Feminist Leadership

Scholar Associate, Building Feminist Movements and Organizations AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) For CREA 2011

This publication was commissioned by CREA as a resource for a meeting “Building Feminist Leadership - Looking Back, Looking Forward”, held from 12-13, November 2008 in Cape Town, South Africa. The author, Srilatha Batliwala is an India-based Scholar Associatewith the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Her current work focuses on building women’s movements and organizations, feminist leadership concepts and practices, and feminist monitoring and evaluation. She is Co-Chair of the Board of Just Associates, and a member of the Board of Gender at Work, PUKAR (Partnership for Urban Knowledge and Research), and IT for Change. She hasover 35 years experience as a grassroots activist, gender equality advocate, and women’s studies teacher and researcher in India and internationally and has published extensively on a range of women’s issues. We would like to thank Oxfam Novib for supporting this meeting.

4 6 10 chapter I What is it? 16 chapter II What’s in it? 30 chapter III Where is it? 60 chapter IV What does it look like? 6472 75

I am very grateful for the extensive feedback received on the first draft of this paper from the participants of the meeting on “Building Feminist Leadership – Looking Back, Looking Forward”, organized by CREA in Cape Town, South Africa, in November 2008, viz.: Charlotte Bunch, Nurgul Djanaeva, Ireen Dubel, Mallika Dutt, Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, Susana Fried, Michel Friedman, Rakhee Goyal,Helen Kim, Jeanette Kloosterman, Frances Kunreuther, Joanna Kerr, Maitri Morarji, Sanushka Mudaliar, Shalini Nataraj, Eva Nauckhoff, and Tania Principe. Caroline Earle of CREA’s New York office researched and provided invaluable inputs to the second draft of the document from materials available only in hard copies in the archives of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University,and sincere thanks to Charlotte Bunch for facilitating this and sharing so generously the oral history of the earliest searches for meaning in the idea of feminist leadership. I owe a great debt to Pramada Menon, Michel Friedman, Caroline Earle and S. Vinita for their caring, loving, and critical reading of both drafts, and for insights that have enriched it enormously. Most of all, I feelprofound gratitude to CREA, and especially to Geetanjali Misra, for pushing and supporting me to make this happen, and to Geetanjali’s vision and foresight in knowing how much this was needed! Srilatha Batliwala Bangalore, July 2010

Since its inception, CREA has focused on building leadership capacity, particularly of younger women, to “… assert their rights by continually evaluating relevantexperiences, questioning their roles in society, challenging power structures, and effectively catalyzing positive social change…” Within this, CREA’s particular goal has been to foster such leadership in the fields of sexuality, sexual rights and women’s human rights, which is the intersection at which we work. This concept paper is part of a broader process launched by CREA to analyze and evaluate theimpact of its leadership development strategies, and to explore how to strengthen these. The main goal of this exploration was not merely to create new theory – although that is valuable as well – but to advance our mission of bridging theory and practice to build feminist leadership for transformative social justice. CREA’s work over the past seven years has consistently tried to informpractice with the best available analysis and theory in the fields of gender, human rights, and sexuality, and to build theory from the knowledge and insights gained through practice. “Clearing the conceptual and strategic cloud on feminist leadership” is a further expression of this commitment. It has emerged out of what we realized was a major gap in our knowledge base about what sorts of frameworks,...