Women, Development, and the UN: A Sixty-Year Quest for Equality and Justice

1. Setting the Stage for Equality, 1945-1965

11 1 Setting the Stage for Equality, 1945–1965 The true republic: men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less. —Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) • Setting the Standard at the UN’s Birth • Early Notions of Women’s Rights • Gathering Knowledge • Working Differently • Responding to Stereotypes of Early Development Thought • The Peace Tent The United Nations rose—like the proverbial phoenix—out of the ashes of World War II.Its creation was an attempt to garner international involvement in the preservation of global security. Its acceptance as a global forum with an extraordinarily variegated membership enjoying equal voting power was a celebration of the possible.Although there has been some lament that the simultaneous emergence of strongly adversarial power blocs muted,if not nullified,consensus on global issues, the advantages of a level playing field, internationalism, and a space between two warring giants provided exciting opportunities for nations emerging from forms of alien domination, both economic and political. There was a moral perspective at work in ushering in this international arrangement that opened a space for movements fighting against injustice and domination, movements claiming rights,such as citizenship,into which were woven women’s rights.1 During these earliest decades of the new world body, the voices of women, confident, already well articulated and internationalized, resounded inside and outside the corridors of power. They exchanged knowledge and strategies from their prewar careers and laid foundations at the UN using a work style that diverged from mainstream ways of operating. Dilemmas and questions about accommodating difference while working toward equality emerged that would Women, Development, and the UN 12 persist as the story unfolded in later years. This period set the stage for what followed in the coming decades, and the origins of most questions raised in the coming decades were present in embryonic form during these early years. Setting the Standard at the UN’s Birth A fact of somewhat extraordinary significance that provides many leads to the rest of this story is that there were just four women among the 160 signatories to the UN’s founding document at its Charter conference at San Francisco in 1945. Three of them were from what one would now call developing countries or the Third World: Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic), Bertha Lutz (Brazil), and Wu Yi-Fang (China). The fourth was Virginia Gildersleeve (United States). Two other women were present at the conference but were not signatories : Cora T. Casselman (Canada) and Jessie Street (Australia). The minuscule number of women reflected and predicted the slender representation women were fated to have in the UN.Yet women were able to balloon this small presence and influence outcomes through their strategic use of power. The four women signatories established a sound foundation for the UN by making sure that women’s issues were present in the text of the Charter. 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 new organization. The old argument that “men” included “women” was simply not good enough for at least this one, very significant, time. The UN’s Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) noted in 1999 that “[t]he international women’s movement from its beginning, influenced the founding principles and goals of the UN with regard to women’s rights.”2 The “founding mothers,” as Hilkka Pietilä refers to them, “laid the groundwork for the struggle for gender equality that has since gained momentum throughout the world.”3 Women from the Latin American countries contributed their experience to shape the language of women’s rights in the UN’s founding documents. Their decades of experience with the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) gave them deep experience in dealing with governments; one historian goes so far as to say that they had “some influence over governments.”4 They had pioneered conventions on civil and political rights through the Pan-American Union (later renamed the Organization of American States [OAS]). Its Inter-American Commission of Women was created in 1928 to remove all legal incapacities of women and ensure that they enjoyed full civil and political rights. It was responsible for the Montevideo Convention on the Nationality of MarriedWomen (1933) and two other conventions—the Inter-American Convention on the Granting Setting the Stage for Equality, 1945–1965 13 of...