The Future
What we know
now
The UN World Conferences on Women aren’t just history. They taught us lessons that could unlock our future.
What did the researchers who studied the fifty-year relationship between the UN and the global women’s and feminist movement learn from doing it? “My big takeaway is that history matters, telling the story matters, and who is telling the story matters,” says the UN Foundation’s Sia Nowrojee.
Women crowd around for a workhop inside the Peace Tent at the Nairobi NGO Forum. (via Anne S. Walker)First and foremost: Transformative progress is possible within a generation.
Planning for the first conference in Mexico City began in 1974; the fourth, in Beijing, happened just 21 years later. But during that time, the world changed radically for women—no, make that, the women’s movement changed the world radically, for the benefit of all people. They ensured that violence against women was understood as a human rights issue. They shifted the global conversation from "population control” to reproductive rights. They pressured states to incorporate women in national political representation. They went from just four countries with female heads of state by 1975 to fourteen by 1995. And they built durable and vibrant networks of activists all over the world.
Top: Women hold the "peace torch" during the opening ceremony of the NGO Forum on Women in Beijing. (via AP)
Bottom: 150 young leaders convene at Youth4Climate in 2022 to discuss climate action. (via UN Photo)
When it comes to women’s and feminist movements, the UN matters….
The UN isn’t perfect—but it gave women’s rights leaders and their allies from around the world a space in which to convene and connect. That was evident at the World Conferences. From consequential friendships, to consciousness-raising, to the development of key civil society organizations and networks like Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO)—the UN, and the World Conferences on Women, served as movement-building incubators where feminists successfully pushed a global agenda for gender equality.
Mayra Buvinic, who prepared the first annotated bibliography on women and world development for the Mexico City conference and would go onto attend each subsequent World Conference on Women in Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing with the International Center on Research for Women (which emerged out of Mexico City), reflects: “These major events were key drivers for civil society, and they attracted donor funding for our work.” Also, importantly—the conferences were fun! Nairobi, for instance, was “a bazaar of rights and activity and joy and discussion,” remembers Nowrojee, “women from everywhere speaking every language, talking, dancing, selling baskets. It was joyous!”
…And we need to see ourselves reflected at the UN.
Because of her early experiences at Nairobi, “I always felt, hey—I have a right to be here” at the UN, Nowrojee recalls. She was a Kenyan teenager, “and I thought, ‘This is great. I’m meeting people who are interested in what I’m saying. And 40 years later, I realize that there are so many people who don’t share that worldview—they don’t feel that the UN is for them. So we need to be clear that it can be. It truly is about We the People–and it will keep getting better because we’re involved.”
Four women from Asia, Africa, Australia and Fiji dance at the Tech and Tools event at the Nairobi NGO Forum. (via Anne S. Walker)Women of the Global South were architects of the global women’s movement.
In the Global North, the story of 1970s-80s feminism is often told through the lens of Western white feminists. But that story misses the fact that the leading architects of the global women’s movement—which inhabited and propelled the women’s conferences—were from the Global South. Their leadership made crucial connections between “women’s rights” and issues of land rights, colonialism, climate, labor issues and more. “So much of what we now understand about gender equality came from women in the global South,” says UN Foundation’s Stephanie Oula. “They’ve been largely sidelined in the historical retelling,” but their fingerprints are there. It was Latin American women delegates who—though a tiny contingent—pushed to alter the phrasing in the original UN Charter to include “the equal rights of men and women.” The Global South network of feminists who created DAWN shaped conference outcomes in Nairobi and transformed understandings of development. And three out of the four Secretary-Generals of the World Conferences on Women were from the Global South. As activist Peggy Antrobus reflected, “We didn't use the word intersectional at that point, but that's what it was and that's what we did from the South.”
Buvinic agrees that these core concepts of contemporary feminism were seeded by Global South women leaders during the conference era: “The words may be different today, but the core issues were fully articulated early on, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, by advocates and scholars from around the world. There was always, between Mexico City to Beijing, a strong Global South presence and voice.” May that work continue to lead us forward!
Top: A workshop group at the NGO Forum in Copenhagen. (via Anne S. Walker)
Bottom: Peggy Antrobus, Rhoda Reddock, Hazel Brownand more, at Beijing. (From the papers of Professor Rhoda Reddock.)It’s predictable: Backlash follows progress.
For women, every step forward has faced resistance. Forces opposed to gender equality were strong throughout the 1980s, but nonetheless, movement leaders forged ahead, and by Beijing in 1995, they were seeing many of their proposals adopted across the board. “The challenges in the ‘80s and ‘90s and even the early 2000s feel so familiar,” says Oula, “and knowing that helps me now,” during this time of daunting regression around the world. “The hope for me is that in 5 or 10 years, our efforts and our movements will have seeded transformative shifts, and we will be able to say, look—this is what we were waiting for. This is what we were working for. It’s beautiful that they got to the shining moment of 1995 after what must have felt like the despair of the 80s.” Feminist economist Naila Kabeer puts it this way: “I think the world is a very dark place right now and it seems to be getting darker…[but] to lose hope would be to let the forces of darkness win.”
Top: Margaret Kenyatta, President of the Conference, speaks alongside Secretary-General Leticia Shahani and Pilar Santander-Downing. (via UN Photo)
Bottom: Secretary-General Gertude Mongella addresses the Fourth World Conference on Beijing in 1995. (via UN Photo)International cooperation between countries matters.
Multilateral efforts—those involving multiple governments—can drive real change and is critical in an age where the world is grappling with “problems without passports.” Just look at the far-reaching impact of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, an ambitious agenda calling for reproductive rights, equal access to economic resources, and an end to violence against women and girls. Or the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a blueprint to 2030 for global partnership on the most pressing issues of our time.
And the real alchemy is governments working hand-in-hand with civil society.
While governments hold final decision-making power in intergovernmental forums, they rely on civil society for cutting-edge research, bold ideas, and the impetus needed to shape policies—especially on issues like human rights and gender equality. In UN spaces, governments look to non-governmental players to “give them the latest data, the right language, the revolutionary idea,” Oula says. This inside-outside strategy has fueled change for decades—in Beijing, for instance, despite being physically distanced by an hour’s drive and without widespread use of email or cell phones, the global women’s movement ensured that they were working closely with allies in official government delegations to push for the ambitious Platform for Action.
To achieve lasting change, you must invest in the people driving it.
Progress doesn’t happen without resources. Yes, the global women’s and feminist movement has won major battles—giving momentum to the legalization of abortion in Latin America, an end to the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, crucial victories against child marriage in Tanzania and FGM in The Gambia, among other gains in recent years. But it has done this work on shoestring budgets and without consistent support. Imagine what might be possible with real, sustained investment in feminist movements. In fact, don’t just imagine. Make it a reality.
“We do not have to romanticize our past to be aware of how it seeds our present.”
—Audre Lorde
From Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches, Berkeley: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, pp 134-144. copyright (c) 1984, 2007 by Audre Lorde. Published by Penguin Random House, New York.