Global Women's Movement Research Articles

Violence Against Women as a Global Public Health Issue.

Violence against women, especially intimate partner violence, is recognized as a global public health issue due to its prevalence and global reach. This article outlines the scope of the issue, with respect to its prevalence, health outcomes, and risk factors, and identifies key milestones that led to its global recognition: methodological and data advances, acknowledgment as a criminal justice and health issue, support by the global women's movement, and the robust evidence demonstrating that intimate partner violence is preventable. Key issues for the future include recognition and consideration of intersectionality in research, improvements in the measurement of other forms of violence against women, and the need to scale up prevention efforts that have documented success. Violence against women is an urgent priority as it affects individuals, their families and surroundings, and the entire global health community.

The Indian Development of Women Journalists and Human Rights

Abstract The concept of women's human rights owes its success and the creation of its use to the fact that it is revolutionary. The idea of women's human rights makes common sense. It declares that as human beings women have human rights. Anyone would find her or himself hard pressed to publicly make and defend the contrary argument that women are not human. So in many ways, the claim that women have human rights seems quite ordinary. On the other hand, "women's human rights" is a revolutionary notion. This fundamental recovery of humanity and the corollary insistence that women's rights are human rights have profound transformative potential. In the 1980s and 1990s, women's movements around the world formed networks and coalitions to give greater visibility both to the problems that women face every day and to the centrality of women's experiences in economic, social, political and environmental issues. In the development of what is becoming a global women's movement, the term "women's human rights" has served as a locus for praxis, that is, for the development of political strategies shaped by the interaction between analytical insights and concrete political practices. The critical tools, the determined activism, and the broad-based international networks that have grown up around movements for women's human rights have become a vehicle for women to develop the political skills necessary for the 21th century.

Contesting ‘Global Sisterhood’: The Global Women's Health Movement, the United Nations and the Different Meanings of Reproductive Rights (1970s–80s)

AbstractThe article contributes to a genealogy of the global articulation of reproductive rights principles, as established at the 1994 United Nations (UN) Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo and the UN Women's Conference held in Beijing the following year. It highlights the key role played by an emerging global women's health movement in the 1970s–80s, in shaping UN debates on family planning, women's rights in procreative choice and women's roles in socio‐economic development. The article focuses on the International Campaign for Abortion, Sterilisation and Contraception (est. London 1978) and the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (Amsterdam and Manila 1984; ECOSOC consultative status in 1992). Adopting an intersectional perspective, the paper highlights the local embeddedness of feminist positions, the shortcomings of Western feminism and the ways in which conflicts between women's organisations allowed for an original and evolving concept of reproductive rights to emerge. It is based on UN papers and the archives of the above organisations and family planning movements.

Agenda 2030: A bold enough framework towards sustainable, gender-just development?

ABSTRACTThis article, from two members of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), aims to provide a perspective from a long-standing south-based network in the global women's movement on the Sustainable Development framework for the next decades. It starts by highlighting some of the key remaining challenges for the advancement of women's human rights and gender equality, and then assesses the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the outcome of the third International Conference on Financing for Development (the Addis Ababa Action Agenda) from a feminist perspective. It pays particular attention to three dimensions: economic and financial volatility, the role of the private sector, and the domestic resource mobilisation. Does the 2030 Agenda and its financing provide a foundation to enable us to tackle the structural obstacles that remain, advancing gender equality and women's human rights for the next decades?

Wearing Platform Shoes: How the Platform for Action Changed our Lives, and how Women's Lives have Changed since the Platform for Action

In this article the author reflects on her personal experience from being at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and the study and work she has done since this time on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action through the United Nations, NGOs and her active role in the global women's movement. She looks at strategic ways the document could have been used in a policy context to lead global and national dialogue and draws from her PhD thesis titled ‘Beijing – Transformation and Feminist Politics: From the Personal to the International’. She links the process of the Beijing conference and Platform for Action back to the accountability within the UN itself, identifying opportunities lost through lack of clear commitment, planning and resourcing. She concludes by highlighting the importance of this event and document on the lives of women who were a part of the process and the value of a future NGO Forum for women for the global women's movement.

