Gender Roles and UN Reform

Abstract

Reform has been an important theme within the United Nations during the decade of the 1980s. That decade has witnessed both the continuation of efforts towards structural reform initiated over thirty years ago as well as the beginning of a rather different species of reform, movement towards reshaping the relationships between men and women within societies whose governments make up official members of the world organization. The latter is reflected most recently in the Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement for Women to the Year 2000 (FLS), the set of guidelines approved by consensus by 159 government delegates at the 1985 UN World Conference on the UN Decade for Women in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985. Though not designated a “reform program,” the FLS contains a set of recommendations which if implemented could contribute to the reform or reshaping of the sex-gender system that characterizes the relations of men and women in public and private institutions within societies throughout the world. In this respect, it is interesting that three prominent American women politicians played key roles in traditional UN reform and with respect to the adoption of the FLS at Nairobi: Maureen Reagan, who headed the U.S. delegation to Nairobi and subsequently served as U.S. Representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women; Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the first American woman to hold the position of U.S./UN Ambassador; and Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, Republican Senator from Kansas, the only woman member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.