly see Western feminism as salvation, they too reproduce the notion of ‘the West’ as a cohesive entity that is distinctive from the Rest. They thus share with the advocates of ‘Western feminism’ a reliance on basic civilisational categories and the identification of gender equality as Western. Indeed, Uma Narayan (1998, 2000) has contended that some of feminism’s sensitivity to cultural difference has tended to replicate civilisation discourses about gender and distinctive cultural traditions, reproducing essentialist and totalising narratives about civilisational difference in critiques of ‘Western feminism’. ⁵⁸ In her words, among feminist concerns with differences among women, ‘seemingly universal essentialist generalisations about “all women” are replaced by culture-specific essentialist generalisations that depend on totalising categories such as “Western culture,” “non-Western cultures,” “Indian women,” and “Muslim women”’. ⁵⁹ The basic civilisational categories are reproduced in some feminist work, in short, with feminism and the empowerment of women once again attributed to the West.

Among some feminisms too, then, gender relations and the status of women function to construct the world as if it consisted of a few cohesive and distinctive civilisations. This is the case among advocates and critics of ‘Western feminism’ alike. In my assessment, the feminist voices that toil to question and provide alternatives to the predominant ways in which civilisations and the situation of women are currently conceptualised are more marginalised. Within academia, scholars such as Uma Narayan and Chandra Mohanty have insisted that allegedly cohesive collectives such as ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ are in fact multifaceted, overlapping and indeterminate identities. They have no given core set of values, and their meaning is open to contextual interpretation across time and space. Civilisations as they are often portrayed in contemporary discussions of the status of women – as mutually exclusive cultural systems with internally coherent and stable norms – simply do not exist as such. ⁶⁰ The status of women thus cannot be a ‘real’ marker of civilisation other than in a temporary, contextual sense.

I would furthermore contend that the link between the empowerment of women and Western civilisation is of little advantage for feminisms. I see at least three major challenges for feminisms of various kinds with respect to the contemporary utilisation of an enhanced status of women as a standard of the West. First, representations of misogynist non-Western cultures help mask violence, discrimination and other oppressive practices that women may face in societies that are believed to fall within the realm of ‘the West’. It is no coincidence that many of the political actors who are most adamant in hailing the emancipation of women as a Western phenomenon simultaneously advance agendas that undermine women’s rights (e.g. assaults on reproductive choice and maternity care, resistance to anti-discrimination legislation, and so on). With the coherent notion of ‘the West’ that is called forth in civilisational comparisons, there is a risk of not seeing the beam in one’s own eye, so to speak. Practices of male violence against women, sexual slavery, rape, pay inequities and discrimination pale in comparison with other civilisations that are portrayed as even more gruesome for women. In these representations, war crimes against women by what are generally referred to as ‘Western’ military forces and the sexual exploitation of non-Western women by what are generally seen as ‘Western’ men somehow do not seem to register as ‘Western’ violence against, or exploitation of, women at all.

Second, the interpretation of gender equality as a Western phenomenon is problematic for women and feminists in contexts where non-Western identification has become a source of integrity, human dignity and pride. When concepts such as gender equality and female emancipation are tied to Western culture, it can become more difficult for women not identified as Western to make claims for improvements. To demand equality or empowerment in such an interpretation would mean to succumb to Western culture – to ‘fall into these traps’ of being ‘influenced by the dominant Western feminist discourse,’ to use the language of Syed and Ali. ⁶¹ There are many examples of this. For instance, the Indonesian women’s suffrage movement of the 1940s suffered as a result of the Dutch colonial women’s movement claiming political equality to be a Western development. ⁶² They had to struggle to spread knowledge of egalitarian, pre-colonial relations between men and women in Indonesia, knowledge which was then relayed among women’s movements in multiple parts of the colonised world. Initiatives for equal treatment of men and women in the mosques of Istanbul have encountered similar criticisms of constituting Westernisation and being foreign to Islam. The supporters of the campaign, such as Istanbul’s deputy mufti Kadriye Avci Erdemli, the city’s second most powerful administrator of the Islamic faith, have countered that ‘all we are doing is taking Islam back to before it was corrupted and misinterpreted, when women and men were treated equally’. ⁶³ In hiding the multiplicity of societies where women have held positions of power and status, and by silencing the present and historical oppression of women in the West, the idea of the gender equal West can fuel patriarchal practices and institutions in contexts where maintaining a distance from the West is valued.

Third, the prevalent circulation of the status of women as a standard of civilisation – and particularly representations of gender equality as Western – may serve as yet another obstacle to forming alliances among feminists. Feminism is a label that obviously includes a wide array of claims, identities and movements, some of which necessarily come into conflict. In this day and age there are few calls for a unified feminist voice, and feminist struggles are fragmented. However, what Narayan calls ‘the Package Picture view’ of civilisations as coherent, homogeneous and distinctive erects barriers where feminist alliances could otherwise form. She contends that giving up this conceptualisation of civilisation opens up ‘liberating possibilities with respect to cross-cultural feminist judgments’. ⁶⁴

Conclusions

The status of women is clearly of central importance as a standard of civilisations for a wide range of actors around the world. It has been used to draw out boundaries for basic civilisational categories, such as the ‘civilised’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ of the 19th century and the contemporary cultural conglomerates of ‘the West’, ‘Islam’, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Africa’. These boundaries are in turn drawn upon as moral hierarchies to mobilise for action, international and domestic. However, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the claim that the elevation of women was a specifically Western or European trait and invention was highly contested. The variety of histories and practices of equality were not forgotten, with Europeans mocking societies in the Americas, Africa and Asia as ‘savage’ for not maintaining separate spheres or for having women hold positions of power.

Today, although the status of women continues to be a contentious issue, the connection between gender equality and the West seems to be much less contested. The notion that gender equality is a ‘Western’ thing is widely circulated and does not appear to be challenged in the manner it was a century ago. The primary point of contestation now seems to be whether this ‘Western’ gender equality is desirable and appropriate in so-called ‘non-Western’ societies. Those invoking civilisation to talk about the status of women seem to be suffering from memory loss about the range of societies within which women have been empowered in different ways. And there is a conspicuous silence – outside of some feminist academic circles – about the extensive reliance of a range of thinkers and practices with roots in the European Enlightenment on sexual differentiation and the exclusion of women from spheres of power.

With gender equality attributed to ‘the West’ as if this unity were given and true, calls for the adoption of ‘Western values’ naturally follow among equality advocates as well as advocates of Western civilisation. Activities to empower women are clearly also susceptible to being denounced as Western cultural imperialism. Problematically, this lends itself to ‘Western’ women being told not to complain because the situation of their sisters elsewhere is allegedly so much worse. It lends itself to Asian, Middle Eastern and African women being called tools or agents of Western imperialism when working for equality. And it may serve as yet another obstacle to forming alliances among feminists at a time when feminisms suffer more from fragmentation and division than from faux universalisms and naive calls for global sisterhood. Few things are more difficult than shifting the terms of comprehension provided by predominant discourse. And yet this is precisely what needs to be done in order to release feminisms from the detrimental effects of the status of women being used as a standard of civilisation.