I ALWAYS TRUST THE MICROCOSM over the macrocosm. So let me leave you with news of an important and growing part of the women’s movement—and a small but growing part of the U.S. national economy—that the media haven’t noticed yet. It has already created more jobs than the Fortune 500 corporations. For the future, it has the potential for innovating a new economic form. Even as an economic alternative, it’s flowering in the cracks left by inflexible, environment-damaging behemoths, and providing exactly the kind of communal, satisfying, productive workplace so many people are hungering for. It creates jobs that are recognized and measurable within the current census and GDP/GNP standards, thus making previously invisible work visible, but because it is controlled by its workers, it also provides for family-centered concerns that are not yet valued in conventional workplaces. It creates its own definitions of success, and doesn’t reward unlimited growth and unreasonable return on capital.
I’m talking about the women’s economic development movement—or empowerment, since development does sound more like hydroelectric dams—that is nurturing women’s cooperatively owned businesses in many parts of this country, from the most isolated rural setting to the most depersonalized urban one. It is growing and changing too rapidly to be captured within the covers of a book, but every group and center of information mentioned here can be contacted through addresses in the notes to Part 5.
Even when one individual example has been noticed—for instance, when 60 Minutes did a report on the Women’s Economic Development Corporation in Minnesota (now called WomenVenture56), a local feminist group that nurtures such businesses by giving them access to expertise, low-interest loans, and communal support—it was treated as an isolated circumstance rather than part of a national movement. In fact, these businesses and the umbrella groups that often nurture them are a conscious and growing part of feminism, with their own national get-togethers and such semi-underground media as Equal Means, a multi-cultural magazine for women forging new grassroots economic models.57 Consisting mostly of businesses started and cooperatively owned by previously low-income or no-income women, this grassroots contagion is nothing less than the first economic base for the women’s movement. After all, if we’re going to agitate freely for our rights, some of us need to have jobs we can’t be fired from, just as immigrant and other “out” groups need businesses they themselves control. As psychic immigrants who are also a majority and so have a better chance of transforming the mainstream, women of all groups need experimental laboratories for new economic forms and values.
This cooperative economic paradigm is neither capitalist nor socialist. Unlike the women business owners who are climbing the ladder Horatio Alger style—and also acquiring politically valuable independence, though usually in a more conventional economic form—these enterprises are usually owned and managed by those who work in them in a way that allows new flexibility and styles of working. The “Small Is Beautiful” or Gandhian village-level economy most resembles their inclusion of family needs, interdependent values, and human relationships in economic life. Some are small businesses that begin with a little capital created by several women who pool their savings, others are groups of pink-collar workers who start or take over companies to become their own employers, and still others are handicraft or other cooperatives that expand production, eliminate the marketing middleperson, and train new workers/owners as they grow. Many have been nurtured by revolving loan funds and other expertise supplied by feminist groups organized for the purpose. That’s where local groups like WomenVenture or the Women’s Self-Employment Project in Chicago58 come in. Their goal is to help low- and moderate-income women become economically self-sufficient through self-employment, and their services range from loans and help with business plans to personal development and support groups. It’s no accident that their loan programs usually follow the group lending approach that has worked so well in developing countries. Named after the Grameen Bank that originated this model in Bangladesh, it combines loans with flexibility and constant group support.* Nationally, the Ms. Foundation for Women has been an umbrella for many groups in this economic empowerment movement for a decade. Under the leadership of Marie Wilson, it has pioneered in putting together collaborative loan funds. (Write the Ms. Foundation for national information, or groups in your area.59) Altogether, their goals are good jobs and investment in people, not the 25 percent return on capital of venture capitalists.
In their total economic activity, these enterprises have already created hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jobs, exactly where they are needed most—often among women who are getting off welfare or out of battered-women’s shelters, or are laboring in poorly paid, pink-collar jobs that have been yielding unfair profits for someone else. Since the much-admired Fortune 500 companies have actually lost jobs for U.S. workers since the late 1960s, this should be hopeful news; yet you’re unlikely to read about these grassroots income-generating and job-creating groups in Forbes or Fortune.
Though their different work and management patterns haven’t been described in terms rooted in economics yet, they resemble the culturally female styles described by Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice, or the all-female classrooms, described by Myra and David Sadker in Failing at Fairness, that are being used to conquer intimidation by such traditionally male subjects as math or science.60 Like those groups and classrooms, these businesses are committed to mutual support, flexibility, cooperation, and helping individual members develop. Like them, these businesses will eventually provide a new paradigm that the mainstream can learn from, just as women have learned assertiveness, daring, and many other useful tools from a culturally male paradigm.
Until there are proper phrases to describe this growing feminist economics, think of it this way: Since women as a group share the characteristics of a developing country, if s not surprising that this economic form most resembles a developing paradigm. As a result, there is a growing exchange of information between women’s economic empowerment groups in the United States and those in the developing world, with women of the north seeking the greater expertise from women of the south in a healthy reversal of the colonial pattern. Those with a scholarly bent might think of the local production model of old-fashioned anarchist theory, but with women’s cultural values added.
