Preparing to Understand Feminism in the Twenty-First Century: Global Social Change, Women's Work, and Women's Movements

The history of wo men's non-wage work, women's wage labor, and contemporary women's movements can be understood with greater clarity if studies of "glob alization, 11 femini sm, and the capitalist world-economy arc examined in relationship to each other. Today many women's movements clearly reflect, respond to, and attempt to shape changes in wage (employ er-organi zed) and non-wa ge (labor-organi zed) work relations. This paper is a conceptual, theoretical and historical exploration of how scholars, who study inter-related global area<;, can prepare to do research on women's work and women's movements that will contribu te to the development of "globalization, 11 feminist, and world-economy scholarship.

Changes in wage and non-wage work arc shaped by, what appears to be, a new cycle of expansion of the world-economy.This expansion rests on past and possibly ongoing reductions in benefits for many sectors of global labor.The global economy grows partly because of a variety of changes between capital and labor, including real wage reductions, the creation of more part-time and temporary positions, and the ability of capital and the state to get laboring households to assume more responsibility for their own reproduction.As labor becomes redefined globally, work relations arc also becoming more highly differentiated across the face of the globe, reflecting growing global and possibly intra-zonal inequalities.In addition to growing polarization within the world-economy, it appears that there may be an emerging differentiation between work that is organized within the world-economy and work that takes place in de-linked areas of the world, outside of capital's global orbit.Both these sets of differentiated and often unequal developments arc shaped by the direction the world-economy has been taking in the last two decades.
Although my research is in a preliminary stage, I am struck by global-, regional-and household-level evidence that suggests that recent investments have gone more to the core, with less investments going to many areas in the semi periphery and periphery.The :frequent use of the concept "globalization" perpetuates the image that commercialized relations arc uniformly invading all corners of the earth.How ever, historical evidenc e point<; in another direction and suggests that an intensification of some forms of uneven development has taken place (Dickinson 1997).Even a propon ent of the global convergence thesis admits, "the expanding global system still seems to be rewarding the same old folks in the same economic centers" (Greider 1997: 32).A<; they have decreased their investment<; in Latin America, U.S. businesses in th e core have increased their private and direct manufacturing investm ents.In fact, between 1950 and 1988, U.S. private investments in Europe increased from 15 percent to almost 50 percent.Global foreign direct investments fell in the periph ery ,1 declining from 25 percent of all private investments in 1980 to 17 percent in 1989 (Maitra 1996: 93-96).In addition, the external debt of especially some Latin American and sub-Saharan African countries grew tremendously between 1980 and 1990 (Kenwood and Lough eed 1992: 254-255).The United States and Western Europe continue to invest in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which arc sligh tly less privileged parts of the core.A number of new areas have been tapped, including Eastern Europe (especially the Moscow area), China's coastal regions, and other selected enclaves in the periphery (Rcmnick 1997: 84;Maitra 1996: 93).Of course, the full range of profit-generating mechanisms, which link the South and North, need to be identified and analyzed.In order to examine these trends, it is critical that empirical evidence be gathered on social change in the last five ycars.2.

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The concept "selective globalization" places emphasis on the very une ven development of the world-economy and may help to change the ways that "globali zation" is defined and applied.In the United States and ch,cwhcrc, the concept "globalization" help ed to broadly communicate the idea that the global economy keeps on changing by establishing new production sites and by changing in scope.Although we do live in a world dominated by a global economy, development is not characterized by a general process that can be described by the simple, uniform term "globalization."Rather, studies of global processes, inter-regional relationships, and household differentiation indicat e that companies arc pursuing more contained and less risky investment strategics.Carefully orchestrated corporate and state policies mean that investments are highly int ensified in some areas and less evident in others.To many, "globalization" creates an imag e of how large companies and international monetary organizations change the ways we live and the ways we are connected.Rather than dropping this term that helped to educate many, I chose to modify the concept by placing emphasis on the very unev en, unequal and corecentered development that is taking place in the world.
In terms of how the general public talk5 about global change, "globalization" has begun to replace some popular terms and everyday conversational phrases that describe th e world-economy.These terms include "the system," "the military industrial complex," and "the forces that be," which emphasize an entrenched state of being.Although "globalization" refers to the process of creating the world around us, it stresses uniformity and universal commodification.This widely used conccp t fails to emphasiz e the fact that the growth of the world-economy (re)crcat cs hierarchy and inequality.I hav e placed the word "selective" before "globalization" in order to build on the general int erest that "globalization" has generated.Perhaps "selective globalization" can serve as a transitional concept that will help recast how "globalization" is perceived and defined.Thi s new concept is designed to focus attention on divisions that come from the world-economy, including those that develop along gender lines.Perhaps a new term is not needed for world-economy scholars who try to differentiat e between particular proc esses of accumulation.However, U .S. intell ectua ls and journalists usually do not use worldsystems concepts in their everyday work; and when they do, these conc epts often arc distorted and taken out of context.Since educators in public and private institutions address how people around the world arc affected by social change, teachers and resea rchers have a responsibility to communicate with people outside of academia.If we cannot, we will ne ed interpr eters, and then there will be an even greater chance that our concerns will be lost.
