Did the UN Decade for Women unite or divide women?

The short answer

• 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.

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.