‘Care Is a Political Act’: MADRE’s Global Legacy of Organizing and Solidarity
In the mid-1980s, neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch considered rape a weapon of war or categorized sexual assault as a violation of human rights. But MADRE did. The 40-year-old, U.S.-based global feminist organization helped correct these egregious omissions.
The group’s legacy includes numerous other accomplishments: MADRE was one of the first domestic organizations to partner with international LGBTQ+ and Indigenous activists and was one of the first to analyze foreign policy through a feminist lens.
And while much has changed since 1985, its work continues to be multifaceted. MADRE is not only involved in political and legal advocacy but also provides direct financial assistance to organizations in more than 40 countries—from Afghanistan to Yemen—to address war, environmental calamities, and political crises. In addition, MADRE provides skills training, strategic planning, and leadership development to organizers who work with women and girls, allowing them to maximize their effectiveness in promoting peace, racial justice, and disability and LGBTQ+ rights.
MADRE’s long-term goals are far-reaching: ending gender violence, winning abortion and reproductive rights, advancing climate justice, and building peace and social justice throughout the world.
Yifat Susskind, MADRE’s longtime executive director, spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader following the organization’s 40th anniversary celebration in mid-March.
Eleanor J. Bader: MADRE began after a group of women visited Nicaragua in the early 1980s. How did the organization develop?
Yifat Susskind: In the early 1980s, attorney Michael Ratner, a founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights, represented a Nicaraguan woman named Mirna Cunningham, who was a medical doctor. Cunningham later became the Minister of Health under the Sandinista government, but years earlier, she’d been detained by the anti-Sandinista “contras” and sexually assaulted. She brought the first international legal case seeking to prosecute sexual violence.
A group of women in the U.S. heard Cunningham’s story and were inspired by it. They began communicating with her, and Cunningham eventually invited them to her community where they met with a number of Nicaraguan mothers. These mothers urged the delegation to return to the U.S. and tell people about the anti-Sandinista violence they were experiencing, violence that was paid for by U.S. tax dollars. The Americans promised to speak out about what they’d learned. Most U.S. residents had no idea that the U.S. was funding the contras to undermine the Sandinistas.
The efforts of these American women led to the formation of MADRE. They used the word “madre” in tribute to the mothers they’d met.
Bader: How did the group evolve to do human rights work in 40 countries?
Susskind: Our focus is on the world’s most marginalized people: young women and girls; Black and Indigenous communities; refugees; migrants; people with disabilities; and those who identify as LGBTQ+.
All of the groups we work with share our political vision. We’re also clear that we’re not a humanitarian aid organization but are instead working to build a world where human rights are a reality for everyone and where everyone has access to resources including education, healthcare, and political rights.
Responding to human rights violations that result from U.S. foreign policy has always been part of MADRE’s DNA. Of course, much has shifted since the 1980s. But while it’s hard to draw a direct correlation between U.S. industrial policy and climate disasters in any one place, we know that the U.S. has an outsized share of responsibility for the environmental crisis.
Bader: How does MADRE approach organizing?
Susskind: We work specifically in the contexts of war and environmental disasters and have a robust system to make grants in emergency situations. Often an initial action grows into a long-term partnership. For instance, in March 2015, there was a massive earthquake in Nepal and we gave an emergency grant to a coalition of Indigenous women’s groups. Ten years later, we’re still working with them to develop regenerative agriculture projects and ensure that government aid is distributed equitably. We’re also helping them monitor the government to make sure it abides by its commitment to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
Our work happens on three fronts: We make grants, we support grassroots groups to strengthen their organizations, and we do human rights advocacy. Everyone needs funding for their work, but when you partner with nascent or grassroots groups, they often need more than money. Our partners regularly ask us for training on topics like digital security and institution building so that they can make headway in achieving their political objectives. Moreover, our extensive human rights advocacy program supports them in changing the underlying conditions that cause their problems. These problems—war, environmental degradation, racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism—typically originate far outside of our partners’ communities. For that reason, we focus on getting them to the tables of decision-making, often at the national and global levels, and equip them with skills and strategies to influence the policies that impact their communities. For people who have faced historic exclusion and discrimination because they’re female, queer, rural, poor, Indigenous, or otherwise marginalized, having the backing of an international feminist organization makes a difference. We’ve seen how partnering with MADRE opens doors to the rooms where policy is made.
