ABSTRACT
From the perspective of women's rights and gender equality, the history-culture nexus is crucial enough that it should compel people to engage with it in all its facets. To insure gender equality, women's perspectives and contributions must move from the margins of cultural life to the center of the processes that create, interpret, and shape culture. The experience in Pakistan of the multi-country Women's Empowerment and Leadership Development for Democratization project (WELDD) underscores the vital pivotal role of solidarity. Few women from Pakistan attended the Mexico conference. The International Year of the Woman in 1975 was followed by conferences, seminars, and institutional initiatives at home. The Beijing conference process provided an unprecedented opportunity for Pakistani activists who, after the fall of the military regime in 1988, had started to develop new skills and adopt new strategies, from oppositional street protests to advocacy and negotiations in a democratic set-up.
