Defining a Women's Movement

In 1994 International Women's Day was celebrated in twenty-three cities and towns in Queensland, and the annual ‘Reclaim the Night’ march in October is held in capital cities and provincial centres. By the mid-1990s traditional feminist organisations like the Women's Electoral Lobby had been joined by groups as diverse as networks of businesswomen in the ASEAN trade bloc, eco-feminists, ‘feminists in cyberspace’, and women joggers ‘running the country’ (Sawer and Groves 1994a:87–8). But do all these organisations belong to the women's movement?

Judith Grant (1993:4) suggests that the core concepts of feminism in its various manifestations – ‘woman’, ‘experience’, ‘personal politics’ – have each posed dilemmas. That to define ‘woman’ would be a problem might seem strange, given that in most societies most of the time social members are only too aware of who are the women and who are the men, performing much boundary work to keep these distinctions clear. Postmodernists question the notion of ‘woman’ to disrupt these taken-for-granted distinctions, a reason for their interest in border-crossing sexual identities such as hermaphroditism, transsexualism, non-heterosexual identities and practices. More central, however, is the question of who feminists mean when they use the category ‘women’, given that women's experiences of oppression differ so widely across time and space.