Episcopal Women Add Their Voices to Beijing Conference's Call for Women's Rights
Episcopal News Service. September 21, 1995 [95-1236]
Patricia Lefevere
(ENS) Even the lights at the toll bridge enroute to Beijing's Capital Airport flashed the theme of the United Nations' largest-ever gathering in Chinese characters and red English capitals: "Equality, Development, Peace."
It was the Chinese Government's parting shot to some 18,000 participants (two-thirds of them women) from 181 nations who had spent 12 days -- and not a few nights -- debating the Platform for Action that they would carry home from the Fourth World Conference on Women staged in this traffic-clogged city of 10 million September 4-15.
None of it had been easy -- not obtaining visas to China, not the negotiations, not the meetings if one lacked fluent English, not the time required between venues and especially the surveillance and what many labeled "harassment" by the Chinese authorities that met attendees at every turn.
For globe-trotting feminists, some of whom had spent two or three days getting here from Africa and Latin America, the specter of omnipresent video cameras, uniformed security forces outside restaurants and inside press conferences and even hotel personnel who reportedly searched some guests' rooms -- were the stuff that tried women's souls.
Most of the harassment and surveillance occurred at Huairou, a suburban resort 35 miles from Beijing, where some 27,000 women held a 10-day festival of workshops, protests, poetry and performances. Many participants said that the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Forum was the greatest networking and empowering event that women had ever known.
Its sheer size and force were reason enough for all the security, some said. Others like First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and Nobel Peace Laureate and Burmese dissident Aung San Su Kyi -- in a videotaped message -- chided the Chinese for their heavy-handedness. In the words of Supatra Masdit, head of the NGO Forum Organizing Committee, "There are still people around who are threatened by smart, capable women."
Guards and camcorders notwithstanding, the women's conference managed through consensus and compromise to adopt the Platform for Action, one-third of which was "bracketed" or identified as needing discussion when delegates arrived. The 150-page document and its shorter preamble, the Beijing Declaration, are the blueprints for women's rights into the 21st century.
Judith Conley of Marion, Iowa, who represented Episcopal Women of Color, at the NGO forum, thought that one of the best things about the women's gathering was that "it showed that churches are not isolated from the real world. What's going on here is being discussed in our churches," she said.
Conley was one of more than 50 Episcopal women who were part of Ecumenical Women United and who gathered to share stories, meditate, worship and hold seminars at Huairou. The group included 60 WCC delegates, a number from the National Council of Churches in the USA, as well as from the Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, Reformed, United Church, World Vision, YWCA and international Christian youth federations.
Several Anglican women from around the world took part in the pre-Forum China tour which included visits to six cities where they met with doctors, educators, clergy men and women and with seminarians in Nanjing. Others left Beijing bound for Tibet and Nepal, to "witness to work being done by Christians and Buddhists to better the lot of women," said Ann Smith, who heads the Episcopal Church's Office of Women in Mission and Ministry. The Chinese refused to issue visas for Tibetan women in exile who traveled to the forum from London. During the forum China celebrated the 30th anniversary of Communist rule in Tibet, which it claims as an "autonomous region."
Smith said that the large number of Episcopal women at Beijing, many of them from such groups as the Mother's Union, would serve as messengers responsible for carrying women's stories to their local churches, where she hoped they would develop programs and discussions of global issues raised here.
"Whatever's done in Beijing must not stop there. We are dedicated to making the UN's actions a living part of our ministry," she said.
Among its strongest tenets, the Declaration states that women's rights are human rights and that human rights are women's rights. It therefore calls upon governments to end violence against women and all forms of sexual harassment, prostitution, pornography, sexual slavery and exploitation. Included are violations stemming from ethnic cleansing, racism, cultural prejudice, religious and antireligious extremism and trafficking of women and children, especially girls.
Holding firm to language in the Cairo Population Summit document last September, the Beijing Declaration reaffirmed women's reproductive rights and recognized that couples and individuals have the right to decide freely the number and spacing of their children and should have the information and means to do so. It also condemned forced sterilizations and forced abortions.
The declaration also called for the creation of an educational and social climate in which all are treated equally and freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief are respected.
