Judith P. Zinsser, "From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi: The United Nations Decade for Women, 1975-1985," Journal of World History, 13 (2002): 139-67.
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From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi: The United Nations Decade for Women, 1975-1985
JUDITH P. ZINSSER
Miami University
From its founding until 1975 and the declaration of the International Women's Year (IWY), the United Nations did little to advance the cause of women's rights. There was, to be sure, the familiar and potentially revolutionary clause in the preamble to the UN Charter, "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small." Also, the Economic and Social Council acceded to pressure from elite women's international organizations and, in 1946, authorized the creation of a full-fledged Commission on the Status of Women. But despite these ideological and structural acknowledgments of women's separate needs, the condition of women worldwide was never a priority for action in any part of the United Nations system.
Initiatives sponsored by the International Labor Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund, and the World Health Organization did affect women, but not in response to agendas that highlighted women's advancement. Most often women were included because of their association with a broader concern such as the effects of a worker's lead poisoning on her unborn children, the importance of breast feeding, or a prostitute's role in the spread of venereal disease.1 The UN's
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1 See, for example, Sandra Whitworth, Feminism and International Relations: Towards a Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and Non-Governmental Institutions (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994). Chapter 5 describes the ways in which the International Labor Organization (ILO) viewed women prior to the 1970s.
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Journal of World History, Vol. 13, No. 1
© 2002 by University of Hawai‘i Press
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The designation of the International Women's Year of 1975, a United Nations Decade for Women from 1975-85, and the three world conferences held under their aegis, effected a dramatic change. Letitia Shahani, the Secretary-General of the last of the Decade Conferences in Nairobi, Kenya (1985) spoke with pride and authority of "the solidarity of the women the world over who, despite socio-economic, political and cultural differences, shared a common vision and determination to shape and provide direction for a more humane, a more just and a brighter future." She described the international network of women, the women's coalitions, that had developed since the first meetings in Mexico City. She explained: "A critical mass has evolved to enable the women's movement to go forward on a more solid foundation. There is no more turning back."2
With only a few exceptions, scholars and activists, particularly those who participated in any of the meetings and conferences that punctuated the Decade, take a similarly positive view. Like many of the European and North American narratives of women's past history, there is a presumption that this contemporary story will also be "progressive," going from bad to good, from less to more rights for women, from dis-advantaged circumstances and limited opportunities to better conditions and a richer quality of life.3.
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2 Letitia Shahani, "Statement on Agenda Item 92 before the Third Committee, General Assembly, 28 Oct. 1985," unpublished, pp. 3 and 13.
3 For a sampling of articles by women from different regions of the world with this positive view of Decade activities and its meetings, despite many clearly identified shortcomings and conflicts, see in particular: Feminist Studies, Vol. 12.2 (Summer 1986): 401-12; Signs Vol. 6.3 (Spring 1981): 531-39; Vol. 6.4 (Summer 1981): 771-90; Vol. 11.3 (Spring, 1986): 584-608; Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 6.5 (1983): 547-57; Special Issue, ed., Georgina Ashworth, "The UN Decade for Women: An International Evaluation," Vol. 8.2 (1985); New Directions for Women, Vol. 14.5 (Sept./Oct. 1985), 1, 12, 14.
Women directly involved with NGOs, the United Nations, and its agencies have also written with this positive perspective. See Hilkka Pietila and Jeanne Vickers, Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, Ltd., 1990). Arvonne S. Fraser, an advisor to and member of U.S. delegations to the three conferences exemplifies the Western perspective on the Decade. She includes condensed versions of the major documents produced by each conference in the following work: The U.N. Decade for Women: Documents and Dialogue (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Inc., 1987). The classic positive image of international feminism after the meetings in Mexico and
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I share the positive sense of the accomplishments of the Decade. I attended the meetings in Copenhagen in 1980 and in Nairobi in 1985.4 I felt the excitement and sense of connection with other women at the Forums, and came away with respect and admiration for the women leaders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the professionals from the UN, and the diplomats, who worked to design and then pass the formal United Nations "Plan" from Mexico City, the "Programme of Action" from Copenhagen, and the Nairobi "Forward-Looking Strategies."5 Even today, more than fifteen years later, I believe that these official documents describe women's disadvantaged status, despite the implicit ideological differences of the Cold War era and the clearly articulated antagonisms between developing and developed worlds. They advocate in ever bolder and more explicit phrases the practical, attitudinal, and structural measures that would ensure women's human rights.
Certainly, women around the world have used these documents in their struggles with their own governments, and in negotiations with
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Copenhagen is Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984).
Note that descriptions of the subsequent Beijing Conference and Forum of 1995 can be, if anything, even more enthusiastic. See Peggy Simpson, "International Trends: Beijing in Perspective," Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8.1 (Spring, 1996): 137-46; and Janice Auth, ed., To Beijing and Beyond: Pittsburgh and the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998).
Neither a bibliography nor a survey of writing on the Decade in European, African, and Asian women's journals has been done. A study of worldwide coverage of the conferences would also be a wonderful resource. Writings by women from Africa and Asia have appeared in North American and British periodicals, as reflected in this and other reference notes.
4 The following institutions and individuals made it possible for me to attend these meetings: the United Nations International School (New York City), the Office of the International Baccalaureate (Geneva, Switzerland), Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, PA), the Oaklawn Foundation, Mildred Robbins Leet, Phyllis Goodhart Gordon, Barbara Auchincloss Thacher, Mary Maples Dunn.
I am grateful for the comments of the participants at the IFRWH sessions at the Congress of Historical Sciences, Oslo, 12 August 2000; and for the patient reading and rereading by P. Renée Baernstein, Sheila Croucher, David Fahey, and Roger J. Millar.
5 Non-governmental organizations held coordinate meetings with the official governmental conferences: the NGO Tribune in Mexico City, the NGO Forums in Copenhagen and Nairobi. Over the Decade and into the 1990s the number of women-oriented NGOs proliferated dramatically. In contrast to the broad-issue North American and European NGOs, these NGOs often represented single issues of significance and to local women, and were formed by coalitions of women who had organized first within their communities. In 1975 114 NGOs registered for the NGO Tribune that met simultaneously with the Mexico City Conference, 134 presented their credentials in Copenhagen, while 163 met at the equivalent Forum in Nairobi in 1985. Over 1,700 registered for the NGO Forum for the follow-up Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995. Estimates of actual numbers of women who attended vary but are as dramatic: Mexico City, 6,000; Copenhagen, 7,200; Nairobi, 13,500.
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But I also agree with critics of the Decade who can easily point to conflict rather than cooperation between leaders of the Forums and delegates at the Conferences, to tensions between haves and havenots, between South and North, East and West, women of color and white women.8 The United Nation's own research has proved that despite the raised consciousness, the networks and coalitions, hours and days of meetings, and thousands of words, from a statistical perspective women's situations have not improved. In 1985 at the time of the Nairobi Conference, and subsequently in 1995 when government representatives met again in Beijing to assess progress, even the most optimistic delegates acknowledged that the world's women have continued to suffer disproportionately in armed conflicts, because of international
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Also significantly, in each instance, the numbers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America increased.
