Giving Meaning to Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

5. Feminism After the State: The Rise of the Market and the Future of Women’s Rights

5 Feminism After the State: The Rise of the Market and the Future of Women’s Rights k e r r y r i t t i c h The rise of the market and eclipse of the state has become one of the defining conditions of contemporary social change. The settled expectation that the state could be prevailed upon to secure greater equality and welfare for its citizens is eroding, swept away by new desire to promote the efficiency and productivity of markets. The result has been a fundamental alteration to the language and terms in which political reform must now be pursued, accompanied by new constraints on the horizon of possibilities for social justice. The crucial idea animating the current framework is by now almost too familiar: it is that the market is the best if not the sole institution for furthering a host of social goods and objectives. So important is the market as a vehicle of growth and prosperity, in the view of its most fervent adherents, that objectives which are incompatible with its demands must be abandoned or held in abeyance, even if this means that goals such as equality and redistribution must be sidelined in the process. The softer version of the argument leads to the same place: international forces and the logic of ‘‘globalization’’ compel the path of the market whether we like its effects or not. In tandem with the rise and dominance of the market is the eclipse and demotion of the state. Pundits, analysts, politicians, and even many progressive social reformers intone that the era of the state, the brief Golden Age which lasted from the end of World War II until about the mid-∞Ωπ≠s, is now decisively over. In this widely circulating narrative, the unprecedented growth that fueled and enabled the interventionist and redistributive welfare state is gone with no prospect of return.∞ Instead we must look to the market to fulfill our individual and collective desires. There is hardly a country that has failed to experience a new sense of retrenchment and constraint about the use of the state as a vehicle of social and economic engineering. The state, it is said, is no longer capable of fulfilling the limitless list of demands that societies at large are capable of generating. Nor can it stand behind citizens as the guarantor of even the most basic standard of living. Instead, individuals must seek their fortunes and take their chances with the market. So, too, must nation-states, which are advised that they pursue paths independent of the imperatives of global markets at their peril.≤ 96 Kerry Rittich Yet at the same time as the market is rising and the role of state is being cut back, human rights are still firmly fixed on the public agenda. Moreover, human rights are now often mentioned in the same breath as market reform and development.≥ Market reformers, too, are talking the language of rights. The transformation in the relationship between the state and the market is relevant to human rights projects of every kind. However, these developments represent a particularly significant turn of events for anyone involved in antisexist work. While some of the interests of market reformers and feminists may overlap, the market poses new challenges to how human rights are conceived. However uncertain the outcome is, it seems naive to imagine that current arguments and strategies will suffice. Conflicting claims all posed in the name of furthering rights may be deeply destabilizing , requiring women’s rights activists not simply to lobby on behalf of women but to justify anew why their conception of human rights should prevail over another. The following questions emerge from this encounter. What does it mean to be in favor of human rights for women when market reformers also claim to be in favor of human rights? What happens to the old strategies for reform once the state has been demoted? How are feminists to argue with the defense that resources are at a premium or simply no longer there? How are arguments concerning the regulatory limitations thrown up by globalization to be met? What should the response be to the argument that many cherished transformative goals, including greater equity and redistribution, are simply no longer proper public goals? In such a world, how do we, can we, sell women’s rights on the market? Although no final or ‘‘global’’ assessment of its effects is possible, the rise...