 |
WAND
and the UN |
The
UN and U.S. Women
July 2005
by
Sayre Sheldon, WAND president emerita
Yes,
Virginia, there is an international women’s
movement; and much of it comes from the United Nations.
Why don’t we hear more about it? Because
we in the United States don’t tend to look much
beyond our borders for social change. And because
we have an administration which prefers to act alone
and especially finds it hard to acknowledge the importance
of the UN.
But around the world, the UN has developed
a series of initiatives for the rights of women that
essentially act as international law. As American
women, do we need to connect with this global movement?
Of course we do—we have plenty to learn from
the international women’s movement; it not only
strengthens our work but there is much we in turn
can do to make it stronger.
After all, much of this movement started here in the
United States. An American woman, Eleanor
Roosevelt, was instrumental in the formation of the
UN in 1945, and she led the world’s first Human
Rights Commission. By building human rights
into all of its programs, the UN could not ignore
women’s rights. For the first time in history,
human rights became women’s rights. The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN General
Assembly in 1948, sets out full equality for women
although women are not mentioned specifically except
in marriage and motherhood. It is interesting today
to read a document that uses the male pronoun throughout.
Perhaps that should have been a warning to women that
they would have a long, uphill, unfinished battle
to equate human rights with women’s rights!
Much of this struggle has gone on
within the UN itself, where the original delegations
were almost exclusively male—and still are from
many countries. Power to govern around the world still
lay largely with men. But the work of many women and
women’s organizations worldwide led to a series
of UN conferences for women beginning with Mexico
in 1975 at which platforms were adopted to bring rights
to women everywhere. The last major conference was
held in Beijing in 1995. Since then much work has
gone in each year at the Status of Women conferences
every March at the UN where the Beijing Platform
is updated every five years. In 2000, the UN Security
Council adopted Resolution 1325 to include women in
all conflict prevention, protection during conflict,
and rebuilding after conflict. March 8th is celebrated
as International Women’s Day, a day to estimate
the progress made and rededicate efforts to continue
that progress.
International Women’s Day, however, has little
or no attention in the U.S. This oversight is connected
with a larger failing: the U.S.’s gradual repudiation
of the UN. The relationship has been an uneasy one
over the years, with various administrations preferring
isolationist policies or preferring to see the U.S.
acting on its own in international situations. These
policies look worse when we see what they mean to
women.
Unable
to adopt an Equal Rights Amendment, the U.S. has failed
to ratify CEDAW, the UN convention to eliminate discrimination
against women, which puts us in a small category of
the world’s worst countries in denying women
their rights. Why should this matter to U.S.
women who certainly have many of the rights listed
in the Universal Declaration and who have the highest
standard of living in the world? Wait a minute, many
women will say, our goals have certainly not been
reached and many issues jump out: lack of equal pay,
protection against violence, unequal political representation,
etc. And worse, as women we have little voice in the
wars our country engages in or the vast military budgets
which starve our social and environmental programs.
If women had the ERA and CEDAW to support their issues,
they could be using them as successfully -- as example
after example shows women in other countries using
CEDAW and now, Resolution 1325, to gain needed reforms.
We could learn new tactics from these women for how
to make changes at home and we could find encouragement
in having solidarity with women everywhere. Women
share the same needs worldwide and easily enter coalitions
to work more efficiently and productively.
For U.S. women there is another important
reason to start connecting with the UN now: perhaps
it has never been under such a concerted attack as
it is today. The right in the U.S. has tended
to fight the UN, wrongly defining it as a threat to
U.S. sovereignty. The Bush administration has carried
this fight to a new level, allowing the religious
right to influence policies to the point of threatening
the very survival of the UN For women the costs have
been great: the U.S. withdrew its funding for the
UN Population Fund in 2002 and more recently tried
to reverse progress on women’s rights around
the world by using its opposition to abortion to halt
progress on implementing the Beijing Platform.
These negative pressures are only
part of what women at the UN are enduring today.
When 8,000 women came to the Beijing plus 5 Conference
in March, 2005, some argued that women’s rights
had gone backwards since 9/11 due to the predominance
of militarism and fundamentalism. “How do we
revitalize the international feminist movement?”
a delegate from India asked. U.S. women who believe
this should happen have a special role--educating
their sisters about the resources the UN has for
bringing about this revitalization. WAND’s mission
is perfectly in harmony with that of the UN’s
women’s movement—women’s rights
and the rights of all humanity can only be attained
in a peaceful world and of course, that peaceful world
can only be brought about by finally recognizing women’s
essential role in making this world a reality.
Sayre
Sheldon, UN representative for WAND and on the NGO
UN Working Group for Women, Peace and Security.