See on NGOs, but with almost no mention of women throughout the 500+-page book, William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "A Curious Grapevine" (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). On women's NGOs and the Decade, see Irene Tinker, "Nongovernmental Organizations: An Alternative Power Base for Women?" in Gender Politics in Global Governance, eds. Mary K. Meyer and Elisabeth Pruegl (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), and Carolyn M. Stephenson, "Women's International Nongovernmental Organizations at the United Nations," in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, ed. Anne Winslow (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995). Specific figures and estimates come from Stephenson, pp. 139-42; Virginia R. Allan, Margaret E. Galey, and Mildred E. Persinger, "World Conference of International Women's Year," in Winslow, ed. pp. 39-40; Tinker, in Meyer and Pruegl, eds., p. 96, see also fn. 1, p. 104.
6 The journal Issue focused on the accomplishments of the Decade by women from Africa. See "Beyond Nairobi: Women's Politics and Policies in Africa Revisited," Issue: A Journal of Opinion, Vol. XVII (2) (Summer 1989).
7 Shahani, p. 4.
8 Many of these negative commentators on the UN Decade ascribe its accomplishments not to the formal governmental conferences but to the NGOs and the coordinate meetings they held at each of the United Nations conference sites. According to these journalists, political scientists, development specialists, women's studies scholars, and feminist activists from Europe, North America, and Australasia, the NGO Tribune in Mexico and the forums of Copenhagen and Nairobi, in their plenaries, planned spontaneous sessions and workshops and created "oppositional processes," "where the real concerns of women did not get lost in the elite structures of UN conferences." These parallel meetings, they argue, were strident, controversial, unconstrained, enthusiastic, "cutting edge," and led governments and UN officials to debate feminist proposals, to amend paragraphs, and to add resolutions focused on women's—not men's—issues. See, for example, West, in Winslow, ed., pp. 177-79, 191-93.
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Even in the most privileged countries, women do not yet enjoy the rights described in each of the three plans of action of the United Nations Decade for Women. For example, the United States is only one of many nations that has not yet ratified the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1975) despite a clear instruction to member governments in the implementation sections of the documents approved at Copenhagen and Nairobi. All over the world there have been new laws, national women's bureaus, statistical documentation of inequality and disadvantage, a dramatic proliferation of organizations and informal networks devoted to women's issues. Some women's lives have improved and their opportunities have been expanded as direct results of these initiatives. Yet, the overall status of women worldwide has not changed, nor have the material conditions of over two-thirds of the world's women improved.9
How to reconcile these positive feelings—hardly an evidentiary basis for scholarship—and the aggregated realities of women's continuing unequal and inequitable circumstances?10 For me, perhaps because I am a historian, the answer lies in a closer reading of the language of the documents: the Declaration, Plan of Action, and Resolutions of Mexico City (1975), the Programme of Action and the Resolutions from Copenhagen (1980), and the Forward-Looking Strategies of Nairobi (1985). They prove the effectiveness of the world's women and thus give substance to optimistic statements about women's futures.
The language of the various documents from Mexico City defined women according to traditional patriarchal images and within the patriarchal ideologies and structures of national and international relations. Women were either victims of forces beyond their understanding and control, or so marginal to the implicit model of the world that the Declaration and Plan of Action asked only that women be
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9 For information on the status of women worldwide, see two United Nations' publications: Women in a Changing Global Economy: 1994 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development (New York: United Nations, 1995); The World's Women 1995: Trends and Statistics (New York: United Nations, 1995). The Division for the Advancement of Women has also produced a CD-ROM, WISTAT.
10 On the relationship between experience and "evidence," see Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, eds. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). As the title of the collection suggests, other articles offer perspectives on other sources and uses of "evidence." These also bear an indirect relationship to discussions later in this essay.
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Ten years later in Nairobi, the phrases and paragraphs of the Forward-Looking Strategies demonstrate that women had taken control of the language. They used the international phrases and procedures confidently and aggressively. Women were now central to structural phenomena such as the international economic order. Rather than victims, in almost every section, women had become active agents in efforts to create new international institutions and practices. Gone are simplistic, essentializing categories of women. Instead, the "Strategies" present a multiplicity of explicit images: women in trade unions, rural cooperatives, health professions, young women, and old women. Thus, between 1975 and 1985, activists from around the world used the UN Decade to challenge the patriarchal model that frames national and international relations.12 The formal documents of the Decade reveal that women had, in fact, changed the discourse. The traditional "family of nations," with its implicit subordination of women, had been superseded. Networks and coalitions of politically experienced women demanded the end to sexual sterotypes and gender discrimination. By 1985, they used the United Nations to speak with new assurance and to assert their rights, opportunities, and responsibilities as "equal partners with men" in the creation of a new international economic, social, and political order.13
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11 On the subordinating and exclusionary quality of such language, see Elizabeth V. Spellman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), especially Chapter 7.
12 See Lynne B. Igliztin and Ruth Ross, eds., Women in the World: 1975-85 The Women's Decade (Santa Barbara CA:ABC-CLIO, 1986, 2nd rev.ed.). I find their description of this "patriarchal model" useful: "1. Women are apolitical; 2. The sexual division of labor reflects inborn differences between males and females; 3. Women's central identity is as wives and mothers; 4. Women are childlike" (pp. xv-xvi).
13 For these readings of the United Nations documents, I am in debt to the theorists in both literature and history who have studied the cultural construction of language. The United Nations documents are excellent examples of what Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott refer to as "discursive oppression." See the "Introduction," in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992). See also Mary Poovey, "The Abortion Question and the Death of Man," in the same collection. Poovey writes of the "sexual double standard which lies at the heart of the metaphysics of substance and therefore lurks in the concept of rights as it has been institutionalized," p. 254. For an application of this kind of gender analysis to international relations, see Whitworth, Introduction, and Deborah Stienstra, Women's Movements and International Organizations (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), pp. xiii-xiv.
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ENSHRINING IDEOLOGIES: WORLD CONFERENCE OF THE
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S YEAR IN MEXICO CITY (1975)
A strategic decision in the early 1960s on the part of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) brought women's issues to the fore at the UN. In 1963 the CSW, led by twenty-two countries, primarily from the Eastern European bloc and new member states from the developing world, won a General Assembly resolution for a United Nations declaration to condemn discrimination against women. The Commission achieved this by presenting "discriminatory customs and traditions" as impediments to the economic transformation envisioned by the first United Nations Decade for Development.14 To the majority of UN members in the 1960s and 1970s, acting autonomously for the first time in post-war international relations, "Development" was the all-consuming issue.
A decade later, a similar strategy won support for the first UN-sponsored international women's conference. In the 1974 General Assembly sessions, the more recently admitted states, now formally recognized as the Group of 77, won passage of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States and the Declaration of New International Economic Order (NIEO), documents designed to take the initiative for defining the nature and emphasis of development away from the industrialized North. Implementation of the two documents had the potential to transform the underlying structures and daily practices of the international economy. These nations had thus demonstrated their ability to act as a third bloc of nations, negotiating between the West—Europe, North America, and Australasia—and Soviet-led Eastern Europe.15 Coupled with the recent declaration of a Second United Nations Development Decade, the male leadership of the Group of 77
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14 The sponsors of the Resolution were: Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Gabon, Guinea, Indonesia, Iran, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Togo, and Venezuela. See Arvonne S. Fraser, "The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (The Women's Convention)" in Winslow ed., fn., 1, p. 92; see also pp. 77-84.
