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Are Women “Human”? The UN and the Struggle to Recognize Women’s Rights as Human Rights

ALLIDA BLACK

At 1 a.m., December 10, 1948, representatives of the fifty-six member states of the United Nations gathered in the Palais de Chaillot to decide whether the declaration of human rights it had commissioned should be approved.¹ After four and a half hours of debate, during which delegates from thirty-four nations spoke, members of the General Assembly finally cast their votes. Drafting the declaration had been a torturous but inclusive process, spanning almost three years, involving eighty-five committee meetings, where delegates from eighteen states reviewed 168 resolutions and spent thousands of hours, debating, stonewalling, and haranguing one another on what human rights meant, who had them, what obligations states had to guarantee them, and what the United Nations should do when states did not act. After voting on each of its thirty articles, the General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by a vote of forty-eight to zero with eight abstentions.²

The UDHR revolutionized human rights. It not only inspired a powerful vision of equality, security, and respect for all the world’s citizens but prompted a new, bold interpretation of international law that in turn gave women a powerful tool to use in their campaign for equal political and economic rights, social status, and full citizenship.

Yet, as this article details, this was a torturous process.

Eleanor Roosevelt (ER) hoped the power of a shared body of rights could eventually trump the fears and turf battles that kept people apart. She hoped the ideals the Declaration proclaimed would goad citizens and nations to action. But, at the same time, she remained realistic about the Declaration’s major limitation—its inability to force government to act. “On the whole I think it is good as a declaration of rights to which all men may aspire and we should try to achieve,” she wrote the night before the General Assembly vote. “It has no legal value but should carry moral weight.”³

Although ER saw the UN craft some legally binding safeguards before she died in 1962, it would take several decades for the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and their nongovernmental organization partners (NGOs) to conceptualize the women’s human rights agenda, develop measurable plans of action, and secure the international covenants necessary to enforce the UN’s interpretation of “fundamental human rights” and expand them to include women’s rights.

Despite the intermediate steps it took to address women’s political rights, the UN waited until 1972 to give serious consideration to the totality of women’s rights. That year, it designated 1975 as International Women’s Year and empowered the CSW to convene the first World Conference on Women. Yet it took five international conferences, the diligent, creative advocacy of both the CSW and women’s NGOs, and the end of the Cold War to force the Human Rights Commission (HRC) and the UN to accept that “women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.”⁴

This article traces the rise of women’s rights and Eleanor Roosevelt’s role in it. It argues that, despite the criticism she has received from historians for not insisting that women have a separate commission within the UN, ER knew what she was doing. Her shrewd understanding of the internal workings of the UN and her fundamental, real-world interpretation of power and politics showed her that if women’s voices were relegated to a commission targeted to address women’s concerns, women’s voices would be marginalized and the scope of their concerns confined to the traditional feminine realm. In short, ER understood that rights are initially defined by those sitting at the negotiating table, and until women held positions of power within both mainstream organizations and nongovernmental organizations challenging those mainstream bodies to respect women, change would be slow.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the Human Rights Commission, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In June 1945, after much pressure from nongovernmental organizations and political activists, the United Nations Planning Conference meeting in San Francisco approved the United Nations Charter. This standard-setting call to action reaffirmed the UN’s “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, [and] in the equal rights of men and women.” It called on member states “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” and to act either independently or in concert with the United Nations to defend these “fundamental human rights.” However, although it professed and encouraged “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion” and authorized the creation of a commission to promote human rights, it did not define these rights.⁵ That task initially fell to the Human Rights Commission.

ER did not expect to join the HRC, much less become its first chair. She thought she would dedicate her energies to the refugee crisis and other specific issues she would confront as US representative to the Committee on Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Concerns. Yet after her very public and very effective rebuke of Soviet repatriation policy, she suddenly found herself appointed to the yet to be convened Human Rights Commission. At the HRC’s first meeting, Henri Laugier, the assistant secretary general for social affairs and convener of the nuclear commission on human rights, appointed ER chair of the formal Human Rights Commission. Within weeks, as the HRC accepted the General Assembly’s request to craft an international bill of rights, the committee turned to ER to chair the subcommittee charged with drafting a human rights declaration.

Against the backdrop of an escalating Cold War, ER mediated between delegates who held conflicting beliefs on the role of government, the responsibilities of citizenship, private property, God, marriage, race, the fundamental nature of humankind, and women’s economic and political status. In the process, she marshaled her unique array of tools—her daily nationally syndicated newspaper column, her monthly question and answer column, her radio show, and her national lecture tour—to convince the State Department that human rights included economic and social rights, as well as political and civil rights, and to sustain the public support necessary to shepherd the declaration through various iterations, political and diplomatic roadblocks, and an often obstreperous Department of State.⁶

Most histories of the UDHR highlight Eleanor Roosevelt’s opposition to the establishment of a separate commission for women’s rights and her refusal to interpret the word “brotherhood” as potentially undermining women’s human rights. They argue that the woman most responsible for the UDHR’s creation and adoption shortchanged women.⁷

A closer examination of ER’s actions depicts a more complicated portrait—one that documents her commitment to women’s rights as human rights and her firm belief that for women to exert influence on policy and protect their rights, they must be at the negotiating table rather than caucusing amongst themselves. ER believed that “women must learn to play the game as men do.” They needed to develop the “banded unity” necessary to deal “with the bosses” and “deliver” votes. They must abandon “helplessness” and “incoherent anarchy” that prompted them to embrace separatism, and “learn to play the game.” She insisted:

If women believe they have a right and duty in political life today, they must learn to talk the language of men. They must not only master the phraseology, but also understand the machinery which men have built through years of practical experience. Against the men bosses there must be women bosses who can talk as equals, with the backing of a coherent organization of women voters behind them.⁸

Only then could women set the agenda and rewrite the rules.

