Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · CHAPTER 6 ·
UN Decade for Women and CEDAW
Chapter 6 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “A Global Movement”
The UN declared 1975 International Women’s Year and 1976–1985 the Decade for Women, with world conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi. Its most lasting result was CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the General Assembly on 18 December 1979.
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The map above is the world of Women’s rights, December 1985 — CEDAW: who had ratified the women’s convention.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Between 1975 and 1985 feminism became a global movement, and the United Nations was the stage on which it happened, because the UN could bring governments and activists from every continent into the same rooms. The UN declared 1975 International Women’s Year and then 1976 to 1985 the Decade for Women, held around three world conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi, which the arrows link. Each conference brought government delegations to negotiate a plan of action, while thousands of activists met at a parallel forum for non-governmental organisations (NGOs), much like the activist gatherings that run beside a modern climate summit. The Decade’s most lasting result was a treaty, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted in December 1979. A state that ratifies it promises to end discrimination in law, work, education, health and family life, and must report regularly to a UN committee, so the movement’s demands became a standard against which governments could be measured.
The map of ratifications at the end of 1985 shows how unevenly that standard spread. Blue covers Mexico, Canada, France, most of the Nordic countries, the Soviet bloc (the USSR and its communist allies) and much of Africa. The United States is grey-tan, because President Carter signed the treaty in 1980 but the Senate never ratified it, so the movement’s most famous homeland stands outside its most important international law. The Decade also turned feminism into an argument among women of the world. Women from the Global South, the poorer and mostly formerly colonised countries, insisted that poverty, development, apartheid (South Africa’s system of legal racial segregation) and war were women’s issues as much as legal equality. At Mexico City a Bolivian miner’s wife told Western feminists so to their faces. By Nairobi in 1985 most of the 12,000 to 15,000 activists at the NGO Forum came from the South, and feminism had become plural. The question of whose experience defines feminism, first raised by Black and working-class women in the United States, had reappeared on a world scale.
The full story
The UN became feminism’s global stage because it combined a forum, a staff and the authority to set standards. Its Commission on the Status of Women, a committee of government delegates, had monitored women’s rights since 1946. The proposal for an International Women’s Year came in 1972 from the Women’s International Democratic Federation, aligned with the Soviet bloc, which shows how Cold War competition to appear progressive helped put women on the agenda. The first World Conference on Women met in Mexico City in June and July 1975, with delegations from 133 governments. A parallel forum, the Tribune, gathered non-governmental organisations (NGOs), citizens’ groups much like today’s charities. There Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the wife of a Bolivian tin miner, challenged middle-class feminists from the North. Her community’s enemy, she argued, was poverty and the mine owners, and men and women had to fight it together. The quarrel announced the central tension of the Decade, between a feminism of legal equality and a feminism of survival.
CEDAW, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, turned the movement’s demands into international law. A treaty binds every state that ratifies it, much as a trade agreement binds its members, so CEDAW gave women a standard for judging their own governments. The UN General Assembly adopted it on 18 December 1979 by 130 votes to none, and it took effect in September 1981. Its Article 5 obliges states to change social and cultural patterns based on ideas of women’s inferiority, an unusually ambitious clause. At the Copenhagen conference of July 1980 dozens of states signed it, the United States among them. Many ratified with reservations, formal statements excluding particular articles; Tunisia, ratifying in September 1985, reserved those on family law and nationality. On the map the United States remains grey-tan, because a signature without ratification does not bind a state to the treaty’s terms.
By Nairobi feminism had become a set of movements with different priorities, connected by shared forums and the language of rights. The final conference met in July 1985 with 157 governments, and most of the 12,000 to 15,000 people at its NGO Forum came from Africa, Asia and Latin America, the poorer, mostly formerly colonised countries known as the Global South. Its Forward-Looking Strategies were adopted by consensus, after the conferences of 1975 and 1980 had split over Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, and over apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation. Activists from the Global South, such as the network Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), argued that debt, rural poverty and structural adjustment, the spending cuts that international lenders demanded in return for loans, were feminist issues. Europe’s new forms of action also reached beyond legal equality: in October 1975 nine in ten Icelandic women stopped work for a day, and from 1981 women camped at the Greenham Common air base in England against American nuclear missiles. A movement that began by naming one group’s problem ended the Decade by learning that women’s problems differed with their place in the world.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Was the Decade “politicised”?