Though envisioned initially as a monitoring body, the Commission on the Status of Women chose to play a more active role. The CSW wrote the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1967), and the subsequent Convention. They presented the Convention for government signatures in 1980 at the Copenhagen official Conference. The CSW continued its activities throughout the Decade, convening meetings and authorizing reports on special issues, for example: women under apartheid, domestic violence, women in prison and detention, stereotypes in the mass media, elderly women, refugees, the traffic in women and children.
15 By the end of the UN Decade, the Group of 77, founded in 1967, had 120 members.
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These political divisions and the purely strategic use and secondary status of women's issues within the UN were evident from the first planning for the year and its Conference. The Commission on the Status of Women had six months and less than $350,000 for the project and its attendant events. In contrast, the Population Conference of the previous year (1974) had over two years and a budget of $3 million for planning the events of the international gathering and for the meetings and sessions necessary for the drafting of the conference documents.16
When the members of the CSW first discussed the preliminary draft for the Plan of Action for International Women's Year, they did not agree even on basic questions. In language reminiscent of international elite women's groups of the 1930s, Western representatives focused on "equality," a strictly legalistic view defining women's political, economic, and familial rights only in terms of those enjoyed by men. Similarly, Eastern bloc members relying on the familiar tenets of international socialism explained that their women already enjoyed these rights and instead emphasized the need for all women to work for disarmament and peace. Members of Third World countries insisted that the primary focus had to be on development and endorsement of the New International Economic Order. The Saudi Arabian delegate believed that Arab women enjoyed "unwritten privileges" that already gave women "more equality than men."17
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16 Steinstra, p. 124. For a clear general history of the Commission on the Status of Women, see Margaret E. Galey, "Women Find a Place" and Allan et al., in Winslow, ed.; and Margaret E. Galey. "The Significance of the United Nations World Women's Conferences," in Auth, ed.
Ironically, the Decade coincided with a period of particular institutional disadvantage for the CSW. In the early 1980s its staff was relocated to Vienna, and its meetings cut to once every other year. The members had to obtain special permission to convene more often in preparation for the Nairobi Conference. The Nairobi "Strategies" called for increasing the budget and responsibilities of the CSW. The reorganization of the Commission between 1986 and 1995 raised the membership from 32 to 45. Asian, African, and Latin American delegates then outnumbered those from North America and Europe. After its reorganization the CSW decided to consider single broad issues in its sessions, discussed in five-year cycles. See Galey, in Winslow ed, p. 23.
17 Stienstra, p. 124. The Saudi Arabian delegate also saw the conference as potentially disruptive of "many time-honored institutions," a view revived with particular force by Islamic representatives at UN Conferences in the 1990s.
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The final draft document for Mexico City reflected each of these positions. Three themes clearly demarcated the sections for the Plan of Action: Equality, Development, Peace. In Mexico City, the 133 government delegations continued to press for their different agendas with 800 separate amendments to the Plan of Action and 168 additional resolutions. The Group of 77 presented its own Declaration of Mexico. In the end, the delegates enshrined rather than reconciled their ideological differences.18 They forwarded three separate types of documents: the Declaration, the Plan of Action, and the Resolutions (consolidated from 168 to 35) to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) as the final conference "Report."19
These documents from the 1975 Mexico City Conference demonstrate that, whether or not women or men spoke from these ideologically disparate positions, they had all subsumed the issue of women's rights within closed, pre-existing ideological frameworks of human relations, and had made the realization of women's rights a secondary, not a primary concern. They agreed on the disadvantaged material conditions under which the majority of the world's women lived. They disagreed, however, on the causes and the remedies for this disadvantaged state. Ending the subordination of women was not a goal in itself, nor was women's equal participation as active agents at society's many levels of decision making. Instead, women most often appear as passive victims of structures and practices the three groups of delegates had come to condemn.
While the Declaration of Mexico makes some attempt to link women to the three distinct ideological agendas, the Plan of Action explicitly favors the transformation of economic structures first, women's rights second.20 Women often come at the end of sentences and paragraphs, "Development" at the beginning. An introductory
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18 The delegates voted on the Declaration in the final plenary sessions. The Western bloc considered the document controversial for its adverse references to "zionism," apartheid, and its designation of the NIEO as the solution to women's disadvantaged status. Israel joined the U.S. in voting against the Declaration. Other Western allied nations abstained. Note that the official count is three negative votes, but that after the vote Denmark indicated that it would have abstained. See Report of the World Conference of the International Women's Year, Mexico City, 19 June-2 July 1975, United Nations Sales No. E.76.IV.1,p. 152.
19 See Allan, in Winslow, ed., pp. 39-41. For the official description of events, see the Report, Mexico City, pp. 150-52, 169-74, 177-79.
20 For example, see the Declaration of Mexico's statement of principles. It begins with a broad definition of "equality" and continues: "All obstacles that stand in the way of enjoyment by women of equal status with men must be eliminated in order to ensure their full integration into national development and their participation in securing and maintaining
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The Plan of Action does list "a minimum" set of objectives to be achieved by 1980, in the course of the succeeding five years. These more specific provisions reflect traditional Western remedies for women's disadvantaged status, for example: "increase in literacy," access to education and training, to voting and eligibility for elected office, to health services and "family planning." Technology can "help reduce the heavy workload of women," as would daycare, "[r]ecognition of the economic value of women's work in the home … and [of] voluntary activities not remunerated."22 But these objectives, like the broader development and disarmament goals supported by the Group of 77 and Eastern Europe and enunciated elsewhere in the Plan of Action, are no less subject to patriarchal attitudes and institutions. Women remain subject to the same inherent contradictions that govern all legalistic societies in which the state has both the authorization to give rights in principle through legislation, and to curtail them in practice through lack of enforcement. In the Mexico City Plan of Action, as in other United Nations documents, national governments remained the final arbiters. The Plan explains: "Since there are wide
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international peace." "Declaration of Mexico," Report, Mexico City, p. 4. See also pp.2-3.
See Principle 15 which also makes women a means to "development": "The full and complete development of any country requires the maximum participation of women as well as of men…: the under-utilization of the potential of approximately half of the world's population is a serious obstacle to social and economic development." "Declaration," Report, Mexico City, p. 5.
For explicit references to the NIEO, see Principles 14 and 18, p. 5.
21 "Plan of Action," Mexico City, pp. 11, 25, 24, 13. The third objective, "Peace," is also made contingent on the shift of economic resources envisioned by the Group of 77. Another introductory paragraph explains: "True peace cannot be achieved unless women share with men responsibility for establishing a new international economic order," p. 13.
22 "Plan of Action," Mexico City, pp. 16-17. This last clause and another reference to "effective utilization of volunteer experts in the setting and running of institutions and projects" could be to NGO activities.
