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Sunday, June 04, 2000
By Sally Kalson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Women: A Work In Progress
In 1995, 50 local women (and a few men) traveled to Beijing for the official United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and its affiliated Non-Governmental Organization Forum.
They went from Peace Links and the World Federalist Association, Chatham College and Seton Hill College, Magee Womens Hospital and Allegheny General Hospital, the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, Hadassah and the Thomas Merton Center, from other groups and no groups.
Their purpose was to consider six areas affecting women worldwide -- equality, health, education, development, employment and peace -- and to return home with a platform for action to be implemented on the local level.
And the results five years later?
In some parts of the world, the conference's influence has been profound.
In 1998, for example, Nigeria granted women the right to inherit property, with huge implications for how girls are valued by their societies. Some nations have written or rewritten constitutions to include specific rights for women. The Ivory Coast, Senegal and Egypt have banned female genital mutilation.
Changes on the personal level have been profound as well. Conference-goers formed connections in Beijing with women from all over the world. The experience, they say, opened their eyes to global conditions for women and broadened their Westernized viewpoints to include a much bigger picture.
In addition, some Beijing alumnae now find themselves immersed in international work on women's health, education and economic development in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
A case in point is Regina Birchem, coordinator of the local coalition called Pittsburgh/Beijing '95 and Beyond. As a result of the conference, she began working with African women through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the oldest peace organization in the world, dating back to World War I.
"I went to Sierra Leone in December 1997, right after they signed the peace accord that is kind of shattered right now," said Birchem, who lives in Sewickley Township, Westmoreland County. "I met with women there on reintegrating the soldiers back into civil society."
But when it comes to concrete programs or results in the Pittsburgh area, the effects are not always easy to gauge.
"It's hard to say such-and-such a thing happened here because of the Beijing conference," Birchem said. "It's more a growing awareness that the conference helped move along."
For example, she said, there's been increased local attention given to role of women in government and politics, a heightened consciousness of community action to enhance opportunities for girls and more efforts to stem the tide of violence against women in the home.
"Our hope was to identify organizations in the Pittsburgh area that were already working on some aspects of these issues and make them aware of how their work was connected to similar work all over the world," said Lois Goldstein of Peace Links.
"That happened in a limited way. We made hundreds and hundreds of presentations over the following year to organizations, schools, colleges and women's studies groups."
Chatham cites change
Beginning tomorrow, the Post-Gazette will offer daily news coverage of the weeklong Women 2000 conference at the United Nations. Each day, it will also look at how women's lives have changed -- for better or worse -- in a dozen key categories that were identified at the World Women's Conference in Beijing five years ago. The lineup includes:
Still, some places do claim concrete results. One is Chatham College, which now has two programs that President Esther Barazzone attributes directly to her trip to Beijing.
One is a beefed-up Institute for Women in Politics, which just finished its first year of active programming under director Bernadette Comfort.
The institute helped train candidates for the new County Council. It's also working with New Leadership Pennsylvania to encourage young women's involvement in politics, and it sets up electronic mentoring programs between Chatham students and women legislators in Harrisburg.
The other change is to the campus' Global Focus program. Every year, it emphasizes the culture of a different part of the world. But this year it added a visiting scholar who is also an expert on women's issues in that part of the world.
"This year's focus was South Asia," Barazzone said. "We had a leading expert on women's issues in India living on campus and teaching."
Her focus -- clean water -- is not something that immediately springs to mind as a women's issue in the United States, but it's clearly essential to the health of a nation's people, especially children and, thus, their mothers.
"One thing that has come home to American feminists after Beijing is that you cannot view women's issues through the lens of Western women only," Barazzone said. "It really opens your mind. We will never teach women's studies at this college the same way again, from just a Western feminist perspective."
Also traveling to Beijing were 14 students from women's colleges across the country. One of them, Susan Homer Pickell of Chatham, says the experience confirmed that she would be involved in international issues for the rest of her life.
Through the conference, Pickell got an internship with The Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA), an international organization working on family planning and reproductive health issues for women around the world.
"It profoundly influenced my senior thesis," said Pickell, who examined the development theories practiced by the United States Agency for International Development.