ER’s experiences with labor, women’s and civil rights organizations, as well as political parties reinforced this view. As she worked to bring women and other reformers into the New York State and federal governments, she learned that to succeed she needed to find both staff support to help craft policy and exert public pressure to implement it. Her experiences with party, civil rights, labor, and women’s coalitions taught her which tactics worked and which were destined to fail. By 1940, her political advice to women had evolved significantly. “It seems to me the only way for women to grow,” she wrote, is that:

Women must become more conscious of themselves as women and of their ability to function as a group. At the same time they must try to wipe from men’s consciousness the need to consider them as a group or as women in their everyday activities, especially as workers in industry or the professions.⁹

Thus, by the time ER joined the UN in 1946, she not only recognized the important voice women would bring to the organization, but she also had a highly honed strategy of how best to achieve her goals.

Moreover, she strove to get more women included in the UN. As the State Department selected delegates, she worked closely with Democratic National Committee leader Gladys Tillett to get more women appointed to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Conference. Her passion for her new role at the UN was obvious to all observers. Martha Strayer of the Washington Daily News noted, “Mrs. Roosevelt was interested in the organization of the United Nations more keenly than she had been in anything since the early days of the New Deal.”¹⁰ And in what would be her final press conference as First Lady, ER again reiterated her strong support for the five women’s organizations scheduled to attend the San Francisco meeting and the impact they could have on the deliberations.¹¹

Even FDR’s sudden death did not mitigate her interest. Although family matters dictated that she remain home in Hyde Park, she confessed to a colleague that she wished she could join the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco assembly. Furthermore, she followed deliberations closely and and stayed in touch with Secretary of State Stettinius throughout the negotiations.¹²

ER even viewed her appointment to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations in December 1945 as more of a tribute to her husband and as a major step for women, rather than a recognition of her diplomatic leadership.¹³ She told readers of her daily column that “being the only woman delegate from this country” made her “feel a great responsibility to … the women of my own country.”¹⁴ She later confessed in her autobiography that one of the reasons she worked so hard was that she knew that if she made a mistake, it would reverberate so loudly that it would give her male colleagues a potent example to use in their not-too-secret campaign to marginalize women. And when John Foster Dulles finally realized her skills and apologized for the dismissive remarks he so often made about her, she told a dear friend “against the odds, women inch forward, but I am rather too old to be carrying on the fight.”¹⁵

ER made her opposition to a separate women’s committee within the United Nations organizational structure well known to both the press and the delegates.¹⁶ As soon as she arrived in London the following January for the General Assembly meeting, leaders of British and American women’s organizations lobbied ER to support such a committee, but she did not commit because, as she told a friend, “I don’t think it should be done but I must, of course, look into it.”¹⁷

Two days later, she made her decision public, writing in “My Day”:

The women evidently want to prevail on the Economic and Social Council to set up a special commission composed of women which would not be considered as a specialized agency but would have a closer relationship to the Council … I can quite see that a commission representing many women’s organizations throughout the world might speak for a very great number of women, but I think they should be treated on the same basis as other specialized agencies. Otherwise, an infinite number of similar groups would be demanding special recognition and special privileges in their relationship to the United Nations—a situation which would result in chaos. I think we should make a very great effort to live up to the sections in the Charter which provide for complete equality. I am sorry that Governments in all parts of the world have not seen fit to send more women as delegates, alternates or advisers to the Assembly, and I think it is in these positions that the women of every nation should work to see that equality exists.¹⁸

The column generated such intense response among “various” women’s groups that ER returned to “My Day” three days later to clarify her position:

I myself believe the important thing is to stress the attitude taken in the very beginning of the UNO Charter, which reaffirms “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.”

“This really means,” she concluded, “that women should come in on an equal basis—not even as specialized groups, unless they are representing some particular objective. Their influence should be felt as delegates, alternates and advisers.”¹⁹ In short, to be effective, women must be at the table rather than outside looking in and fighting to get a seat in the back corner.

Not all of the women delegates agreed with ER. The women delegates from Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic who had convinced the San Francisco conference to include sex as a specific human rights category in the UN Charter now pressured the first General Assembly to establish a specific women’s commission to link women’s rights with human rights.²⁰ Although the assembly rejected their request for an independent body, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) recommended a Sub-commission on the Status of Women within the Human Rights Commission and instructed the women to work with HRC director John Humphrey to “submit proposals, recommendations and reports to the Commission on Human Rights.”²¹ The women responded by urging ECOSOC to approve “four immediate tasks”: the creation of a new Secretariat office on women managed by a woman director; the completion of the international comprehensive study of laws related to women, which had been initiated by the League of Nations; promotion by all UN agencies of “equal educational opportunity”; and convening a UN-sponsored worldwide conference on women’s concerns.

