The Women Who Ran the Show
Meet the four Secretary-Generals who presided over the historic World Conferences on Women
Every UN World Conference on Women had its own Secretary-General—all of whom were women (itself a noteworthy fact), and three-fourths of whom were from the Global South. They were extraordinary leaders long before and after the conferences. Get to know them here.
Mexico City, 1975: Helvi Sipilä
Sipilä, the year before she was named Secretary General of the Mexico city conference. (via Getty Images)
The first UN Conference on Women was chaired by Finnish diplomat Helvi Sipilä—who, three years earlier, had already become the first female Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. The daughter of Finnish farmers, Sipilä graduated with her law degree from Helsinki University in 1939. She worked as an advocate for women in Finland, specializing in family and matrimonial law, and was the second woman in Finland to open her own law firm, per the New York Times. Sipilä came to the UN in 1960 representing the Finnish government on the Commission on the Status of Women; she became the chair of the group in 1967, just as women’s lives were changing due to social, economic and political transformations. As noted in her obituary in The Guardian, Sipilä used to say that “women were discovered in 1975 in Mexico City: nothing was business as usual in the UN, or the world, after that.”
Copenhagen, 1980: Dr. Lucille Mair
Dr. Mair at UN headquarters in 1979, after she’d been named Secretary-General of the upcoming conference. (via UN Photo)
Dr. Lucille Mathurin Mair was a diplomat, activist, and author from Kingston, Jamaica. Six years before the Copenhagen conference she had become the first person to complete a dissertation based on women at the University of the West Indies, and the first academic historian to examine the intersections of gender, race and class as they affected the lives of women. Before Copenhagen, Dr. Mair was part of the Jamaican delegation in Mexico City; she helped draft the Declaration of Mexico and later the Regional Plan of Action for Women of Latin America of 1977. In 1979, Dr. Mair was named Assistant Secretary-General, and later became the first woman from the Global South to serve as Secretary-General of a World Conference on Women.
Because of her leadership, the Copenhagen conference was much more political than its predecessor. It “broke new ground by addressing the root causes of women’s inequality,” according to fellow West Indian activist Peggy Antrobus. However, Dr. Mair’s service to the UN didn’t end with the conference; two years later, she was the first woman to be named Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. She served as a special advisor to UNICEF on Women’s Development, and was appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Palestine (from 1982 to 1987).
Nairobi, 1985: Leticia Ramos-Shahani
Ramos-Shahani at a military-academy ceremony in the Philippines in 1997. (via AP Photo)
The New York Times said it best: “Leticia Ramos-Shahani is a name every feminist should know.” Born in the Philippines in 1929, she was also a woman who lived many lives. After nearly a decade in academia, Ramos-Shahani became a foreign service officer and was appointed the Philippines’ ambassador to the German Democratic Republic and Australia. She was involved in the women’s conferences from the start, serving as a chair on the preparatory committee for Mexico City and as an official delegate for Copenhagen. She also worked tirelessly and fearlessly behind the scenes to write the first draft of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. “I quietly approached the Soviet delegate, Tatiana Nikolaeva, to ask whether she was willing to join me in submitting a draft,” Ramos-Shahani wrote. “At that time our two countries had no diplomatic relations, but women could be ahead of their times.” Later the Philippines would become the first ASEAN country to ratify CEDAW. By the time Ramos-Shahani was appointed to lead the Nairobi conference, she was more than prepared, and went on to lead the Philippine delegation at Beijing.
After her time with the UN, Ramos-Shahani served her country as a senator. Along with supporting equal pay for equal work, she was “instrumental” in expanding the legal definition of rape to include, for the first time in the Phillippines, marital rape. Both a widow and single mother to three children, Ramos-Shahani carved out an extraordinary career.
Beijing, 1995: Gertrude Mongella
The year before the conference, Mongella briefs the media on what’s to come. (via UN Photo)
Known by some as “Mama Beijing,” Gertrude Mongella was born one month before the establishment of the United Nation in 1945. She became an educator and dedicated politician who served in Tanzania’s Prime Minister’s Office for Women’s Affairs from 1982 to 1985. And then, while on her way to India as Tanzania’s Ambassador, she received word that she had been appointed the Chair and UN Secretary-General of the Fourth World Conference on Women.
The Beijing conference brought together roughly 17,000 official delegates, making it the largest global women’s conference to date. Mongella played a key role in producing the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. But chairing the best-known women’s conference in history wasn’t enough. In 2004, Mongella was elected the first President of the Pan-African Parliament, and later became Tanzania’s Goodwill Ambassador to the World Health Organization.
At the end of the Beijing conference, Mongella said, “A revolution has begun, there is no going back.” She’s been right for the last 30 years.
Listen to Gertrude Mongella tell her own story here.