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This paramount role assigned to the state by the Mexico City documents leaves women in a passive role. The tone and the language of the Declaration, the World Plan, and the Resolutions set the authors apart from their subjects, in this case the mass of the world's women. They describe a patriarchal hierarchy of disadvantage. A diverse range of men are present by implication. In contrast, the explicit provisions for women, like the general objectives of the Plan's introduction, give a simplistic image of "the woman." In the major sections of the Plan "Equality, Development and Peace," women lose their specificity and, in a predictable melding of traditional cultural and ideological images from East and West, North and South, become the "mother, worker and citizen."24
"Mother," the adult woman in the family, is by far the most common way in which women are identified in the documents of the Mexico City Conference. Though the Plan of Action calls for greater recognition of women's contributions to the family, and the according of "[h]igher status for this role in the home—as parent, spouse and homemaker," subsequent phrases suggest a more limiting, subordinate reality. A "higher value" is to be placed on these activities not to give agency and independence to women but in order to maintain "the family group," so that this state within a state can "fulfill its basic functions of the procreation and education of children."25
In sections on Employment, Health, Family, Population, and Housing, the simplistic image and superior tone predominate. Young girls become young women and then mothers.26 The woman in the family lives in a rural setting and measures are to be taken to assure that she does not move to urban areas. She must, however, have the right to free
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23 See Poovey, in Butler and Scott, eds., on this contradiction, p. 245. Note that the Plan of Action does ask that national "bodies" review legislation, establish commissions and "women's bureaux" to investigate and make recommendations. The Plan also suggests that implementation "will require a redefinition of certain priorities and a change in the pattern of government expenditure." For the provisions, see "Plan of Action," Mexico City, pp. 13-15.
24 "Plan of Action," Mexico City, p. 13.
25 "Plan of Action," Mexico City, p. 26. On the "binary logic" of such traditional views of sexual difference and the roles those difference dictate, see Butler and Scott, eds., "Introduction." The phrase "state within a state" and the implications of the macro and micro aspects of patriarchy come from Pathek and Raj, in Butler and Scott, eds., p. 265. See also Whitworth; she discusses "the ways in which knowledge about sexual difference is sustained, reproduced and manipulated by international institutions." See, for example, p. 4.
26 See, for example, "Plan of Action," Mexico City, pp. 22-26.
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The Declaration of Mexico and the Plan of Action do envisage activities outside of the family for some women. In these paragraphs the stereotype of the ignorant peasant mother gives way to a different, more European and North American model of the relatively privileged woman dividing her time between her family and her paid employment, between what the documents describe as "traditional" and "non-traditional" activities. There are tentative references to "training" and "inexpensive child care" to "free women and girls" from "domestic work," now described as "confining," rather than a woman's normal activity. Changes in housing designs would make "easier the pursuit of other interests." Staggered and flexible working hours, part-time work for "women and men," child care leave systems, and communal kitchens, would "help them to discharge household tasks more easily."28
The Mexico City Conference also presents an image of the woman working for wages, an image equally skewed by traditional attitudes. To describe such women, the elite authors of the Plan of Action generalize about women in industry, just as they did about women in the family. Surprisingly, however, these generalizations make no reference to women's other obligations as members of families. Instead they mirror the traditional language of labor unions and European socialist and communist party platforms. Under the broad rubric of "the worker," women, when not potentially, or actually pregnant, become to all intents and purposes men. It is this sexual transformation that entitles them to "equal" rights—for example: to training, to jobs, to equal pay for work of equal value, and to promotion to management status.29
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27 See "Plan of Action," Mexico City, pp. 20, 21, 26, 27, 28.
28 "Them," because the Declaration suggests that "[m]en should participate more actively, creatively and responsibly in family life … in order to enable women to be more intensively involved in the activities of their communities and with a view to combining effectively home and work possibilities of both partners." See "Plan of Action," Mexico City, pp. 21, 29-30, 27, 24; "Declaration of Mexico," p. 4.
29 "Plan of Action," Mexico City, pp. 23, 4, 22, 24. See Whitworth's discussion of the similar conflation of male and female workers by the International Labor Organization, Chapter 5; see also p. 76; and Poovey on rights, identity, and reproductive capacity, pp. 242-43.
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The model of the citizen in the 1975 Declaration, Plan of Action, and Resolutions comes directly from the patriarchal world system of Cold War era ideologies. In the sections devoted to "Peace" the binary division shifts from "Developed" and "Developing" to "oppressor" and "oppressed." The paragraphs, male-oriented by implication, invite female participation. They call for "the solidarity of women in all countries of the world," "acting as co-equals with men," to reject "intervention in the domestic affairs of States," to promote "real, general and complete disarmament," to "eliminate colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism, foreign domination and occupation, zionism, apartheid, racial discrimination."30
These provocative phrases represent the views of the Group of 77, of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Others, also in the section on "Peace," explicitly reflect the concerns of North America and Western Europe. They present a clearly elitist image of the "citizen." According to the Plan of Action, some women citizens—by implication, women similar to the authors of the document—are already active in public office, but still are not "equitably" represented. These women seek recognition and increased participation in the implicitly male-dominated political structures. To answer possible complaints about the lack of qualified women, they suggest that "studies" will "establish the levels of economic, social and political competence of the female compared to the male population for recruitment, nomination and promotion." These references, however, are not meant to describe all women. The majority of the world's women are presented as dependent, passive, marginal to the world's political institutions. Other clauses of the section on "Peace" explain and justify their continued exclusion. As described in the Plan of Action, these other women lack the "education, training, civil awareness and self-confidence to participate effectively in public life."31
MAINSTREAMING WOMEN: THE MID-DECADE CONFERENCE
FOR WOMEN IN COPENHAGEN (1980)
According to the U.S. press coverage of the 1980 Mid-Decade Conference in Copenhagen, and the accounts of the Western women participants, politics, politicians, and political ideology dominated the
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30 See the "Declaration of Mexico," p. 7; "Plan of Action," Mexico City, p. 18, and on the rights of the citizen generally, pp. 19-20.
31 "Plan of Action," Mexico City, p. 19.
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The opposition of the United States, and its decision to vote against the Programme as a whole once the inflammatory word "zionism" had been inserted into Paragraph 5, was no less politically motivated. In playing out this controversy, all of the delegates endorsed the realities of the patriarchal system of international relations. In fact, these participants,
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32 Østergaard as quoted in Lois A. West, "The United Nations Women's Conferences and Feminist Politics," in Meyers and Pruegl, eds., p. 180. On the comments of delegates about the primacy of "politics" and "ideological interests" over "matters of real concern to all women," see U.S. statement, Report of the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, Copenhagen, 14-30 July 1980, A/CONF. 94/35, p. 107. Other countries' comments follow, pp. 198-207. For a more general sense of how these attitudes colored the meetings of the Forum and the Conference, see Judith Zinsser Lippmann, "The Third Week in July" Women's Studies International Quarterly, vol. 6.5 (1983): pp. 547-57. The varied views of First and Third World participants can be found in "Letters/Comments," Signs, Vol. 6.4 (Summer 1981): 771-90; see especially, Nilüfer Çagatay and Ursula Funk, and Helen I. Safa.
The Copenhagen meetings began with evidence of specific measures for women. Delegates participated in the ceremonies surrounding the presentation of the new Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and many nations signed it. Arvonne Fraser believed that this Convention gave women the opportunity to support a "feminist" initiative without ever having to use the term "feminist" with its charged implications of Western European and North American cultural imperialism. Fraser as quoted in West, in Meyer and Pruegl, eds., p. 180.
At the conclusion of the Copenhagen Conference, only four countries—the United States, Australia, Israel, and Canada—voted against the Programme of Action. On a previous, separate vote on Paragraph 5, the U.S. had been joined by other Western European nations, for a total of 24 negative votes. Overall, however, it is significant that most nations at the Conference agreed to the condemnation of "zionism," equating it to a form of racism. See Report, Copenhagen, pp. 195, 197. See Jane S. Jaquette, "Losing the Battle/Winning the War: International Politics, Women's Issues, and the 1980 Mid-Decade Conference," in Winslow, ed., for an account of the Copenhagen meetings. Jaquette sees these events as part of the general isolation of the United States within the United Nations at this time. See pp. 46-47.