ER, who had a nonvoting seat on the subcommission, worked to shape the group and the scope of its activities. She objected to the worldwide conference and wanted the study to be a more tightly focused document rather than a laundry list detailing every instance of discrimination women faced in the public and private spheres.²²

Bodil Begtrup, who chaired the subcommission, objected strongly to both ER’s recommendations and Humphrey’s direction and launched a full-scale campaign to have ECOSOC upgrade the women’s group to a free-standing commission on the status of women. When Begtrup agreed to drop the call for an international woman’s conference, ER dropped her opposition to a free-standing commission. June 14, 1946, with ER and Begtrup on board, ECOSOC approved an independent Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and instructed it to “elevate the equal rights and human rights status of women, irrespective of nationality, race, language, or religion, in order to achieve equality with men in all fields of human enterprise and to eliminate all discrimination against women in statutory law, legal maxims or rules, or in interpretation of customary law.”²³

No longer officially tied to the HRC, CSW no longer consulted regularly with that commission and expected the HRC to make consistent overtures to them. When that did not happen, CSW complained to ECOSOC about the HRC’s alleged overlooking of women’s issues. On December 2, 1947, ECOSOC then instructed the HRC to inform the CSW whenever women’s issues were to be discussed.

Meanwhile, ER focused on increasing the number of women delegates to the UN and its regulatory agencies and crafting a declaration of human rights and mechanisms to enforce its principles. She continued to believe that the best way to handle the horrors of war, famine, prejudice, and fear inflicted on women was to present them—as well as the men in their communities—a vision of a world that could stand up to the darkness and fear of the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, the economic crisis, and discrimination generated.²⁴

In June 1947, the HRC drafting subcommittee gathered in Lake Success, New York, to review the draft declaration Humphrey had prepared for their review. Politics dominated the deliberations. Britain’s delegation wanted a legally binding document (presumably focusing on political and civil rights). The Soviets objected to provisions respecting civil liberties and the right to nationality and wanted economic rights discussed in greater detail. ER—concerned that the United States would not adopt a legally binding document and convinced that the world needed the UN to act quickly to offset fear and despair—urged her colleagues to draft both a human rights declaration and the human rights covenant necessary to enforce the declaration’s principles.

On June 16, the Soviets switched their focus away from civil liberties to gender. Although Article 6 of the proposed draft noted that “every one is entitled to the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,” Article 1, the article which set the declaration’s tone and defined its view of human nature, used the term “all men.”²⁵

Vladimir Kortesky, the Soviet delegate, objected and insisted that the phrase “all men” eliminated “half of the human species.” He then urged that Article 122 of the Soviet Constitution (which “not only … stated that women had equal rights in all fields,” but “enumerated” the “various ways” this principle could “be put into effect”) be included to insure “the rights of women.”²⁶ ER disagreed. “I have always considered myself a feminist but I really would have no objection to the use of the word as the Committee sees fit.”²⁷

Yet when the Lake Success draft was submitted to the full commission for consideration in Geneva that fall, Article 1 read: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and in rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience, and should act towards one another like brothers.” How this change occurred is not clear. As the HRC debated the draft, Hansa Mehta, the delegate from India, expressed her dislike of “the wording ‘all men’” and “‘should act … like brothers’” because terms “might be interpreted to exclude women, and were out of date.” Nevertheless, after debating Metha’s motion, translation problems, and intent, the HRC voted to adopt “all men” and to attach a special note to Article 1 declaring that “all men” meant “all people.” Meanwhile, the Secretary-General forwarded the CSW’s draft of Article 1 that used “all people” instead of “all men” and “in the spirit of brotherhood” instead of “like brothers.” As debate continued in subsequent sessions, the HRC embraced “all people, men and women,” discounting Soviet insistence that it would be impossible to translate into Russian. Yet when the final draft reached the full Human Rights Commission for a vote, Article 1 began “all human beings.” No one objected; the HRC adopted the draft and forwarded it to ECOSOC for adoption.²⁸

Clearly, Eleanor Roosevelt had an encompassing interpretation of “men,” “brotherhood,” and “people.” She believed the subsequent articles reinforced her interpretation and wanted the declaration to be as clear in other languages as it was in English. Does her position infer that she accepted “sexist implications” to the UDHR? No. It means that she did not realize the way, decades later, it would still be used to give lip service to women and their concerns.

As chair of both the Human Rights Commission and its drafting subcommittee, ER helped craft articles that began with “no one shall be” or ‘“everyone.” She navigated increasingly intense domestic and international political turf battles to craft a declaration guaranteeing women the right to life, liberty, and security of person (Article 3); the right to be recognized as a person before the law (Article 6); the right to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this declaration (Article 7); the right to marry and have equal rights during the marriage and “its dissolution” (Article 16); the right to own property (Article 17); the right to vote and hold elected office (Article 21); the right to equal pay for equal work (Article 23); the right to be a mother and have one’s children respected and protected (Article 25); and the right to education (Article 26). Moreover, she did so anticipating and accepting the intense opposition of the American Bar Association and other prominent legal and political groups. She would spend the rest of her life—risking her life and her income—promoting the UDHR and urging the ratifications of the covenants it generated.