Women's work and women's movements arc greatly influ enced by the highl y selective development of the world-economy.Especially in the 1980's and 1990's, the global economy has expanded in highly selective ways, increasing the gap between hi ghly invested areas and largely bypassed or de -linked areas.} In his response to th e Report on the South Commission, Samir Amin refers to two types of de-linking, and both th ese arc of interest here because they affect women's work, women's options , and women's politics.Amin argues tha t the ways that compe tition occurs between Europe, Unit ed States and Japan will affect how "globaliza tion " procced5.Possibl e developm ents includ e the "part ial negation" of the world -economy 's expans ion by "the construction of regional groupings and/or by the de-linking of regions in the periphery."In addition, Amin writes , there is always the possibility of labor's localized, intentional de-linking from th e worldcconomy, or "the submission of external relationships to the needs of internal development" (Amin 1993: 135, 138).Both unintentional de-linking that is prompted by global competition and labor's intentional de-linking seem to be taking place in the world today.And if women's work, women's options, and social mov ements arc to be mor e readily understood, then the selective character of global investm ent must be taken into consideration.
Developing an understanding of today's world requires world-econom y scholars to reach out to related areas of scholarship and to scholars who operate outside of the boundari es that often contain world-systems research.Studying women's work and movements means crossing boundaries between communities of scholars who may feel at theor etical and methodological odds with each other.Unfortunately, scholar s who study "globalization," women's work and movements, and world-system<; research often arc isolated from each other.These separate groups of scholars usuall y do not analyze socia l trends in collaborative learning and research environment<;, where they can m eet face -tofacc and figure out where the world is headed.If scholars arc to understand global social change processes, they will need to listen to, interact with, and possibly work collaboratively with researchers in at least three related resear ch areas: "global ization" studies, Women's Studies, and world-economy studies.The multi-disciplinary, holistic approach taken here is designed to help redirect "globalization" research and feminist scholarship in more concrete directions, and to expand and deepen scholarship on the world-economy.Along with ethnic studies researchers and others, this broad gro uping of scholars can contribute a great deal to the stud y of the transformation of multi-la yere d global hierarchies.

USING A FEMINIST SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE TO EXAMINE "GLOBALIZATION"
With the exceptio n of a small number of feminist and world-economy scholars, twenty years ago few scholars in the North accepte d the idea that a global profit-making system had been one of the primary forces determining the destiny of the world's people.The climate ha<; shift ed with the decline of U.S. hegemon y, bringing a widespread, but often superficial underst anding that North American economic and social life is affected by the global economy.In municipal meetings and during coffee breaks at local diners, U.S. residents now acknowledge that global product ion can mean that some working famili es may suffer a<; large and small companies particip ate in the accumulation race.The more overt need -to-compete ideology in the Unit ed States ha<; become almost larger than life a<; public school<; claim to produce world-cla<; s workers, and a<; even under -lit works hops with semi-skilled emp loyees and outdated technology claim that they now arc "world cla~s companies" (Grubb ct al. 1992).Today more academics, executive branch officials, Congressional members, financial journalists and business owners mention the bottomlinc, end-of-quarter considerations of global production and the imperative for companies to become more competitive in the global race for profits and economic survival.
Although countries and political organizations have been decrying a~pccts of global capitalism sometimes for decades, sometimes for centuries (including those with antiimpcrialist messages), suddenly "globalization" ha~ been discovered in the United States and elsewhere, too.The U.S. work force ha~ been taught that, in post-l 970's structural development, a "new" global economy requires employers and the state to take low-cost "offahorc" labor almost a~ seriously a~ they take U.S. labor.Partly because most U.S. workers have not seriously thought about global labor in the pa~t, corporations' reeducation efforts dictating new world-economic rules of operation have, with one blow, ruptured U.S. laboring families' a~sumcd total cultural supremacy vis-a-vis the rest of global labor.Popular understandings of global change typically relate to labor's recent civic lesson: North Americans live in a global world that may adversely affect working people's lives, including their own.Within this late twentieth-century context, some academics and writers who do research on "globalization" have defined this process a~ essentially the unchecked, universal spread and intensification of manufacturing and consumer relations across the face of the globe (Greider 1997;Rilkin 1995;Aronowitz and Difazio 1994;Barnet and Cavanagh 1994).The introduction of more open discussion about the global profit-making system is a welcome change from previous decades of silence, but the standard convcrgcnccccntcrcd approach taken by some analysts of global trends is more than disturbing.The idea that global convergence is inevitable veers sharply from growing evidence of new levels of divergence in the la~t one or two decades.
