Making the Unimaginable Possible: the International Women’s Movement and Women’s Human Rights
Paper Presented at EU-China Human Rights NetworkNetwork Seminar on Gender and Human Rights Law
Beijing, 27-28 September 2004.
Dr. Eilís Ward,
Women’s Studies Centre,
NUIG, Galway,
Ireland
Tel: +353.91524411 Ext 2108
Email:
Making the Unimaginable Possible[1]: the International Women’s Movement and Women’s Human Rights
Dr. Eilís Ward, Women’s Studies, NUI Galway, Ireland.
Summary
This article traces the relationship between the women’s movement, whether global, national or local, and the development of women’s human rights. In transforming traditional notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres the women’s movement has radicalised both the language and our understanding of human rights.
It argues that that the existence of an autonomous women’s movement is necessary for the development and consolidation of a comprehensive human rights culture within and between states
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is three fold:
· to sketch the development of the women’s movement internationally in relation to the evolution and development of women’s human rights.
· to identify the nature of the relationship between the women’s movement and women’s human rights.
· to illustrate the role of an independent women’s movement in the context of developing a human rights culture
All of my comments are framed in an acknowledgement of the fraught
nature of attempting to universalise the human experience, and specifically women’s experience and women’s lives, in a world marked by differences in culture, beliefs, power structures, psychological practices and social structures. When dealing with issues of feminist analysis or critiques, we western academics must be particularly aware of the tendency for western feminist discourse towards hegemony within feminism or the global women’s movement.[2]
I’d like to structure this paper primarily around a simple question: what has been the relationship between the women’s movement (globally, regionally, nationally and locally) and the long historical sweep of the women’s rights movements and the women’s human rights movements. I will trace this relationship through history but will concentrate mostly on recent decades. In particular I will refer to the issue of violence against women.
But before we begin, we must be clear about what is meant by a women’s movement. A considerable body of literature exists on both social movements generally and the women’s movements particularly. As our purpose here is not to debate this literature I am proposing to move forward with a working definition of a movement which captures two critical characteristics of the women’s movement: its dynamic nature and its sharing of a collective identity despite differences. The women’s movement we can say involves the sustained activity of organised groups, to include networks of organisations, that have a shared sense of belonging to the movement although they may have different goals and members.[3]
Tracing the History
The women’s movement globally is customarily described as having developed in
two distinct waves beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century.
However, the idea of women’s human rights is frequently cited as beginning much earlier with the publication in 1792 of Mary Wollstonecrafts’ book A Vindication of the Rights of Women.[4] Furthermore, the evolution of women’s organisations and women’s movement politics have been frequently bound up with nationalist and anti-colonial movements, the nature of the state (such as liberal, authoritarian) and inevitably have been determined by the facilitation or otherwise of an independent civil society within any given state.[5] These differences were articulated frequently in the nature and extent of the women’s movement that emerged. We can however, state that the first wave of the women’s movement was facilitated primarily by the demand for women’s suffrage (or the right to vote) and was unambiguously assisted by women gaining access to education to the labour market and, importantly, to advances made in birth control.[6]
The ‘First Wave’ of the Women’s Movement
The year 1848 is conventionally cited as the first point of departure in the story of women’s rights. At a meeting in Seneca Falls in New York a number of women came together to articulate demands for women’s freedoms and rights. Many of these principles on which the demands were made would appear one hundred years later in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[7] From this point onwards we can trace throughout several continents the clustering of women’s groups around issues of the vote, slavery, peace, women’s rights to property, access to public life and other issues. In the 1860’s an English women’s rights campaign organised itself around four key issues (access to education, prostitution, control over income and property) while continuing to campaign on the right of women to vote.[8] Similar campaigns were found throughout Europe, in South and Central America[9], In Japan, following several decades of activism by women, The Association of New Women was formed in 1919 to campaign for the vote and other issues.[10] One of the earliest cited successful campaigns against a form of violence against women was that run by missionaries and Chinese women against the practice of footbinding in China between 1874-1911. Here a national campaign led by reformers considered the abolition of footbinding and the general improvement of women’s status (such as in relation to employment and education) as a necessary part in the wider programme for national self-strengthening.[11]
A key factor in all these movements was its international dimension best exemplified by the many international conferences held by women’s organisations.[12] which were attended by women from all over the globe. Ideas moved across national borders. Women heard about, were inspired by and sought to replicate activism in other states.
The near universal extension of the vote to women by the period after World War Two can be read as making the unimaginable possible – women were now allowed to vote. But the change had deeper significance also for women’s rights. It revealed that the manner in which citizenship had been conceived, particularly in relation to the rights it endowed in relation to participating in public and civic life and being a representative of the wider population, was deeply gendered: that women had been seen ‘as less’ than the citizen or ‘other’ to the citizen. The resistance to extending this right, or its circumscribing, in certain parts of the world today indicates its fundamental nature in terms of cultural perspectives on equality between men and women.
The ‘Second Wave’ of the Women’s Movement
In as much as the first wave of the women’s movement was mediated by other movements for significant change (labour and workers movements, anti-slavery movements, early articulations of socialism) the second wave was equally mediated by global change and a time of ferment. Customarily again we describe the period beginning in the late 1960’s as embracing the second wave. Here the wider movements of international socialism, civil rights (such as in the US), anti-colonial struggles (such as in Africa), student agitation (such as in Europe and the US) and national liberation movements (such as in South and Central America) created spaces and the ferment of ideas which reverberated deeply with those concerned with women’s rights specifically. In turn, women began to create and articulate their own demands. Increasingly they used the language of human rights as laid down with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
A brief account of the key points for women’s advancement during this period underlines the need furthermore to understand that while there were certainly ‘waves’ of movement, there was also a constant flow of ideas through historical time and across continents. This forum does not allow for a complicated analysis of this period and the gains made but we can summarise some key point which will be of interest here for this seminar.