ER left the UN on January 3, 1953. President-elect Dwight Eisenhower, who objected to the UDHR, did not want her to continue to represent the United States on the Human Rights Commission. She spent her last day at the UN advocating for the Convention on the Political Rights of Women and making the same argument she made when she entered it—that women must vote, hold office, and represent their nations at the UN. She concluded:

I hope that within the next few years we will find that equal suffrage has been granted to women everywhere, including two areas—Libya and Eritrea—in which the United Nations has a special interest. I hope also that in the next session of the General Assembly and in those to follow we will find the promise of this convention reflected in increasing recognition for women in high posts in all governments and as representatives in the United Nations.²⁹

The Commission on the Status of Women and Nongovernmental Organizations Take the Stage

The CSW, like the UN itself, viewed human rights as new tools to use to fight traditional (i.e., political and civil) discrimination. While the UN used the UDHR as a tool to assess government’s treatment of its citizens and protect activists working to build democratic governments, the CSW saw the Declaration as a major tool to combat laws that discriminated against women. Using the UDHR as its rallying point, the CSW spurred the drafting and adoption of the Convention on the Political Rights of Women (1952); the Convention on the Nationality of Married Women (1957); and the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages (1962). In short, as Margaret Bruce, chief of the UN section on the Status of Women, noted, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, “the most spectacular progress” in women’s rights came “in the political field.”

While the UN avoided controversy by focusing on traditional women’s rights issues (political and civil rights), its affiliated organizations began to address violations outside the ballot box (economic, social, and cultural rights). In 1951, as the UN and the CSW worked for the right to vote and hold office, the International Labour Organization (ILO) focused on equal pay for equal work and adopted its Convention on Equal Renumeration for Men and Women Workers. Seven years later, the ILO reinforced that convention by adopting a new convention prohibiting discrimination in employment and occupation. By the end of the decade, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) joined the women’s rights campaign by endorsing a Convention against Discrimination in Education.

Despite the progress these conventions represented, all of these actions occurred outside the Human Rights Commission and thus marginalized women’s rights as issues not worthy of the commission’s time and deliberation.

This began to change when the UN adopted the Covenants on Political and Civil Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on December 16, 1966. Almost twenty years after Eleanor Roosevelt and the Human Rights Commission initiated their work, the General Assembly adopted legally binding agreements authorizing the HRC to review reports detailing human rights violations, “to make general comments as it may consider appropriate,” to request additional information from offending states, and to assess that state’s progress in addressing the complaints against it. As dramatic a change as the covenants introduced, however, three equally dramatic limitations remained. First, the HRC could not “judge” the state’s progress in addressing these issues nor make specific recommendations as to what actions states should take to address their violations. Second, the UN focused on legal rather than de facto discrimination and thus neglected discrimination that women encountered from common law, cultural practices, and other extralegal forces.³⁰ Third, and perhaps most important, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights did not authorize any agency to address its findings, could only review reports submitted to it, and respond with “recommendations of a general nature.”³¹

All the while, human rights got caught in the political crossfire of the escalating Cold War. The United States and the Chinese grew increasingly mired in Vietnam, and the Soviets and Chinese challenged Western influence in the new postcolonial nations. Calls to address economic and social rights—especially the rights to food, shelter, health, and work—seemed “suspect” to many in the noncommunist West. As a result, as Charlotte Bunch notes, “human rights bodies dominated by western conceptions of human rights priorities focused on violations within the civil and political realm—the ‘public’ sphere.” This meant that human rights policies whipsawed women. Already battling the barriers public-private spheres posed to equal treatment, “the predominance of the civil and political rights within human rights organizations eclipsed” any assessment of the barriers to equal social and economic conditions essential to full “exercise of civil and political rights and participation in public life.” In short, human rights investigations into women’s legal status focused on “certain areas … considered to be women’s rights (such as family rights and the right to vote) rather than the totality of human rights protected under the Covenant.”³²

Increasingly women, inside and outside the UN, did not see women’s rights and human rights as an either/or proposition. In 1963, Polish, Ghanian, and Mexican delegates to the CSW, dissatisfied with the loopholes in the covenants, began drafting a declaration that targeted this public-private dilemma. After the CSW adopted the draft, it launched a public education campaign to generate international support to force the UN to focus—albeit briefly—on the discriminatory barriers women face. Four years later, the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (DEDAW) in 1967. CSW then shifted its focus to drafting a legally binding covenant—or convention—that could enforce the principles articulated in the declaration.

Outside the UN, many women who knew nothing about the CSW or its declaration began “examining the pervasiveness of sex discrimination at all levels of society and strategizing as to the most effective means to overcome it.” By 1970, a new international women’s movement flourished on college campuses; business and professional communities; as well as within the labor, art, and civil rights communities. Refusing to distinguish between the personal and public spheres, they insisted that “the personal is political.”³³

Yet these two groups—the CSW and the newly formed feminist organizations—worked in their own separate sectors until 1975 when five thousand women traveled to Mexico City to attend the first UN Conference on Women. Even though the CSW led the effort to have the UN designate 1975 as International Women’s Year and secured UN support for the conference, it quickly became apparent that the NGO women wanted to have their say as well. After overcoming intense Cold War sparring over development and other socioeconomic policies, the conferees crafted an ambitious World Plan of Action. Declaring “women will emerge as a powerful revolutionary social force,” the plan called for verifiable progress in women’s literacy and civic education, women’s participation in policymaking, “recognition of the economic value of women’s work in the home,” women’s access to health education and health services, and rural women’s access to the “modern rural technology” necessary to “help reduce the heavy workload of women.” It also empowered the women’s NGO community by urging “the promotion of women’s organizations” and “the active involvement of non-governmental women’s organizations” in UN efforts to secure these benchmarks.³⁴

The plan’s most effective planks, however, did not deal with meeting minimum metrics. It called for a UN proclamation declaring 1975–1985 to be the UN Decade for Women, UN support for additional international women’s conferences in 1980 and 1985, the establishment of a UN fund dedicated to advancing women women’s rights and gender equality (UNIFEM), and the drafting of a Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to be presented at the 1980 conference in Copenhagen. In short, the women’s demand for institutional support created the machinery that gave women the opportunity to debate, strategize, and organize.

