Did the UN Decade for Women unite or divide women?

The short answer

• The UN as an amplifier. The UN had machinery that a movement could use: the Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1946, and authority to declare years, call conferences and draft treaties. International Women’s Year brought delegations and reports on women’s status. Ministries and statisticians gathered evidence of inequality, and activists with little influence at home could appeal to an institution that had made their questions international business.
• Decolonisation changed the room. Decolonization changed the balance inside the UN. By 1975 it had 144 members, most from Africa, Asia and Latin America; many had been independent for less than twenty years, and African states held about a third of the seats. Their delegates brought experiences of poverty and colonialism and could outvote Western states. Development and peace consequently joined legal equality on the agenda, widening the discussion and sharpening its disputes.
• A Western movement looking outward. After a decade of campaigns at home, American and European feminists sought international solidarity. Their organizations brought money, publications and experience, but resentment followed when they treated abortion rights or workplace equality as everyone’s priorities. Many Southern delegates regarded men in their communities as allies against poverty and imperialism. Western radical feminists found that position difficult to accept.
• Cold War competition. The Soviet Union and its allies pointed to high female employment and state childcare as evidence of their leadership on equality. The Women’s International Democratic Federation proposed International Women’s Year, while the United States and its allies had reason to avoid appearing less committed. Cold War rivalry raised the political cost of ignoring women’s rights.

What it changed

A standard for movements everywhere. The CEDAW Committee of independent experts first met in October 1982 and reviewed its first national reports in 1983. Campaigners gained an international audience and, in dozens of countries, used the treaty to challenge nationality, inheritance and family laws. Tunisian organizations campaigned for decades against the reservations with which their country ratified in 1985. After the 2011 revolution the government withdrew its specific reservations while retaining a general declaration. The treaty gave those campaigners a standard to use over a long struggle.

Feminism of the Global South. Women at the Nairobi Forum and networks such as DAWN made debt, development and poverty central to international feminism. That broader agenda appeared at the next world conference in Beijing in 1995. Its Platform for Action declared that “women’s rights are human rights” and placed violence against women at the center, although that issue was largely missing from CEDAW’s original text.

The United States stays outside. Despite hearings in later decades, the US Senate never ratified CEDAW, leaving the country among a handful of UN members outside it. Opposing senators cited national sovereignty and possible intrusion into family law. The United States changed its own laws through courts and statutes while declining the treaty’s international oversight, a gap critics abroad have continued to cite.