Content area
Full text
MAKING THE CONNECTIONS: WOMEN'S HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Abstract: This paper examines and compares the transnational women's health movement with the environmental justice movement in the US. It discusses how both seek to empower those discriminated against with the information, tools and resources to challenge discrimination. Women have played key roles in both these struggles. Each movement has mobilized its own constituency and developed a distinctive political and economic critique. While providing a broad brush overview of each movement I underline their similarities and key differences. I compare the two movements on the basis of their objectives, leadership and membership patterns, organizing methods, constituencies, and their impacts. The paper points to potential areas for collaboration and suggests ways to relate to other social movements dedicated to creating a future based on a more inclusive set of values.
Key Words: health, environment, transnational organizing, environmental justice
This paper examines and compares two fairly recent social movements - the transnational women's health movement and the environmental justice movement in the US. Through their different approaches to health, these movements have demonstrated the limitations of traditional health frameworks and led to new policy initiatives and new lines of research. They have mobilized constituencies which previously played no role in shaping a health agenda While the transnational women's health movement has focused on issues of gender discrimination, the environmental justice movement has emphasized race and class as the basis of health differentials and disproportionate impact of disease and ill health. Thus, one uses gender and the other race as the primary lens through which health issues are viewed and acted upon.
Each movements seeks to empower those discriminated against with the information, tools and resources to challenge discrimination. Women have played key leadership roles in both these grass-roots, decentralized struggles. They have independently developed similar political and economic critiques, though the processes through which they have arrived at their political understanding have been strikingly different. While the transnational women's movement has developed its critique in small consciousness-raising groups and through large international networks and gatherings, the environmental justice movement has developed its understanding through opposing direct health threats in specific communities. Activists in each movement have taught themselves about health issues and questioned the ways in which "risk" is...