Putting Global Gender Issues on the US Foreign Policy Agenda

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 …

Negotiating Religious and Women's Identities: Catholic Women at the UN World Conferences, 1975-1995

At the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, the delegation from the Holy See succeeded in ensuring that religious views of women were placed prominently on the UN agenda. Yet the situation was not without conflict in the Catholic ranks. The Vatican's recent involvement in this field challenged the authority and influence of long-time Catholic women's organizations, such as the World Union of Catholic Women's Organizations, who had, since the birth of the UN, often single-handedly represented the Catholic perspective on women. This article explores how the participation of this NGO in the World Conferences on Women encouraged Catholic women to take an active part in the global women's movement and to promote a more secular-influenced understanding of women's rights. It also describes how the growth of discussion on reproductive rights in the 1990s engendered a reconsideration of their "moderate" feminism under the pressure of John Paul II's "new feminism" and the emerging women's human rights movement.

The Global Women's Movement and Chinese Women's Rights

The global women's movement is an example of a successful transnational civil society movement that is a mechanism for the globalization of ideas, aided more recently by the Internet. Two UN conferences, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 and the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing, advanced women's rights in China. The Beijing conference was a galvanizing event for the Chinese women's movement and a transformative experience for the All China Women's Federation (ACWF). The official UN meeting and NGO Forum provided opportunities for global interaction by the ACWF and NGOs working on women's rights. These connections transformed work on two issues affecting women's rights in China: the family planning program and domestic violence.

Toward a Feminist Para-Ethnography: On Gender Equality Policy Making in Business

Toward a Feminist Para-Ethnography:On Gender Equality Policy Making in Business Melissa S. Fisher (bio) Corporations have wrestled since the 1960s with creating equal opportunities for their employees, in the context of shifting ideas in the larger society about discrimination (Kessler-Harris 2001; Kwolek-Folland 1998; Laird 2006). From setting up affirmative action plans in the seventies to managing diversity in the eighties and placing gender discrimination at the center stage of policy making in the 1990s, businesses have developed wave upon wave of programs to improve the numbers of women and people of color in their internal ranks, especially at the most senior echelons (Dobbin 2009). More recently, however, we have seen corporations turning to address gender inequality in the global economy and developing new partnerships. Increasingly they have had to respond to stakeholder pressure—from institutional investors and others—regarding concerns about the negative effects of their activities on the status of women throughout and beyond the workplace, concerns that have only accelerated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Small but growing numbers of institutional investors are engaging in what is commonly referred to as social or sustainable investing—adding the assessment of a corporation's social (e.g., human rights, women's rights), environmental, and governance performance to their traditional and exclusive focus on financial performance (Langley 2008). In 2004 Calvert Investments, a sustainable and socially responsible investing firm, in partnership with the United National Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), launched the ground-breaking Calvert Women's Principles®: the First Global Code of Corporate Conduct; it focused exclusively on empowering, advancing, and investing [End Page 1] in women worldwide. Today the Calvert Women's Principles form the foundation of two key initiatives that are affecting women around the world: the Gender Equalities Principles (GEP) and the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEP).1 Both the WEP and GEP provide tools and assessment practices for corporations to evaluate and implement gender equality principles in key areas, including employment and compensation; health, safety, and freedom from violence; and civic and community engagement. Several hundred top executives of major companies have now signed a CEO statement in support of the WEP. Once a year corporate leaders, consultants, and academics as well as representatives of NGOS, state, agencies, and international organizations convene in New York City to discuss how corporate behavior and practices are being transformed to align with the Women's Empowerment Principles. In doing so these companies are engaging in what is commonly referred to as "gender mainstreaming"—putting gender and the goal of gender equality in the center of all of their policy areas (Page 2011). Leaders of these initiatives contend that adopting these policies is good for corporations' "bottom line." Here they seek to enact a form of market feminism, aligning liberal feminist ideals about gender equity with the logic of the market (Fisher 2012; Kantola and Squires, forthcoming). Drawing on nearly two decades of research—fieldwork with the first generation of women on Wall Street, consulting work as a business anthropologist, and participation in conferences on the WEP—I have come to identify gender equality initiatives, such as the WEP and GEP, as key sites within a new global policymaking arena.2 Specifically, I am arguing that we are witnessing the emergence of a global gender mainstreaming policy field, composed of sometimes overlapping assemblages of local, national, and transnational organizations, partnerships, and subjects. Gender equity initiatives like the WEP and GEP are thus an ethos and set of social and technological practices embedded in an intricate network of institutions, investments, and people. They are a kind of "social imaginary" of the relationships among institutions, structures of meaning, gender, and power, and practices in the global economy. As such I see gender mainstreaming initiatives not only as part of the broader corporate social and sustainability movement but also as an important part of the larger global women's movement, which is itself an "expansive, polycentric, heterogeneous discursive [End Page 2] field of action" composed of national and transnational feminist networks (sometimes aligned though often fragmented) that drive forward gender equality demands (Kantola and Squires, forthcoming: 8). In this article I discuss the challenges of studying...

