42. New York Times, May 6, 1997; http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engasa340042006.
43. Indira Jaising, “Violence Against Women: The Indian Perspective,” in Women’s Rights, Human Rights, ed. Peters and Wolper, pp. 53–54; Omvedt, Women in Popular Movements, pp. 21–27; Connelly, Fatal Misconception, pp. 356–57; Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation, 2nd ed. (New York, 2002), pp. 257–62; Jeff Jacoby, “Choosing to Eliminate Unwanted Daughters,” Boston Globe, April 6, 2008.
44. Testimony and documentation of rape was presented at the Nuremberg trials, but never prosecuted. In Tokyo, rape was included in the general list of crimes in the indictment, but only minimal attention was paid to the charge. Tokyo was a precedent, however, in international prosecution. See Julie A. Mertus, War’s Offensive on Women: The Humanitarian Challenge in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan (Bloomfield, Conn., 2000), p. 77.
45. The story of Omarska, a main camp where women were held, is recounted in the remarkable documentary Saving the Ghosts, which also chronicles the trip of several women to testify in the ICTFY in The Hague.
46. Kate Nahapetian, “Selective Justice: Prosecuting Rape in the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda,” Berkeley Women’s Law Journal 126 (1999), p. 130. The “Foca indictment” of 1996 was the first ICTFY indictment to deal specifically with rape and sexual assault. It charged eight Bosnian Serb police and military officers with the rape and sexual assault of at least fourteen Bosnian Muslim women in the town of Foca.
47. A count of the information up to 2007 from the Netherland Institute of Human Rights (University of Utrecht) yielded these numbers: www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.CONF.157.23.En. For a comprehensive statement of the revised view of rape’s importance, see Dorothy Q. Thomas and Regan E. Ralph, “Rape in War: Challenging the Tradition of Impunity,” SAIS Review 14 (Spring 1994), pp. 81–99; Catharine MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 17 (1994), pp. 5–16.
48. Rapport du Rwanda aux Nations Unies pour la Quatrième Conférence Mondiale sur les Femmes … Beijing (Kigali, Rwanda, 1995). Since 2000, Rwanda has designated rape and sexual slavery in Category One of genocide crimes, the most serious class.
49. Washington Post, January 27, 1998, p. A18; New York Times, January 8, 1998, p. A3, January 12, 1998, p. A20, June 19, 2002, p. A22; Chante Lasco, “Virginity Testing in Turkey: A Violation of Women’s Human Rights,” Human Rights Brief 9, no. 3, brief 10 (2002); Mary Geske and Susan C. Bourque, “Grassroots Organizations and Women’s Human Rights: Meeting the Challenge of the Local-Global Link,” in Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global Perspective, ed. Marjorie Agosîn (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), p. 257.
50. Ann Jones, Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (New York, 2006), p. 155. Jones’s grim meditation on the prevalence of violence against women in Afghan society during the war is on p. 173.
51. Freeman, “Beijing Report,” p. 12; Fraser, “Becoming Human,” pp. 901–2.
52. Sexual slavery was “present in all situations where women or girls cannot change the immediate conditions of their existence; where, regardless of how they got into those conditions they cannot get out, and where they are subject to sexual violence and exploitation.” International Feminism: Networking Against Female Sexual Slavery, ed. Barry et al., pp. 8–9.
53. Amadiume, Daughters of the Goddess, pp. 125–31; Paulina Makinwa-Adebusoye, “Hidden: A Profile of Married Adolescents in Northern Nigeria,” pp. 16–17, available at www.actionhealthinc.org/publications/downloads/hidden.pdf. Blaine Harden, “Child Bride’s Killing Shocks Nigerians,” Washington Post, May 3, 1987. Amadiume gives the most searing account of the politics around the case; the Post reports outrage from Muslims and Christians alike.
54. Ms. (Spring 2004), pp. 3, 47.
55. Agarwal, “Gender and Land Rights Revisited,” p. 214. On the bad faith swirling around the defense of tradition, see the penetrating work by Uma Narayan, especially Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (New York, 1997), notes to pp. 614–16.
56. Elizabeth Friedman, “Human Rights: The Emergence of a Movement,” in Women’s Rights, Human Rights, ed. Peters and Wolper, p. 21.
