Looking Back, Looking Forward: Women's Human Rights in Global Perspective
![handle is hein.journals/worts38 and id is 347 raw text is:
LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD:
WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS IN GLOBAL
PERSPECTIVE
Charlotte Bunch
I want to reflect on the importance of the Beijing World Conference on
Women in 1995, as one who has worked cross-culturally for many years on
issues of global feminism and who organized around the Beijing
Conference as the Director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership
(CWGL) at Rutgers-New Brunswick.) An assessment of the importance of
this event needs to begin with understanding that it was not the beginning,
but rather the culmination of a long period of feminist organizing and
ferment around the world. One of the key achievements of Beijing was the
framing of the Platform for Action2 and women's issues as human rights;
this paradigm shift grew out of the global feminist movement in the 1980's
and began well before the Beijing Conference.
Since the first UN International Women's Year World Conference in
Mexico City in 1975, feminists have come together to utilize the United
Nations as a global space to meet and learn from each, to network and
develop feminist understandings of various policy issues. Much of this
began with defining so called women's issues, - policy areas that were
primarily shaped by gender, such as reproductive rights and violence
against women. The first task of the movement was getting attention to
these issues and putting them on the global agenda. In this process, debates
grew over what was a women's issue, and feminist discourse evolved
into seeing that all issues are women's issues. Within this frame, the
importance of concepts like intersectionality emerged as a way of
understanding that gender was also affected by issues of race, class,
sexuality, age and other factors. 3
The evolution of these understandings of feminism did not always
emerge smoothly and certainly did not come necessarily from the West, as
is so often assumed in US media. What makes them vibrant is that the
' Center for Women 's Global Leadership, RUTGERS SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES,
http://cwgl.rutgers.edu/ (last visited Feb. 11, 2017).
2 U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, Platform for Action, 17, A/CONF. I17/20/Rev. I
(Sept. 15, 1995)[hereinafter U.N Fourth World Conference].
3 KIMBERLE CRENSHAW, ON INTERSECTIONALITY: ESSENTIAL WRITINGS OF KIMBERLE
CRENSHAW (Perseus Distribution Services 2012).
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Looking Back, Looking Forward: Women's Human Rights in Global Perspective
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