No one has yet considered how significant it may have been that the Copenhagen Programme of Action (unlike the drafts for Mexico City and subsequently for Nairobi) was not written by the Commission on the Status of Women, but by a special Preparatory Committee appointed by the Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, at the request of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). See Report, Copenhagen, for Preparatory Committee members and its formal relationship with the CSW, pp. 114-15.
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Thus, the resulting document (drafted by a special Preparatory Committee appointed by the Secretary General, not the CSW), the Copenhagen "Programme of Action for the Second Half of the United Nations Decade for Women," continued to reflect the ideologies and political agendas of the three blocs of delegates. As in Mexico City, female and male official representatives argued about the underlying causes of women's disadvantaged status and material conditions and favored different remedies. None overtly questioned or challenged the implicit acceptance of the worldwide patriarchal institutions and practices that govern national strategies and international relations, institutions, and practices that relegate women to subordinate roles and status.34
But despite these significant limitations, the Copenhagen Programme did advance women's interests. The final document places women in the mainstream of these ideologies and institutions. No longer are they just invited participants in the process of development. Generalized images of "the woman" defined by her reproductive function have been replaced by a multiplicity of images that describe and applaud women's autonomous activities in the economy and in the family. Education of every kind will be the means to increased agency for women. Some paragraphs even suggest a veiled gender critique of the international order in clear statements about the adverse effects for women, as distinct from men, of contemporary economic structures and cultural attitudes.
In the 1980 Copenhagen Programme of Action, as in the documents from the meetings in Mexico, "development" remains the objective,
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33 Inadvertently, these women created a simplistic binary opposition between "feminist" and "political" that obscured the multiplicity of much more significant tensions in international and national relations, between women's rights and traditional patriarchal structures and ideologies, between images of women as passive recipients and active agents. See Whiteworth on the idea of the tension between structures and agency, p. 67.
For an example of the use of this simplistic approach in analyzing the Programme of Action, see Stienstra on the relegation of the North American term "sexism" to a footnote, p. 129; see also p. 128. In fact, this did not mean the rejection of the realities of discrimination against women as women. Instead, the fact of the inclusion of the term at all represented a concession to Western women on the part of Third World and Eastern European delegates, not a defeat, as it is often portrayed. Note that, in contrast to writing by North American participants, observers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while critical of the U.S. position in Copenhagen, wrote positively of the Conference and its Programme of Action. See, for examples, references in notes 3, 6, 32, 66, and 70 of this essay.
34 For example, as in the Mexico "Plan of Action," the state's rights to set priorities was honored. See "Programme of Action," Copenhagen, pp. 12, 55.
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The economic sections of the Copenhagen Programme offer multiple images of women and remedial provisions from many different perspectives. Two premises unite these images: women are described outside of the family context, regardless of their reproductive capacity, and structural obstacles and societal attitudes limit them, not their physiology or inherent intelligence. The restriction of women "to the domestic sphere" and the "division of labour" that caused it, "has unduly burdened" women. The first "National Target" of the 1980 Programme is reaffirmation of the "joint responsibility of men and women for the welfare of the family in general and the care of their children in particular." The "community at large" also shares in these responsibilities and thus there should be government-sponsored child care (even during school holidays), parental leave for either parent, and flexible work hours. All women, like all men, are presumed to combine work outside the home with parental obligations.37
Women's work life as reflected in the provisions of the Copenhagen
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35 See "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 44-46 for specific ways in which women would be integrated into development; for theoretical statements quoted, see pp. 6, 48, 5, 14 (NIEO).
36 "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 15, 7, 8.
37 The bulk of the references to women's reproductive function come in the section on "Health," and refer to better care during pregnancy, to "safe and effective fertility regulations"
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For women in the tertiary and industrial sectors, "National Strategies" on employment call for government protection of rights and for access to the means to advance and prosper. Small-scale women traders, and particularly "domestic services workers" require credit and marketing facilities, the rights to unionize, to improved working conditions, to equal pay for work of equal value, and to the knowledge of processes and technology that can guarantee "new employment and occupational mobility."40
The choice of "Education " as the third subtheme for the Copenhagen Conference underlined the commitment to women's agency. Many kinds of training and obstacles to that training are described, reflecting a new appreciation of the differing circumstances of women around the world and the vast range of problems they encountered. The Mexico City Plan of Action had emphasized education, but with implied limitations. Girls were to receive training specifically directed
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(the euphemism for access to birth control). Unlike the Mexico City "Plan," this "Programme" asks that "doctors and other health professionals" also concern themselves with women's health needs other than those related to "pregnancy and childbirth." "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 7, 16, 20, 27, 31-32, 40, 47.
38 "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 6, 17.
39 "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 19, 24, 46, 47, 48.
40 "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 27-31, 47.
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Like the delegates in Mexico City, government representatives in Copenhagen made no overt criticism of the subordinating ideologies and institutions endorsed by their national systems. However, unlike their counterparts in Mexico City, in the Copenhagen Programme of Action they identified some of these structures and practices as specifically harmful to women, and thus implied a critique of the way in which societies work.42 Patriarchal cultural understandings, "men's and women's attitudes towards their roles and responsibilities in society," are the first change targeted in the section on "Family." In addition, class "biases and prejudices" are seen to have "hinder[ed] understanding of the role and situation of women." The Programme holds the mass media accountable as "one of the basic means in society of overcoming the contradiction in, on the one hand, the presentation of women as passive, inferior beings having no social significance and, on the other, an accurate picture of their increasing role and contribution to society at large."43
The authors of the Copenhagen Programme also noted the adverse
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41 For provisions of the Mexico City Plan of Action, see "Plan of Action," pp. 20, 21-22; Resolution No. 24, Mexico City, pp. 99-100. For Copenhagen, see "Programme of Action," pp. 20, 21, 23, 35-37, 41, 47.
42 Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sunder in their essay "Shahbano," in Butler and Scott, eds., suggest that there is malleability within fixed and coherent parameters, particularly within aspects of international relations. In Copenhagen, this malleability allowed the inclusion of new understandings and provision for the creation of others; see p. 260. Whitworth also discusses the apparent contradiction between acceptance of patriarchal terms of reference on the one hand, and a multiplicity of women's perspectives on the other. See pp. xii, 4, 70, 71.
43 The Programme also mentions "[c]ommercial advertising" as manipulating patterns of consumption ("Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 16, 37, 24).
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Most significantly, many sections of the 1980 Programme of Action call for the gathering and analysis of statistics: to reflect "unpaid work in the household and in agricultural tasks"; to document the extent of women's absence from paid employment "because of maternity"; new "census and survey forms" that will provide data for evaluating the progress made by women towards development. The Programme imagines governments setting "qualitative and quantitative targets," commissioning "periodic reviews," setting "timetables" for increasing the numbers of women active in politics, "statistical indicators" to measure and monitor women's "progress towards equality." Overall in the Copenhagen Programme, there is the presumption that women's material conditions and participation in structures and institutions will change once there is an "Improvement of the data base [emphasis in text]."46 Quantitative data in the world of international relations constitutes evidence. "Evidence," as part of the patriarchal system of validation, has the status of irrefutable proof. Statistical proof, it was assumed, could be the means to force patriarchal institutions to act for the improvement of the lives of the world's women.47
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44 "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 7, 13, 28. Note, however, that the realities of national and international politics leave the responsibility for designing and establishing transitional "compensatory mechanisms aimed at achieving equality of opportunity" (the United Nations version of "affirmative action") to the goodwill of governments. See p. 16.
