This September, the Feminist Majority Foundation will meet with women's organizations from around the world in Beijing, China to form alliances and share strategies at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Forum. The Feminist Majority Foundation will hold workshops at the NGO Forum on Achieving Gender Balance in the Workplace, Achieving Gender Balance in Politics, Empowering Women through Media, RU-486, and on implementing the Plan of Action from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development.
In Beijing, the Feminist Majority Foundation will also work with thousands of official government delegates to help finalize contentious language in the conference document. Women's rights organizations hope the final Platform for Action will result in concrete measures to empower women politically, economically, and socially.
The NGO Forum will be held outside of Beijing, an hour away from the official United Nations conference, because Chinese officials made a sudden decision to move the NGO Forum site further away from the official conference site. The resulting outcry from NGOs worldwide caused Chinese officials to concede to demands to upgrade the facilitates for the NGO Forum. Thirty thousand people are expected to attend the NGO Forum and the official United Nations conference. &venty-four percent of the attendees will be from the United States, and twentytwo percent from Japan.
In preparation for the Conference, the Feminist Majority Foundation as well as other women's rights groups successfully lobbied the U.S. State Department to reverse their position on two issues. The government now supports strong language on the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and language on political asylum for women fleeing gender discrimination.
In addition, heads of reproductive rights and women's rights organizations including Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal met with Timothy Wirth, the newly-appointed Alternate Chair of the US Delegation, and presented him with a list of recommendation's for women's empowerment to be carried out by the U.S. government.
The list includes the following: ratification of CEDAW; government provision of training and support of reproductive health care providers; assignment of doctors to rural abortion clinics through the Public Health Service Act; government support for sex education in schools; respect for the privacy of minors; funding for the eradication of unsafe abortion worldwide; gender impact analysis and integration of findings for all programs carried out by the US Agency for International Development ; the appointment of more women in high-level positions and as agency heads at the United Nations and in International Financial Institutions.
In an about-face, Pope John Paul II issued a "Letter to Women" apologizing for the Catholic Church's historic opposition to women's rights and saluting the fight for women's equality. The letter sets a conciliatory tone in anticipation of the opening of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in September.
"The Pope's letter provides hope that the Vatican will not hold the Fourth World Women's Conference hostage to anti-abortion and anti-family planning dogma, " commented Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation. "Yet even this conciliatory letter is framed in painfully patronizing, separate-but-equal terms. At the same time that the Pope seeks to I promote the cause of women,' he extols motherhood by rape. And the Pope continues, with very convoluted logic, to justify the exclusion of women from the priesthood."
Despite the Pope's recent statement, the Vatican continues to object to the Conference's Platforirn for Action, which outlines concrete strategies for improving the status of women worldwide. At a recent preparatory meeting, the Vatican succeeded in "bracketing" all language concerning reproductive and sexual health.
By bracketing this language, the Vatican forces contentious debate over these issues at the conference. While it is expected that key reproductive rights provisions won in Cairo at the International Conference for Population and Development will be retained in Beijing, the Vatican may still use the abortion issue to obstruct approval of the Women's Conference platform.
"Even this conciliatory letter is framed in painfully patronizing, separate-but-equal terms."
At the March preparatory meeting, the Vatican, along with Concerned Women for America, a right-wing U.S. women's group, orchestrated a dispute over the use of the word "gender" in the platform in an effort to derail platform deliberations. These groups argued that the word "gender" would be interpreted as promoting homosexuality, bi-sexuality, and trans-sexuality, and succeeded in bracketing many sections of the document in which gender appeared. Further negotiations over the gender language are scheduled to take place before the conference opens.
Concerned Women for America, led by Beverly LaHaye, and the Eagle Forum, founded by Phyllis Schlafly, attacked the document as anti-family at a June summit held by right-wing women's organizations to plan for the Conference. Another anti-abortion group based in Florida which calls itself the True Majority (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!) says they will speak out in Beijing against "godless feminists, whose evil agenda is to deconstruct womanhood." The True Majority is headed by Judy Madsen, the anti-abortion activist whose challenge to abortion clinic "buffer zones" was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case brought by the Feminist Majority Foundation. 0
by Alia Khan
New Clinton Administration Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) guidelines allow women who are victims of sexual abuse and violence resulting from political persecution to be granted asylum in the United States. The new guidelines take effect immediately, and will be overseen by Doris Meissner, commissioner of the INS.
Prompted by a growing awareness of the mass rapes taking place in Bosnia and an intensive lobbying effort by women's rights and human rights organizations, the new guidelines follow a precedent-setting case involving a Haitian woman who tried to seek political asylum in the US. She had been refused asylum by a US immigration judge after having been a victim of gang rape by Haitian soldiers because of her support for Haitian President Jean Bertrande Aristide. However, whereas the judge did not believe the rape was in retaliation for the woman's political alignment, the US Immigration Board of Appeals overturned the ruling, citing the gang rape as a clear form of political persecution.
