Crazy for Democracy

Women in Grassroots Movements

Temma Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134719259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Feminismo y teoría feminista

Crazy for Democracy vividly shows, through the lives of six women in the United States and South Africa, just what can be and is being accomplished to change our lives. At a time when we're depressed about democracy, pessimistic about race relations, and anxious about feminism, Crazy for Democracy vividly shows, through the lives of six women in the United States and South Africa, just what can be and is being accomplished to change our lives. In building real social movements to achieve a safe environment, win human rights, and safeguard their homes, these grassroots feminist leaders have been creating democratic institutions to achieve social justice for us all.

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Introduction:
Women Prophets and the Struggle for Human Rights

A NEW GENERATION of women leaders is carrying out an invisible revolution. All over the globe women have been asserting collective rights to protect their children against pollution, disease, and homelessness. Not content merely to fight for improvements in the lives of their families and communities, many of these women justify their action by making broad claims about human needs and rights according to an interpretation of justice that they themselves are developing through their actions.¹ The women featured in this book have linked social need to democracy by creating clinics, schools, and local governments in the squatter settlement of Crossroads, South Africa; by protesting against the dumping of soil laced with toxic waste in Warren County, North Carolina; and by forcing the government to buy their contaminated homes in Love Canal, New York. They have grown from individuals fighting to survive to members of communities with collective identities. Taking for granted that all human beings are entitled to safe housing and a clean environment and that sometimes only women can secure them, women in the United States and South Africa frequently have transformed grassroots struggles into full-blown social movements.²

Though widely used, the term grassroots does not have a commonly recognized meaning. Grassroots generally implies being widespread and common, in the sense of being universal. The term also suggests being outside the control of any state, church, union, or political party. To the women claiming its provenance, being from the grassroots generally means being free from any constraining political affiliations and being responsible to no authority except their own group. Though such women generally recognize their seeming powerlessness against corporate and governmental opponents, they also assert their moral superiority, their right to be responsible citizens, not according to official laws, but on their own terms.

Women such as Dollie Burwell, Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, Kim Burwell, Regina Ntongana, and Josette Cole are hardly household names. Neither was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956 when at the age of 26 he became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott.³ Even after he and Miss Ella Baker helped establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), few in the North or West recognized her name. Neither she nor the countless local women in church and civic groups all over the South attracted much attention.⁴

Dollie Burwell, who in 1982 helped launch the movement for environmental justice, combining civil rights and environmentalism, continues to work in The Warren County Citizens against Toxic Waste. She also served as registrar of deeds for Warren County, North Carolina; sits on the boards of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice and the Office for Church and Society; and acts as a local leader of SCLC. But few outside the movement or the region know anything about her or what she continues to accomplish.

Her daughter Kim Burwell, an activist in the Leadership Initiative Project and its umbrella organization, the Youth Taskforce, helps direct a southern grassroots youth crusade, engaging young people from fifth-graders to people in their twenties, as she herself is. By focusing on local schools, civil rights, and the environment, Kim Burwell helps empower a new generation of activists, many of whom will remain in their home towns in the South to create a permanent core of citizens with a vested interest in politics and the necessary skills to make their voices heard.

Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and the women of the Love Canal Homeowners Association first alerted Americans to the dangers of toxic waste in their own backyards and basements. Worried about the growing number of miscarriages and the degeneration of the health of the children in their neighborhood, formerly docile homemakers became enraged citizens, determined to win recognition of their predicament and redress of their grievances. Today, Lois Gibbs s Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, on whose board Luella Kenny sits, coordinates the efforts of seven thousand grassroots environmental organizations all over the United States.

Regina Ntongana and Josette Cole fought to end influx control laws, one of the legal pillars of apartheid in South Africa. Ntongana lost two children in 1973 because she, like millions of other South African black women, was expelled from her home in the city and was forced to live in the barren wastelands called Bantustans, where there was little food, water, or access to medical care. Ntongana moved her three other children back to Cape Town, constructed various shacks made up of what white South Africans had tossed away, and prepared to fight to preserve her life and the lives of her remaining children. Once she had a home, she had to fight alongside others to keep it from being bulldozed by the South African government, which was determined to expel her and the other black women who had established themselves in the city where they weren’t wanted. The women organized to defend themselves and fought for eight years before being driven out of their homes. But they refused to leave Cape Town. They moved to other squatter communities in the city and formed an organization to help women like themselves fight the injustices of apartheid.