The UN Decade for Women gave both the CSW and the women’s NGO community unique venues outside their home environments where they could meet as equals, discuss strategies, debate priorities, expand their network, and develop the platform to make their concerns known. There they explored how existing human rights practices and definitions “fail to account for the ways in which already recognized human rights abuses often affect women differently because of their gender.” Working together, women human rights activists and women’s rights leaders encouraged each other to take “the double shift” critical to transcending the public-private sphere gap and to crafting a new lens through which to view women’s lives.

By the time more than ten thousand women and men convened in Copenhagen in 1980 for the Second World Conference on Women, the new international women’s movement had inspired an “explosion” of groups dedicated to improving women’s lives. A far more diverse group attended the Copenhagen conference, and stark regional divisions soon surfaced around the conference’s major theme—women and development. Men led most of the government delegations and did not support a gendered approach to development. Plus, women from economically privileged and powerful nations had sustained intense, painful, and, in the case of Middle Eastern nations, volatile conversations with women from nations whose economies were either dominated by Western powers or were so unstable that development meant securing enough food and wages to remain alive. Eventually some overcame political and regional differences enough to acknowledge that while gender discrimination placed intense barriers to women’s economic security, other factors such as nationality, race, class, and region also played major roles in shaping women’s economic lives.

Moreover, although they did not yet realize its power, by Copenhagen, women had secured the second legal tool essential to implementing their platform—CEDAW. The General Assembly had adopted CEDAW in 1979 by a vote of 130 to 0, with ten nations abstaining. At the same time, “the Assembly expressed the hope that the Convention would come into force at an early date and requested the Secretary-General to present the text of the Convention to the mid-decade World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women.”³⁵

CSW’s thirteen-year campaign for a legally enforceable covenant had paid off. The Copenhagen delegates now had a framework they could soon use both for examining the “human rights framework through a gender lens, and describing women’s lives through a human rights framework”³⁶ and for protecting those who risked their lives to defend women’s human rights—those who exposed the abuses women suffered, who worked with decision makers to address these issues, and who delivered essential legal and social services.³⁷ Indeed, CSW so realized the central importance CEDAW would have in their work that they arranged a dramatic signing ceremony in the midst of the Copenhagen conference where sixty-four states signed the convention and two presented their instruments of ratification. Women’s human rights advocates embraced CEDAW with passion and efficiency and secured, in record time, the eighteen additional ratifications CEDAW needed to be enforced. By September 1981, the convention was legally enforceable.

CEDAW held the UN, governments, and human rights communities accountable to apply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its covenants to women and to implement the Declaration to End Discrimination Against Women. Declaring that “extensive discrimination against women continues to exist,” it then defined discrimination as:

Any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.

Unlike previous conventions, CEDAW mandated:

States Parties shall take in all fields, in particular in the political, social, economic and cultural fields, all appropriate measures, including legislation, to ensure the full development and advancement of women, for the purpose of guaranteeing them the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms on a basis of equality with men.³⁸

Furthermore, it required states to “condemn discrimination against women in all its forms, agree to pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against women” by:

Incorporating “the principle of the equality of men and women in their national constitutions or other appropriate legislation,” and ensuring “through law and other appropriate means, the practical realization of this principle”;

Eliminating “all acts of discrimination against women by persons, organizations and enterprises”; and

Establishing tribunals and other legal bodies necessary “to ensure the effective protection of women against discrimination.³⁹

Equally important, Part V established the CEDAW Committee, twenty-three “experts” of “high moral standard and competence” nominated by their governments and approved by the UN, to monitor states’ behavior and facilitate the treaty’s implementation. With a committee modeled after the Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, women now had the power to assess a state’s behavior and to enforce its compliance with the CEDAW mandate.

Yet it took a little more than a decade for CEDAW’s influence to be felt. As one long-serving CEDAW Committee member noted, “for some time” human rights organizations viewed the committee as their “poor relative.” Therefore, as the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights also addressed some of the concerns CEDAW addressed, the states opted to follow its weaker enforcement protocols—that efforts to eliminate discrimination “needed only to be progressively implemented rather than ‘without delay’ as Article 2” required.⁴⁰

CSW and their NGO allies, however, refused to accept this approach and by the time they reconvened for the Third World Conference on Women, a vibrant transnational women’s movement insisted that “women can hold their governments accountable” for the positions CEDAW detailed. In July 1985, approximately 15,000 women (2000 delegates and more than 13,000 NGO representatives from 150 nations) traveled to Nairobi to participate in 1,198 planned workshops and in another 300-plus spontaneous discussions convened by the NGO Planning Committee. Perhaps the most significant increase, however, occurred within the delegations themselves as, for the first time, governments appointed more women than men to chair their delegations.