Remarks by Akiko Ito

My name is Akiko Ito, and I am Chief of the Secretariat for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities at the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (also known as DESA). DESA works to support the development pillars of the United Nations--peace and security, and human rights. BACKGROUND Our starting point is the commitment of the United Nations to the advancement of the rights of women and of persons with disabilities. This commitment is deeply rooted in the UN Charter, which calls for progress in economic and social development, and promotion of human rights for a peaceful and prosperous world. (1) Over the past decades, we have seen great advances through global movements of women and persons with disabilities. Perhaps I do not need to mention to this audience the history of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), (2) or of the world conferences on women held in Beijing, Copenhagen, Mexico, and Nairobi. I believe that we all share the history of the global women's rights movement as an integral part of our movement toward gender equality and women's empowerment. Over the past decades, we have also seen great advances brought about with the advocacy of movements and organizations of persons with disabilities. As a result, we have today the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopted in 2006, (3) which is the first human rights treaty setting out a comprehensive normative framework for the protection and promotion of the rights of persons with disabilities in all aspects of society and development. The drafting process for the CRPD, which benefited from substantial participation and leadership of persons with disabilities, was indeed about interpreting from the disability perspective the universal human rights enshrined in existing conventions and other norms and standards. It was an extraordinary opportunity for learning from and for all stakeholders, and is recorded as one of the most successful treaty conclusions in the history of the United Nations. The Convention has enjoyed great support. There are today 111 states parties to the CRPD, sixty-three of which have also ratified its Optional Protocol. WOMEN WITH DISABILITIES The CRPD specifically stipulates the rights of women and girls with disabilities. In spite of this, women with disabilities often remain excluded from their communities due to multiple forms of discrimination and lack of access to political, economic, and social structures and decisionmaking processes. Woman with disabilities may face additional layers of discrimination based on other aspects of their identity, such as being a member of a racial minority or their indigenous status. In this regard, it is worth noting that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly in 2007, (4) also specifically addresses the rights of indigenous peoples, including women and girls, with disabilities. The theme of our panel today is of critical importance because evidence suggests that women with disabilities experience disproportionately high rates of violence. In his 2006 In-Depth Study on All Forms of Violence Against Women, for example, the Secretary-General observed that surveys conducted in Europe, North America, and Australia have shown that over half of women with disabilities have experienced physical abuse, compared to one-third of non-disabled women. (5) The question I'd like to address today is about the role of the United Nations in promoting the human rights of women with disabilities, and in combating violence against women with disabilities. THE WORK OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS In accordance with a series of resolutions adopted by the General Assembly, (6) DESA, through the work of the Secretariat for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of the Division for Social Policy and Development, has prioritized the mainstreaming of disability in the United Nations agenda, and within its multi-dimensional efforts, DESA strives to include the perspective of women with disabilities. …

Challenges to Sustainability: A Caribbean reflection

Peggy Antrobus is from the Caribbean – living and working in many of the island states. Since 1974, when she served as advisor on Women's Affairs to the government of Jamaica and established their Women's Bureau, she has worked for the advancement of women's rights and development. In 1978 she set up the Women and Development Unit at the University of the West Indies, and is a founding member of many regional and international organizations including the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era and the International Gender and Trade Network. She has contributed chapters and articles to many publications and her book, The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies, was published by Zed Books in 2004.

The Reinvention of Feminism in Pakistan

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.

