Sisterhood Is “Sleeping on Couches”

Yes, the UN conferences were about politics. They were also about friendships so meaningful they helped make movements

“In the beginning, we had to sleep on [each other’s] couches,” says Tarcila Rivera Zea, shown here in 2018. (via UN Photo)

When you speak to participants of the revolutionary women’s conferences of the late 20th century, one theme comes up over and over: Friendships can be revolutionary. “I always tell the new generation: at the beginning, we had to sleep on couches in the houses of friends who supported us,” says Quechuan activist Tarcila Rivera Zea, the founder and director of the Center for Indigenous Cultures of Peru (CHIRAPAQ). Rivera Zea was among the thousands of world leaders and activists who convened at the UN’s Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985 to continue developing a global agenda for gender equality—an agenda that drew power from the friendships between activists through the decades.

In the grand scheme of social justice work—particularly when it comes to the arc of global feminism—it’s one thing to be allies in the struggle for women’s rights, but it’s quite another to like each other while doing it. While institutional racism and economic disparities within the global women’s and feminist movement have often resulted in prohibitive power dynamics, personal connections can help leaders work across and through these challenges. “There’s some stuff you can’t explain,” says Caribbean feminist activist Peggy Antrobus, who was at the first world conference on women, held in Mexico City in 1975. “What you can do is to acknowledge that friendship is part of it.” Antrobus, along with Indian feminist Devaki Jain and others, were founders of DAWN (Development of Alternatives with Women for a New Era), a network of feminist scholars and activists working for economic and gender justice across the Global South that would offer a transformative paradigm shift on development alternatives for the global women’s and feminist movement starting with the 1985 Nairobi conference. 

“DAWN could not happen without the people that Devaki met over the years,” Antrobus says. “They were her friends. She just invited people that she knew.” And the differences between them were what deepened the friendships—and the work. “Black and white, North American, European African, Asian,” she says. “First of all, we like each other. We care for each other…We look out for each other.” 

Those friendships nourished Jain, Antrobus and other global leaders over decades. Soon after returning home from Mexico City in 1975, Jain and Ela Bhatt, founder of India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), followed up with contacts they’d made during a seminar held prior to the conference in Mexico City—and continued to collaborate with those people for years. “So Mexico, therefore, was a defining moment for me,” Jain recalled nearly three decades later. 

That basic idea—that friendship can be a crucial way to actually make progress—resonates for young feminists today. As Ruby Johnson and Devi Leiper O’Malley, former co-directors of FRIDA, The Young Feminist Fund, put it in 2021, “At FRIDA, we did our best to build rituals, make space for personal check-ins, and offer up personal information to each other so that we brought our whole selves to work, and not just our labour and skills to deliver a task.” 

Bringing one’s “whole self” speaks directly to the emotional availability which nourishes both friendships and movement-building. Youth activist Zahra Al Hilaly, a first-generation Australian from a Palestinian and Iraqi family, who played a prominent role in drafting the Young Feminist Manifesto during the Generation Equality Forum (GEF) process in 2021, says the bonds created with fellow activists during that time were vital to her sense of purpose. “I remember feeling so lost during the pandemic, because these global spaces were taken from us.” But during GEF, even the 24/7 Slack rooms to draft the Young Feminist Manifesto provided bonding. “These were pivotal moments where you were meeting other young people, and now you shared part of their advocacy story, and they shared yours.” 

Participants at a 2020 International Women’s Day commemoration. (via UN Photo)

Have friendships helped forge activist work for you? Or do you have a friendship memory from the UN World Conferences on Women or other UN processes on gender equality you’d like to share? Tell us about it. We’d love to hear from you!