Western delegations and many Western feminists complained that the Decade’s conferences were hijacked by Cold War and Middle East politics. The Declaration of Mexico (1975) listed Zionism alongside colonialism and apartheid as obstacles to women’s equality, and the Copenhagen Programme of Action (1980) was adopted over the opposition of the United States, Israel, Canada and Australia. Jocelyn Olcott’s history of International Women’s Year argues that this complaint reflects a narrow view of what counts as a women’s issue. For delegates from newly independent states, the economic order that kept their countries poor, the apartheid system in South Africa and the occupation of Palestinian land shaped women’s lives as directly as discriminatory laws did, so excluding them would itself have been a political choice. Arvonne Fraser, who served in the US delegation, and Peggy Antrobus, a Caribbean founder of the Southern network DAWN, offer contrasting memoirs of the same rooms. The debate mirrors the American quarrel over who was left out: it is a dispute about whose experience defines the movement’s agenda, and the Nairobi consensus of 1985 suggests that by the end of the Decade the participants had learned to negotiate that dispute inside the same hall.
Does ratifying a treaty change anything?
A treaty has no police, so historians and political scientists ask whether ratifying CEDAW changed women’s lives or only governments’ reputations. The evidence points in two directions, and the case for doubt begins with reservations. Many states ratified with sweeping reservations, especially to Article 16 on marriage and family, which some critics argue empties ratification of meaning; Tunisia kept its specific reservations until 2014. Yet the reporting system forces governments to describe their laws to an expert committee every four years, and domestic activists use those reports and the committee’s comments to press for change. The political scientist Beth Simmons found statistical evidence that ratification is associated with improvements in girls’ education, access to contraception and women’s employment, especially in countries that are neither fully democratic nor fully closed, where activists have room to mobilise and something to gain from an international standard. In the United States, which never ratified, opponents argued that American law already offered equivalent protections and that the treaty threatened national sovereignty and state family law. The general finding is that treaties change behaviour mainly by arming domestic movements, so a treaty matters most where protest already exists to use it.
“Let me speak”: testimony as evidence
Much of what historians know about how women of the Global South experienced the Decade comes from testimony, and its value and limits are worth weighing. The most famous example is Si me permiten hablar (1977; in English Let Me Speak!), the life story of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, recorded and edited by the Brazilian journalist Moema Viezzer after the Mexico City Tribune. It describes the hunger, strikes and massacres of the Bolivian tin-mining camps and the housewives’ committee Domitila led, and it became one of the most widely read Latin American books of its kind. As evidence it is vivid and rare, since few poor women’s voices reached print. It is also mediated: it was spoken, transcribed, shaped by an editor with her own politics, and published for an international audience of sympathisers. Historians such as Olcott use such texts alongside conference records and press reports, which show that the clash between “feminism of equality” and “feminism of survival” was real, although the famous exchanges were often retold and sharpened later. The general lesson for any source pack is that testimony tells us how people understood their experience, and that its framing must be read as carefully as its content.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The UN as an amplifier. An international institution can magnify a movement by making governments answer questions they would otherwise avoid, and the UN had the tools to do so: a Commission on the Status of Women from 1946 and the authority to declare years, convene conferences and draft treaties. Once International Women’s Year was approved, governments had to send delegations and write reports on women’s status, and these obligations turned ministries and statisticians into collectors of evidence about inequality. The same machinery lent weight to activists who had little leverage over their own governments.
Decolonisation changed the room. Decolonisation changed who sat in the room: by 1975 the UN had 144 members, most of them from Africa, Asia and Latin America, many independent for less than twenty years, and African states alone held about a third of the seats. Their delegates brought priorities shaped by colonialism and poverty, and they could outvote the Western states. The Decade therefore had to address development and peace alongside legal equality, which broadened feminism and also produced its sharpest quarrels.
