Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509180092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EDITH M. LEDERER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BEIJING LENGTH: Medium
The old boys' network better watch out. The 30,000 women who left Beijing energized to fight for women's rights don't yet have an old girls' network, but they're on the move.
Armed with a 150-page plan of action, they are heading to the four corners of the world to pressure governments to change discriminatory laws and put money into health and education instead of arms and ammunition.
Perhaps as important as the document itself is the global network of women who are now committed to achieving its goals - equality, development and peace.
Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who made a rousing call for action at Friday's close of the Fourth World Conference on Women, said the women's network is growing and reaching down to the grass roots.
``Women's issues have become broader issues than they were maybe 20 years ago,'' and now include topics such as development, the economy and the environment, she said in an interview.
Since the first U.N. women's conference in Mexico City in 1975, women have been organizing internationally. Their focus has sharpened and their political skills have been honed.
At the last U.N. women's conference in Nairobi in 1985, the negotiators were mainly male bureaucrats, and representatives of voluntary organizations were pretty much sidelined, said Indian feminist Gita Sen.
Over the past decade, she said, women's organizations recognized that it was crucial to get their views across when governments and international agencies were discussing issues and making commitments.
Otherwise, ``we're always put in the position of having to plead with them after the fact ... that somehow we fit into their agendas,'' she said.
In the international arena, women first made a big difference at the U.N. conference on human rights in Vienna in 1993 when they put women in the center of the human rights debate, she said in an interview.
At last year's U.N. population conference in Cairo, women again played a critical role, changing the debate from controlling population growth to women's rights to control their bodies, she said.
American feminist Betty Friedan, godmother of the women's liberation movement, said the women who came to Beijing ``were not there as victims the way they were in previous conferences.''
For all women's activists, the key word now is action.
Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, deputy foreign minister of Namibia, said Africa's agenda in Nairobi was to end apartheid in South Africa and liberate the continent from colonialism. With those goals achieved, it is now focusing on development ``and economic liberation,'' she said.
``From here, we will not rest,'' she said, noting that African nations which met daily in Beijing would set up a regional organization to ensure that governments implement the Platform For Action.
It is this kind of commitment that many women see as one of the most important results from Beijing.
``This conference is the jump start for the next century, where women I think will be the most prominent of the peacemakers and the negotiators and the decision-makers,'' Bella Abzug, the American feminist and former congresswoman, said in an interview.
But they aren't there yet.
Patricia Licuanan of the Philippines, the head of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, said the process of building a women's network like the old boys' network is just beginning.
``It's just now that women are really getting into positions where they can network, or take advantage of people at the same level who do the same thing,'' she said. ``I'm sure ... it will grow exponentially.'
by CNB