ABSTRACT
Beginning August 30, 1995, and continuing through September 15, the United Nations held two inter-related conferences on women hosted by the People's Republic of China. The opening conference gathered together upwards of forty thousand participants for the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Forum on women held in Huairou, a town situated roughly an hour outside Beijing. The second conference was the official UN Fourth World Conference on Women, and brought together 189 nations with their roughly ten thousand delegates, to assess the status of women in their countries and to move beyond the consensus built around the UN Forward-Looking Strategies for Action to support women's rights signed in Nairobi, Kenya, ten years before. They sought to gain the agreement of all member nations on the wider Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a document that reportedly had one-third of its language still under discussion when the conferences began. By the end of the UN Conference, the statement with its twelve areas of concern for women was finalized and signed by 180 UN member nations.
