Some pictures speak a thousand words; others speak a thousand years. Such was the image of U.S. feminist Betty Friedan sitting under a tree in Nairobi, Kenya, with some 100 women from perhaps as many nations gathered in a semicircle around her.
"Dialogue under a tree" was the image of all that was right, good, hopeful, and energizing about the United Nations Women's Decade Conference in July. More than 14,000 women from around the world gathered in one place to celebrate their sisterhood, to recognize the achievements made in women's rights over the past decade, to share their struggles and concerns, and to continue striving for the lives and hopes and dreams of women around the world.
When the dialogue moved from under the tree to the inside of Nairobi's Kenyatta Conference Center for the official meetings of the conference, however, it became less inspiring and more adversarial. But even under those conditions the conference was able to produce a significant document that represented the unanimous agreement of women from 157 nations on 357 feminist proposals (See "For the Record," p. 11). The governments of the world now have a record of the world's women speaking with one voice on such important matters as employment, political participation, child care, and household work.
But for all its basking in the accomplishments of the women's movement, its righteous indignation at the untold suffering of women, and its unwavering commitment to the empowerment of women, what the U.N. Women's Decade Conference boiled down to was men. Some of the world's most influential women succumbed to ancient, unjust male attitudes and political structures.
The official national delegations to the conference were appointed by men and represented governments and policies made by men. The inequalities to be rectified and the obstacles to be overcome were produced and perpetuated, in large part, by men. The agenda was set and the results were determined, in part, by men. The final document was prepared for presentation to the male-dominated U.N. General Assembly for approval. And, in the end, any action on the more than 350 unanimously approved feminist resolutions depends upon political decisions made by men.
Perhaps it was the recognition of these political realities that led Maureen Reagan, daughter of the U.S. president and head of the U.S. delegation, to remark at a Nairobi press conference that the final report of the conference is just a "piece of paper that is not going to make a difference." More likely it was her acceptance of such realities and the assumptions underlying them that prompted her to make such a detached and cynical statement. And the fundamental flaw of the conference was exactly the acceptance and embodiment of such oppressive male attitudes by the women of the U.S. and other First World delegations.
EVEN CONSIDERING the great power men held over the nature and outcome of the conference, it would be wrong to paint the male gender as the big, bad villain of Nairobi. Instead, it was the misguided and elitist attempt by some delegations to confine conference deliberations to the "unique concerns of women" that robbed the conference of its potential to present an alternative, women's vision on the political problems and violent, life-threatening forces that pervade our world. The political pronouncements that filled the conference center were frightening echoes not of earlier women's conferences in Mexico City and Copenhagen, but of thousands of years of male-defined prescriptions of what is and is not proper for the female gender. For ages, men have told women where their place is.
First World women dominated the Nairobi conference. Their concerns about constitutional amendments, fair pay, day care, and family violence are important and necessary, but they pale somewhat in the light of many women's daily struggle to survive. Yet these First World women told their more oppressed sisters that a women's conference delegate's place is in the arena of the "unique concerns of women," which are supposedly a gender apart from the political realm of militarism, terrorism, racism, imperialism, and global economic and political injustice.
Women of the United States and other Western nations were so obsessed with the inequalities between men and women in their prosperous and war-free homelands that they refused to acknowledge the very real inequalities among the women of the world. Yet these inequities must be addressed by delegates to an international women's conference, precisely because they exist both as a result of global political and economic disparities and as a result of the worldwide gap between genders.
But these inequities were not adequately addressed. The narrow definition of "women's issues" imposed by delegates from the world's most powerful nations robbed the women and men of the world of any hope of influential women's statements on Israel's foreign policies, the question of a Palestinian homeland, economic sanctions against South Africa, or unfair trade policies against the Third World. However, delegates from across the globe did manage to agree on several condemnations of the arms race, including a specific reference to the "spread of the arms race ... to outer space."
IT SHOULD COME as no surprise that male delegates led the censoring of "political" discussion at the conference. Chief among them was Alan Lee Keyes, the only male on the U.S. delegation, who served as its spokesperson on political issues. "We are at a women's conference. We cannot negotiate fundamental questions of policy at this conference," Keyes said in explaining the U.S. delegation's refusal to support a resolution declaring the Palestinian people's right to create their own state.
But political issues cannot be separated from the conditions in which women must live. While some issues concern women—and children—more than global society at large, there are no issues that do not affect the lives of women in some way. The quality of a Palestinian woman's life cannot be separated from the interminable killing in the Middle East; a black South African woman can have no meaningful rights under the system of apartheid; equality with her spouse is a moot point for a Nicaraguan woman whose husband has been killed by U.S.-backed contras; equal pay for equal work means little to a woman forced by the Reagan administration's budget cuts to choose between a low-paying job, welfare, or leaving her children unattended.
The failure of the majority of delegates to the Nairobi conference to address such issues is a loss for all women. The conference could have represented, for a brief moment, the union of women of the world and their concerns. It should have been a moment of strength, clarity, new vision, and momentum.
But the sad truth to emerge from the conference is that if we women can do no better than men in confronting the injustices of our age, if we impose the same unjust orders on one another that men have imposed on us, then while we may have improved our own lives, the world will be no better off.
Vicki Kemper was news editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
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