Women as Agents of Change

The U.S. mid-term elections were good news for progressive women, writes Ellen Goodman. Not because of greater representation at the national level, though:

Alas, this was not The Year of the Women Redux, although Speaker-elect Pelosi has broken the "marble ceiling" and has the bruises to show for it. Yes, there will be more women in Congress than ever before, but so far the percentage has only gone up from 15.4 to 16.4485981. Hold the applause.

According to pollsters and a post-election survey done by Ms. Magazine and the Women Donors Network:

[A] majority of women listed rebuilding after Katrina as a top priority for the next Congress. Katrina was a turning point for women who saw the government's reaction as cold indifference. Katrina also became a stand-in for the issues of poverty and division. ...

[F]or many [women voters], the biggest concern still is healthcare. As Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, one of the new breed of young moms in Congress, says, "I don't want the next generation of moms hand-wringing over how to deal with the sniffles and waiting until it turns into pneumonia." It's past time to make healthcare available to all kids.

On a broader level, a panel seeking to make the United Nations more effective has suggested forming a single women's agency with increased stature and involvement in decisions, reports Bojana Stoparic.

International policy-making for women is currently handled at the U.N. by the Division for the Advancement of Women and the Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women. Among other things, they organize world conferences on women and monitor governments' compliance with the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, known as CEDAW.

Representatives of current U.N. women's programs, professional women's rights advocates and human rights groups such as the Center for Women's Global Leadership and London-based Amnesty International, have endorsed the idea of a single agency.

"A strong women's presence on the country level would allow us to ensure that whatever commitments are made at the inter-governmental level get translated on the ground," Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of UNIFEM said in an interview earlier this month. "Work on gender equality at the U.N. is fragmented and does not have enough status or resources to achieve a world that is free of violence and poverty for women."

I tried to find the U.S. government's reaction to this exciting proposal, but to no avail. One Associated Press story quotes Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who co-chaired the UN panel, as saying, "We very much believe the recommendations will be implemented. ... We have never seen this kind of broad support." However, the article makes no mention of the U.S. stance on the panel's proposals.

The website for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations also does not mention the panel's proposal for a unified women's agency -- at least not anywhere that I could find. Ditto for the White House and State Department websites. Perhaps this is another reason to oppose John Bolton as U.S. Representative to the United Nations?