45 "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 7, 12, 13, 16, 22, 28.
46 "Programme," Copenhagen, pp. 17-18, 21, 24, 29, 54, 71.
47 As explained by Whitworth, "While the institutions had been created to maintain the status quo, they were also a play in which actors could organize to oppose that status quo." Whitworth, p. 73.
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TRANSFORMING SOCIETIES: THE END-OF-DECADE
CONFERENCE IN NAIROBI (1985)
For the 1985 Nairobi Conference, the Economic and Social Council again gave the Commission on the Status of Women responsibility for the draft document and the organization of the Conference. The three major sections of the final Nairobi "Forward-Looking Strategies" reaffirmed the goals of the decade as first enunciated in 1975: Equality, Development, and Peace. But within each category, paragraphs followed a three-part format emphasizing action over intention: "obstacles" and "basic strategies" lead to "measures for the implementation of the basic strategies." Every category covered in the sections reflects the increased sophistication of the framers, not only in their understanding of the realities of international relations, but also in their ability to turn those realities to the service of women's interests worldwide. As the Forward-Looking Strategies attest, they redirected the language of the document to focus on women and a women's agenda. The document explains: "the advancement of women is without doubt a pre-condition for the establishment of a humane and progressive society." Thus, women have become central, not peripheral, to the realization of the broader goals of the United Nations.48
This clear shift in focus is reflected in the increased specificity of the images of women presented in the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies. There are women in "industrial countries" and women among the "rural and urban poor," for whom the solution of problems is "often a matter of survival." In a new category, women in "areas of special concern" are "traditional healers," "informed consumers," "single mothers," "birth attendants," intellectuals, abused women, planners, indigenous women, the unemployed, pregnant and lactating mothers, young wage earners, members of minorities, disabled women, refugees, migrants, the landless, managers, union members, politicians, "service workers."49
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48 See, for example, "Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women," in Report of the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, Nairobi, 15-26 July 1985, A/CONF.116/28/Rev. 1, pp. 5, 15.
49 On the need to understand differences between women, see "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, p. 29. Other references come from throughout the text. See "Areas of Special Concern," pp. 66-75.
Even a category like "prostitutes" indicates the greater understanding of women's lives. The Mexico City and Copenhagen resolutions and the paragraphs of the main documents instructed governments to eradicate the profession. All women had been "forced" into the practice as part of the worldwide trafficking in women and children. Prostitutes collectives
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In sections on "obstacles" to equality, the Nairobi Strategies explicitly identify gender discrimination based, for example, on sexual stereotypes, as a significant cause of women's disadvantaged status. References to "gender-based discrimination" begin in the introductory paragraphs. "Occupational barriers and taboos," and "the continuation of women's stereotyped reproductive and productive roles, justified primarily on physiological, social and cultural grounds, has subordinated them … and in fact [has] contributed to the increased burden of work placed on women." Not content with citing this cause of women's unequal status, the Nairobi document states, "there is no physiological basis for regarding the household and family as essentially the domain of women, for the devaluation of domestic work and for regarding the capacities of women as inferior to those of men." As in Copenhagen, the media with their "especially degrading images of women in articles and programs disseminated world wide," are pointedly named as a cause. Other paragraphs call for changes in curricula, teaching materials, and methods. For the first time, pornography is specifically cited for its "obscene portrayals of women and the portrayal of women as sex objects."50
In addition, the Forward-Looking Strategies criticize the discriminatory assumptions and actions of male supervisors at government agricultural extension centers, rural project managers, and staff members of international agencies and organizations.51 In many sections "special measures" are recommended which will open more occupational fields to women until "equality of opportunity and treatment have been achieved." The Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies flatly insist that governments "challenge and abolish all discriminatory perceptions, attitudes and practices by the year 2000."52
In contrast to the emphasis on male-defined political ideologies in the goals of the conference documents from Mexico City and Copenhagen, and focus of the Nairobi Strategies definitively shifts to women. For example, there is to be recognition of "the centrality of women's role in development" and the redirection of "policy programs for the
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first lobbied delegates and NGOs in Copenhagen demanding the same rights as other waged workers: and end to discriminatory legislation, access to health care, social security benefits, and police protection from violence. Finally in Nairobi, only "forced prostitution" was prohibited, leaving those who had chosen this employment entitled to all benefits guaranteed to other women. "Plan of Action," Mexico City, p. 31 and Resolution No. 7; Copenhagen, Resolution No. 43; "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 70-71.
50 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 6, 17, 24, 26, 28, 44, 46, 76, 87; see also pp. 19, 50.
51 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 76, 79.
52 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 23, 24.
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The general recommendations of the 1985 Forward-Looking Strategies go beyond their predecessors and insist on women's significance at all levels of decision making, with particular emphasis in the sections on "peace." Equal participation begins within the household (including decisions on the size of the family and the spacing of births) and reaches to "all aspects of international organizations and activities."55 The training necessary for professional qualification in the civil service, government, and diplomatic corps concerned with peace and disarmament must be made available to women. For, as the Forward-Looking Strategies with its focus on women explains, "Universal and durable peace cannot be attained without the full and equal participation of
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53 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 79, 81.
54 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 20, 33-34, 46-48, 81.
"Science and technology," a subsection of recommended "measures for the implementation of the basic strategies at the national level," illustrates this major shift in emphasis from men's to women's perspectives particularly well. Previous Decade documents noted the harmful effects on women's health and working conditions occasioned by new technologies, and then shifted to general mention of their need for access to training. Overall, women were portrayed as victims or indirect beneficiaries of science and technology. In contrast, in 1985, "women should be viewed as users and agents of change." Needed education is defined more specifically: science, mathematics, engineering. Women must be guaranteed their "fair share of jobs at all levels" in the new technological industries. In rural areas women have different needs, and "appropriate technology" emerges as a key concept. They are to be "operators and owners" of essential local transportation, and to plan, implement, and manage projects, like those to supply water, that address women's traditional responsibilities. One of the most popular exhibit areas of the Nairobi Forum was called "Tech and Tools" and was devoted to the idea of "appropriate technology" for women ("Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 46, 47, 49, 51).
55 For example, noting the absence of women "from senior management levels," the Strategies call for an "equitable balance between women and men staff members at managerial and professional levels." See "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 24-25, 31, 32, 77.