Although there is a global system that affects almost everything in today's world in some way, work relations and women's everyday lives reveal incredible social and economic diversity.Rather than a gradual leveling and slow replication of consumer-centered, urban-industrial life in every part of the world, the social and economic diversity in women's and men's lives suggests that global capitalism may be directly and indirectly fragmenting humanity in more ways than before.There probably ha~ not been this much work-ba~cd diversity since the mid-twentieth century, when almost all the world's people found themselves dependent on the world-economy for ba~ic survival.As the twenty-first century is ushered in, the development of the world-economy is not just incrca~ing the separation between rich and poor, but incrca~ing the gender divide.There also appears to be the very significant introduction of a growing split between those who arc in the global economic system and those who arc incrca~ingly left out ofit (Dickinson 1997).
Furthermore, it is hard not to be struck by the uneven checkerboard, patchwork, or quilted appearance of today's world, which incrca~ingly differentiates area~ within nation-states, making parts of the North seem more like parts of the South, and area~ in the South seem like parts of the North.Of course, the structural division between the North and South remains.But the North's "Third World-like" area~ (such a~ inner-city Detroit and abandoned rural enclaves) have witnessed the disappca ranee of som e jobs, the decline of state subsidies and services, and a vanishing of the hope that economic mobility is possible with education.But when these growing losses arc looked at in relation to the South, the North's economic, political and social advantag es arc highlighted .Likewise, manufacturing factories and neighborhood s in export enclav es in the semi periphery and periphery may more closely resemble wage-dependent manufacturing area.., in the North ( especially a.., they looked in the pa..,t), but low individual wages, the relative lack of political freedom, and sparse state services indicate that major differences develop.One consequence of the differentiation within zones may be that women in the North and South can now find more common ground, giving them greater ca..,c a.., they talk about and address their globally-related differences.Women from the South and North have talked about their different, but related positions in the global system during the Women's Linking for Change Conference in 1994, the B eijing Conference on Women in 1995, and the Women's Day on Food Conference in Rome in 1996 (Sweetman 1994).1 [Page 99]

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When I read the "globalization" literature, I find myself wrestling with contemporary definitions of a worldwide process that allegedly broadens and deepens the rule of the capitalist market everywher e.I try to approach my examination of the "globalization" thesis by examining today's empirical trends in relationship to pa..,t global economic patterns.As I do this, many questions arc generated, and I become critical of the strong cmpha..,is on the newness of "globalization."Isn't "globalization" today's mor e generally acceptable nam e for something that many people have studied and fought for a long time?Doesn't the concept "globalization" cover up just a.., much a.., it reveals ?To many critics of full-blown commercialization, the concept "globali zation" fortunatel y is used to cmpha..,izc the despotic side of change.But for others, isn't "globali zation " another way of saying economic development ha.., become unlea..,hcd primarily through the late twentieth-century forms of global manufacturing sweatshops and global consumer marketing (promoting, for example, the dispersion of Nike running shoes and Levi jeans)?However, although some suggest that a universalizing mark.ct compels consum ers to complete more final moments of capital accumulation, these researchers may unknowingly hit a wall th e minute they confront evidence that jeans often arc sold at regional markets a.., recycled goods in the Third World.Furth ermore, right next to sellers of used j eans, a ... sault rifles and stolen Mercedes arc women and girls whose main source of incom e is selling sexual scrviccs.2 Just like so many modernization analysts did in the pa..,t, some contemporary writers reproduce a..,sumptions about the inevitabili ty of globali zcd investments, the spread of First World consumerism, and the promise of worldwide "economic growt h" in ways that often arc stripped away from their ever-present counterparts of underdevelopment and undcrcmploymcnt.ln doing so, these scholars fail to examine alternative trajectories for global and regional developments .
Although they may discuss trends in overly generalized ways, researchers who arc concerned about the adverse consequences of global commodification have helped to legitimize the exploration of global issues.This is a helpful educational advance.Today it is rare to go to feminist conferences on women's work without hearing the word "globalization."Using this concept a.., a backdrop, feminist educators talk about the very real effects of stepped-up corporate inva..,ion in some area.., of the world.I hear about how ongoing corporate commercialization affects women farmers through the seizure of their resources, the patenting of their seeds, and the imposition of multinationals' farm equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, and cxpropriatory gene manipulations (Mies and Shiva 1993).I hear about how teen girls and young women arc sucked into the centripetal webs of export-producing factories that acquaint them with the global a',scmbly lines' repetitive monotony, unhealthy and cruel working conditions, low wages and often sad, crowded worker-dorm life (Kung, 1983;Ong, 1997;Wolf, 1992;Tiano, 1994;Safa, 1995).Then, there always is the fundamental (but too often unmentioned) issue of the growing traffic in women, and the expropriation of women's bodies for the global sex industry (Altink 1995;Skrobanck ct. al 1997;Coqucry-Vidrovitch [1994] 1997:128).