After graduation, Pickell got a job with CEDPA and moved to Washington, D.C. For three years, she worked on training programs for nongovernment agencies that advocate improved programs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eurasia and the Middle East.
Although she has changed jobs since, Pickell still devotes 20 percent of her time to volunteer work teaching English as a second language to immigrants through a group called People Without Borders. And this week, she will be in New York for Beijing Plus 5.
A passionate story
Linda Hunt, an actress with Kuntu Repertory Theatre, had never been outside the United States before attending the Beijing conference, and couldn't have gone without a wealthy sponsor underwriting some of her expenses.
Five years later, she's still mulling over unanswered questions and conflicting feelings about the experience.
"I got to hear the stories of women from all over the world, and that gave me a perspective I never had before," said Hunt, who lives in McKees Rocks. "In some ways it made me feel that what I've gone through being an African American cannot be compared to their experience. If a woman in a village wants to change where she plants her crops, she has to get permission from a man first. As bad as things are here, they're not that bad."
On the other hand, she said, she was shocked to be at a conference with 1,000 African-American women and not find a single workshop about what was happening to black males in the United States.
Hunt's son was wounded in a drive-by shooting that killed his friend; the boy who drove the car, only 15 at the time, got a 20-year prison sentence. Hunt thought the epidemic of violence in the black community should have been considered a women's issue in Beijing, since the pain always came home to roost with the mothers, wives and daughters of victims and perpetrators alike.
"Their answer was that this was an international forum and not the place for that subject. I thought it was exactly the place, because we were all there."
Hunt came home with a burning need to tell the stories of women like herself. Recently she's begun looking for grant money to get a video project off the ground.
"It's a passion for me now," she said. "We have these stories and they need to be told."
For Roseann Rife, executive director of the World Federalist Association, the big push out of Beijing was to get nations to approve the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, an international treaty ratified so far by 165 nations -- but not the United States, which has signed the document but not voted to implement it.
Locally, that translated into the World Federalists working on Pittsburgh City Council's successful resolution in support of ratification. A resolution in the state Legislature stalled last year and has not been reintroduced.
"Ratifying the convention would allow us to affirm U.S. leadership in women's rights around the world," said Rife. "It's kind of odd that this country had so much to do with drafting the treaty and yet hasn't ratified it."
Brazil, on the other hand, adopted a new constitution that used the core principles almost word for word.
The strategy, Rife said, is to get local governing bodies to support the convention as a way of putting pressure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where the measure has been sitting for six years without a vote.
The importance of locally based action was driven home to Tanya Kotys at the Beijing conference, too. Kotys went representing Magee Womancare International. Today she lives in Jamaica, but is still consulting with 24 hospitals around the United States on outreach programs for grassroots community health services for women.
"In Beijing, I looked at the multiple cultures with such diverse moral foundations and cultural traditions," Kotys said. "The one thing everyone shared was the conviction that the most effective way to make women healthy and empowered was grass-roots community education, whether it's funded by the government, the for-profit sector or individuals."
The Beijing conference showed her that large-scale women's projects can work.
"That's what drives me right now," she said. "You can take thousands of women from around the world and get them to agree on an agenda when you find a common denominator."
And finding that common ground has never been more possible, thanks to the Internet.
"We are all connected with each other," Kotys said -- through humanity and technology.
"From women in the bush of Africa to the rice paddies of India to me on an island in the Caribbean -- no one can shut borders and close doors anymore. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and it's very empowering.
"It's all one big Beijing conference now."
5 Years Beyond Beijing
First of a seven-day series
Chatham College President Esther Barazzone - "One thing that has come home to American feminists after Beijing is that you cannot view wonen's issues thought the lens of Western women only." (John Beale, Post-Gazette) 
5 Years Beyond Beijing
Looking back so they can move ahead
Monday
Women and Poverty
Women and Education Tuesday
The Girl Child
Women and Health Wednesday
Human Rights
Women and Power Thursday
Women and the Environment
Women and Violence Friday
Women and Institutions
Women and the Economy Saturday
Women and Armed Conflict
Women and the Media 
Regina Birchem, coordinator of Pittsburgh/Beijing '95 and Beyond - "It's hard to say such-and-such a thing happened here because of the Beijing conference. It's more a growing awareness that the conference helped move along." (John Beale, Post-Gazette)