Preface
The clock showed 4:45 a.m. when Patricia Licuanan, chairperson of the Main Committee of the Fourth World Conference on Women brought down her gavel and declared that the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action had been agreed. It was September 15, 1995 and, as the night had progressed, weary delegates had gradually left the hall in the newly-built annex to the Beijing Convention Centre where, for two weeks, the main negotiations in the largest United Nations conference in history had taken place.
The podium of the Main Committee, September 14, 1995
On the front dais, from right to left were Kate Starr Newell, a career international civil servant from the United States, the Secretary of the Main Committee; Patricia Licuanan, the academic vice-president of Ateneo de Manila University and a womenís rights leader from the Philippines; Gertrude Mongella of Tanzania, a former parliamentarian, cabinet minister and ambassador, the Secretary-General of the Conference; and me, a political scientist from Minnesota. I was the only man in the front rank, as I had been for most of the eight years leading up to this moment. Looking now at the videotapes made by the United Nations Department of Public Information, I am impressed by how calm and business-like we all look. Over the six hours of that last meeting, the videotapes show continual movement of the UN staff sitting behind on the podium. As sections of text are agreed and new sections taken up, different staff members sit behind me. They come from every region of the world; they are almost all women. As a section is agreed, I visibly pass it back to a colleague so that it can be sent to New York by e-mail or fax for translation.
While the formal adoption would have to wait until the next day, the fall of the gavel in the early morning hours at Beijing is the last action of a process that began when the last gavel fell at the Plenary of the third United Nations womenís conference at Nairobi, Kenya over a decade earlier on July 26, 1985. Over that ten year period, women and men, in governments and non-governmental organizations, in the conference halls of the United Nations and in rural villages, refined the ideas and priorities that were reflected in the document of 361 paragraphs that we had just agreed upon. That document included agreements by governments that had never been made before. It expressed ideas that ten years earlier could only have been dreamed by the most ardent feminists.
When, at the opening session of the Conference ten days earlier, Mrs. Mongella had announced that ìthe revolution has begun; there is no turning backî, I thought to myself, ìShe hasnít got it right. The revolution has already taken place.î Reflecting on myself, I realized that I had been part of it; one of the few men in the womenís revolution.
It was not a revolution made by armies, nor by their generals. It was a revolution of ideas, which came up from the experience of every woman and many men, and which could be synthesized, expressed and agreed by representatives of all of the Governments on the planet. It was, if for that reason alone, a more durable revolution than most of those based on force. It was a revolution based on a new definition of legitimacy, of what would be behavior that was accepted internationally as a norm of civilized society.
It occurred to me that there was an analogy in those ten years of the revolution to the Long March that was a central revolutionary event in China. If the Platform for Action was a revolutionary document, Beijing was a fitting stopping point on the march.
But I was also aware that the march was longer than ten years. It had gone on for fifty, the whole history of the United Nations. It had its origins in earlier times. The march had not always gone in a straight line and, unlike the historical Chinese Long March, harassing attacks had not always beset it. It had not been immune to them either. But like that other event, the marchers always had a sense of where they were going. There was no question about the goal.
Revolutionaries on the march do not have time to write their memoirs; they are too busy with the struggles of today, and tomorrow, to worry about yesterday. There are not many books about the march to Beijing. Those that are describe the march as outside observers and, while they may see the outcomes of events, they cannot tell much about the process leading to that outcome.
That is particularly true of United Nations itself. There were three types of participants in the march: Government delegates, representatives of non-governmental organizations and staff of the United Nations. With few exceptions, they have gone on to other things and their stories are at best anecdotes passed around the dinner table.
People who were not on the march, as a result, cannot learn about it. People who were on the march do not know the whole story. Eventually people may forget that there was a march, that there were origins to the ideas that made up the revolution and there may be tendencies to revise backward.
For the United Nations, under whose banner the march took place, these are trying times. It has been hard to explain to a public that has lost much of its faith in government that something as remote has value. There is a lack, perhaps, of ìwar storiesî, recounting battles whose outcomes tell us something about the combatants, but more importantly show the link between those battles of the past and the everyday life of today.
As I began to move the things out of my last office in the United Nations Secretariat in 1996 after a career spanning some thirty years, the last ten of it with the womenís program, the volume of documents produced by the Division for the Advancement of Women during my time there stood out: two editions of the World Survey on the Role of Women in Development, two comprehensive reports on the review and appraisal of the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies, a series of monographs on women in decision-making, over 30 substantive reports on womenís issues presented to the Commission on the Status of Women, the Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly, innumerable papers for seminars and expert group meetings held over the period. Built into those words was a record of how ideas changed through the interaction of scholars, practitioners, diplomats and activists, mediated by the United Nations Secretariat.
There is a story to tell.
Perhaps I am but one of many who could tell the story and many would probably tell it differently. The women who were on the march, and who led it, knew what was at stake. It was their interest and their identity. No man can really understand womenís issues since no man has experienced them directly. Even the choice of a military metaphor for the title of the book and this preface is a masculine way of looking at the issue. Most women would not have chosen that metaphor. In a narrow sense, I was an outsider on the march, someone who was not really engaged in the struggle. My colleagues on the march were always polite to me and, in a very feminine way, they appreciated allies and they tolerate my choice of titles for the book. But others saw a man on the march as someone out of place.
In a larger sense, advancement of women is a manís issue. As men, our lives are as much shaped by the circumstances of our mothers, sisters and daughters as by our fathers, brothers and sons. A world of equality between women and men is simply a better world and achieving it will diminish no one and allow everyone to grow.
As I began to write down the story from my notes and memory, I realized that it would take much longer than I originally thought. During my first year away from the Secretariat, I worked on the historical period and on the first seven years after the Nairobi Conference. Then progress stopped. Other activities intervened, for sure. But the main factor was that as I began to think about how I would describe the events during the last two years leading up to Beijing, I realized that I was still too close to the events to put them into perspective.
Several years passed before I returned to the manuscript. The Special Session of the General Assembly on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action (Beijing Plus Five) took place and re-affirmed (and defended) what had been agreed at Beijing. As I looked back, I realized that the period from 1979 to 1993, when the Division for the Advancement of Women was located in Vienna, Austria, had been seminal for the development of most of the ideas that were eventually incorporated into the Platform.
There is almost no one left in the United Nations who remembers that period. One by one, we have retired. Chafika Meslem, the last Director of the Division in Vienna, and the person to whom I dedicate this volume, passed away in the summer of 2000.
This book is about the long march through its Vienna period and the revolution of which it was a major part during that time. Mostly it is about the ideas of the revolution and how they emerged, were packaged and adopted by all. It is mostly drawn from the sequence of documents. Where I was present, it reflects what I saw. Where I was not present, it reflects the documents themselves and occasionally what others told me they saw. From time to time, I have included some notes about myself, a form of post-it stickies on the story, by way of illustration and testimony.
Through this, I hope that those who have not been on the march will join it, those who are still on the march can renew their energy and for those who, like me, are now resting on the side of the road, we can relive those days and tell the stories to our successors.
At some point, if there is interest and when I have time to put logical order into the frenetic last two years of the march, the second volume, covering the New York period and the Conference itself can be prepared. In the meantime, this history of herstory will have to do.
Mt. Tremper, New York
May 2001