Putting Global Gender Issues on the US Foreign Policy Agenda

Abstract

Gender & Foreign Policy in the Clinton Administration. By Garner Karen. Boulder, CO: FirstForumPress, 2013. 331 pp., $69.95 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-935049-60-9). Contrary to popular assumptions, the United States ranked only 27th on the UN Development Program Gender Inequality Index in 2012, 23rd on the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index in 2013, and 83rd in terms of women's representation in national legislatures in 2014 according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. It also remains one of only seven countries that have not ratified the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Although the United States still lags behind most other Western countries (if not most of the world) on such indicators, Karen Garner argues in Gender & Foreign Policy in the Clinton Administration the turning point for getting the US government to take gender equality seriously as a foreign policy matter and a global norm can be traced to the work of savvy American feminists inside and outside the Clinton Administration, who took advantage of the post-Cold War moment and accompanying temporary absence of Republican administrations hostile to women's rights and the rise of a more feminist-friendly Democratic administration. They were a part of, and greatly aided by, the rise of a global women's movement facilitated by the UN Decade for Women conferences held between 1975 and 1985 and subsequent UN conferences held during the Clinton years on Environment and Development (1992), Human Rights (1993), Population and Development (1994), and Social Development (1995), as well as two more UN Women's Conferences (Beijing in 1995 and Beijing plus Five in 2000). The political opportunities these international …