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The different sections of the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies go further in their analysis of the causes of women's disadvantaged status than previous conference documents and constitute a sharp critique of national and international ideologies and institutions. The authors identify a "power structure that controls society and determines development issues and peace initiatives." In the case of "peace," that power structure is clearly male. "Mankind is confronted with a choice: to halt the arms race and proceed to disarm or face annihilation." "Mankind's choice," is juxtaposed in the next sentence to "the growing opposition of women to the danger of war…." According to the "Strategies," women must function within an "obstructive" "societal context" that is patriarchal by implication.57
Paragraphs dwell and elaborate on the constraining and denigrating structures, both national and international, within which women have had to act. Influences of class and region that privileged some women over others in the Mexico City Plan of Action have been superseded by criticisms of patriarchal attitudes and practices limiting the advancement of all women. The Forward-Looking Strategies speak of "factors intensifying the economic exploitation, marginalization and oppression of women [that] stemmed from chronic inequalities, injustices and exploitative conditions at the family, community, national, subregional, regional and international levels."58
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56 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 55, 56, 57, 64. On the significance of the "Peace Tent," see, for example, Stienstra, pp. 115, 148. In an implicit reference to South Africa and Palestine, women are encouraged to support each other's "initiatives and action relating either to universal issues, such as disarmament … or to specific conflicts between or within States." Note that the Strategies also refer to "threats to the peace" as obstacles to the realization of equal status for women, and to the special vulnerability of women and children in armed conflicts, pp. 56, 57.
57 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 16, 59.
58 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 5, 15. For this concept of women's actions within "structural inequalities," see Whitworth, p. 67.
Poovey discusses it more generally in terms of the variation between definitions of rights and of enforcement, and by implication, how this leads to the deprivation of rights. "[T]he argument for abstract rights will always simultaneously mask and assume a set of social conditions that actually defines those rights and delimits who has access to them. Once exercised,
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On the national level, the clearest structural obstacles are laws which discriminate against women. These, in conjunction with "customary provisions," "customary law," "civil, penal and commercial codes and certain administrative rules and regulations," have created what the document refers to as "compound discrimination," (both de jure and de facto) and have subjected women to "double standards in every aspect of life." Even in those states where laws have been altered, "sharp contrasts between legislative changes and effective implementation" remain. In terms of the specific goals to be realized by 2000, the Forward-Looking Strategies indicate: "[a]bove all, laws guaranteeing equality for women in all spheres of life must by then be fully and comprehensively implemented to ensure a truly equitable socio-economic framework."59
The Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies criticize the international socio-economic framework as well. The Strategies explain that women have been the most affected by the structural readjustment policies (and the economic recessions that accompanied them) mandated by international lending institutions. Thus, the Nairobi document provides evidence for and highlights what the Secretary General of the Nairobi Conference, Letitia Shahani, described as the "paradox between the international commitment to the advancement of women and the increasing structural imbalance in the global economy."60
Using much of the language, emphasis, and information of the two statistical studies done in preparation for the Conference, the World Survey on the Role of Women in Development and Selected Statistical Indicators of the Status of Women, the Strategies assert that women are no longer marginal to the international economy, whether the topic is
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‘rights’ and ‘choice’ cannot remain abstract, and the concrete situation in which they are embedded limits what these concepts mean and who will be able to exercise them" (Poovey, in Butler and Scott, eds., p. 250).
59 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 15, 17, 18. See also pp. 19, 84.
The Forward-Looking Strategies pinpoint other internal "structural imbalances that compounded and perpetuated women's disadvantages in society." In particular, "Concerted attention should be directed towards the establishment of a system of sharing parental responsibilities by women and men in the family and by society." This would entail both "structural and attitudinal changes." Changes in tax structures and provision of daycare facilities are but two of the specific measures to be implemented, that together would mean that governments had given priority to the development of "social infrastructure" that would "reduce the ‘double burden’ of working women in both rural and urban areas" ("Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 6, 17, 32, 35, 54).
60 On how integral women are to development, see "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 6-7, 15; see also pp. 27, 28. On the reduction of government services because of economic recession, see p. 28. See Shahani, p. 3.
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THE NATURE OF VICTORY: CONFLICT AND
COOPERATION REWARDED
In this analysis I do not mean to diminish the significance to the Nairobi delegates of the political realities of traditional international relations. The Nairobi delegates, like their counterparts in Mexico City and Copenhagen, had to satisfy the dictates of their governments' and blocs' official policies. They became women's advocates and their final document an international women's manifesto, through their remarkable ability to prevent the traditional patriarchal set of loyalties and responsibilities from deflecting them from their own unspoken political goal for the Conference. Though few would have described themselves as "feminists," the majority of delegates in Nairobi were committed to approving a document that presented an image of women's global solidarity, not their division and fragmentation. Specifically, in the language and practices of the United Nations, this meant the
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61 The two publications produced by the Secretariat between 1980 and 1985 are Selected Statistics and Indicators of the Status of Women, 3 May 1985, A/CONF.116/10 and World Survey on the Role of Women in Development, 11 December 1984, A/CONF.116/4. The astonishing number of gaps in the data for countries in every region of the world led to more insistent calls for research and for the collection of "gender-specific data" at Nairobi. The categories of the Survey included, for example, education, waged labor, marriage and fertility, health and nutrition, and political participation. For examples of the renewed call for statistics, monitoring, and research, see "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 76-84.
62 "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 23, 29, 31.
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The delegates achieved this consensus because of a variety of compromises and decisions made even before the official opening of the Conference in July 1985. In preparatory meetings called by the Commission on the Status of Women national representatives worked through all but the most difficult issues. In Nairobi only 76 paragraphs, approximately twenty percent of the Strategies, remained to be debated. In special sessions held during the two days before the plenary convened, key member nations agreed on a definition of "consensus." The concept would be utilized "without prejudice" and would constitute "no precedent." Thus, a country's vote could not be used in other United Nations or international relations contexts. Procedures in the two drafting committees of the Conference worked for agreement, not intransigence. For example, the presiding officer of the Second Committee made delegates who disagreed leave the room and return only after they had formulated a compromise.
On the final night of the Conference, by a variety of procedural stratagems, including breaking for a recess of over five hours, Margaret Kenyatta, President of the Conference, gaveled through the most controversial paragraph, No. 95. This section had originally included a condemnation of "zionism," the issue that had occasioned so much controversy in Mexico City and in Copenhagen. In its amended form in the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies, this provocative clause became the less specific condemnation of "all forms of racism and racial discrimination." Neither the supporters of Palestine, nor of Israel, dared oppose by a negative vote.64 The rest of the contested paragraphs
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63 The "consensus" of Nairobi, however, allowed delegates to express a country's "reservation" to a particular paragraph. On this acknowledgment of differences between countries and the varying rates of changes in particular women's lives, see "Forward-Looking Strategies," Nairobi, pp. 15, 16. Most of the reservations by the U.S. delegation appear asterisked in the text of the "Strategies." For those of other countries, see the Report, Nairobi, pp. 143-57.
64 The paragraph is identified by a different number in the draft "Strategies," No. 94bis. All accounts speak of the presiding officer Margaret Kenyatta's actions throughout the Conference. She was key to the compromise wording and the long negotiations that evening over the final version of this paragraph and other controversial motions. Also significant was the desire on the part of the Group of 77 that this first Women's Conference in Africa be a success. Maureen Reagan, head of the United States delegation, also played a role in creating this appearance, if not literal reality, of consensus. For example, she announced in one press conference, "Everything is negotiable." See Judith P. Zinsser "Nairobi Confab Ends
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Historically, the Decade, its official governmental conferences, and the NGO organized Tribune and Forums, represent another chapter in the evolution of the international women's movement. North American and European activists for women's rights first corresponded and consulted with each other in the 1840s. At the end of the nineteenth century wage-earning women from Eastern and Western Europe were active in the Socialist Internationals, and privileged women leaders from the Middle East joined the multinational groups working for women's right to vote. Peace advocacy before and after World War I drew in elite women from Latin American countries, Australasia, and Japan. In 1931 a number of these and other international women's organizations created a formal liaison committee to lobby the League of Nations and the ILO, a forerunner of women's NGO activities with the UN and its affiliated agencies after World War II.66 But it was the United Nations Decade for Women from 1975-85 that gave women activists the opportunity to make the movement truly international and, whether they wished it or not, radicalized their agendas and perspectives.67
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On High Note," New Directions for Women vol. 14 (5) (September/October 1985), pp. 1, 12, 14; and Charlotte G. Patton, "Women and Power: The Nairobi Conference, 1985," in Winslow, ed., pp. 63-71.