A Western movement looking outward. After a decade of domestic campaigns, American and European feminists were eager to build international solidarity, and their organisations had money, publications and experience to export. Their confidence brought energy to the conferences and also provoked resentment when they assumed that their own agenda, such as abortion rights or workplace equality, was everyone’s. Many delegates from the Global South saw the men of their own communities as allies in struggles against poverty and imperialism, a view that Western radical feminists found hard to accept.
Cold War competition. The Soviet Union and its allies presented themselves as pioneers of women’s equality, pointing to women’s high employment rates and state childcare, and the Women’s International Democratic Federation proposed International Women’s Year. The United States and its allies could not afford to appear less committed. Here superpower rivalry, an unlikely ally of women’s rights, raised the political price of ignoring them.
THE TURNING POINT
CEDAW adopted, 18 December 1979. The adoption of CEDAW is the hinge because it converted a decade of declarations and conferences into a binding legal standard that states could join, be measured against and be pressed to honour. Earlier documents, such as the 1967 Declaration on discrimination against women, had no reporting system or committee. By the end of 1985 more than seventy states had ratified it. The treaty also carried the movement’s ideas into family law and culture through Articles 5 and 16, areas many governments had treated as off limits. A protest movement achieves its most durable change when it writes its demands into rules that outlast the protest.
What it changed
A standard for movements everywhere. The CEDAW Committee of independent experts, which first met in October 1982 and reviewed its first national reports the next year, gave campaigners an international audience. Activists in dozens of countries used the treaty to challenge discriminatory laws on nationality, inheritance and family. In Tunisia, which ratified with reservations in 1985, women’s organisations campaigned for decades to lift them, and after the 2011 revolution the government withdrew its specific reservations while keeping a general declaration, which shows that a treaty works slowly and only when someone at home uses it.
Feminism of the Global South. Networks such as DAWN and the women who filled the Nairobi Forum made development, debt and poverty central to international feminism. The next world conference, in Beijing in 1995, adopted a Platform for Action that reflected this broader agenda, declaring that “women’s rights are human rights”. It also placed violence against women at the centre of the agenda, an issue largely missing from CEDAW’s original text.
The United States stays outside. The Senate never ratified CEDAW, despite hearings in later decades, which left the United States among a handful of UN members outside the treaty. Senators opposed to ratification argued that it would intrude on family law and national sovereignty. The movement’s most famous homeland had changed its own laws through courts and statutes, while declining international oversight of them, a gap that critics abroad have cited ever since.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did the UN Decade for Women unite women across the world, or reveal how divided they were?
The Decade certainly revealed how divided women were, along lines of class, region and politics. At Mexico City the Bolivian miner’s wife Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s challenge to Western feminists exposed a gulf between a feminism of legal equality and a feminism of survival. The conferences of 1975 and 1980 also split over Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, over apartheid and over the world economy. Yet the same Decade produced CEDAW, adopted by the UN General Assembly without a single vote against, and built networks of women who had never met before, such as the 12,000 to 15,000 people at the Nairobi Forum. The divisions were themselves a sign of unity of a kind, because women who disagreed were for the first time arguing inside shared institutions. Olcott’s work suggests that the quarrels were the Decade’s real achievement, since they forced Western feminists to recognise that their agenda was one among many. The most persuasive judgement is that the Decade replaced the illusion of a single global sisterhood with a working coalition of different movements. The transferable lesson is that international protest succeeds, when it does, by giving people with different priorities a common framework in which to bargain.
An interesting fact
The first United Nations world conference on women was chaired by a man. When the delegates met in Mexico City in June 1975, the host government’s nominee, Mexico’s attorney general Pedro Ojeda Paullada, was elected president of the conference, a choice that delegates and journalists at the time noted with irony. The conference’s emblem, a stylised dove combined with the symbol for woman and an equals sign, was designed by the American graphic artist Valerie Pettis and became the symbol of the whole Decade for Women. The chair went to the host country by custom, a convention that made the irony possible.
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