Language condemning religious extremism and fanaticism, which was bracketed in the draft document, "got weakened" in the final text, according to Aruna Gnadason, who heads the World Council of Churches women's desk in Geneva. She was one of five WCC official delegates to the conference. Although the United States "pushed hard for stronger language," she said, Iran succeeded in getting it "watered down."
Throughout the meeting it frequently looked as if the Islamic states and the Vatican had joined forces to oppose much of the draft document's language related to women's health and sexual rights, though the Vatican strongly denied any alliance with Muslim states. Men led the delegations of almost all the Islamic states and a woman held sway over the Holy See's corps of 14 women and eight men.
Rome's chief spokesman Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls reiterated that there could be no pact "due to profound differences between Christianity and Islam on the position of women." Dr. Janne Haaland Matlary, a philosopher and social scientist from Oslo, Norway and a member of the Vatican team, called the New Testament, with its accounts of Jesus' treatment of women, "a Magna Carta for women," and added that Muslims were "unlikely bedfellows."
The Vatican's top representative, Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, added a 12-point list of reservations to the document, rejecting all of its health section and disagreeing with specific paragraphs concerning sexual and reproductive rights -- including contraception and abortion -- the family and the interpretation of the word, "gender."
Islamic states added similar objections to the document, which is non-binding, but intended to guide governments as they work to improve women's lot during the next 10 years.
While the document called for the mobilization of "new and additional resources... to contribute towards the goal of poverty eradication," targeting the 70 percent of women and children who comprise the 1.3 billion poorest people in the world, the U.S. and European nations kept reminding Third World delegates that there were no new and additional resources.
India announced that it would spend 6 percent of its gross national product on efforts to end illiteracy and improve education, as compared with the current level of 2.5 percent. Tanzania vowed to alter laws that discriminate against women. The U.S., the United Nations and the YWCA all announced campaigns against violence towards women. Many European and Asian nations said they would increase the number of women in their police force and Cambodia announced it would make half its peace negotiators women.
Even with these promises, plus pledges from the World Bank to improve loans to institutions lending to the poorest women, Anglican UN Observer James Ottley thought that more attention had to be paid to the social justice concerns of women, especially those in nations paralyzed by the debt crisis, which he said has helped to keep women in poverty, destroyed jobs and deflected money from social programs.
Bishop Ottley was one of 27 NGO spokespersons -- among some 3,200 present -- invited to address the meeting. His invitation came from Conference SecretaryGeneral Gertrude Mongella, a Catholic from Tanzania.
The Panamanian bishop, who formerly headed the Episcopal Church's Diocese of Panama, quoted from a WCC statement, which was filed with the UN, though not read. It held that "economic, political and social justice are pre-requisites for the empowerment of women." It also endorsed the position taken at the Copenhagen Social Development Summit in March, namely that empowering people, especially women, to strengthen their own capabilities is "the main objective of development and its principal resource."
Betty Wakana of Burundi agreed heartily with the bishop and the WCC. An Anglican who coordinates women's programs for the National Council of Churches in Burundi, she said she would be returning to Burundi seeking "to consciensize African women about what's going on."
To gain sensitivity to women's issues, Africa needs more women in politics, she said. In Burundi only two women have served as ministers since independence in 1962, and they've held the same portfolio, she added.
"Once we have women in higher places, we'll have peace," Wakana believes. She called peace the most important of the conference's three themes for Africa, noting that without it there's little hope for development or equality. "Women bring life and bury the dead -- often their husbands and sons," she said. "Women carry the seeds of peace within themselves."
Another African, WCC youth delegate Faith Moruti, an Anglican from Botswana, thought that the ending of domestic violence and the education of girls were paramount to women's struggles for equality, development and peace.
In Botswana violence against women includes the battering of children, the harassment of rape victims by the police, the taking of the oldest daughter as a wife by a man who is widowed or whose wife leaves, and poverty itself. It is poverty that causes homelessness and makes African women prey to violence in the street, she said.
Moruti said that many African women have come to see themselves as responsible for all domestic work and as having an inferior place to men in society, the workplace and the family. Only eradicating illiteracy and educating women and men will end this traditional discrimination, she said.
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