Also unlike Copenhagen, where regional and racial differences threatened conference consensus, the Nairobi conference used “the framework of the United Nations and the goals of the UN Charter of equality, development and peace” to examine discrimination against women and women’s rights. This wider framework gave women new tools to assess their progress to date and to confront those who refused to recognize their rights in the future.

As they reflected on their experiences and debated how best to advance women’s security and draft the Nairobi plan of action, the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies, the women delegates made three significant contributions to the international women’s agenda. First, women’s economic security did not just depend upon eliminating discriminatory policies and customs that targeted women. Programs advancing women’s economic security must also assess how nationality, region, class, and race reinforce discrimination. Second, that violence against women—whether inflicted and supported by custom (female genital mutilation), used as a weapon of war (rape), or promoted as a business venture (trafficking and sexual slavery)—undermined any effort toward peace. And, finally, in order for women to achieve full equality, governments must not only mainstream women’s concerns but also establish “high-level institutional mechanisms to monitor and implement progress towards equality in all sectors.”⁴¹

By focusing on the UDHR, the covenants, and CEDAW, the Nairobi conference “legitimized” the goals these instruments presented “as applicable to women worldwide and elaborated them to encompass women’s concerns.”⁴² The delegates’ experience with and understanding of apartheid and civil wars taught them how violence against women posed a grave “obstacle to peace.” Thus, as they prepared the conference’s outcome document, the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies, the delegates not only addressed the discrimination women encountered in peacetime but also graphically detailed the specific assaults inflicted on women in wartime and called for specific measures to address these violent crimes.⁴³ As one Kenyan delegate recalled, “it was at the Nairobi Conference in 1985 that the domestication of CEDAW was seen as an important step towards the implementation of the rights for women.”⁴⁴

The Vienna and Beijing Conferences: Governments Join the Campaign

As no Fourth World Conference for Women was planned for 1990, the UN Decade for Women concluded with the Nairobi conference. Determined to keep the momentum going, NGOs convened local, regional, and national meetings in the following year. When in 1991 the UN announced plans for a human rights conference in Vienna and left women’s rights off the conference agenda, NGOs promptly organized to secure a prominent place for women’s human rights on the conference program. The Center for Women’s Global Leadership convened the Global Campaign for Women’s Human Rights, a coalition of regional, national, and international women’s organizations determined to correct the Vienna oversight. Global Campaign members then launched a “16 Day Campaign” (the period between the UN designated International Violence Against Women Day and International Human Rights Day) to secure signatures on its petition demanding that the UN “comprehensively address women’s human rights at every level” of the Vienna proceedings and recognize that “gender violence, a universal phenomenon which takes many forms across culture, race and class, as a violation of human rights requiring immediate action.” By the end of 1991, more than a half-million women, representing 1000 organizations in 124 countries, signed the petition. In 1992, women secured their space on the agenda.⁴⁵

Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president of the United States on a major party ticket, and chair of the U.S. delegation in Vienna, addressed the issue of violence against women in a New York Times editorial on June 13, 1993, the day the conference opened.

Several years ago, women’s rights advocates worldwide began to turn up at the same conventions, seminars, university settings, diplomatic receptions and refugee centers. They had many different problems. But as they listened to one another, they saw they had at least one concern in common that no international organization was talking about: violence against women. Female infanticide. Genital Mutilation. Wife murder. Sex tourism. Rape. Assault. Discrimination in health care. Barriers to political social and economic equality that make millions of women less than third-class citizens.

As they talked, the women made a global connection: these weren’t scattered “women’s problems,” not “minor” abuses that some governments has passed to a study commission and forgotten. These women recognized that gender-based violence as a matter of fundamental human rights.

Drawing attention to “the systematic rapes” of women in the Bosnian war and the “quieter rapes” and abuses that occurred daily around the world, Ferraro declared that the Global Campaign for Women’s Human Rights, an international coalition of more than 950 organizations, would “press” the Vienna conference to finally “denounce abuse of women as abuse of human rights.”⁴⁶

The women’s campaign had targeted the human rights conference because it knew that a “document” generated by that body “saying something about women’s human rights that will legitimize our next step.” It had prepared so well that even the press called the women “here to promote women’s human rights … the strongest and most effective lobby.”⁴⁷ Their work paid off. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action not only addressed women’s rights and domestic violence in detail (Section 1.7), it specifically linked women’s rights to human rights, declaring:

The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community.⁴⁸

Thus, as women prepared for the Fourth World Conference on Women to be held September 1995 in Beijing, they had secured official UN recognition of the framework they first explored in Mexico City twenty years earlier and which the United Nations Charter proclaimed in 1945.

More than forty-five thousand women and men—more than three times the record the Nairobi conference set—convened in and out of Beijing. Concerned that the thousands of activists attending the parallel NGO forum would challenge China’s human rights practices, the government relocated the forum to Huariou, a remote location thirty-five miles outside Beijing. The separation energized rather than isolated the attendees and together, the official delegates and NGO activists adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

Yet reaching consensus involved intense negotiations. Conservative groups and the Vatican objected to including planks supporting the right to abortion and family-planning services, as well as rights related to sexuality and gender identity. Many in the U.S. Congress objected to an American delegation traveling to communist China—which had just arrested human rights activist and Chinese expatriate Harry Wu, after he reentered China, and falsely convicted him of espionage—to address women’s issues and human rights. Senators Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm told the press that the conference was “shaping up as an unsanctioned festival of anti-family, anti-American sentiment.” Furthermore, for the first time, the U.S. ambassador to the UN (who just happened to be a woman) and the First Lady co-chaired the U.S. delegation to the conference.

