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Devaki Jain opens the doors of the United Nations and shows how it has changed the female half of the world -- and vice versa. Women, Development, and the UN is a book that every global citizen, government leader, journalist, academic, and self-respecting woman should read. -- Gloria Steinem Devaki Jain's book nurtures your optimism in this terrible war-torn decade by describing how women succeeded in empowering both themselves and the United Nations to work toward a global leadership inspired by human dignity. -- Fatema Mernissi In Women, Development, and the UN, internationally noted development economist and activist Devaki Jain traces the ways in which women have enriched the work of the United Nations from the time of its founding in 1945. Synthesizing insights from the extensive literature on women and development and from her own broad experience, Jain reviews the evolution of the UN's programs aimed at benefiting the women of developing nations and the impact of women's ideas about rights, equality, and social justice on UN thinking and practice regarding development. Jain presents this history from the perspective of the southern hemisphere, which recognizes that development issues often look different when viewed from the standpoint of countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The book highlights the contributions of the four global women's conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing in raising awareness, building confidence, spreading ideas, and creating alliances. The history that Jain chronicles reveals both the achievements of committed networks of women in partnership with the UN and the urgent work remaining to bring equality and justice to the world and its women.

Since 1945 more than 20 international legal instruments dealing specifically with women have been modified or consummated, reflecting a growing international consensus on issues concerning women's role in society. This book is the first complete collection and examination of this group of documents. Dr. Hevener analyzes each of the agreements and assesses its likely impact on the legal status of women. Categorizing the documents according to their goals, she demonstrates the broad range of economic, social, and political concerns they cover and evaluates contemporary patterns and future needs they reveal. The book includes a table of ratifications organized by country and region.

This book celebrates a century of progress for women's voting rights and offers thought-leadership on challenges and opportunities for fully realizing gender equality and women's empowerment, particularly their full and meaningful inclusion in political life and leadership.Women's Voices: Global Perspectives on the Right to Vote is a special global collection of essays, published as a companion to personal stories about the importance of the right to vote by women in several countries captured on video and produced with the assistance of LexisNexis and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).These essays will be of particular interest for advocates of women's voting rights and political inclusion. They provide insightful and pragmatic best practices and suggested actions for women's rights advocates, policy leaders, legislators, political party leaders, and lawyers to remove bias, prejudice, and discriminatory practices in political parties, elections, and public life.Authors of these essays represent voices from every continent, except Antarctica. The authors were chosen for their diverse perspectives and for a comparison of experiences within varied legal traditions and systems, including common law, civil law, Islamic law, and customary law. These trailblazing women agreed to share stories of triumph and challenge, whether of their own experiences or those of their mothers and grandmothers, and their thoughts on the way forward. As a reflection of their voices, the essays retain each author's use of the terms \"female\" and \"women.\"

In the years following World War I, women activists in the United States and Europe saw themselves as leaders of a globalizing movement to promote women's rights and international peace. In hopes of advancing alliances, U.S. internationalists such as Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Doris Stevens reached across the border to their colleagues in Mexico, including educator Margarita Robles de Mendoza and feminist Hermila Galindo. They established new organizations, sponsored conferences, and rallied for peaceful relations between the two countries. But diplomatic tensions and the ongoing Mexican Revolution complicated their efforts. InPan American Women, Megan Threlkeld chronicles the clash of political ideologies between U.S. and Mexican women during an era of war and revolution. Promoting a \"human internationalism\" (in the words of Addams), U.S. women overestimated the universal acceptance of their ideas. They considered nationalism an ethos to be overcome, while the revolutionary spirit of Mexico inspired female citizens there to embrace ideas and reforms that focused on their homeland. Although U.S. women gradually became less imperialistic in their outlook and more sophisticated in their organizational efforts, they could not overcome the deep divide between their own vision of international cooperation and Mexican women's nationalist aspirations. Pan American Womenexposes the tensions of imperialism, revolutionary nationalism, and internationalism that challenged women's efforts to build an inter-American movement for peace and equality, in the process demonstrating the importance of viewing women's political history through a wider geographic lens.