Informed by the history of women’s activism and organisations and increasingly, but not exclusively, by feminism as a comprehensive critique of women’s disadvantage[13], the second wave of the feminist movement encompassed social, cultural, civil and political rights. The movement, in the US, in Europe, in the Americas[14] for example, began to present a profound critique of, inter alia, women’s role in society, in family life and how sex-roles and sexuality are constructed. In particular, socialist feminists, some of whom were informed by their experiences in socialist and revolutionary politics began to articulate that there was a force, or structure independent of the means of production which systematically oppressed and disadvantaged women. The concept of ‘patriarchy’ provided an important explanation as to why even where ‘rights’ (such as the right to education) were universally upheld in a particular state, women did not attend, achieve or flourish as well as men within that system and were frequently discriminated against in law or in practice. Equally the concept of ‘gender’ as opposed to ‘sex’[15] became a critical tool in explaining the systematic, universal discrimination against women in countries and states which were otherwise marked by differences.
It was this kind of critique emanating from within the women’s movement and its intellectuals that brought about a focus onto human rights and in particular onto the importance of the UN and its institutions to break down patriarchical constructions. A critical argument, eventually recognised at the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, was that until human rights treaties were themselves gendered (specifically accounted for gender dimensions of rights), the legal basis of much of women’s rights activism on the ground would remain inconsistent and ad hoc.[16]
The story of the evolution of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the UN in 1979, is well documented and this convention is being discussed in another panel during this conference.[17] We know also of the history of the UN World Conferences flowing from the adoption and implementation of CEDAW: Mexico, 1975; Copenhagen, 1980; Nairobi, 1985 and Beijing 1995.[18]
Each of these conferences, of itself, provided an opportunity (through the preparatory process, the provision of shadow or alternative reports, the participation of representatives in states parties delegations and at the NGO Forums at each event) for increased networking and strengthening of collective positions on the part of women’s movement activists nationally and globally.[19] In addition the women’s movement internationally has advanced its cause by participating in other important world conferences held by the UN such as the conference on the Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, 1992); the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna 1993); the World Conference on Racism (South Africa, 2000).[20] As has been pointed out by come commentators, while the UN did not set out to facilitate global feminist and women’s movement networking, the conferences and surrounding work helped create the conditions and context for women to come together to develop understanding and a way of working together.[21]
Of very particular importance was the gain made at the Vienna conference (1993) not just because the conference embraced the goal of much international women’s movements activism over the previous decade, viz , a global recognition of the universality of women’s human rights, but also because of the gains made on the issue of violence against women. Gender based violence against was women was, up to this period, not recognised as a human rights issues and hence not an issue that required attention from the international human rights community.[22] At Vienna, the principle that women’s rights were human rights was acknowledged.
The Issue of Violence Against Women.
The campaign on the human rights of women in the context of gender based violence against women emanated from an acknowledgement that, when it came to violence against them, women were treated as secondary to the ‘human rights’ of men. In the run up to the Vienna Conference of 1993, women’s networks, and groups, globally organised themselves specifically on targeting this issue as a way of both revealing the gendered nature of ‘human rights’ and the need for greater state protection against the many violent practices that were accepted or invisible across cultures.[23] In addition, in response to pressure from women’s organisations, groups such as Amnesty International began to locate violence against women in a human rights discourse. The adoption of a human rights framework to address violence against women in Vienna was facilitated by the mass rape of women during the civil war in Yugoslavia which made policy makers (at the UN) aware of the political nature of gender violence, its pervasiveness and its cross-cultural nature.[24]
Arguably, the issue of violence against women has provided some of the greatest successes for the women’s movement in advancing women’s human rights and is also providing to be the most intractable. At least two, related explanations can be offered for this difficulty.
Firstly, much of the difficulty arises from the embedded nature of practices and attitudes within cultural norms and institutions (such as the institution of the family) which can be used to justify violations. Amongst these practices are acts such as, broadly, domestic violence, rape within marriage, sexual assault in intimate relationships, female genital mutilation, bride burning, female infanticide, and trafficking. By insisting that this gender-based violence, often carried out within the ‘private sphere’ was as serious and as fundamental a human rights violation as, say, denial of political rights, the women’s movement successfully forced government’s to recognize that familiar or intimate relationships came within the purview of the human rights obligations.[25]
Secondly, the case made by women’s movement activists and organisations rested on arguing that it was, often, the states’ failure to protect women from such violence was, itself a human rights violation. Hence states were obliged to eliminate violence perpetrated by public authorities and by private actors.[26] This campaign finally culminated in the adoption of a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, by the UN General Assembly in 1994, the appointment by the UN of a Special Rapporteur on violence against women the same year and the adoption by the Beijing Platform for Action of a section on gender-based violence in 1995.
Again the time allocated to this paper does now allow an examination of the impact of these changes in the lives of women in the ground in terms of an improvement in their rights. This is for another paper. However, a critical point to be extracted here is that, as illustrated by the success of the campaign to secure a human rights regime on violence against women, is that the change came about as a result of local, national and international movements of women asserting a case which, in many instances, were based on imagining the impossible. And if, for many women a world without wife battery, rape, FGM and other violation is still impossible to imagine, this does not diminish the gains that have been made for many others. The networks of information and lobbying which grew up, the organisation of local and national events, the degreee of public education and mass campaigns, the collaboration with other like-minded organsiations, all stemmed from the dynamic and policy-focused nature of the women’s movement.