ABSTRACT
The international women’s movements were pioneers of activism beyond national borders since the fight for suffrage in the late nineteenth century. But it was the second wave of the international women’s networks in the 1960s and 1970s and its influence on the United Nations (UN) that fulfilled the potential of crossborder organizing for social change in the increasingly global age (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 167-98). Organizing internationally for women’s issues gained momentum during the UN’s International Women’s Year (1975), its Decade for Women (1975-85) and the three conferences in connection with that special decade (Mexico City 1975, Copenhagen 1980 and Nairobi 1985) were critical in building and consolidating the networks of women’s organizations around the world (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 168-69). Although these meetings were platforms for fiery debates that critics often interpreted as a ‘split in the sisterhood’, the very fact that there was disagreement attested to the fact that women from all over the world were participating in a conversation about women’s rights. Women activists from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific contributed to global women’s issues as international feminists-using the perspectives from ‘home’ to participate in fashioning women around the globe.