Although there arc exceptions, what I rarely hear at feminist conferences arc critical analyses of the concept "globalization."The overwhelming relief that comes with being able to mention and study global systemic influences ha.., created its own barriers to doing critical research.Feminist scholars, like so many others, often do not move beyond using the overly general "globalization" .6.framework, even though there is ample historical evidence that they probably should.
Just when research on women's work and women's movements seems like it should get ca..,icr, it is necessary to take the time to sec what the popular definition of "globali zation" explains and what it docs not.Furthermore, a.., cnthusia..,tic a.., scholars arc about the important research that shows how women's lives arc affected by transnational penetration (through the global commodification of seeds, for example), this international penetration model may not provide a metaphor for all global developments affecting women.Although all parts of the world arc influenced by the ways that the global profitmaking system develops, they arc not changed in the same way .

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Rather than reproducing the cultural shock that came with U.S. labor's recognition that U.S. pow er declined, educational work in the university should include figuring out what actually is going on in today's world, based on the full composite of work-relat ed trends and relationships that arc unfolding.Comprehensive, multi-disciplinary research must be done in a variety of related fields if changes in women's work and women's diverse struggles arc to be understood.A critical part of this project involves placing women and girls, non-wage work and wage work, and female and male relationships at the heart of social and historical analysis.When women, girls and their work arc examined a~ part of labor--and not just added on or seen scparately--thc whole world can be seen in a different way.

KNITTING TOGETHER AN EXPANDED THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND OPENING UP THE STUDY OF SOCIAL CHANGE
Today some global scholars clearly arc beginning to question the idea that capital accumulation is running unchecked, commodifying all untouched and all incompletely commodificd area~ of life, and tightly binding all low-wage rural women and men to the transnational orbit of global production (Amin 1993).This type of critical thinking about the unchecked global commodification thesis needs to be supplemented with the identification and development of alternative explanatory frameworks.The earth's people arc not facing equal levels of capitalist inva~ivcncss, nor arc they facing equal levels of homogenizing and fragmentary pressures a~sociatcd with development of the capitalist world-economy.Although it ha~ been predicted that "globalization" will eventually level out economic disparities for the world's population (Greider 1997), there is no evidence that this is a worldwide trend.On the contrary, there is substantial empirical evidence that suggests that the integrating forces of the world-economy actually create growing polarization and differentiation, both within the system and through the creation of a small number of regions that seem to be becoming external to the system.Today's social trends arc both a continuation of and a rupture with pa~t world-economic trends.The development of the world-economy, a~ it ha~ been since the initial days of global production for profit, is a combined and uneven process.The social nature of the capitalist world-economy ha~ not changed in any fundamental sense, although the system began going through a new period of structural development during the mid-1970s.In recent decades, capital accumulation seem~ to have become a highly differentiated and, for many parts of the world, a more highly commodificd process.This ha~ led to the formation of new complexes of wage and non-wage work relations throughout the world, often resulting in highly polarized gender relations.
The North continues to have relatively high wages ( although real incomes have declined), and households have different degrees of access to many state-supported services and income transfers, including public education, limited medical care and limited unemployment support.Although regional, ethnic, and gender variations abound within the North and the South, and within countries in the North and the South, the gender and ethnic stratification that is inherent in the world-economy still provides indirect benefits to a minority in the North.These wagc-ba~cd, social service and political benefits cannot be divorced from two major indirect sources: the self-organized work and the greatly undervalued labor of the world's majority.The burden that ha~ been imposed on women, especially in the South, ha~ grown in the la~t ten or twenty years.Although women historically have done most of labor's self-organized work (which ha~ included growing and transforming most food for their families), feminist scholars usually argue that women in both the North and South now do more work (Blumberg et al. 1995).Though both groups of women now do more unpaid work and possibly even more underpaid wage labor, the structural divide between them has remained firmly in place.
If the last twenty years of trends in investments and related und erdevelopm ent help forecast what the next twenty years will bring, more uneven development (not global convergence) appears to be on the horizon.Transnational investment, a core -center phenomenon, link.., certain low-income regions to the core, and bypasses others.Investing by core-based transnational corporations and by states appears to be a highly selective process, one that often creates and revolves around rising and sometimes quickl y deserted export-enclaves.And employers in these enclaves have tended to employ many young and middle-years women.Partly through the mechanisms of export enclave creation and disinvestment, today's global economy continues to create linkages between the South and the North, carving and transfiguring asymmetrical and highl y unequal pathways of accumulation."Selective globalization," a concept that was designed to encourage "globalization" scholarship to become more concrete, refers to the systemically-rooted intensification of changes in combined and uneven development that occur as part of capitalist development in the post-US.hegemonic period .This uneven and combined development includes, not just the development of past forms, but the "patchwork" spread of corc-ba..,cd investments and the emergence of growing, de -commodifi cd social relations in some regions of the world.The decline of worldwide capitalist relation s in some areas has begun to occur a.., limited involuntary and voluntary de -link age with the world-economy ha.., taken place.

