ABSTRACT
The United Nations World Conferences on women and related conferences on human rights and population have fostered organizing among women’s groups and nurtured transnational dialogues and relationships that have sustained and transformed women’s organizing. They have contributed to the expansion of transnational women’s organizations and affected the character of these organizations. As focal points for movements, transnational conferences contribute to the articulation of shared values as well as conflicts, and the long history of transnational women’s activism shows that conflict, relationship-building, and dialogue in such spaces has been a potent force for movement transformation (see, e.g., Desai 2009; Alvarez 2000). Any reading of the history of the transnational women’s movement shows that
this movement is intimately linked to the evolution and operation of intergovernmental organizations. Many women were leaders in the peace movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and they advocated for the creation of inter-state institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations as a means of restraining the arbitrary use of violence by states (Chatfield 1997; Rupp 1997; Taylor and Rupp 2002; Wittner 1993). Women and feminist activists were also key players in regional international organizations. For instance, Meyer (1999) documents how feminists in Latin America helped establish the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) in the Organization of American States (OAS) in the early 1920s. The CIM, and the women who staffed it, helped press for changes in the League of Nations to reflect women’s concerns. They also were important in the effort to establish the United Nations and to include women’s concerns in its Charter (Prügl and Meyer 1999; West 1999). In helping establish the CIM, feminist activists brought women’s issues onto the agenda of the United Nations, which later led to the campaign to create the International Women’s
Year and the UN Decade for Women – both of which helped nurture transnational women’s organization. A recurrent theme in the literature on the history of transnational feminist politics
is that women’s organizing has helped create and expand the spaces where women’s issues could be discussed and where feminist analyses could develop. But these efforts have often fallen short in their larger goal of improving the actual conditions and experiences of women. This is due in part to the fact that feminist organizing seeks to fundamentally restructure the basic foundations of society, requiring at least some engagement with dominant institutions like states and markets, whose language and institutional arrangements marginalize alternative cultures and modes of organizing, especially those advanced by women (see Desai, this volume; O’Brien et al. 2000: ch. 2). As a result, agencies like the OAS’s CIM and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (formed in 1947) soon
became ghettos for “women’s issues” in the OAS and the UN in subsequent decades, lacking sufficient funding, staff and political clout to carry out their missions fully. Nevertheless, they did maintain some space to conduct important work, including gathering international data on women, preparing technical reports, drafting conventions or treaty language relating to women and children, keeping certain women’s issues on the multilateral agenda, and helping to translate new issues into official policies.
