Are we taking for granted that there is a Women's Movement in this country? Is there really one and if so, who are the ones behind it? Do we still need to fight for gender equality? Is there still a need for some women to fight on especially when so few young women seem interested in the women's liberation cause?

Such fundamental questions were still being asked and re-looked by women activists at a recent gathering with the theme Rethinking the Women's Movement. At the end of the meeting there was an overall feeling of enlightenment, and yet a deep sense of despondency. There were many curiosities around the 'woman question' left unrevealed and frontiers of emancipation yet uncharted for women of all ages and classes in this country.

The meeting, organised by the Women's Development Collective (WDC), an organisation run by a small group of women based in Selangor was meant to tease out some of the questions above and, in the usual pragmatic mould of NGOs, to find directions for the future.

Participants included members of various women NGOs, such as the All Women's Action Society (AWAM), the Women's Crisis Centre (WCC), the Women's Aid Organisation (WAO), Sisters In Islam, Persatuan Sahabat Wanita Selangor (PSWS), Malaysian Women in Ministry and Theology (MWMT) and the Women's Candidacy Initiative (WCI), among others.

Other participants came from NGOs that are not specifically focussed on women's interests. Some had been in their organisations for some two decades and others had just joined their groups within the last three years or even later.

To have a theme devoted to 'rethinking the movement' meant that some women were ready to move on but didn't know how and in which direction.

Looking at themselves

One of the most enlightening aspects of the workshop was that women activists were finally attempting to look at themselves rather than at other women whom they've always assumed to represent. They looked at themselves as the movers of the Women's Movement in this country. They looked at themselves as the vanguard of the new consciousness for a new gender order.

Obviously, they differentiated themselves from the mainstream women's movement, or institutions that are directly linked to the state or to market-interests, and which are largely boosted by male patronage.

Participants at the workshop felt that the contributions of the non-mainstream women NGOs were critical in defining a new space for women; yet the movement blazed by them was so little acknowledged by the public.

Most of the women's groups gathered at this meeting originated in the early to mid-1980s. They were formed in response to a need to tackle the incidences of violence against women in society, which included the crime of wife-battery, household violence, rape and sexual harassment.

Unlike women's movements in the past, the organisations formed in the 1980s were different. The former served the interests of women in a fragmented way. Some of the past women's organisations fought for equal wages and equal employment rights which excluded non-working women within their sphere of concerns.

Other women's organisations were appendages to political parties and almost always ethnic or religion-based, and were thus unable to provide a platform of unity for all women regardless of race.

In the 1980s a movement finally coalesced around the concept and reality of 'Violence-Against-Women' (VAW) and provided a new basis of unity and solidarity for women regardless of race, class and religion.

An added push

In the 1980s, developments on the international front - especially the 1975 United Nations Declaration of the Decade for Women - gave this movement an added push. What this meant was that governments all over the world had to commit themselves to providing resources and recognition to the struggles for the betterment of women.

While mainstream women's organisations (or those formally linked to the government) tried to redress gender inequality by focussing on social and economic advancement programmes, alternative women NGOs chose to look at women's most basic source of oppression: crimes and assault against their bodies. This was the area which mainstream and state-linked women's organisations steered clear of as it was hard to measure in terms of national gains and productivity and was culturally contentious.

Through self-reliant efforts, organisations like the WAO, the WCC, AWAM and the WDC were established to fill in the 'Violence-Against-Women' gap left untouched by mainstream NGOs and by the government during the whole decade of the 1980s. The campaign to address the issue of VAW started in 1985 with the formation of the Joint Action Group (JAG), which held a two-day event filled with speeches, forums, skits, dances, and exhibitions to publicise the issue of VAW for the first time in Malaysian history. The event was a runaway success in terms of the turnout and the media attention it received.

After 1985 at least four women's crisis centres were established in the country. Among some quarters, and if not for feminist consciousness, the VAW campaign could have been reduced to nothing more than the building of women's shelters and counselling centres. But the organisations affected social changes in other areas as well. They shaped the Women's Movement of the 1980s and onto the 1990s.

Alternative women's movement

The strength of these organisations was more than just their ability to provide services. The alternative women's organisations spearheaded women's involvement in lobbying for new legislation like the Domestic Violence Act of 1994. They provided feminist input to national policy-making initiatives, challenged powerful existing orders such as the Syariah legal system to highlight Muslim women's problems and politicised the personal by bringing issues of gender relations within the household onto the public forum. Yet, to what extent has all this new consciousness sunk into the width and depth of mass society?

Trying to answer such a question was despairing. Perhaps alternative NGOs were only a spoke in the big wheel of women in movements rather than the hub upon which the Malaysian women's movement was centred. This feeling was stirred when one of the younger workshop participants who is a graduate of a local university related how she was 'not allowed' to become a feminist within her family, on campus and even among friends. This, despite the fact that the women's movement fashioned for almost two decades was supposed to have created a more equitable gender culture in society.

Did the alternative women's movement get sidelined by mainstream sexist commercial culture or did it never succeed in making even a nick in the mighty canvas of patriarchal conservatism?

The non-state, non-political party-based women's movement of which the alternative NGOs fall into lacks a constituency. It does not have a mass base, it lacks strength in membership numbers and it is not spread wide enough throughout the country. Most crisis centres only have women who seek them in their most dire moments and leave, once their lives are put into order.

Notions of idealism

After more than a decade, women NGOs are still unsure about whether to engage or not to engage with the state, whose character is suspect in light of the post-1998 political crisis. Gains for gender equality engendered by the state have also been too sporadic and tied to a much larger and expedient political agenda. Legislative reforms have been few and far between and society is still too much divided on the basis of class, race and religion to lend the cause of gender equality prime importance.

Perhaps on top of all this is globalisation, a phenomenon that while still nebulous a concept, is nevertheless a living reality. The globalisation of commercial consumerist culture has imposed a uniformity upon society, inviting a backlash in the form of individualist or parochialist movements.

People recede into their private or communitarian spaces by exerting forceful forms of identity politics. What appears to be a culture clash between the universal uniformity of MacDonalds-driven eating habits and the ethnocentric distinctiveness of Islamic dress are two sides of the same coin, manifesting the contradictory impacts of globalisation. Perhaps this is how the younger generation, ensnared within an identity labyrinth, is forced to forsake idealism, the element which used to passionately drive youth to selflessly take up political causes.

We ended the workshop wondering how a generational continuity carrying the torch of women's emancipation could be ensured when both state and market forces are working against any notions of idealism. Could we find something in common with younger women to continue the work started by generations of women even before the VAW decade came into being?

Should the alternative women's movement work towards capturing political power and enter electoral politics directly? Conversely, should it operate within the realm of civil society, which will always be a third autonomous force in the triad of governance involving the state and the market?

Finding neat solutions to complex problems is an impossible feat but women could start by laying the most basic ingredients for a free and vibrant society. All participants agreed that without a level playing field - a field where the institutions of democracy, rule of law, free press and freedom of speech, assembly and association are not in place - no movement, whether feminist, environmentalist, religious or humanist can find its deserved constituency.

The new stimulus for a refreshed women's movement could perhaps be sought by building imperative alliances with other civil rights movements and by reaching for the broad mass which may be inert but filled with latent unease.