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Journa I of World-Systems Research A.., part of uneven global development, two general social and economic processes seem to be taking place .First, the expansion and intensification of capitalist investments in production continues to occur, incrca..,ing the level of commodification in many area.., of the world, especially in the core, and simultaneously expelling some laborers from production .Expansion is also evident with the growth of global a ... sembly lin es in the semi periphery and periphery, the spread of more capital-intensive agricultural estates in the South, and the explosion in the traffic in women.Of course, the North makes a large portion of its profits from the South largely through debt collection, a process which yields commercial profits from pa..,t corc-ba..,cd investments in the periphery.The "underside" of this expansion also continues to unfold in large portions of the world, creating underem ployment and poverty, which ha.., always accompanied global investments and capital accumulation.When some transnationals' investment.., in production declined in the South, regional capitalists may have had mor e room to accumulatc, 1 but they have also continue d to create poverty.Some individual laborers arc being expelled from capitalist production a.., a result of the recent application of new capital-intensive technologies, leading to the dccommodification of hous ehold relations and the growth of non-capitalist income generation.
Second, new non-capitalist economic activities seem to be developing outside of the rule of the world-economy.The dccrca~c in transnationals' direct investments in portions of the periphery, area~ which transnational corporations and banks seem to have at lea~t temporarily "rcdlincd," ha~ led to the dccommodification of labor in these area~ and its removal from direct capitalist control by transnationals and sometimes other employers.
In addition, a small proportion of former laboring households seem to have chosen to live outside the global market.
Both these capitalist and external processes shape work and gender relations, creating transformed relationships between labor and capital and changing the ways that wage and non-wage work arc connected at the level of households.At the center of these macroand micro-processes arc women and the ways their work is defined and valued.Because women have been socially designated to be the primary group of the world's non-wage workers, and the burdens a~sociatcd with this role seem to be growing in many area~ of the world-economy, women arc placed in a central social location a~ commodification and dccommodification develop side-by-side.
But how can capitalist production be intensifying and create more intertwined markctdcfincd webs at the same time that oncc-commodificd labor is becoming de-linked from the world-economy?Businesses arc reaching into new area~ that have been underutilized a~ far a~ ranching, mining and logging companies arc concerned, and at the same time, there seems to be a gradual disinvestment from particular pieces of land and a limited disengagement of labor.Both commodification and dccommodification processes arc taking place simultaneously, and they arc affecting workers and their relationships to land.Some of the world's social spaces arc becoming more commodificd or rccommodificd, and others arc undergoing a process of dc-commodification.The further commodification of labor in some locales takes place separately from its dccommodification in other locations.At the same time that land is being commodificd and rccommodificd by large-scale producers, laborers on that land can be dc-commodificd.We arc so taken by the image of capitalist production spreading across the face of the globe that it is hard to imagine the integrated, system-driven "reverse" of this process: the decline of some commodificd work relations, a~ well a~ the decline of commodificd land in some area~.For example, in some U.S. inner cities, in particular U.S. rural area~, and in large portions of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, labor and sometimes land appear to be undergoing a process of dccommodification.It is unclear how long this "reversal" process will continue.The decline of commodificd labor and/or land takes place at the same time that commercial goods like "Coke" replace women's homemade fruit drinks, and at the same time that garment producers lure young women into manufacturing establishments with the promise of sufficient wages for purcha~ing factory-made soap and other "luxuries" (Wolf, 1992).
Economic trends shaping women's wage and non -wage work arc complex and overlapping, connecting employment, under-and unemployment, and economic exclusion.Although there arc many incrca~ingly commodificd spheres in today's world, global economic development is not a process of global convergence that primarily brings higher wage export manufacturing jobs to women who used to toil in the fields or, for example, who used to sell chewing gum on the street for a pittance.This global economic process is not about gradually equalizing wages or offering cxpandc d "opportunities" to a new generation of girls in the semi periphery and periphery.Ultimately global development is about establishing new forms of inequalit y and rcstratifying world labor.

Journa I of World-Systems Research
A review oflitcraturc on "globalization" and female manufacturing workers in export enclaves highlights three points about engendered paid employment, wage -related nonwagc work, and work task<; that largely fall outside of the system.First, today 's global transformations bring little security to young female workers, who find themselves in a pool of recycling female labor, playing company-controlled musical chairs, and knowing that they most likely will be replaced by the time they become "adults." This manufacturing track for young females definitely can develop next to mal e employm ent track<; and male employment life cycles, and not appear to interfere with them .Different employment track<; for females and males, young people and adults, people of color and whites, and Third World workers and First World workers all lower global wage levels for the world's workers.Superficially, it appears that labor pools arc not relat ed, but all laboring groups arc closely tied together through both the world-econom y's competitive anarchy and the implementation of corporate strategics.
