The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Global feminism, heavily dependent on Western countries for funding and publicity and especially tied in with America, also met with considerable resistance and outright antagonism in the many places where women’s rights thinking was reviled as colonial ideology. Feminists in Asia, Latin America, and Africa had difficulty countering the charge that patriarchalism was rooted in indigenous custom and tradition. The corollary of this wave of antifeminism was that male dominance was a proud feature of culture and religious piety. Feminist assertions were said to introduce Western individualism, anticommunalism, and selfishness that undermined the will and soul of the postcolonial nation.

  Human rights politics aided local feminists in changing the terms of argument by strengthening feminism’s universalist claims beyond the West. It seems counterintuitive that women had never fully been enveloped in human rights declarations: Were they not human? But then, they had never been included in development discussions, either. The foundation of the human rights movement, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR, 1948), did not specifically address the human rights of women but rather folded them into generic Man—although Latin American women were at least successful in getting women as a group recognized in the United Nations’ founding documents. The United Nations fully acknowledged the specific entitlements of women as a vulnerable population only in 1979, when, in the wake of the Mexico City world conference, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).32 CEDAW was a giant ERA, a world bill of rights for women. The treaty provisions summed up most of the classic goals of the women’s movement since Mary Wollstonecraft—the rights to education, equal pay, ownership of property, divorce, child custody, the end of legal disabilities in marriage—as well as new ones that were the product of modernity, such as access to family planning and equal participation in government. CEDAW declared, for instance, that a woman should not have to give up her nationality if she migrated with her husband or married a man from another nation, a common practice that could render a woman a stateless refugee should the husband die or desert her.33

  CEDAW’s enforcement mechanisms were nonexistent and the ratification process was drawn out, spotty, and halting. By 2010, 185 countries have signed (over 90 percent of U.N. members), although nearly one third noted reservations, meaning they retained the right to ignore requirements that didn’t suit them. Reading through the reservations is a world tour of patriarchy, with the lion’s share devoted to those sections of the treaty pertaining to men’s governance of women and children. A Turkish feminist nailed the problem: “The patriarchal system is at its most intractable in its resistance to reforming the institutions of marriage and the family.”34 Many of the reservations were about those measures pertaining to marriage and family law. For instance, provisions that attracted reservations were those that accorded women the same rights as men to determine the nationality of their children and to choose their own domicile. Islamic states, especially but not exclusively, objected to provisions that interfered with sharia, or religious law. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) lodged so many reservations that Sweden registered a reservation about those reservations, complaining that they were so numerous that they effectively nullified the UAE’s status as signatory.

  President Carter signed CEDAW in 1980 but the Senate never ratified it; once Reagan took over, conservatives blocked CEDAW every time it was introduced. Taking their cues from the charges that the Stop ERA campaign invented, American opponents called CEDAW an insult to women with traditional values, who wanted to be protected and cared for by their husbands in their homes, not have their rights meddled with by international treaties. As of this writing, the United States still has not ratified the agreement, a position that puts America in the company of Iran, Sudan, Somalia, and several small Islamic states and Pacific islands.35

  The long section of reservations signaled CEDAW’s limitations. Those states whose laws CEDAW contravened put the world on notice they had no intention to abide by it. Nonetheless, the convention announced the presence of women as a class in international law, and it had positive, although uneven, effects. In places where governments and left-wing and nationalist parties derided women’s rights as bourgeois and Western, CEDAW’s international stature gave feminist dissidents some legitimacy in phrasing their demands as basic requirements of modern nations. Women’s advocates could seize on local abuses otherwise untouchable in order to publicize them as abrogations of an international agreement. In Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, for instance, CEDAW gave women a platform from which to demand the reform of inadequate laws against domestic violence. In Kenya, tribal governance coexisted with the modern state and posed a major constraint on women: Tribal laws limiting women’s inheritance, for example, overrode civil law. CEDAW’s provisions gave women and their supporters some power to pressure states to bring their legal codes into line. In Argentina, after the junta collapsed in 1983, a women’s movement emerged and used CEDAW to revamp longstanding laws: New measures decriminalized birth control and permitted remarriage after divorce. And CEDAW’s existence, although hardly common knowledge, was enough to alert a few that patriarchal systems that seemed otherwise unbreachable were under pressure, even if the source of pressure was remote.36

  The treaty was a palimpsest of earlier moments, of basic demands that had been achieved in some places, but achieved for too few; or achieved and undone; or never achieved at all. Provisions were nonenforceable, and implementation depended on countries’ self-reporting. CEDAW was a doubled image: of feminism’s failures in the modern era and its abiding promise that justice to women was necessary for a better world. On the one hand, there was an international agreement whereby parties assented to bring their laws into conformity with a list of basic rights. On the other, the United States—a major repository of modern feminism—refused to ratify: That could be taken as an indication that nothing was ever won, that the same ground had to be staked out and fought for again and again. Little about the position of women was entirely settled, in part because, as Catharine MacKinnon pointed out, CEDAW does not challenge the premises of the system it aims to change. Nowhere does the agreement state that male supremacy is unjustifiable. “Sexism remains clothed, sexual politics ungrounded,” she concluded. The further feminism reached—the more it promised—the more it became clear that the very fundamentals were still not secure.37