A theory of leadership that explains the activities of these women and countless others depends on the idea of charisma.⁵ They are charismatic in the sense that sociologist Max Weber meant, insofar as they appear to have inherent magical qualities of authority that justify their ethical mission.⁶ Yet unlike leaders who stand aloof, acting as stars, participating only in the most publicized meetings, these women pay as much attention to the nitty-gritty of daily organizing as to making points that register at the national level. In doing so they create new political cultures.⁷

Though three of the six women focused on here are deeply religious, their charisma lies not in their religion but in their commitment to promoting new ethical principles as the basis for democracy. Their moral fervor challenges the meaning of human rights and justice as the woman have known them. In Weberian terms, these women are prophets:⁸ lay people who evoke a higher moral order. They would not blaspheme their inherited religions by claiming to be prophets, but by promoting ethical agendas for transforming society, they fulfill Weber’s definition. What they are doing is reclaiming human rights on their own terms, redefining humanity and making demands for the social and economic support necessary to sustain it. Such women, with their strong personalities, abilities to pitch in, and high morale, gather together people with different backgrounds, areas of expertise, and status, helping create egalitarian movements.⁹ Where a grassroots leader seems to enhance the ability of the group to reach a higher moral plane, she doesn’t stand out herself so much as she helps the community come together.

The grassroots leaders considered here, despite their similarities, differ in the kind of leadership they exercise. Dollie Burwell has the mind of a craftswoman. She can imagine an improvement and carry it out from start to finish. She can dig in at the person-to-person level, going door to door registering voters as happily as when participating on presidential committees on rural development. The goal for her is always social justice. Some think the concept is utopian; she knows it is attainable. Whether she is in the forefront, arguing before cameras, or in the background, acting as a voting monitor in the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, she is always at the service of the same cause: helping create a just life. For her, that includes a healthy dose of democracy.

Regina Ntongana resembles Dollie Burwell in her self-confidence and her commitment to others who are trying to better their lives. As Ntongana, known to her friends as “Ma,” frequently says, “We, as women, were feeling the pain.” The pain had first to do with the injustice of apartheid, and now with the removal of formal laws discriminating against blacks and other people, with the inequalities of life where whites secure most of the benefits from the land while others live in excruciating poverty, without housing, running water, electricity, health care, or education.

If Dollie Burwell and Regina Ntongana are like artisans, seeing individual projects through from start to finish and participating whether or not they lead, Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and Kim Burwell are more like orchestra conductors; and Josette Cole moves from one position of leadership to another. All can play most of the instruments, but what they usually do is put the notes together to create an ensemble whose power surpasses those of the individual tones. A synergy of sound.

Gibbs’s organization, The Citizens Clearinghouse For Hazardous Waste, grew from her realization that others wanted to fight back, as she and her neighbors at Love Canal had, against companies that damaged the environment and against government bureaucrats who underestimated their determination to save their families from destruction. Luella Kenny sits on the board of the clearinghouse and also directs the Love Canal Medical Trust fund, distributing the financial settlement a group of homeowners won for the ailments they developed from living over a toxic waste dump. Kim Burwell, having grown up as Dollie s daughter in the movement for social justice in the South, has an historical vision and a sense of group process. Cole, one of the founders of the Surplus People Project in Cape Town, South Africa, began by aiding women like Regina Ntongana, then joined her for ten years working to achieve land and housing rights all over the Western Cape. When that no longer seemed sufficient, Cole moved on to work in more informal settings, entering into alliances with people who wanted to push the new South African government to recognize people’s social and economic needs as well as their civil rights in the revised constitution of 1996.

To a certain extent Gibbs, Kenny, Kim Burwell, and Cole, by accepting leadership of organizations, making sure that the whole job of planning, coordinating, and campaigning gets done, miss the day-to-day pleasures and mobility of simply acting as members of a group. Lois Gibbs talks about the loneliness of being the one responsible for cheering people on, keeping their spirits up, having no one in whom to confide her own doubts, no one on whose shoulders she can cry. Gibbs and others who head grassroots organizations must be ready to carry their institutions alone while encouraging others to assume more responsibilities. Dollie Burwell and Regina Ntongana lead in different ways, acting as facilitators, expressing the views of people they talk to, working with individuals, shaping them into self-administering communities. By acting as political intermediaries, they help rejuvenate the organizations in which they participate.

But how could all this be going on without the public noticing? In part, it is because grassroots movements are mainly concerned with local issues, with what affects ordinary people every day. The media and public opinion are preoccupied with the spectacular, with the activities of celebrities. What’s more, the participants in grassroots movements are ordinary women attempting to accomplish necessary tasks, to provide services rather than to build power bases. Therefore, the work they do and the gains they make hardly seem politically significant.

