THEORIZING ABOUT WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS GLOBALLY:

Abstract

Diane Margolis (September 1993) has raised important issues in her recent article comparing women's movements in different countries and proposing several hypotheses for testing in further research. This is a laudable effort, as comparisons of social issues in different cultural and political settings are indispensable for an understanding of single-culture phenomena as well as variations in interational perspectives. To respond to Margolis's call for further reflection, I offer several comments and criticisms-both substantive and methodological -based on my own work with women's movements in a number of countries, especially in South and Southeast Asia, and an acquaintance with the global situation through secondary sources and international conferences. Obviously, generalizations drawn from a particular nation or region reflect the larger social, political, and economic contours of their places of origin. But researchers from different cultural and intellectual traditions also vary in the extent to which they willingly accept limits on their ability to generalize across national or cultural boundaries. In an earlier essay entitled The World Is Not Like Us (Papanek 1980), I criticized U.S. sociologists for being overly eager to extend conclusions drawn from U.S. studies to the rest of the world. I now think that this eagerness to generalize is a more widespread phenomenon. I have noted, for example, that many Indian scholars emphasize specificity over generalizability, whereas the work of some Latin American scholars (or others writing about countries in Central or South America) shows an eagerness to generalize, at least to the Third World, that equals or exceeds that of U.S. writers. Theories and ideologies that are widely accepted in particular intellectual milieux may also exacerbate such tendencies, particularly if they also make claims of global applicability.