65 See on this point Nilüfer Çagatay, Caren Grown, and Aida Santiago, "The Nairobi Women's Conference: Toward a Global Feminism?" Signs, Vol. 12.2 (Summer 1986): 404.
66 The organizations represented included, among others: International Council of Women, International Women's Suffrage Alliance, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, International Women's Christian Temperance Union, International Association of University Women, International YWCA. The League of Nations provided a forum for these elite women leaders, but with little substantive action. The League embarked on a study of the status of women, but it was incomplete at the outbreak of World War II. See Carol Miller "Geneva—The Key to Equality': Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations," Women's History Review, Vol. 3.2 (1994): 219-45. I am grateful to Karen Offen for this reference.
67 On the international women's movement see: Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Amrita Basu with the assistance of C. Elizabeth McGory, The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995); Suki Ali, Kelley Coates,
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Sheer numbers of women leaders from around the world, interacting for the first time, forced this radicalization and the enunciation of a broad, inclusive definition of "feminism." Over 3,000 African women attended the NGO and Conference sessions in Nairobi. Over 2,000 women from all over the world participated in workshops organized by DAWN (Development Alternatives for a New Era), the NGO founded by Third World women to define and implement "alternative visions" of development, formulated from women's, not men's, perspectives.68 In Nairobi "feminism" could manifest itself as a demand for "sexual egalitarianism," for the fulfillment of "basic needs," or as a call to international lenders for a debt moratorium.69
Senegalese women explained that the Decade gave them " ‘le droit à la parole’—the right to speak out, and the right to be heard."70 Others measured success in networks established, the numbers of new government offices concerned with women's advancement, or in the effectiveness of NGOs, UN staff, and government delegates in raising women's issues and perspectives at subsequent UN conferences on the environment, population, and human rights.71
In their own countries, within the UN hierarchy, at international meetings, the insistence on new research and data gave advocates for women a means to confront patriarchal attitudes and frameworks
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and Wangui Wa Goro, eds., Global Feminisms: Politics and Identity in a Changing World (New York: Routledge, 1999).
68 Their book, Development Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women's Perspectives, was written and published for distribution at this workshop. See Stienstra on DAWN, p. 113.
69 See Çagatay et al., pp. 405, 407, 408-409.
70 Fatou Sow, Issues, p. 32. On the views of Third World Women see also Ifi Amandiume, Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women Struggle for Culture, Power and Democracy (New York: Zed Books, Ltd., 2000), especially pp. 11-17. Two First World authors have examined more inclusive definitions of "feminism": See Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Angela Miles, Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions 1960s-1990s (New York: Routledge, 1996). See also the collection Global Feminisms Since 1945: A Survey of Issues and Controversies, ed. Bonnie G. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2000).
71 On government initiatives see Amrita Basu, Signs, Vol. 11.3 (Spring 1986): 604-605; on NGOs see Galey, in Auth, ed., pp. 22-23. A coalition like the ones mentioned won passage of the UN Declaration Against Violence Towards Women, a Special Rapporteur to study incidents of violence, and condemnation of "systematic rape in time of war" as a "crime against humanity." For an account of these activities at the United Nations Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, see Charlotte Bunch and Niamh Reilly, Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women's Human Rights (New Brunswick, NJ, and New York: Center for Women's Global Leadership and UNIFEM, 1994).
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These kinds of demands indicated that advocates for women could no longer ignore the inherent contradiction of their position. As the Forward-Looking Strategies demonstrate, even the most privileged among the women leaders from North America and Europe came to question whether women could ever become defining participants of ideologies and the equals of men in structures predicated on their exclusion and disadvantage. Legal definitions of equality and access to traditionally male-dominated institutions even in the most industrialized nations did not bring the realization of basic rights for all women.73 A worldwide change in the balance of power and privilege between the sexes demanded transformations far more radical than those envisioned by men in their New International Economic Order.
How did so many women from such diverse circumstances reach these conclusions? Beyond some biographical sketches of the presiding officers of the conferences and forums, no study exists of the women and men who lobbied for the Decade, who organized the hundreds of NGO sessions, wrote the Conference documents, who argued and maneuvered the Plans, Programmes, and Strategies through to final
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72 In addition to its call for statistical studies, the Copenhagen Conference established INSTRAW, the International Research and Training Institute for Women, and presumed that it would take a key role, as indeed it did, in designing ways to measure the "quantitative" and "qualitative improvements in the status of women." See "Programme," Copenhagen, p. 6. A director of INSTRAW, Dunja Pastizzi-Terencic, revised the UN statistical methodology so that numbers could be disaggregated by sex (Ashworth, Introduction, "Special Issue," Women's Studies International Forum, p. 95). Subsequently, governments have gradually agreed to include unpaid labor in calculations of national economic activity. Canada added questions on unpaid labor to its census survey in 1996 (Barbara Arneil, Politics and Feminism [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers: 1999], p. 60).
73 For discussion of this paradox, see Whitworth, p. 157. For the reaction of a woman leader, see Peggy Antrobus, quoted in Stienstra, pp. 112-13. Joan W. Scott has explored this problem from the perspective of another paradox, women who emphasize their similarity to men and advocate their inclusion as equals of men, while at the same time calling for solidarity among women as separate, distinct, and therefore different from men. See Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
For thoughtful criticisms by First and Third World women of the Decade and of the subsequent conference in Beijing in 1995, because of the continuing narrowness of traditional calls for "equality" of rights, for the lack of resources allocated to women's concerns, and for the inherent contradictions of women's situation, see Stienstra, pp. 157-58; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, " ‘Woman’ as Theatre: UN Conference on Women, Beijing 1995," Radical Philosophy, Vol. 75 (Jan./Feb.): 2-4; Hilary Charlesworth, "Women as Sherpas: Are Global Summits Useful for Women?" and Mallika Duff, "Some Reflections on US Women of Color and the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and NGO Forum in Beijing, China," Feminist Studies, Vol. 22.3 (Fall 1996): 537-47 and 519-28.
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These results have significance beyond their service to women. They counter a frequent critique of the United Nations: that it accomplishes "nothing," just the production of reams and reams of paper filled with well-intentioned but useless words. The Women's Decade, its UN-sponsored forums and conferences, however divisive, and the studies, declarations, conventions, and reports produced under its auspices, have political force. The Decade, its formal meetings, its Plan and Programme of Action and the list of Forward-Looking Strategies gave implicit and explicit power to women, to those who attended the sessions, and to those who participated in deliberations at every stage of the proceedings. Most importantly women in every kind of social, economic, and cultural circumstance later used their experiences and the UN-sanctioned words and phrases to work towards an end to all women's disadvantaged status, and thus demonstrated how the United Nations can be a means to advance the human rights of all peoples.
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| Introduction | Document List |
First Document |