Women's Engagement with Development and the United Nations: A Commentary

This commentary responds to Jain and Chako's assertion that the relationship between the global women's movement and the United Nations is at a critical juncture. It agrees with the authors that the global women's movement worldwide needs to address its own diversity and build a new consensus to strengthen its effectiveness at the UN. It also argues that new synergies and approaches are needed as well as vastly increased financial commitments and political will by member states of the UN if the latter is to continue to be a force for women's human rights and women's empowerment worldwide.

Revisiting Trauma and Recovery

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this discussion of Judith Herman's important book Trauma and Recovery and its relevance today. In this volume, published in 1992, Herman developed many crucial dimensions of battering that continue to be essential to work on violence against women. In these brief comments, I want to highlight two of these dimensions. The first is the link between battering, trauma, and larger political and social violence-what I would call the operation of gender violence on a macro level. I remember reading the book for the first time after I had already been doing work on legal representation of battered women for many years. I was amazed by the very first chapters, in which Herman makes the connection between political violence and battering. I realized that my own understanding of violence against women had been limited by my sense of it as being within the context of a relationship between two people. Yes, I had seen it as political, as a part of a larger context of patriarchy and gender subordination, but I had not consistently made the link between larger political violence and violence against women. Herman saw that battering was terrorism in the home and made those links explicit (see Marcus 1994). Aspects of Herman's analogies have been integrated into sociological and psychological accounts of battering, such as the use of the phrase hostage. But the past fifteen years has seen the development and expansion of these insights, particularly in the context of a global women's international human rights movement (see Schneider 2000). This movement has explicitly linked sexual violence and political violence. We now understand gender violence as a form of torture and recognize that violence against women occurs in wartime and as a weapon of national and international conflict (Copelon 2003). Even the United Nations secretary general's In-Depth Study on All Forms of Violence Against Women, submitted to the General Assembly in fall 2006 (and on which I worked as a consultant), recognized gender violence as a human rights violation and as a vehicle of war (United Nations General Assembly 2006). The law school casebook on battering that I coauthored includes a chapter on international human rights and emphasizes that international human rights frameworks expand our understanding of battering as linked to larger political and social violence (see DaIton, Schneider 2001; Schneider, Hanna, Greenberg, and Dalton 2008). …

Bobby Sands, MP: IRA Volunteer and Revolutionary Icon

tion (p. 42). Although they stand against bending to the will of global capitalism, fem inists from a range of perspectives do present proposals for action. Yet the multiple voices and nuanced positions of feminist political economy and post colonial literatures are lumped together and pushed aside. To their credit, Bahramitash emphasizes the role of women organizations and their in fluence on the state for guaranteeing wom en's rights and Jaquette and Staudt devote the last section of their volume to women's mo bilization and power. That both volumes are compelled to address women's activism is the signature of a wide and strong network of women's organizations the world-the congealing of a global women's and feminist (that includes all sorts of feminist and women-centered posi tions). In the closing chapter, Empowerment Just Happened: The Unexpected Expansion of Women's Organizations Tinker claims that the leap from disparate organizations to a diverse global women's movement relied on funding by international development agencies (p. 299). Several feminist sociolo gists have approached what drives the glob al women's movement. While we know re sources are important for all social move ments, that makes the world go around may matter more in explaining the rise of transnational feminist networks. Searching the internet to see if my em bellished refrain taken from the movie musi cal Cabaret (1972) had been used elsewhere, I found it as the title of the first chapter of Cynthia Enloe's book, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Interna tional Politics (1989). This is probably where I sourced the title, cranially filing it whilst in graduate school. I was also encouraged to re member Enloe's book, an exemplary volume that bridges feminisms and in which gender and the global economy are envisioned as a single process.