  After 1980, human rights organizations multiplied, adding to their staffs, expanding the scope of their investigations, and branching out in their understanding of who it was they were defending. Despots, war, authoritarian regimes, whipped-up ethnic hatred, genocide, and mass murder fueled the cause: Cambodia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, El Salvador, Guatemala, Congo, Iran, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Uganda, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, China, Cuba, Nigeria, and many more countries were the scenes of massive cruelty and political repression. In the 1980s, American foundations poured millions of dollars into the movement. Global feminism was a major beneficiary.38

  The victims who came to light included both sexes, but initially men were much more prominent in the concerns of human rights groups such as Amnesty International, because these organizations championed victims of state-sponsored repression in the public sphere: Journalists, opposition leaders, and prominent dissenters were mostly male. It was not a question of ignoring women, but rather a selectivity dictated by the nature of the enterprise. As stories and testimonials piled up from around the world, though, it became evident that civil and political definitions of human rights did not begin to cover much of the systematic brutality being reported.

  In 1993, feminists at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, held to amend and extend the cornerstone UNDHR, succeeded in expanding the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action to affirm “the human rights of women and of the girl-child.” The Vienna Declaration’s commitments to women went beyond CEDAW: It held not only states but private indiv
iduals accountable for human rights violations. Catherine MacKinnon, who shifted the focus of her theoretical work and activism from a dissolving autipornography movement into human rights work, elucidated the problem: Violence against women was conscious and systematic, yet it had no salience in international law when the perpetrators were men in civil society and not state actors—officials, soldiers, or police.39 The new human rights provisions challenged the shibboleths of family integrity and tradition, holding that domination and supra-exploitation of women in the family and ordinary economic and social life were violations of their human rights: physically abusing women and girls, trafficking them for the purposes of prostitution or coerced labor, sexually harassing them, using them for purposes of pornography and forcibly impregnating them as a weapon of war (a practice that Serbian forces were using at the time in the Bosnian War).40

  The Vienna Declaration was not an international convention like CEDAW; it had no binding power. Regardless, after 1993, public and professional interest in women’s human rights quickened. Human Rights Watch compiled a massive 1995 Global Report on Women’s Human Rights, which laid out a dreadful array of violations: girls forced to undergo virginity exams (Turkey), rape used as a weapon of war (Bosnia, Somalia, Kashmir, Peru), sexual trafficking (Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma), states with no laws against domestic abuse or informally condoning it (Russia, South Africa), and wife murder (Brazil).

  In the next ten years, human rights publicity turned the sentence by a sharia court in Nigeria of a woman to be executed by stoning into an international cause célèbre and brought world attention to the plight of Korean women enslaved as sex workers by the Japanese military during World War II—the so-called comfort women. Both of these became matters for serious diplomatic negotiations.41 American papers published articles on dowry deaths in India, clitoridectomy in Somalia, forced sterilization in China, and military rapes in Peru and Burma as violations of human rights, worthy of attention and redress.

  Victims who caught the attention of local advocacy groups might find legal help and kick up public support; the fortunate attracted the interest of sympathetic journalists who brought the case to the notice of newspaper readers—fortunate being an ironic status, because it was the severity of the woman’s fate that made her newsworthy. Spirited resistance to horrors that were unfamiliar and exotic in the West made the news, such as the fight put up by Miriam Willingal, who defied tribal law in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1997. Willingal was part of a complex compensation package offered to the clan of a murdered leader by the clan of the murderer: Willingal was offered in marriage, along with money and livestock. Willingal, who had ambitions—she wanted to finish high school and work as a typist—refused to play her part. She found a sympathetic woman lawyer in a nearby town who pushed her case up through the regular judicial system, making it a test of highland people’s rights to force women into bride payments. Amnesty International and then The New York Times picked up the story, and the Papua New Guinea high court eventually upheld her constitutional right to choose her own husband and ordered tribes to abandon the practice.42

  Attacking human rights abuses perpetrated by families was often the most radical and dangerous work feminists did, undertaken in the face of hostile officials, indifferent police, judges, and menacing guardians of supposed tradition—often male elites and politicians with a stake in preserving power over wives and daughters. Most victims did not have access to Western sympathizers. It was local feminists—individuals and organizations—who brought the scandals and cases to light, gave sanctuary to victims, provided support and legal help, and put in the work to fight laws and police practices. The feminist movement in India, for example, was notable for tackling cruelty and murder and unmasking officials who rationalized criminal behavior. The political dynamics came from a productive dialectic between urban, middle-class and rural women. Over several decades, feminists made public the suppressed scandal of dowry deaths, of systemic, quasi-sanctioned rape—including habitual rape by police and landlords—and of sex-selective abortions, which by 2000 were badly skewing the sex ratios of India and China (with a huge portion of the world’s population between them), as well as of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea.43