Nancy Kelly and Deborah Anker, co-founders of Harvard Law School's Women Refugees Project, as well as Michele Beasley of the Women's Commission for Refugeq Women and Children, drafted the proposed recommendations upon which the new INS guidelines are based. Thirty-five other organizations, including immigration advocacy, human rights, and women's rights organizations, endorsed the recommendations.
Previous to the new guidelines, the United States granted asylum based on persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Under the new guidelines, women can be considered a particular social group, and can be granted asylum if they have been victims of rape, domestic abuse and other forms of sexual violence, forced abortion, forced sterilization, female genital mutilation and violence against women. Although the burden of proof for granting asylum will still remain high, the guidelines recognize gender-based discrimination as a form of political persecution and require immigration officers and judges to recognize and be sensitive to acts of violence against women.
The INS guidelines also strengthen the Violence Against Women Act which went into effect in September 1994. The Act bolstered immigration law by allowing women who reside in the US, but are not citizens, to leave abusive husbands without risk of deportation from the country.
Bosnian and Croatian women continue to be raped in Serb-run rape camps, according to Zainab Salbi, founder and President of Women for Women in Bosnia, a sponsorship program linking women in the United States and Canada with Bosnian and Croatian women.
Salbi founded Women for Women in Bosnia in June 1993 after becoming horrified at the events unfolding on television and in the newspapers, but unable to find a group specifically dedicated to helping women. Women for Women has since brought financial and emotional support to more than 500 women in Bosnia.
Within Bosnia, rape, torture, civilian massacres, and expulsion from homes and villages continues. Salbi said at least one estimate puts the number of women raped at 60,000.
Salbi visited Bosnia and Croatia last summer, speaking to women's groups and social workers. "The women I talked to confirmed the continued existence of Serb-run rape camps in Bosnia," said Salbi. "Women were able to give me the exact locations of camps, but asked that we not publish the names and locations. In the past, published reports of specific rape camps have led to the murder of the women, particularly if international observers asked to visit the site."
Through the Women for Women program, American and Canadian women exchange letters and send $22 each month to their "sisters" in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. An American nurse living in Croatia and a Bosnian representative in Sarajevo hand-deliver the funds and letters to the women each month.
"A lot of these women feel so abandoned," Salbi explained. "That's why providing some type of emotional support was so important to me."
For more information on how to become a sponsor, call Women for Women in Bosnia at (703) 519-1730, or write to P.O. Box 9733, Alexandria, VA 22304.
"Structural adjustment" - these two cryptic words represent an economic policy that has an enormous and often negative impact on women in developing countries. Feminist economist and economic literacy advocate Pam Sparr has gathered a collection of essays on structural adjustment by women in a variety of developing countries including Turkey, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Jamaica, Egypt, and the Philippines.
What is structural adjustment? Third-world countries in economic poverty are in desperate need of loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the largest international development lending institutions. These loans contain conditions that require developing countries to liberalize trade, downsize government, deregulate business, and greatly reduce overall government spending. This ensemble of policies is known as structural adjustment. In response to these conditions, governments will usually choose to cut education and social services budgets before cutting larger budget items such as the military.
World Bank and IMF policies have primarily been driven by the political and economic agendas of their major shareholders - the richest industrialized countries.
Sparr reveals the gender bias inherent in structural adjustment, which ignores unpaid women's and girls' work and undermines their economic opportunities.
Empirical studies show that women are more likely to become unemployed as a result of structural adjustment. Evqpn where women keep their jobs, wage differentials between men and women increase. New jobs are frequently created in those sectors of the economy from which women have been excluded because of sex and race discrimination. Tougher economic climates give businesses less incentive to maintain good working conditions. Under structural adjustment, companies often violate labor laws on wages, hours, and working conditions and cease providing benefits.
In her chapter, Mervat Hatem illustrates structural adjustment's erosion of advances made by Egyptian women in employment. The Egyptian government had actively facilitated women's entry into the workplace in the 1940's and 50's by mandating benefits such as paid maternity leave, childcare, and guaranteed employment for all high school and college graduates. Women's labor force participation therefore increased significantly. However, structural adjustment severely curtailed these benefits, restricting women's opportunities in the workplace. In addition, poor overall economic conditions exacerbated by structural adjustment measures fueled Islamic fundamentalism, driving women out of the workplace and back into the home.
Maria Floro analyzes the results of export promotion on the division of labor by gender in the Philippines. By decreasing credit to small farmers in order to funnel money to larger, commercial farms, the government effectively shuts women out of this market.
Overall, women are getting poorer under structural adjustment. As the government provides fewer social services, women's and girls' unpaid labor increases to take up the slack, which slows down the enrollment of girls in school. There is also evidence that domestic violence against women increases under structural adjustment policies.
Mortgaging Women's Lives is extremely critical of the neo-liberal economic model that gives rise to structural adjustment policies. Sparr concludes that although some financial institutions now favor a more grassroots, "women in development" approach, this is merely an add-on, rather than a fundamental revision of economic policy and development strategy. Empowerment, she insists, is the fad of the 1990s in international development. Activists should therefore be clear on the underlying political agenda of policymakers, who ultimately want to promote the market-oriented approach to development even at the cost of women's economic security.
--Christine Onyango