Women, Poverty, Equality: The Role of CEDAW by Meghan Campbell (review)

In practical thought, we are often concerned with people's lives, their success, and the goals they have. There is a unifying concept underlying these concerns, which we may call "well-being". Well-being is the measure of the success of a person's life. When we determine a person's well-being, we determine how successful their life is, has been, or will be. The measurement of the success of a person's life (i.e., their well-being) largely depends on their goals. There is an important link between this philosophical concept of well-being and contemporary economic measurements of well-being. In economics, one tends to use incomes and commodities as the basis for assessing well-being. While the reliance on such traditional indices for well-being has been widely criticized,¹ nonetheless, "[p]overty is an obstacle to human flourishing."² Thus commences Meghan Campbell's monograph with the most basic recognition that, while wealth is not necessarily the indicator of success in life, "the 'defining feature of a poor person is that she has very restricted opportunities to pursue her well-being.'"³ This is a point universally recognized. Indeed, even before the founding of the UN, the International Labour Organization (ILO) recognized in its Declaration of Philadelphia that "poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere."⁴ One element of the author's thesis is therefore well-established not only in international legal discourse but also in the general public's psyche.

The other key element of Campbell's thesis is the gendered basis of poverty. As the author makes clear, in local and global terms, women are disproportionately affected by poverty. It is an ill which tracks women at every stage of their development; be it as girls in school, women in the labor force or mothers in the home. The poverty which Campbell speaks of is not mere financial poverty stricto sensu; it is an impoverished life, a life without opportunities for flourishing and becoming, in Amartya Sen's words, "deprived of something that she has reason to value."⁵ As Campbell puts it, "poverty for women is not merely insufficient income but is also characterised by exclusion from social life, political marginalisation, bodily and psychological insecurity, stigma, fatigue and voicelessness."⁶ Poverty, therefore, is a great cancer in the lives of many women around the world, one which Campbell, in her monograph, diagnoses and hopes to provide some form of, albeit limited, cure. While the author is to be congratulated in making the link between women and poverty from the outset, the reader may have benefited from even a short exploration of the effect of poverty on, for example, transgender people. It is certainly plausible that non-binary people are similarly, if not more seriously, affected by poverty than women alone. It strikes this reviewer that adopting a binary approach to gender, as Campbell seems to, may overlook the experiences of transgender people who experience poverty. Expanding on the concept of gender which the author, and the Convention on the Elimination on All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), deploys may have been helpful.

The monograph comes in two parts, each consisting of four chapters. The beginning of Part I (Chapter One) introduces the reader to and defines the problem of gender-based poverty. The link is then made between gender-based poverty and legally enforceable human rights. Given the significance of the phenomenon of gender-based poverty globally, one might expect it to feature in international human rights law and discourse. As Campbell notes, however, none of the nine UN human rights treaties contain provisions for addressing gender-based poverty. However, CEDAW does hold out some promise of resisting and challenging gender-based poverty, though it also has some significant limitations. For one, there are no specific provisions on gender-based poverty in CEDAW, only a passing reference to poverty in the Preamble thereto. Does this gap...