If scholars expand their scope and look at global production beyond export enclaves, they would also sec the world-economy's multi-layered track<; of workers in diverse transnational and state sectors.If they expand the scope of analysis, research would focus less on how female workers arc replacing well-established male wage laborers and more on how women and children generally arc becoming impoverish ed .This would entail more discussion about how female and male workers both face hard er times.Analyses of "the feminization of the labor force" need to be supplemented with discussions of the challenges faced by the divided group of world labor.They also should includ e an analysis of the highly disorganiz ed, remaining portion of the world's workers who do not have access to wage incomes at this time, and who may not access them in the future.
Of great importance is the extent to which individual laborers and households have becom e partially or fully disengag ed from capitalist production .Within this context, it is hard to miss seeing the significanc e of the world's refugee camps, where women and children predominat e.In general, refugee camps do not repres ent enclosur es oflabor, but enclosures of non-labor, or labo r that ha<; been transformed into workers who have started to live outside of capitalist production.Lik ewise, the growing pool of intra-national and international migrants, and those family members who arc left behind, doubtlessl y include large numbers of disenga ged laborers, who survive by supporting themsel ves outside of the system and/or by figuring out ways to partially re-enter the global system of production.

GLOBAL SOCIAL CHANGE PROCESSES, WOMEN'S WAGE AND NON-WAGE WORK, AND WOMEN'S SOCIAL CHANGE MOVEMENTS
In summary, women's social change activities and movements develop within th e global context of both the contradictory forces of the world-economy (which stratify and fragment world labor) and the still very limited disengagement of labor from capitalist production.These movements both respond to and shape complex changes in wage and non-wage work; they help to define the various directions that social relations may tak e.Although contemporary women's struggles address different aspect-, of social life in diverse contexts, these struggles often emerge from or relate to work-based situation s.These work-based situations include, for example, working to reclaim the commons a-, gardening or bioma<;s generation area-,, fighting the effects of toxic poisoning in landfills and water sources, demanding the right to organize factory workers in export enclaves, and organizing to establish women-centered producing and marketing networks (Leonard, 1995;Blumberg, 1995;Scott, Kaplan and Kcatcs, 1997).
By focusing on women's actions in relation to changes in wage and non -wage work, many seemingly different women's movements can be related to each other..B.
Understanding relationships between women's movements by analyzing changes in the world-economy, wage labor, and non-wage work is a concrete, multi-dim ensional, research approach.This approach could contribute to the reduction of fragmentary research done on feminist movements .An integral part of this approach would include studying women's and men's work that occurs in work situations that arc becoming at lca<;t temporarily severed from wage labor and capitalist production.Some feminist scholars have been moving in this direct ion, and their int ellectual leadership helps everyone who recognizes the need to link together gender analysis, "globalization" studies, and world-economy research .However, thi s scholarship seems to be limited in various ways.In some ca-,es, abstract notions of "glob alization " and commodification sometimes hide fundamental [Page 103] Journal of World-Systems Research contributions (Mies 1991;Mies, Bcnnholdt-Thomsen and Von Wcrlhof 1991;Mies and Shiva 1993).Although I find ethnographic analyses of households and gen dcr in differ ent regions to be especia lly compelling, many writers fail to use their empirical mat erials to help develop compreh ensive theories (Blumberg ct al. 1995).Well-r esearched ca<; c studies of women in export enclaves sometimes are presumed to take place within "a new internati onal division of labor;" but, by choosing a flat, largely unexamined backdrop, these writers may not directly compel readers to examine how regional changes in women's work and women's protests can contribute to a mor e sophisticated theoretical understanding of the world-economy (Wolf 1992;Tiano 1994;Safa 1995) .Edited collections on women's work and movem ents often document the details of women's lives, but these articles often neglect to show how "feminisms" arc mor e than just expressions of "cultural differences" within a diverse world (Momsen and Kinnard 1993;Ba<;u 1995;Scott ct al. 1997).There is a need to build on this sound ba<;c ofrcscarch by engaging in comparative, multi-cultural discussions that try to link trends in women's lives with an understanding about the dircction(s) that the world-economy is taking.
One way to link social change at global and regional level<; is by studying gender relations through the institutions of the household and cla<;s. 2 Women's movem ents can be more fully understood if women's lives arc thought about in relation to the global transformation of workers' houscholding continuum.This global continuum of laboring households goes from households that rely heavily on subsist ence work and low-paid wage labor (predominantly in the periphery) to those households that rely on high wages, state transfers and services, and very mark.etdependent reproduction (predominantly in the core).lQWomen have bridged the social spheres of this houscholding continuum, actively organizing the social relations that enable households to generate incom e from wage and non-wage work.Women have also been designated by the state a<; reproducers oflabor and, therefore, are intimately affected by family and welfare policies.Particularly in the late twentieth century, when women's non-wag e work burden is extremely heavy, women arc centrally located in the heart of rapidly changing wage and non-wag e relations.Women's work-related movements and social actions, th erefore, form pivotal centers of global labor movements, a<; well a<; representing gender -related protests.
