The Power of Autonomous Feminist Movements
There is also another influential factor that contributes to and is documented by researchers—the role of autonomous feminist movements. In their cross-national study of 70 countries across six continents and four decades, Htun and Weldon (2018) found that “a strong, autonomous feminist movement is both substantively and statistically significant as a predictor of government action to redress violence against women across all models.”
Their book, proves that a national autonomous feminist movements are a stronger predictor of legal and policy reform at the national level related to violence against women than the number of women in parliament, the presence/influence of leftist parties, or national wealth.
The large number of countries and the time covered allows this study to draw robust conclusions about the impact of movements. Analyzing data from 1975 to 2005, Htun and Weldon further explain that “movements are critical catalysts for policy development in all years, though their efforts are supplemented by policy machinery, international norms, and other factors.” Regarding organized efforts to bring accountability for violence against women, [national] autonomous feminist movements ensure that institutional reforms live up to the potential imagined by activists who demanded them and ensure that “words become deeds.”
And yet, patriarchy’s power remains steadfast despite the massive advancements women have made over the last century. Men retain control of every social system: government, culture, business, finance, and religion. Yet women persevere. As women amass power, patriarchy’s tactics to maintain control escalate, but the nature of these intensifying attacks is often highly predictable. For example, they almost always involve a salvo against reproductive rights—striking at the foundation of women’s autonomy— which we are currently witnessing to an unprecedented degree. “Opposing women’s right to control our own bodies is always the first step in every authoritarian regime,” says Gloria Steinem.
Throughout time, every significant advancement for women—including suffrage, women’s legal rights, girls’ access to education, protections from gender-based violence, and the invention and legalization of birth control— happened because of women’s movements, which were funded by women philanthropists who invested their own money to drive those victories home.11 One of the reasons the American feminist movements that began in the 1970s have thrived and grown into continuously stronger and larger waves of feminism ever since is because of the best-kept secret of the women’s movement— the most powerful social justice tool of our time—a women-designed philanthropic innovation called the Global Women’s Funding Movement.
The Global Women’s Funding Movement is a worldwide network of women’s funds that power gender equity and social justice movements with money and resources, focusing on the needs and concerns of women, girls, and gender-expansive people everywhere. Although most women’s funds are public charities, they can also be private. Today, women’s funds (sometimes they are called women’s foundations) are typically public, non-profit funds that are led and governed by people who identify as ciswomen, transwomen, and non-binary people, whose primary purpose is to challenge dominant power structures by moving money, power, voice, and resources to efforts that are led by and advance the leadership and the empowerment of marginalized genders, including marginalized genders from Black, Indigenous, and communities of color.
By reconceptualizing philanthropy, redefining issues, and radically sharing power and learnings to leverage resources, amplify diverse voices, and fund movements for gender justice, women’s funds are shifting power, norms, voice, policies, and resources and demonstrating that a transformed world is possible and, indeed, is underway.
The Global Women’s Funding Movement has a feminist ethos as its guiding principle.
As Srilatha Batliwala states, “Feminism stands for power to, not power over. We struggle to change the practice of power both within our own structures and movements as well as in the social, economic, and political institutions we engage.”
In the words of bell hooks: Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Feminism is not anti-men; rather, it’s anti-discrimination (of all kinds); it’s anti-patriarchy, it’s anti-sexism, and with a positive focus on realizing a peaceful, just, creative, and equitable world free of violence for all.
Ndana Bofu-Tawamba, CEO of Urgent Action Fund Africa (UAF-Africa), reflects: When we’re talking about feminism, it is an ideology. But within that ideology, it is driven and facilitated by values and principles. It is those values and principles that are seeking to bring about equity, transparency, accountability, and equality. Equity and equality, and above all, seeking to bring about justice in a world that is so highly unequal and marginalizing of the Other. It is that that I think has facilitated and informed most of what I see as feminist philanthropy.
Tomorrow learn about: The Global Women’s Funding Movement Emerges