Initially, the women leading such struggles merely act according to what I have called “female consciousness.”¹⁰ By female consciousness, I mean that certain women, emphasizing roles they accept as wives and mothers, also demand the freedom to act as they think their obligations entail. Women in many societies and historical periods learn from youth that they will be responsible as mothers for providing food, clothing, housing, and health care for their families. When toxic pollution or expulsion from their homes threatens their communities, certain women will take action according to female consciousness, confronting authorities to preserve life. Far from being a biological trait, female consciousness develops from cultural experiences of helping families and communities survive.

Placing human need above unjust laws, South African women, struggling to win housing and create community, launched one of the leading social movements of the seventies and eighties. They acted as prophets and contributed to the destruction of apartheid in South Africa. Homemakers in Love Canal began by protecting the safety of their homes, and wound up alerting the country to the poisons beneath the soil of homes throughout the nation. Local housewives and ministers realized that their neighborhood had been chosen for the landfill because their neighbors were largely poor, black, and thought to be politically powerless.

Presupposing that collective needs should be fulfilled by authorities, prophetic women called the entire system of politics into question at Crossroads, Love Canal, and Warren County. But unlike other leaders and movements that have undermined the political systems we know, discrediting democracy itself, these grassroots women’s groups have attempted, through moral claims for justice and human rights, to transform politics in far more democratic directions than ever seemed possible.

Such activists draw on an implicit theory of human rights, seeking to make community health a corollary of justice, deriving its power from commonsense notions of human need rather than codified laws. These women move back and forth between specific requirements for survival and principled demands for general goals such as justice. When a crisis ensues and the patterns of everyday life come into question because of health threats, housing shortages, or because of disruptions in the social order, such women sometimes argue that justice requires that they intercede. By justice, they often mean more balanced behavior, an end to violence, and equal distribution of social necessities. Recently, certain women of the working classes and subordinated ethnic and racial groups made claims for justice, representing their demands as selfless and their provenance as universal. They challenged rights of private property and unfettered markets, substituting a demand for economic equality and social transformation.

The particular brand of justice women evoke in these kinds of movements rests with fundamental human rights that no existing government or legal system now promotes. But these rights—to eat, have shelter, remain well, and live in peace—are so much a part of what every human being in every culture knows is necessary to survival that only tyrants are willing to say that others should not strive for them. Women such as those in Love Canal, Warren County, and Crossroads increasingly have compared their own collective treatment at the hands of powerful companies and governments that endangered the health of their families to violations of justice and human rights. And these women have not been alone. In grassroots movements all over the world, women activists have integrated social and economic demands into their conceptualization of human rights. To win their demands, women have formed networks of grassroots and private organizations known outside the United States as Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs.

The term NGO became familiar to many Americans for the first time in 1995 when the Fourth World Conference on Women, sponsored by the United Nations, met in Beijing, China and Americans got their first look at the invisible revolution on the move. United Nations’ conferences on women had been held in Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, and Nairobi in 1985, to report on economic, social, political, educational, and sexual conditions of women during the U.N. Decade of Women (1975–85) and to vote on proposals for improvements.¹¹ In the early fall of 1995, determined to see what progress had been made, the General Assembly sponsored another conference. Each of the U.N. women’s conferences really had two parts: an official assembly of representatives from different member states, and the NGO Women’s Tribunal or Forum, made up of women’s grassroots and private organizations from all over the world. The goal of the Forum in Beijing was to exert influence on the Platform for Action, the official document the governmental conference of the General Assembly would issue at the end of its deliberations.

The sight and sound of twenty-six thousand women (more than one-third of whom were from the United States) converging on the Chinese capital caught the imagination of the international press. Because the American media were conscious of human-rights abuses in China and because First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton headed the American delegation, the Beijing conference received widespread coverage. During the conference, the media dwelled on government harassment, bad facilities, exotic costumes, and absurd fears that lesbians would demonstrate naked in the streets of China. What the press seemed to miss was that women from all over the world were meeting to express their hopes for a transformed future.

The Chinese had wanted the summer Olympics to be held there in the year 2000, but because of human-rights abuses and bad facilities, the Olympics went elsewhere. As a booby prize, the U.N. agreed to hold the Conference of Women in Beijing. No one thought to stipulate that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Women Prophets and the Struggle for Human Rights
• 2. Suburban Blight and Situation Comedy
• 3. “When it rains, I get mad and scared”: Women and Environmental Racism
• 4. Homemaker Citizens and New Democratic Organizations
• 5. Generation X, Southern Style
• 6. “We sleep on our own graves”: Women at Crossroads
• 7. Surplus People and Grassroots Women’s Leadership in the New South Africa
• 8. Conclusion: Social Movements and Democratic Practices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index