Women organize where there arc work-and income-related pressure points, and the locations of these pressure points differ.In the core, a<; the state ha<; cut transfer payments to "low-and middle-income" hous eholds, working women have struggled to main tain state transfers and state-organi zed scrviccs .11In the semi periphery, where girls and young to middle-years women form the bulk of assembly lin e laborers, workers have been organizing to form unions and to incrca<;c wages in export-oriented factories.Women in especially the periphery have fought to maintain their access to natural resources, which arc needed if women arc to carry out much of their subsistence and marketing work (Leonard 1995).Women's fights against environmental degradation often rel ate directly to their struggles around non-wage work . 12 In gene ral, hous ehold and women's needs emerge in relation to changes in the total complex of work and household income; this includes wage work, income support from employers, state income transfers and services, and the gendered division of labor and work.Women's political actions emerge in rel ationship to global, regional and local shifts in wage and non-wag e work.There are multiple causes of these shifts.Selective transnational investments, the general decline in real wages, reductions in state support and services, wars and famine, and environmental degradation have disrupted household relationships, leading to more migration, more female-headed households, and more economic and social burdens for women .
In the la<;t few years , women's political actions have centered around diverse work-and income-related area<;, includin g: strikes by Mexican teachers and Southca<;t As ian a<;scmbly line workers, public campaigns against U.S .and Western European welfare cuts, fights in the school system against the eventual restriction of employment opportunities for South Korean girls, efforts to increase access to land for gardening (such as land-owning female farmers who share their land with other women in Vancouver), and the creation of new female marketing networks in regions in Canada , Germany and Sub-Saharan Africa.Many of these social change efforts were discussed at the Women's Day on Food Conference in 1996, as well as at the Beijing Conf erence on Women in 1995.ll

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Because laboring women and other household members do both wage and non -wage work, it may be impossible to draw a clear line between the political activities organized by wage-dependent women and disengaged women who have been expelled from wage labor.Even in the most wage-dependent and consumer-oriented households in the core, women almost always need to combine income from wage labor, non-wage work, and state transfer payments.It may be useful to study whether the lives of once wagcdcpcndcnt women intersect frequently with partially wage-dependent women, who engage in daily or regular non-wage activities to supplement their hous eholds' low wages.It is time to consider how often the political pathways of wag e-dependent and ageless women cross as they, for example, fight to maintain their biomass plantations that yield fodder, firewood, and a source of marketing income, or as they organize small scale vending and petty producing operations (Sarin 1995;Jhabvala 1994).It may be useful to determine which women's actions spring from conditions of wage dep end ency (as much 11 casualizcd 11 labor docs), and to determine which actions grow out of situations where women and their households arc organizing, controlling and benefiting from their own work.In many cases, women's political actions often take place within a cross-gender context, where women struggle next to men, and where women's issues becom e blurred and often obscured.
The specific sets oflabor and work relations in regions and zones of the world-economy shape the types of women's struggles that emerge in these areas.In the core, where the levels of wage-and state-depend ency arc the highest, women's movements tend to center around wage employment practices and the decline in state transfer payments.Rural and urban residents consider establishing cooperative networks and evaluat e the benefits of establishing women's centered production, marketing and trade networks.In some cases, women conceive of their de-linking actions as "dropping out of the system," "getting off the grid, 11 or "short circuiting" the system (Douthwaitc 1996).
In the United States, petty producing networks arc growing in the areas of service work, newly prod uced and reso ld consumer goods, and vegetable, fruit and flow er selling.However, many self-employment activities arc organized by indi viduals and households and do not involve larger women's netw orks.In inn er cities that face corporate disinvestm ent, where many women have been disengaged from wage labor (but not from most system-derived market relationships, and often not from all state transfer payments) self-employment networks have grown.In places where poverty has been addressed as a serious issue (such a<; Chicago), women have started to value re -centering household and community relationships around their small businesses and income-generating properties.
New kinds of connections arc developing between women in the North and in the South.For example, because women in the North recognize that new, higher-paying work situations need to be created for women, they often have adopted and modifi ed "Third World" self-employment strategics.Reflecting a rejuvenated kind of economic and social exchange, the global fair trade movement link<; primarily female consumers with women who usually produce craft goods in Third World countries.In addition, women in the core, including Japan, have aligned with women in the semi periphery and periphery to fight the exploitation of girls and women in the global sex industry.For example, the A<;ian Women's Human Rights Council met in Tokyo in 1994 and held an open tribunal on the traffic in women (Skrobanck ct al. 1997: 81).
Because of the diverse mixture of First and Third World forms of work and social reproduction, women's movements in the semi periphery try to shape income-related relations in many ways.This includes:

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• pushing the state to maintain or create "upper mobility " pathway s throu gh schooling and intra-and international migration • limiting agro-industrial expansion • gaining higher wages and wage-related benefits (including on the global assembly line) • improving working conditions • organi zing ca<;ualizcd work ers (in capitalist production and in self-employment) • fightin g to freeze consumer-good pric es • seizing food destined for foreign and urban markets • reducing the level of environmental degradation • im proving women's access to natural resourc es • establishing women-centered and community-based producing and marketing networks.