Bader: What do you consider to be MADRE’s greatest achievement?
Susskind: We’ve always been on the cutting edge of human rights work, expanding the human rights system to meet evolving global challenges and protect more and more people. Forty years ago, we were one of the first groups to say that women’s rights are human rights. Today we’re thinking about the Rights of Nature. Although this is still outside of a conventional human rights framework, we’re part of global movements to expand our collective vision of what is possible. We’re looking for levers of influence to boost the idea that nature has a right to exist and that the trees, oceans, animals, and mountains are part of an ecosystem that is essential to all life. At first, this idea sounded crazy to many people, but today, the Rights of Nature are codified in Ecuador’s Constitution.
In addition, we recently worked with a coalition of Indigenous women to amend CEDAW to incorporate recognition of Indigenous rights for the first time. Indigenous women made it happen with support from MADRE and we’re now working on implementation.
Bader: Do you have any regrets or insights about organizational missteps or things MADRE might have done differently?
Susskind: In the early 1990s, MADRE launched a campaign throughout the U.S. called “Healthcare: We’ve Gotta Have It.” We’d been working in countries where universal healthcare was provided, so we wanted to get a movement going domestically. The campaign fell flat. But a dozen years later, universal healthcare became a major political issue. Maybe the effort was just ahead of its time.
Still, this raises an interesting question. As organizers, when do you start where people are, and when do you step out in front?
Bader: We’re now experiencing tremendous political backlash. Have the cutbacks to USAID impacted MADRE or your partner organizations?
Susskind: The groups we work with are generally too small to be USAID recipients but they live in communities that are often dependent on U.S. aid for job training, agricultural development, healthcare, vaccination programs, toxic waste clean-up, education, and more. This means that many local women’s organizations are having to pivot from, say, programming on ending domestic violence to meeting people’s basic needs. Care work—whether at the household or community level—is largely what women do, so we’re seeing under-resourced local groups scramble to meet urgent needs exacerbated by the dismantlement of USAID. Unfortunately, these groups can’t satisfy the demand and people are already dying. The pain of cutbacks and loss of assistance has never been evenly distributed, and the impact is always worse in places where people have been made poor.
Bader: Given this, what are MADRE’s current priorities?
Susskind: Right now we’re focused on protecting our partners from the worsening repression that is a knock-on effect of growing U.S. authoritarianism. For instance, we’ve been working with the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, which is fighting to keep its NGO status and we’re helping with the emergency relocation of women’s rights activists in countries where their efforts are increasingly criminalized.
Overall, we’re seeing backsliding from democracy in many places and we’re doing what we can to protect those who are in harm’s way. We’re also trying to find ways for people to safely resist the repression. Finally, we’re working to preserve the vision of what we want in the world. Right-wing governments and movements may be lowering the bar on human rights, but we can’t allow them to lower our own sense of possibility.
There are moments in history when liberatory movements are ascendant, and moments when we are constrained. Staying mobilized in these moments of constraint or backlash is critical. One of the ways that MADRE does this is by using the idea of motherhood as a political metaphor. We believe that if care were an organizing principle not just of parenting but of politics, it would go a long way towards alleviating the suffering we see in the world and creating conditions where people and the planet can thrive. It is now more important than ever to keep this North Star visible.
Eleanor J. Bader is a freelance journalist from Brooklyn, N.Y., who writes for Truthout, Lilith, the LA Review of Books, RainTaxi, The Indypendent, New Pages, and The Progressive. She tweets at @eleanorjbader1 .
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