Even before the right terminology emerges, however, we can see these local groups as small but bright pieces in a growing national and international economic quilt with these characteristics:
1. They tend to arise first among women at the very bottom of the larger economy, as if the view from there is more clear and the absence of temptation toward old versions of women’s economic roles is a blessing in disguise. Washington poverticians never imagined that women could get off welfare by starting their own businesses, but that’s what’s happening. The pioneering feminist groups that act as go-betweens also help change restrictive welfare regulations, intercede with local banks, or offer revolving loan funds (often made up of contributions from foundations, individual donors, and investors looking for some return on their money plus a different kind of bottom line). They also provide continuing services so that a woman who’s out there on the edge of personal and economic history has some support. In these alliances between feminists with economic expertise and grassroots economic adventurers, it’s the women doing the work who are calling the shots.
2. These new groups integrate economic techniques like job training, sophisticated marketing, management tools, and advanced technology with such innovative techniques as flexible schedules, child care, language workshops for new immigrants, assertiveness training, help in getting a driver’s license, a link to political activity in the larger community, and even songs, poems, and ceremonies that fill a deeper need than the usual workplace practices. Like some of the labor-organizing groups of the 1930s, they tend to see life as a whole, with work and family, economics and culture, united—only this time, with women making their own decisions.
3. The groups put a premium on autonomy and independence. Like the Ramah Navajo women weavers in New Mexico,61 they may already have a skill and a product, and just need help with bypassing the profiteering middlepeople. Or like the 240 African-American and Latina workers who own and govern the Cooperative Home Care Associates of the Bronx in New York,62 they may assure training, benefits, and career opportunities to each other, while setting an industry standard of good service to the homebound ill and elderly. The point is that the people who do the work also make the decisions. As a result, these groups value a small-is-beautiful size over bigness, but that doesn’t mean they can’t reach national and international markets. The 700 workers of the Watermark Association of Artisans of North Carolina63 produce many of the most prized handmade items now marketed through catalogs, cable television, and international companies, yet they can work at home, create their own schedules, and share in management decisions and profits. These women, whose success built a headquarters in the middle of cornfields two hours from the nearest airport, chose as their motto: “Rarely are orders too large or too small for us to handle.”
4. These grassroots groups are also gaining the confidence and expertise to analyze and replace the values of the economic mainstream. After the challenge made by women’s groups from developing countries to economic policies at the 1985 United Nations World Women’s Conference, in Nairobi, Kenya, U.S. and other women from overdeveloped countries began to realize that they could and must understand and take on their own economies. Indeed, just using the term “overdeveloped” implied the need for a healthy process of change and achieving balance, just as “underdeveloped” did at the other end of the scale. Since then, efforts to demystify economics and promote “economic literacy” have sprung up at the grass roots. Now, international conferences turn into information exchanges and organizing meetings on the various experiments in women’s economic empowerment—both in overdeveloped and underdeveloped countries. In the United States, a new group founded in 1992, An Income of Her Own,64 helps teenage women, especially but not only from low-income groups, to train for and even start their own businesses, with conferences, an entrepreneurial summer camp, and its own publications.
Since all the examples of this new economic paradigm strive to value what is important in our lives, from humane work patterns and child rearing to personal development and economic independence, perhaps the best definition comes from Rebecca Adamson of First Nations Development Institute,65 which also nurtures businesses following a modernized Native American paradigm that includes the principles of communal ownership and balance rather than accumulation and exclusivity. Her updated definition of economics is this: “The science of dealing with the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth in a naturally holistic, reciprocal manner that respects humankind, fellow species, and the ecobalance of life.”
Or perhaps we just need the words of Alice Walker’s poem “We Alone”;
This could be our revolution:
To love what is plentiful
as much as
what is scarce.66
* At a 1993 Washington conference, “Hunger, Poverty, and the World Bank,” Professor Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank spoke about this model, which gives small loans in thousands of villages, 94 percent to women, and has an almost perfect repayment record: “We take quite a bit of time preparing our borrowers to learn how to make decisions within their five-member groups. … We repeat the following advice many times to them … ‘Please never get angry with the person who cannot pay the installment. Please don’t put pressure on her to make her pay. Be a good friend, don’t turn into an enemy. … First find out the story behind the non-payment. … When you get the full story, you’ll see how stupid it would have been to twist her arm to get the money. She can’t pay the installment because her husband ran away with the money. As a good friend, your responsibility will be to go and find her husband and bring him back, hopefully, with the money. It may also happen that your friend could not pay the installments because the cow which she bought with the loan money died. As good friends, you should promptly stand by her side, give her consolation and courage at this disaster. … Ask Grameen to give her another loan, and reschedule and convert the previous loan into a long-term loan.’ … The borrowers own the bank. We lend out $30 million each month in loans under $100 on average. … Studies tell us that the borrowers have improved their income, widened their asset base, moved steadily toward a life of dignity and honour. Studies also tell us that nutrition level in Grameen families is better … child mortality is lower … adoption of family planning practices is higher. … All studies confirm the visible empowerment of women.”
After years of ignoring the successful Grameen example, the World Bank came through with a small $2 million grant to help start the Grameen Trust, which will begin 30 to 40 such micro-credit programs in other countries in the next five years.