The world press—and the international women’s human rights community—followed these developments closely. Hillary Clinton told her chief of staff that she wanted her remarks “to push the envelope as far as she could on behalf of women and girls.” In a speech that reverberated around the world, she threw her unquestioned support behind the conference:

For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words. The voice of this conference and of the women at Huariou must be heard loud and clear.

After denouncing human trafficking, female genital mutilation, specific violent acts against women, and the denial of women’s “right to plan their own families,” she concluded:

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.⁴⁹

The delegates agreed. Citing the UN Charter, the UDHR, CEDAW and other conventions, the governments signing the Beijing Declaration affirmed that “women’s rights are human rights” and pledged themselves “as Governments to implement” the Platform for Action and ensure “that a gender perspective is reflected in all our policies and programmes.”⁵⁰

This 223-page Platform for Action, coupled with CEDAW and the Vienna Declaration, defined the contemporary women’s human rights agenda. It identified twelve “critical areas of concern” for women (poverty, education and training, health, violence against women, women’s human rights, as well as women and armed conflict, women and the economy, women in power and decision-making, governmental and UN mechanisms for the advancement of women, women and the media, women and the environment, and the girl-child) and listed objectives and recommended actions to improve women’s access to rights in these areas.

The Platform, like the UDHR, is a declaration, not a covenant, and therefore carries no legal power. However, as the governments who signed the Platform pledged themselves to act, the declaration did, as it continues to do, carry great moral weight. As the Center for Women’s Global Leadership notes, “it serves as a policy guide for governments, institutions, private businesses, and UN agencies, and establishes standards by which to judge policies and programs already in place.” When governments adopted the Platform, they “strongly committed themselves to addressing obstacles to the advancement and empowerment of women.”⁵¹

Beijing compelled the UN to act. Its third Millennium Development Goal directs its members to take measurable action to “promote gender equality and empower women.” The Security Council adopted Resolutions 1325 on Women, Peace & Security, 1820 on Sexual Violence in Conflict, 1888 on protecting women and girls from sexual violence in armed conflict, and 1889 on monitoring efforts to enforce Resolution 1325. The UN Foundation made women and population one of its four investment priorities.

Women, from the UN’s inception, have shaped and defined its human rights framework. They led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, insisted on covenants defining and empowering its implementation, and, in the process, gave the world a new vision. In the process, they mastered the halls of diplomacy, developed an energetic global movement, and put discrimination at bay enough to rewrite law and challenge custom. They showed the world that “human rights are too important to be negotiable.”⁵²

NOTES

1. The UN had fifty-eight member states in December 1948. Honduras and Yemen did not attend the December 9 session.

2. Eight Soviet-aligned nations, who wanted the vote postponed, abstained. General Assembly, 180th Plenary Meeting, Summary Report, E/777, December 9, 1948, 933–34, United Nations Organization, General Assembly Records, Wellesley College.

3. ER to Maude Gray, December 9, 1948, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Volume I: The Human Rights Years, 1945–1948, ed. Allida Black (Farmingham, MI: Scribners, 2008).

4. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks to the 4th UN World Conference on Women,” September 5, 1995, Fifth World Conference on Women, http://5wcw.org/docs/Clinton_Speech.html; and Charlotte Bunch and Samantha Frost, “Women’s Human Rights: An Introduction,” Center for Women’s Global Leadership, http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/globalcenter/whr.html (accessed June 29, 2010).

5. United Nations Charter, Basic Documents in Human Rights, ed. Ian Brownlie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.

6. For examples of ER’s mediation see The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Volume I; and Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).

7. For example see Johannes Morsink, “Women’s Rights in the Universal Declaration,” Human Rights Quarterly 13, no. 2 (May 1991): 229–56; and Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008), 277–79.

8. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Women Must Learn to Play the Game as Men Do,” Red Book Magazine, April 1928, 78–79, 141–42.

9. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Women in Politics,” in What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt, ed. Allida Black (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1995), 258.

10. Martha Strayer Transcript, April 2, 1945, in The White House Press Conferences of Eleanor Roosevelt, ed. Maurine Beasley (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983), 213.

11. Ibid.

12. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” May 31 and June 1, 1945; and Edward Stettinius to Eleanor Roosevelt, July 10 and July 26, 1945, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 41–46, 59–62.

13. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” December 22, 1945; The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 159.

14. ER also noted “I know many men are made a little uncomfortable by having women in these positions, but I think the time has come to face the fact that you have to win as many women’s votes as you do men’s votes and that the Democratic Party probably has more strength among women if it stands as the liberal party and the party of human rights than it has among the men.” Eleanor Roosevelt to Robert Hannegan, June 3, 1945, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 48.

15. ER to Joe Lash, February 13, 1946, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 248–49.

16. ER’s advocacy for women to be part of UN leadership drew immediate interest. She had not yet disembarked from her transatlantic voyage to the General Assembly when the press asked what she thought about the “resumption of the old status of a women’s committee or of some such body.” She promptly replied that she had not “heard any direct suggestion of a specific committee,” but left no doubt as to where she stood on the matter. “I should think that if we could bring any question under an existing committee it would be a good idea. I do not like the multiplication of committees as long as some committees are prepared to take up the questions.” Memorandum of Press Conference, January 15, 1946, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 209.