57. Western feminist debate on clitoridectomy, especially in the United States, proceeded in a bubble in the 1980s, with little interest in the views of African women. The problem of self-involved Westerners winds in and out of arguments in Egypt and East Africa. For a concise summary, see Melanie McAlister, “American Feminists, Global Visions, and the Problem of Female Genital Surgeries,” in Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, ed. Michael Kazin and Joe McCartin (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006). An especially illuminating study of a particular case is Ellen Gruenbaum, “The Islamic Movement, Development, and Health Education: Recent Changes in the Health of Rural Women in Central Sudan,” Social Science Medicine 33, no. 6 (1991), pp. 637–45. Isabelle R. Gunning, “Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 23 (1991–92), pp. 189–248, expresses the dilemmas of an American feminist at a point of transition in the discourse. A sober assessment of the problem is Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer and Robert F. Reynolds, “Female Genital Surgeries, Reproductive Health and Sexuality: A Review of the Evidence,” Reproductive Health Matters 7 (May 1999), pp. 112–20. See also the essays in Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics, ed. Stanlie M. James and Claire C. Robertson (Urbana, Ill., 2002).
58. Sheila Dauer, “Indivisible or Invisible: Women’s Human Rights in the Public and Private Sphere,” in Women, Gender, and Human Rights, ed. Agosîn, pp. 75–79; Deborah Ellis, Women of the Afghan War (Westport, Conn., 2000), pp. 67–68, 85, 104; Anne Garrels, “Concern Grows over Iraqi ‘Honor Killings,’ ” report from Iraq on National Public Radio, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5043032; Fadia Faqir, “Intrafamily Femicide in Defence of Honour: The Case of Jordan,” Third World Quarterly 22 (February 2001), pp. 65–82; Suzanne Ruggi, “Commodifying Honor in Female Sexuality: Honor Killings in Palestine,” Middle East Report 206 (Spring 1998), pp. 12–15. On the sati case in India, see Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, “The Burning of Roop Kanwar,” Manushi, no. 43 (1987), pp. 18, 20; “Deorala Episode: Women’s Protest in Rajasthan,” Economic and Political Weekly 45 (November 7, 1987); Radha Kumar, “From Chipko to Sati: The Contemporary Indian Women’s Movement,” The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective, ed. Amrita Basu (Boulder, Colo., 1995), pp. 79–82.
59. “Respite for Woman Who Faces Stoning,” New York Times, June 4, 2002, p. A10; “As Stoning Case Proceeds, Nigeria Stands Trial,” New York Times, January 26, 2003. Information on Amina Lawal Kurami from Amnesty.org.
60. Flanders, “C. MacKinnon in the City of Freud,” Nation, August 9/16, 1993, pp. 174–77.
61. Connelly, Fatal Misconception, passim.
62. Legal abortion was far from what literary critic Gayatri Spivak, speaking as a feminist of the Third World, derided as a “master symbol” of Western feminists who made it their “alibi … to keep the world order as it is.” Spivak’s talk at the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo 1993, is reported in Loes Keysers, “Reflections on Reproductive and Sexual Rights During the ICPD,” Newsletter—Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights 47 (July–September 1994), p. 5. The International Conference on Safe Abortion gave updated statistics in 2007; the number had dropped to 42 million, with 68,000 women dying every year. Jane Gabriel “The Choir,” Open Democracy, October 25, 2007, www.opendemocracy.net.
63. R. A. Bang et al., “High Prevalence of Gynecological Diseases in Rural Indian Women,” Lancet (January 14, 1989), pp. 85–87; Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, “Why Women’s Rights Are the Cause of our Time,” New York Times Magazine, August 23, 2009, pp. 36, 38. The strength of women’s movements in Af
rica is discussed throughout the essays in African Women’s Movements: Transforming Political Landscapes, ed. Aili Marie Tripp, Isabel Casamiro, Joy Kwesiga, and Alice Mungwa (New York, 2009).
64. Rhonda Copelon and Rosalind Petchesky, “Toward an Interdependent Approach to Reproductive and Sexual Rights as Human Rights: Reflections on the ICPD and Beyond,” in From Basic Needs to Basic Rights: Women’s Claim to Human Rights, ed. Margaret Schuler (Washington, D.C., n.d.), p. 346.
65. Petchesky, Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights (London, 2003), chapter 3.
66. Razawi and Miller, From WID to GAD, p. 17
67. Reproductive Health Matters 4 (May 1996), Special Issue on Men.
68. Dunlop et al., “Women Redrawing the Map”; Copelon and Petchesky, “Toward an Interdependent Approach,” pp. 346–47.
69. The phrase of Princeton demographer Charles Westhoff, in Connelly, Fatal Misconception, p. 364.
70. The letter to the president was followed by a highly unusual attack on Vice President Al Gore, accusing him of lying about the American position on abortion. “Letter released on April 5, 1994, by the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican,” available at www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2CLINT.HTM; New York Times, September 1, 1994; Betsy Hartmann, “The Cairo ‘Consensus’: Women’s Empowerment or Business as Usual?,” GeoJournal 35, no. 2 (1995); Keysers, “Cairo plus Five—Business as Usual?,” Newsletter—Women’s Global Network 65 (1999); “The Sudan Withdraws from U.N. Cairo Conference on Population,” New York Times, August 31, 1994.
71. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Vatican Alliance with Muslims Did Not Materialize in Cairo,” National Catholic Reporter, October 14, 1994.
72. On the alliance of the Holy See with conservative Muslim states, see Marge Berer, “Images, Reproductive Health, and the Collateral Damage to Women of Fundamentalism and War,” Reproductive Health Matters 9 (November 2001), p. 6; “Introduction,” Globalization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts, ed. Jane H. Bayes and Nayereh Tohidi (New York, 2001), pp. 1–6.
73. Susan A. Cohen, “Global Gag Rule: Exporting Antiabortion Ideology at the Expense of American Values,” Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 4 (June 2001).
74. Berer, “Images, Reproductive Health, and the Collateral Damage to Women of Fundamentalism and War,” p. 6.
75. Snitow, unpublished manuscript in my possession (2002).
76. Ibid.
77. Carla Power, “City of Secrets,” Newsweek, July 13, 1998; Veronica Doubleday, Three Women of Herat (London, 1988). Doubleday’s book is about 1976, when she spent a year in Herat living in a family household. For the long war, see Deborah Ellis, Women of the Afghan War (Westport, Conn., 2000).
78. Nancy Hatch Dupree, “Afghan Women Under the Taliban,” in Fundamentalism Reborn: Afghanistan and the Taliban, ed. William Maley (London, 1998); Rosemarie Skaine, The Women of Afghanistan Under the Taliban (London, 2002); Jan Goodwin, Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World (New York, 1994), chapter 4.
79. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, Conn., 2001), p. 177; chapter 8, “A Vanished Gender,” pp. 105–16.
80. Rashid, Taliban, pp. 180–82; Abby Van Buren and Mavis Leno, “Dear Abby,” Ottawa Citizen, July 23, 1999, p. B6 (and many other newspapers where Dear Abby was syndicated). Skaine chronicles the campaign in Women of Afghanistan, pp. 128–34.
81. Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) co-sponsored the resolution, S. 68. Congressional Record (Senate), March 17, 1999, pp. 2871–72; see the important interview with Sima Wali in “Regime Cracks Down on Women”; also Beena Sarwar, “Women Pay as Fundamentalism Grips Pakistan,” Ms., June–July 1999, pp. 15–17 (on Taliban influence in Pakistan); Haleh Anvari, “Asylum Denied,” Ms., March 2001, pp. 26–27 (on the plight of women refugees). After 9/11 and the onset of the war, Ms. also published updates.
82. Rashid, Taliban, p. 182.
83. Congressional Record (Senate), October 25, 2001, Introduction of S. 1573, pp. S11105–S11109.
84. First Lady Laura Bush, too, spoke of fighting brutality against the women and children of Afghanistan.
85. Janelle Brown, “Any Day Now,” Salon.com, www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/12/03/afghan_women.
86. Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Jan. 17, 2003, citing Physicians for Human Rights, “Women’s Health and Human Rights in Afghanistan: A Population-Based Assessment,” December 31, 2001, http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/
report-2001afghanistan.html.
87. Sharon Lerner, “What Women Want: Feminists Agonize over War in Afghanistan,” Village Voice, October 30, 2001; Brown, “Any Day Now”; The W Effect: Bush’s War on Women, ed. Laura Flanders (New York, 2004); Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror, ed. Betsy Reed (New York, 2002). September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winters (Melbourne, Australia, 2002), includes American authors.
88. Sonali Kolhatkar, “Chain of International Violence in Afghanistan: An Interview with RAWA,” Said It 3 (February 2002), p. 2, http://saidit.org/archives/feb02/article3.html.
89. Dexter Filkins, “Afghan Girls, Scarred by Acid, Defy Terror, Embracing School,” New York Times, January 14, 2009. An excellent chronicle of women’s lives inside the country, the struggles of female politicians, and the work of NGOs can be found in the reports of the organization Women for Afghan Women, www.womenforafghanwomen.org.
CHRISTINE STANSELL is Stein-Freiler Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her previous books include American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century and City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860. She writes widely about matters of feminism and American history in journals and newspapers, including The New Republic, Salon, and The Daily Beast. Among other awards, Stansell has received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the Mary Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
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