Troubling Secular Assumptions: What 'Early' Feminist Resistance Can Tell Us about Globalization, Religion, and Secularism

Abstract

This project uses the archive at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international Quaker peace and social justice organization headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, in order to shed light on the globalization resistance labor of the Nationwide Women's Program (NWP) and its transnational networks. The NWP was an internal program at the AFSC, initiated by women staff and committee members who challenged the practices of gender discrimination within the organization and initiated external AFSC programs that served women's unique needs in peace and social justice initiatives. By focusing primarily on the serial inserts of the group's newsletter from 1978 to 1988, entitled Women and Global Corporations: Work, Roles, Resistance, this project draws attention to the dense networks of transnational communication and resistance against global economic restructuring during this time. It uses and challenges social movement scholarship by suggesting that the analytical frameworks of transnational advocacy networks and social movement mobilization more accurately capture the antiglobalization activity that took place several decades prior to when it is conventionally identified in 1999. The project highlights the NWP's social movement brokerage and the embodied social movement activities of the activists, scholars, and laborers in its orbit. These social movement activities included boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, labor organizing, and a plethora of other on-the-ground activities and discursive practices against global corporations and the institutions that supported them. An investigation into the sources of the NWP's knowledge production in brokering this movement reveals both Quaker and feminist influences that call into question the conventionally accepted binary between religion and secularity in the Western imaginary. The presence of Quaker and feminist influences on the NWP's understandings of globalization provides the opportunity for thinking through at least two possibilities: how a tacit Protestant secularism within the organization contributed to its own erasure, and how contemporary globalization narratives are infused with a Protestant secularism that insidiously frames globalization resistance as retrograde and fuels a universalizing (and therefore exclusionary) notion of progress and unsustainable growth.