Where were the women?

However that might be, the spirit of Bandung that was embodied in the 1949 Conference and the women’s organisations that were instrumental in making it happen, have some significant lessons for feminist organising in today’s world.

- BY PRIYANTHI FERNANDO

Women today are faced with a human rights and development discourse that has for too long been dominated by cis white men from the global north and which has inadequately incorporated the expertise, experience, priorities and perspectives of women and other marginalised groups in the global south. The emerging discussions on decoloniality and decolonisation are in danger of being coopted by a certain brand of white feminism, there is a real pushback on the rights of women, sexual minorities and other marginalised groups, and international solidarity among the different women’s movements are constrained by geopolitical concerns and fear. In this context, Elizabeth Armstrong’s description of the internationalist solidarity of the women’s movement in the early 20th century as “a solidarity of shared human rights, and a solidarity of complicity that took imbalances of power between women of the world into account” is particularly relevant and inspiring. A solidarity for a commonalty of women’s shared human rights is what feminists today would describe as ‘intersectionality’ — or the recognition of effects of multiple forms of discrimination on women’s daily lives; understanding how various aspects of individual identity such as race, gender, social class and sexua