General Background
While this happened in Beijing, China after 10 years of the ‘Decade for Women’, 20,000+ attended an NGO forum. Four women addressed the conference.
Talk 1: Opening Address, Plenary Session, by Gertude Mongella
Talk 1 – Background
Gertrude Mongella b. 1945
Gertrude Mongella is a Tanzanian politician and women’s rights advocate, who had served in a number of official roles in Tanzania and in the U.N. on the topic of women. Years after she gave this address to the U.N. Conference on Women, she became the first President of the Pan-African Parliament.
Talk 1 – Recap
This forum is a tapestry woven by women… that ’embodies the aspirations hopes and actions which will guide us all into the twenty first century […] there can be no spectators, no side-liners, no abstainers for this is a crucial social agenda which affects all humanity.’
All women attending should become ‘committed crusaders’ for the cause. A few points:
- ‘There is a need to look at women’s issues in a holistic manner[…]’ Women helped men abolish slavery, liberate from colonialism, and dismantle apartheid; ‘It is now the turn of men to join women in their struggle for equality.’
- ‘[…] because of the crosscutting nature of women’s issues, it is imperative that each issue is given due weight and consideration.’
- We have to recognize the ‘inter-generational link which is unique to women.’
- We have learned that it is up to us women to achieve equality. After significant research, it is evident that ‘women fare badly relavtive to men.
This last decade of the twentieth century is crucial. We must band together beyond dividing lines, work with men and the youth. We must address ‘eradication of illiteracy, ill-health, poverty, unemployment, violence and promotion of decision making and empowerment.’
‘The basis of change is here’ but ‘action is the only way forward.’
Wars and armed conflict must stop. ‘This platform will not see light as long as the issue of peace is not properly addressed.’
Talk 2: The Indigenous Women’s Network: Our Future, Our Responsibility by Winona LaDuke
Talk 2 – Background
Winona LaDuke b. 1959
Winona LaDuke is an environmentalist and Native American activist in the United States. She is the first Native American women receive an Electoral College vote for Vice President.
Talk 2 – Recap
‘The Earth is our Mother’ and sustains life.’ ‘all females, are the manifestation of Mother Earth in human form.’ Chief Seattle once said ‘what befalls the Earth, befalls the People of the Earth.’ That is today’s reality of the status of women and Indigenous peoples. As industrialism developed a predator-prey relationship with the earth, so too with women.
Most matrilineal societies have been obliterated by colonialism and industrialism. Mine does too.
In North America, Indigenous societies remain in a predator-prey relationship with industrial societies. They took the earth and misuse it which hurts women. Pollution & environmental contamination hurts women most due to breast cancer and milk contamination.
So we see, ‘what befalls our Mother Earth, befalls her daughter’ – women.
If we are not healthy we can not fight for ourselves.
Equal pay for dominant societies is not a just cause if it’s based on unsustainable consumption models and hurts other women’s rights elsewhere in the world.
The struggle is to ‘recover our status of Daughters of the Earth.’
Talk 3: Statement of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, by Palesa Beverly Ditsie
Talk 3 – Background
Palesa Beverly Ditsie b. 1971
Beverly is a South African lesbian rights activist and film maker. She is one of the organizers of the first Pride March in South Africa. Her statement is the first to the U.N. on LGBT issues. A year before her statement marked South Africa’s first elections with universal suffrage.
Talk 3 – Recap
I come from South Africa where last year in 1994, President Nelson Mandela said discrimination based on sexual orientation would never again happen. He received ‘resounding applause’ for this.
Though it’s against the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, ‘violence, harassment and discrimination’ happens to lesbians every day. ‘Women who love women are fired from their jobs; forced into marriages; beaten and murdered in their homes and on the streets; and have their children taken away by hostile courts. Some commit suicide due to the isolation and stigma that they experience within their families, religious institutions and their broader community.’
The ‘Platform for Action’ in this conference needs to take the term ‘sexual orientation’ out of brackets, and recognize discrimination based on sexual orientation as a violation of a basic human right.
‘Anyone who is truly committed to women’s human rights must recognize that every woman has the right to determine her sexuality free of discrimination and oppression.’
Talk 4: Closing Address
Talk 4 – Background
Gro Harlem Brundtland b. 1939
She served as Prime Minister of Norway on multiple terms, and later went on to be the General Director of the World Health Organization.