Analyses of women's environmental movements suggest that women's environmental actions in most parts of the world can be directly linked to needs related to non-wage work, or to objections to the destruction of natural resources by mineral extractors, largcscale agricultural companies, and industrial producers.Women's environmental movements work to preserve resources for the future.However, saving trees, growing bio-mass, fighting water and land pollution, and protesting the use of agricultural pesticides all have to do with preserving natural resources required for subsistence or marketing work, and with guaranteeing the health and safety of family members.
In the periphery, higher levels of impoverishment, corporate disinvestment, and the severing of some workers from wage labor have meant that many women's struggles center around the less commodificd types of non-wage work.Women's environmental movements represent a very important part of the struggle to maintain, develop and protect resources for non-wage work.Women's work often becomes readjusted around the migration of adult males, contributing to the development of houscholding strategics that involve all remaining household members (Asian Exchange 1995:12).In some sub-Saharan countries, where women have few rights in terms of owning and inheriting land, one-half to two-thirds of families have female-headed households (Leonard 1995).
Women from these countries frequently establish local production, marketing and/or trade networks that bypass middlemen.The combined pressures of austerity measures, low-wages, low levels of remuneration for self-organized producing and marketing work, and the rapid disinvestment in sub-Saharan Africa and South America by many First World transnational corporations makes the establishment of women-and communityccntcrcd economic relationships, not just a choice, but sometimes the only option for survival and development.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: STUDYING GLOBAL SOCIAL CHANGE AND WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS
Uncovering contemporary relations of uneven development, including the selective process of capitalist expansion, selective corporate disinvestment, and labor's forced (and occasionally chosen) de-linking from wage labor, provides a framework in which to develop a more comprehensive analysis of women's wage and non-wage work and related women's struggles to reshape the social world.Preliminary research on this topic suggests that many contemporary women's movements emerge within the context of nonwage and wage relations.The state's reduced sup port for the reproduction of labor also has served as an important focus for addressing work-related issues.These movements, which center around women and their work, have been emerging as the work hierarchy and related gender hierarchy become restructured.In the last two decades, many women have felt increased economic pressures as they have assumed more responsibility for the reproduction of their households.Economic development often has particularly painful consequences for girls and women who arc systemically exploited and marginalized.This includes, but is not limited to exploitation by the global sex industry and by garment and electronics manufacturers in export enclaves.This systemic marginalization and exploitation affects women's politics, placing emphasis on the intimate overlap between women's non-wage work and their wage labor.

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There arc many related women's movement.., that arc both overtly and less overtly connected together at the global level by women's organization s and by more informal social action network..,.Women in the South and the North engage in dialogu e on common problems and social differences born of the global division oflabor, while at the same time there exists a tremendous amount of cross-fertilization between wage-and non-wage movements.Women's movements in the periphery , particularly thos e related to self-employment and non-traditional credit-granting mechanisms, have dir ectly influenced women's movements in the core, just as women in the core have influ enced women's political perceptions elsewhere.Both in the South and in the No rth, women have tried to expand and institutionalize new income-generating options for women.Th e development of women's credit-granting organizations and peer lendin g circles ( originally created in Bangladesh) have provided a model for women's organizations to expand wom en's work options.When they organized wom en's peer lending circles, for example, Chicago's Women's Self-Employm ent Project (WSEP) and San Francisc o's Women's Initiative for Self-Employment (WISE) both drew their inspiration from Bangladesh's Gramccn Bank.On the global a ... scmbly line , women and unions affiliated with the electronics industry have discuss ed the possibility of organizing a global, industry-wid e union for over a decade .However, many internat ional conferences that involve women from the South and North have created new global initiativ es, a.., we ll a.., influencing policy agenda.., of nation-states.These cross-hemispheric efforts contribut e to the creation of new globally-linked women's movements , which largely have operat ed on a day-to-day ba..,is at local and regional levels.
In conclusion, this analysis of how to study women, their work and their mov ements ultim ately takes us back to labor , and to men.Women carry out the types of work they do largely because of the ways that the world-economy ha.., constructed labor.With the development of mor e core-centered investments, the world-economy ha.., started to push more working individuals and their families outside of its economi c jurisdiction, or outside of the global profit-making system.However, women's work in all its forms ha.., provided a reproduc tive ba..,c for capital, for labor, and for all hous ehold members.In fact, wom en's movements form a central part oflabor's political actions, and women's protests need to be taken in account when world-economy and "globali zation" scholars study labor movements.A.., much a.., feminist scholars need to examin e gender relations in relation to concrete global processes, world-e conomy and "globalization" schol ars should also examine wome n's work and politics a.., an integral, informati ve, and constitu ent part of world-economy and "globalization" studies.This will enabl e multidisciplinary researchers to identify new a..,pccts of social change, and to acquir e a greater appreciation of how female and male workers arc influencing the world around them.