Women’s Human Rights: Seeking Gender Justice in a Globalizing Age (review)

In 1995, the Western media was abuzz with reports about the United Nations World Conference on Women being held in Beijing, China. Hilary Clinton, then wearing the title of First Lady of the United States, attended and gave a rousing, and controversial, speech in which she chastised the Chinese government for its human rights violations and then famously called for the recognition of women’s rights as human rights. Perhaps that recognition—“women’s rights as human rights”—does not strike the same resonant chord today as “yes we can,” but, at the time, Clinton’s speech was something of a barn-burner.

The media headlines from 1995, particularly in the Western press, reflected a mixed—to put it politely—reaction to the Beijing conference. For some, Beijing heralded a (possibly optimistic) change in gender dynamics and social relations: “ ‘Old Boys’ Network’ Be Warned: Women Are on the Move,” reported the Charleston Gazette (West Virginia),¹ “Beijing: The Surge of a Tidal Wave,” ran a headline in The Age (Melbourne).² For many other newspapers, Beijing represented the thin edge of a giant, dangerous, feminist wedge: “A Five-Cornered Battle of the Sexes Is Nigh,” warned the Sydney Morning Herald’s headline.³ The US press, meanwhile, was preoccupied with Hilary Clinton’s China visit: was she standing up for American values or shepherding “a load of lesbians” to China?⁴

The hype around the Beijing Conference on Women confirmed a now routine pattern: talk of “women’s rights” leads to excitable predictions. Advance women’s rights and two results are possible: either the world will warp drive into an egalitarian utopia (and the possibilities here are inspiringly optimistic: the rise of a female economic power house; the end of child poverty; the breaking of taboos, silences, and chains of various forms; a rewriting of gender relations as we know them; and so on) or the world will be rendered asunder (“the family” will be destroyed; men will be impoverished; childhood will end; licentiousness will abound; religion (Christianity) will be treated as the new terrorism; and, and, and . . .).

It would appear that the stakes in discussions on women’s rights are high, and particularly so when these discussions take place in international contexts. Despite this (or maybe because of it), international arenas at which law and policy are formulated are generally seen as promising sites for feminist activism. And the period of the 1990s—the Beijing conference and its impacts on an array of legal and policy issues—is a key source for that optimism. During the 1990s, feminist activists and scholars were able to generate an amazing list of gains in international legal and institutional commitments to ending women’s inequality. These gains included the formal recognition that “women’s rights are human rights,” with a corresponding series of changes strengthening international protection of women rights such as the optional protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (to allow individual complaints), the appointment of a special rapporteur to investigate violence against women, and the “mainstreaming” of gender analysis in other human rights bodies.⁵ Feminist lobbying efforts at other UN world conferences, such as the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights, helped to build momentum to strengthen the international prosecution of rape, first by the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals and then by the International Criminal Court. And the steps taken by the United Nations Security Council to mainstream gender into its security and post-conflict work was a direct result of the Beijing Platform for Action. Clearly, this list of feminist-inspired “gains” could go on. The lobbying efforts of the 1990s, many of which continue into this new century, are generating a myriad of results, many of which are only just becoming visible. The newly established UN agency for women—UN Women—is perhaps the most recently visible culmination of years of lobbying by feminists and their allies.

In Women’s Human Rights...