Global feminism: transnational women's activism, organizing, and human rights

Preface Part I1 Globalization and Feminism: Opportunities and Obstacles for Activism in the Global ArenaMyra Marx Ferree2 Unlikely Godmother: The UN and the Global Women's Movement Margaret Snyder3 The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms: Consensus, Con?ict, and New Dynamics Aili Mari TrippPart II4 Turkey's Modern Paradoxes: Identity Politics, Women's Agency, and Universal Rights Yakin Erturk5 Working Women of the World Unite? Labor Organizing and Transnational Gender Solidarity among Domestic Workers in Hong Kong Sarah Swider6 Women's Organizing in Post-Yugoslav Countries: Talking about Donors Aida Bagi'c7 Women as Agents for Development: Learning from the Experiences of Women in Finland? Hilkka PietilaPart III8 Regional Women's Activism: African Women's Networks and the African Union Melinda Adams9 Measuring Feminist Mobilization: Cross-National Convergences and Transnational Networks in Western Europe Dorothy E. McBride and Amy G. Mazur10 Transnational Feminist NGOs on the Web: Networks and Identities in the Global North and South Myra Marx Ferree and Tetyana PudrovskaPart IV11 Human/Women's Rights and Feminist Transversal Politics Nira Yuval-Davis12 Challenges in Transnational Feminist Mobilization Aili Mari TrippAbout the Contributors Index

Book Reviews

Rural SociologyVolume 71, Issue 2 p. 358-371 Book Reviews First published: 22 October 2009 https://doi.org/10.1526/003601106777789747AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible, 2nd Ed. Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture & the Cultivation of Sustainability, by Michael Mayerfeld Bell. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, James W. Loewen. Developing Power: How Women Transformed International Development, edited by Arvonne S. Fraser and Irene Tinker. The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies, by Peggy Antrobus. Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent: Power, Conservation, and the State in Mexico, by Nora Haenn. Volume71, Issue2June 2006Pages 358-371 RelatedInformation

Negotiations: Feminism, racism and difference

Enisa Eminova looks from a young Roma woman's perspective at the need for us all to tackle racism in the global women's movement. She asks how seriously to take on class divisions and class issues and develop mechanisms to do so, and looks to innovative ways to build and create spaces for new leadership, especially in and from minority communities. Here, question is how do we go beyond one size that fits all strategies.

Fostering transnational dialogue: Lessons learned from women peace activists

Given the incredible diversity of the anti-globalization movement, developing inclusive and participatory spaces is an enormous challenge. Inequities in power, resources, and experience between Northern and Southern activists are of particular concern to a movement that values democratic participation. Dialogue is seen as a critical new way of addressing conflicts within the movement. For three decades, women's organizations dealt with similar issues at the UN World Conferences on Women. It was not until the 1990s that a global women's movement emerged. This paper, which is based on a qualitative study of women's peace organizations gathered at the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in 1995, addresses the development of positive coalition dynamics. The focus on individual activist stories fills in gaps left by studying organizations as units of analysis or on transnational movements as a whole. My research shows that if transnational activists use constructive approaches, conflict can assist in building coalition dynamics necessary for effective and equitable cooperation. I conclude that a commitment to respond to conflict in a constructive manner is as important for coalition building as formal processes or mechanisms that foster dialogue.

The Future of women's rights: global visions and strategies

1. Introduction: The Future of Women's Rights - Ellen Sprenger and Alison Symington 2. From 'Opposing' to 'Proposing': Finding Proactive Global Strategies for Feminist Futures - Joanna Kerr 3. Creating a New World with New Visions: African Feminism and Trends in the Global Women's Movement - Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi 4. Rights of Passage: Women Shaping the 21st Century - Mahnaz Afkhami 5 Challenging Power: Alternatives to the Current Global Order - An interview with Josefa (Gigi) Francisco 6. An Action Framework for South Asia - Deepa Dhanraj, Geeta Misra, and Srilatha Batliwala 7 Different Worlds Possible: Feminist Yearnings for Shared Futures - Sarah Bracke 8. Diversity as our Strength: Transforming Power, Public Policy and Popular Culture - Ana Criquillion 9. Confronting Globalization: Feminist Political Spirituality as a Strategy of Action - Alda Facio 10. Globalization and Reinventing the Politics of A Women's Movement - Vanessa Griffen 11. Caution! Women Moving: Strategies for Organizing Feminist Visions of the Future - Sisonke Msimang 12 International and Post-Socialist Women's Rights Advocacy: Points of Convergence and Tension - Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck 13 Gender Equality Advocates Speak: Feminist Issues and Strategies Into the Future - Rhonda Leeson