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68 united nations ideas changing the world 4. Gender From Eliminating Discrimination to Promoting Women’s Rights and Empowerment • Early Landmarks • Global Conferences • The Significance of CEDAW • Gender and Human Development • Conclusion From a contemporary vantage point, it seems extraordinary that there were just four women among the 160 signatories to the UN’s founding document at San Francisco in 1945. Two other women were present at the conference but were not signatories. However, this handful of women established a sound foundation for the UN by making sure that women’s issues were included. As Devaki Jain asserts in Women, Development, and the UN: A Sixty-Year Quest for Equality and Justice, “The simple act of inserting the word ‘women’ in the text made sure that the principle of equality between the sexes was part of the founding ideas of the organization.”1 Subsequently, the UN’s ideas, language, and activities have fundamentally altered the situation of women in country after country, especially through its promotion of human rights and the mobilizing influence of the four global women ’s conferences held in Mexico, Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing between 1975 and 1995. These raised awareness, spread ideas, built confidence, and created alliances that changed gender politics and policy worldwide. In turn, the conferences —and the women participating in them—also changed the structure and attitudes of the UN, providing the mandates for CEDAW, UNIFEM, and INSTRAW (the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women). Equally significant, concerns for women’s issues raised awareness of broader human concerns in the whole process of development. These advances were the result of the vision and mobilizing efforts of women (and usually of some supportive men) in all three United Nations. The four women at the founding conference were members of government delegations— the First UN—though they were supported by a number of women in the gender 69 forty-two NGOs present—the Third UN. In the early years, several pioneering staff members—the Second UN—played key roles in focusing on the rights of women, especially in the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). By the time of the four world conferences on women, NGOs had expanded enormously in numbers and influence (an estimated total of 32,000 participants were registered in Beijing from 189 governments and 2,000 NGOs), which added greatly to the energy and impact of these events. NGO members went back to their countries, both to report on what happened and to mobilize further national action. Thus, all three UNs have had an impact in changing attitudes about women within the UN and in bringing concerns for women and gender more squarely into policy and action in every region of the world. More often than in most other areas of action, triangular alliances formed between women in each of the three UNs—women delegates to UN bodies, women working in the secretariat, and women working outside the UN. This alliance was visible in the first debate in the General Assembly, and it has continued in many other UN activities. Over the years, such alliances grew and became stronger. Jain reports that by 1980, “researchers, academics and activists from developing countries” had become “a communicating club, meeting frequently in various international forums, largely those convened by the specialized agencies,” UN funds, and regional commissions.2 Women’s contributions have broadened definitions of poverty and deprivation, strengthened understanding of participation in decision making, and maintained an emphasis on issues of peace and reconciliation, often promoting a southern perspective . Less noticed is the fact that while developing countries strongly promoted collective or community rights, many Third World women insisted that it was important not to lose sight of individual rights. Many of these advances for women built both on new thinking and on new initiatives for action in a process that was dynamic and interactive rather than simply linear. As Jain put it, “Women’s ideation did not ride piggy back on the intellectual development of UN thought; their intellectual work constantly defined and redefined what equality meant for women and for those who are unequally placed.” Women brought into development discourse the questioning mode: “Their quest for dignity and equal citizenship led almost to definition by negation, what is called in the Upanishads, nethi nethi . . . not this, not this.”3 Each advance, each achievement uncovered further goals and aspirations, just as climbing a mountain reveals a new peak on the horizon just as the first one...

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