Humanitarian intervention

Synopsis

Between 1975 and 1985, there were three U.N. conferences on women held in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi. This article is a brief reflection on the tensions that informed these first 10 years of the international women's movement seen from the point of view of the American women who believed that their leadership of that movement was being challenged by the strident anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Soviet Union and its allies. Soviet support for the international women's conferences was instrumental in forcing otherwise reticent American politicians to take the emerging international women's movement seriously. Fearing that socialist women would hijack the deliberations with their anti-capitalist "peace" agenda, U.S. congressmen became actively involved in constructing a definition of "appropriate" women's issues for the U.S. delegates attending the conferences, laying the bedrock of what would later become the relatively hegemonic, internationalized form of Western feminism that would ironically be exported to Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in 1989.

Executive Summary

Some women seek to redefine traditional interests of nationstates such as security, equality, power, wealth, development, justice, and peace to accommodate what is, in their view, the feminist perspective. Not all women seek this objective, and the feminist views held by some do not necessarily coincide with the views of others. Thus, the fact that an international conference is devoted to women's issues or feminism does not imply that a common set of views will be shared by the delegates (U.S. House of Representatives, 1980a: 8).

Women as a legitimate topic of political debate stepped into the international arena during the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women. Although there had been a Commission on the Status of Women at the UN for over 25 years, itwas only in the 1970s that women's issues moved to center stage. Between 1975 and 1985, there were three UN conferences held in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi that brought together women from all over the globe. Although the purpose of the conferences was to promote dialogue and understanding among theworld'swomen, therewere deep divisions between themfromthe very outset.Women fromthe socialist countries actively participated in all three conferences, bringing with them their own unique worldview, often challenging and undermining feminists from the United States who viewed themselves at the forefront of thewomen'smovement. Inmany ways, the first 10 years of the international women's movement were characterized by passionate disagreements about what "women's issues" actually were, a fact that is often forgotten in international feminist circles today.

This article is a brief reflection on the tensions that informed the first 10 years of the international women's movement, seen from the point of view of the American women who believed that their leadership of the movement was challenged by the strident anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Soviet Union and its allies. Eastern Bloc women claimed that they were already emancipated after the collectivization of the ownership of the means of production and thus forced otherwise reticent American politicians to take the emerging international women's movement seriously. The Americans recognized that the communist activists had ...