A Band of Noble Women brings together the histories of the women’s peace movement and the black women’s club and social reform movement in a story of community and consciousness building between the world wars. Believing that achievement of improved race relations was a central step in establishing world peace, African American and white women initiated new political alliances that challenged the practices of Jim Crow segregation and promoted the leadership of women in transnational politics. Under the auspices of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), they united the artistic agenda of the Harlem Renaissance, suffrage-era organizing tactics, and contemporary debates on race in their efforts to expand women’s influence on the politics of war and peace. Plastas shows how WILPF espoused middle-class values and employed gendered forms of organization building, educating thousands of people on issues ranging from U.S. policies in Haiti and Liberia to the need for global disarmament. Highlighting WILPF chapters in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Baltimore, the author examines the successes of this interracial movement as well as its failures. A Band of Noble Women enables us to examine more fully the history of race in U.S. women’s movements and illuminates the role of the women’s peace movement in setting the foundation for the civil rights movement

The stark reality is that throughout the world, women disproportionately live in poverty. This indicates that gender can both cause and perpetuate poverty, but this is a complex and cross-cutting relationship.The full enjoyment of human rights is routinely denied to women who live in poverty. How can human rights respond and alleviate gender-based poverty? This monograph closely examines the potential of equality and non-discrimination at international law to redress gender-based poverty. It offers a sophisticated assessment of how the international human rights treaties, specifically the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which contains no obligations on poverty, can be interpreted and used to address gender-based poverty. An interpretation of CEDAW that incorporates the harms of gender-based poverty can spark a global dialogue. The book makes an important contribution to that dialogue, arguing that the CEDAW should serve as an authoritative international standard setting exercise that can activate international accountability mechanisms and inform the domestic interpretation of human rights.

In this brand new radical analysis of globalization, Cynthia Enloe examines recent events—Bangladeshi garment factory deaths, domestic workers in the Persian Gulf, Chinese global tourists, and the UN gender politics of guns—to reveal the crucial role of women in international politics today. With all new and updated chapters, Enloe describes how many women's seemingly personal strategies—in their marriages, in their housework, in their coping with ideals of beauty—are, in reality, the stuff of global politics. Enloe offers a feminist gender analysis of the global politics of both masculinities and femininities, dismantles an apparently overwhelming world system, and reveals that system to be much more fragile and open to change than we think.

Since the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict zones has received much media attention. In large part as a result of grassroots feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, mass rapes in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the Rwandan genocide received widespread coverage, and international organizations-from courts to NGOs to the UN-have engaged in systematic efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to ameliorate the effects of wartime sexual violence. Yet many millennia of conflict preceded these developments, and we know little about the longer-term history of conflict-based sexual violence.Sexual Violence in Conflict Zoneshelps to fill in the historical gaps. It provides insight into subjects that are of deep concern to the human rights community, such as the aftermath of conflict-based sexual violence, legal strategies for prosecuting it, the economic functions of sexual violence, and the ways perceived religious or racial difference can create or aggravate settings of sexual danger. Essays in the volume span a broad geographic, chronological, and thematic scope, touching on the ancient world, medieval Europe, the American Revolutionary War, precolonial and colonial Africa, Muslim Central Asia, the two world wars, and the Bangladeshi War of Independence. By considering a wide variety of cases, the contributors analyze the factors making sexual violence in conflict zones more or less likely and the resulting trauma more or less devastating. Topics covered range from the experiences of victims and the motivations of perpetrators, to the relationship between wartime and peacetime sexual violence, to the historical background of the contemporary feminist-inflected human rights moment. In bringing together historical and contemporary perspectives, this wide-ranging collection provides historians and human rights activists with tools for understanding long-term consequences of sexual violence as war-ravaged societies struggle to achieve postconflict stability.

This book looks at the centerpiece of the international women's rights discourse, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and asks to what extent it affects the lives of women worldwide. Rather than assuming a trickle-down effect, the author discusses specific methods which have made CEDAW resonate. These methods include attempts to influence the international level by clarifying the meaning of women's rights and strengthening the Convention's monitoring procedure, and building connections between international and domestic contexts that enable diverse actors to engage with CEDAW. This analysis shows that while the Convention has worldwide impact, this impact is fundamentally dependent on context-specific values and agency. Hence, rather than thinking of women's rights exclusively as normative content, Zwingel suggests to see them as in process. This book will especially appeal to students and scholars interested in transnational feminism and gender and global governance.

In the late 1950s, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's Division for International Cooperation launched an initiative to present the state of Israel as a champion of women's advancement in the developing world. One of Israel's earliest initiatives for African women was the Kenya-Israel Rural Social Workers Training School. Drawing upon archival material from Israeli aid workers and politicians, United Nations advisors, and British officials who remained in Kenya after independence, this article explores the gendered dimensions of Israel's international development program in Africa. The article brings into focus the importance of African domestic affairs for the evolution of Israeli development aid, the tensions that sometimes characterized relations between Israeli government officials and aid workers, and the discrepancy between the image of Israeli women's empowerment promoted by Israel's Foreign Ministry and the experiences of Israeli women working in Africa as technical experts.