  High-profile cases were tried in international courts. A turning point came after the Bosnian war, with the first international prosecutions of sexual slavery and rape as crimes against humanity. The 1949 Geneva Convention designated rape a crime of war, but the indictments at Nuremberg did not include any for rape and the Tokyo trials gave rape only cursory attention.44 What happened in Bosnia was related to customary practices but intensified. The Serbian command encouraged soldiers to commit mass rape—as many as twenty thousand women may have been assaulted—as one way to terrorize civilians, force them into flight, and impregnate Bosnian Muslim women. Serbian soldiers took women captive, imprisoned them in camps used to torture and execute men, and raped them over periods ranging from days to months.45 Determined lawyers and victims brought charges in the International Tribunal for Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia (ITCFY) in The Hague.46

  A collaboration between NGOs in Bosnia and feminists based in New York and London helped victims make the atrocities known, drawing outraged attention to practices that had long been judged regrettable, horrible, but unavoidable. The ICTFY in The Hague issued some forty-six indictments. Although in the end only four men were convicted and sentenced to prison, the vital contact among Bosnian women, American and European feminists, and jurists trained in international law was a turning point in human rights litigation and the international understanding of rape.47

  Revelations about Bosnia meant that the mass rapes of the Rwandan genocide would be seen in a very different light, as instrumental, not incidental. In 1995, the new government, staggering out of the mass murder, incredibly and heroically pulled together a report to the Beijing conference that counted the number of rape victims at fifteen thousand in the first ten days of the killing (an estimate we now know was far too low) and went into some detail about the Hutu militias’ use of rape as a weapon. The influence of women’s human rights ideas can be seen in Rwanda’s 2000 decision to put rape and sexual slavery in the category of the most serious crimes—along with multiple murders and organizing the genocide—to be tried in the country’s massive effort to bring justice. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, also issued multiple indictments for rape as a crime against humanity, including one of a woman, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. Nyiramasuhuko was minister for women’s affairs under the Habyarimana government. Eager to make a name for herself, she helped organize the genocide in and around the university town of Butare, allegedly calling the militias to rape Tutsi women before they killed them and, in one episode, urging soldiers to rape as a prelude to burning the victims alive.48

  These trials were points when the women’s lobby mobilized the power of international law and diplomacy, trials that made something visible that had long been invisible or occluded. But rape as a weapon of war was a dramatic instance of brutality, a rallying point around which any sane person would gather. More difficult to challenge were practices embedded in laws and family relations, especially men’s control over women’s sexuality. The defense of these forms of patriarchal power summoned up custom and culture. Practices such as child marriage, the argument went, were regrettable, but inseparable from honorable traditions, religious beliefs, and national or ethnic folkways. To oppose them was to introduce alien Western values. Human rights language pushed past this impasse by gesturing instead toward international norms.

  Sometimes issues that would have otherwise gone unmentioned, staying below the radar of international relations, became points of negotiation. Feminists in Turkey, for instance, were able to use the 1995 Human Rights Watch report about virginity exams (forced on girls and unmarried women, including schoolgirls, security guards, and government employees) to create an outcry inside and outside the country as Turkey was gearing up to
renew its application for admission to the European Union. The bad publicity led the government to ban the practice in 2002. Brazilian feminists used human rights language to strip away the veneer of custom and machismo that accrued around their society’s extensive pattern of male domestic abuse; at one point in the 1980s in São Paulo, they had enough power on the city council to establish a police precinct staffed by female officers specially trained to deal with sexual violence.49

  Generally, though, the overriding problem was that feminists’ reach was so limited in states where the worst violations occurred. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), for instance, where 5.5 million people died in the war and its aftermath between 1998 and 2008, the violence continues, and today rape and sexual torture are legion. In the conservative Muslim world, aggression against women and women’s movements mounted after the 1979 Iranian revolution; there, human rights pressure, CEDAW, and Western public opinion were of little use to beleaguered women imprisoned, tortured, and forced underground or into exile. Even in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led occupation in 2004, with Kabul awash in donor money and peppered with NGOs, Ann Jones, an American who worked there for several years, noted impatiently that the monthly meeting about violence against women set up by UNIFEM moved down a predictable path, everyone beginning by agreeing that atrocities were widespread and proceeding to a consensus that the issue should not be raised publicly lest it cut into conservative support for the government.50

  The ubiquity of violence against women was American feminists’ signal contribution to international discussions. A popular—indeed a prevalent—subject of concern in the United States in the 1980s, violence against women became over the last two decades of the century a copious designation, which included rape, domestic violence, murder, forced marriage, sexual trafficking, sexual harassment, homophobia, and clitoridectomy. It was here that American feminists spied the most atrocious abrogations of women’s human rights and the most urgent international issues. And who could not agree that violence against women must end? The subject did not materialize in deliberations at the Mexico City conference in 1976, but it emerged the next year in an International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women held in Brussels, funded by American donors. At the Nairobi conference in 1985, the topic generated scores of workshops and thousands of pamphlets. At the Beijing conference, sexual violence “transcended race, class and cultures, and united women worldwide in a common cause,” reported a pleased participant: “There were so many different workshops on violence … that one could not have attended them all in nine days.”51