17. Rather than write daily letters to her close friends, ER decided to keep a diary that her trusted assistant Malvina Thompson would distribute to the small trusted group. Eleanor Roosevelt, London Diary, January 23, 1946, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 221.

18. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” January 25, 1946, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 223, n.13.

19. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” January 28, 1946, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 224, n.13.

20. Arvonne S. Frazer, “Becoming Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 21, no. 4 (November 1999): 886.

21. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 230.

22. She supported Carrie Chapman Catt’s “anxious” request that an American woman “familiar with the evolution of the rights of women in the English speaking countries” be appointed and recommended Dorothy Kenyon to be that representative. Carrie Chapman Catt to ER, May 7, 1946, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 305–8.

23. Margaret E. Galey, “Promoting Nondiscrimination Against Women: The UN Commission on the Status of Women,” International Studies Quarterly 23, no. 2 (June 1979): 276.

24. In February 1946, ER not only joined the eighteen other women delegates to sign the Women’s Appeal but used her column to publicize their “call on the Governments of the world to encourage women everywhere to take a more conscious part in national and international affairs,” as well as their call “on women to come forward and share in the work of peace and reconstruction as they did in the war and resistance.” While she understood “that women in various parts of the world are at different stages of participation in the life of their communities, that some of them are prevented by law from assuming the full rights of citizenship, and that they may therefore see their immediate problems somewhat differently,” ER remained optimistic. She urged her fellow women delegates to tell “the women of all our countries” that that the UN offered women “an important opportunity and responsibility”—the opportunity to shape policy and the responsibility to represent women’s voices. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” February 8, 1946, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. I, 240, n.8.

25. The June 1947 Human Rights Commission Draft read: All men are brothers. Being endowed with reason and conscience, they are members of one family. They are free, and possess equal dignity and rights. Glendon, A World Made New, 281.

26. UN Economic and Social Council, Summary Record, June 13, 1947, E/CN.4/AC.1/SR.6.

27. Glendon, A World Made New, 28 and ibid.

28. Morsink, Universal Declaration, 199.

29. A. M. Rosenthal, “2 U.S. Mainstays Bid U.N. Farewell,” New York Times, December 21, 1952, 1, 4.

30. Laura Reanda, “Human Rights and Women’s Rights: The United Nations Approach,” Human Rights Quarterly 3, no. 2 (May 1981): 14.

31. Ibid. 17.

32. Bunch and Frost, “Women’s Human Rights: An Introduction.”

33. As Arvonne Fraser correctly notes, the nascent feminist groups “paid no attention to CSW and little to international affairs.” It took the “traditional NGOs who lobbied the Commission [and who] were influenced by this new movement” to bridge that gap and bring the outside activism to CSW women determined to combat the same prejudice. Fraser, “Becoming Human,” 893.

34. UN, Report of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, June 19–July 2, 1975, paragraph 46, E.76.IV.1 (1976).

35. “Short History of the CEDAW Convention,” at the UN website, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/history.htm (accessed June 28, 2010).

36. Bunch and Frost, “Women’s Human Rights: An Introduction.”

37. Felice D. Gaer, “Reality Check: Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations Confront Governments at the United Nations,” Third World Quarterly 16, no. 3 (September 1995): 393–95.

38. UN, Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Article 3, at the UN website, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/ (accessed June 29, 2010).

39. UNIFEM, “30 Years: The United Nations Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,” www.unifem.org/cedaw30/about_cedaw/ (accessed July 5, 2010).

40. Hanna Beate Schopp-Schilling, “Celebration: Twenty-five Years of the Work of the CEDAW Committee,” July 23, 2007, at the UN website, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/cedaw25anniversary/HBSS.pdf (accessed July 5, 2010).

41. UNIFEM, “30 Years: The United Nations Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.”

42. Margaret E. Galey, “The Nairobi Conference: The Powerless Majority,” PS 19, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 255–65.

43. Ibid, 256.

44. Kathambi Kinoti, “An interview with Dr Jacinta Muteshi of Kenya’s National Commission for Gender and Development,” June 2006 in African Women’s Engagement with the UN, Association for Women’s Rights in Development, http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Library/African-Women-s-Engagement-with-the-UN (accessed July 5, 2010).

45. Bunch and Frost, “Women’s Human Rights: An Introduction.”

46. Geraldine Ferraro, “Human Rights for Women,” New York Times, June 19, 1993.

47. Alan Riding, “Women Seize Focus at Rights Forum,” New York Times, June 16, 1993, A3.

48. UN, Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted June 23, 1993, at the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights website, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/vienna.htm (accessed June 29, 2010).

49. Charlotte Bunch and Niamh Reilly, “Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights,” Center for Women’s Global Leadership, http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/globalcenter/publications/demand.pdf (accessed July 5, 2010), 14.

50. Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, at the UN website, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/beijingdeclaration.html (accessed June 29, 2010).

51. Center for Women’s Global Leadership, “Beijing +15 Overview and Regional Activities,” September 18, 2009, www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/16days/kit09/beijing15.doc (accessed June 29, 2010).

52. Mary Robinson, “Acceptance of the Erasmus Prize,” in Mary Robinson: A Voice for Human Rights, ed. Kevin Boyle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 20.