Talk 4 – Recap
‘Women will no longer accept the role as second-rate citizens.’ ‘What we have achieved is to unbracket the lives of girls and women. Now we must move on […] life, freedom, equality, and opportunity have never been given. They have always been taken.’ No one else will do it for us. Countries face economic costs of having ‘a continuing genderized apartheid.’ But no countries today offer equal opportunities. So we must go back everywhere and make changes. ‘We need women at all levels of management and government.’ It’s not enough to have rights – women also must use them. For example, it was a shock when I first became Prime Minister 15 years ago, but today girls ask their mother’s whether there can be also be male Prime Ministers.
The Platform for Action focuses on several points. Education.
Human rights – cuts beyond culture, even if cultural practices have with deep roots. No justification for violence against women or wife beating. Freedom from sexual coercion. Genital mutilation of girls has no justification, even if it’s part of a culture. Nor does ‘fatal neglect of infant girls’ from parents who wanted boys. No reason there should naturally be more boys than girls in any country. Inequalities in nutrition, health care, education to girls. Also sexual exploitation.
Poverty has a gender bias.
It’s not true that men are breadwinners and women raise kids. Women have always worked – harder than men, and with no acknowledgement. They should be able to get loans.
Every government should adopt the 20/20 plan – 20 % of budget to basic social services, and genderized for women.
We learned in the Cairo Population Conference to avoid “too many, too soon, too late and too close.” “There is no morality in condemning women to a life of perpetual childbearing and fatigue.” We should de-criminalize women who seek abortions. This upsets people, but it shouldn’t.
We owe it to the babies born.
Reflections
Gertrude Mongella’s point that men owe it to women to struggle for equality since women helped men with slavery, colonialism, and apartheid – surprises me.
The call to ending wars and armed conflict is ambitious. Linking it inter-dependably to women’s rights is another issue. We have seen other feminists take this tack, with linking poverty to women’s rights and saying women’s rights won’t be achieved until poverty is solved. Or racism. I recognize that everything is related. But I don’t know if these couplings help garner support for women’s rights. To use an extreme example, would Gertrude Mongella reject army general’s from being part of the women’s rights movement? For those who link women’s rights to poverty, should capitalist tycoons be excluded?
Winona LaDuke explains the problems of women’s rights in terms of human’s treatment of the earth; environmentalism. Same question regarding linking other issues to women’s rights. Are non-environmentalists, or even more extreme – industrialist polluters- welcome as legitimate women’s rights activists?
Her point about how equal pay is not a women’s right if it hurts the Earth and other women – interesting point, describing how global systems are connected. Still, though, the fact that Western consumption is based on environmental exploitation and is linked to human rights issues in other countries- does that mean that men should still be making more money than women in those Western countries? Here, too, I would argue that equal pay is a women’s rights issue that is worthwhile. At the same time, changing the entire system of industrialism and how it hurts women & people in other countries – is an important cause as well. That the equal pay issue occurs within a broader problematic framework – does not disqualify it as a worthwhile issue.
LaDuke’s formulation of the struggle for women’s rights as to reclaim being ‘Daughters of the Earth’ excludes men; in stark contrast to Gertrude Mongella, who spoke before her.
Palesa Beverly Ditsie urges sexual orientation rights a women’s rights issue. Same question: does she think that anti-lesbian women fighting for equal pay, for example, are not true feminists? Also notable that she mentioned nothing about gay rights, or transgender rights, but only kept it to lesbian rights.
Gro Haarlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, said that there were no countries in the world that offered equal opportunities to women. The charge against “perpetual childbearing and fatigue” is interesting, since presumably women who have children chose to do so. So her argument is for abortion, or at least de-criminalizing abortion.
Considering each of the presentations, it strikes me that there are multiple sub-agendas within the women’s rights movement. Anti-war, environmentalism, gay rights, anti-abortion. As the speakers argued, each can be shown to be inextricably linked to women and women’s rights. From a tactical perspective, I am still not convinced that promoting each sub-agenda best serves what is most common to women’s rights.
Or maybe it’s the only way – people pursue justice and rights for the issue that burns to them most strongly.
Readings of E.B. Freedman's Book 