{"id":267995,"date":"2020-03-10T10:31:42","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T14:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/why-the-world-conference-on-women-matters\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T22:52:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:52:25","slug":"why-the-world-conference-on-women-matters","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2020\/03\/why-the-world-conference-on-women-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the world conference on women matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

If not for the coronavirus, there would be a women\u2019s metropolis within the metropolis of New York this week, its hotels and restaurants filled with the 12,000 civil society participants of the UN Commission on the Status of Women conference. The commission, however, has indefinitely postponed the event<\/a><\/span>, which was also meant to mark the 25th<\/sup> anniversary of the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and its declaration and platform for action<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

What a shame, this postponement. The late feminist icon Betty Friedan said of the 1995 conference<\/a><\/span> that the \u201cmeeting was the message,\u201d and so it was. You put together tens of thousands of women to agitate for change, and change is bound to occur \u2013 within their global causes but also for them individually.<\/p>\n

Back in 1995, I was a journalism student at Concordia University and a brand-new, part-time reporter at The Canadian Press. My friend Carol McQueen (today, Canada\u2019s ambassador to Burkina Faso<\/span><\/a>) and I were co-news editors at Concordia\u2019s newspaper, The Link<\/em>, and we had this crazy idea about going to cover the conference in Beijing.<\/p>\n

Over the months, we fundraised from every possible source, and finally scratched together the money to make a go of it. I also set up a freelance gig with the now defunct weekly Montreal Mirror<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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The Conference was being held only six years after the Tiananmen Square Massacre<\/a><\/span>. China was a very different place at the time, in the very early stages of major economic reforms. Here it was, \u201cwelcoming\u201d tens of thousands of equality activists, and also media from around the world. China was under the global spotlight in a way it had never been before, and we, too, were being scrutinized. Most of us were surveilled in some way during the conference, and at the massive NGO Forum on Women of 30,000 civil society delegates that was held before the official conference. Just a few months before the opening of the forum, the Chinese government abruptly moved it to the woefully underprepared town of Huairou, about 50 kilometres away from Beijing. The Chinese government and the Vatican had also tried to block certain women\u2019s groups from attending.<\/p>\n

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In Huairou, the infrastructure was rough. Rainy weather turned the grounds into a Woodstock-esque mud pit. Women with disabilities relied on others to help hoist wheelchairs up stairs or into tents. Tibetan exiles from around the world battled with Chinese police on a daily basis. The LGB tent received constant visits from authorities, and its pamphlets would go missing.<\/p>\n

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Lesbian delegates sing and chant during a march to demand equal rights at the NGO Forum on Women in Huairou, China on September 5, 1995. (AP Photo\/Mike Fiala)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Still, the energy at the forum was electric. There were women from every corner of the planet there, picking their way around puddles and collapsing tents to attend speeches and panels, and rallying behind those who had the most harrowing stories to tell \u2013 of genital mutilation, domestic abuse, enslavement, wartime rape, and sexual orientation conversion therapy.<\/p>\n

One day, on the morning shuttle bus from Beijing to Huairou, I sat beside Betty Friedan herself (had it happened today, of course, I would have had a selfie). Other feminist celebrities were there \u2013 Gloria Steinem, Sally Field, for example. It was in Huairou that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton made her first major international speech.<\/p>\n