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Monday, June 05, 2000
By Ann McFeatters , Post-Gazette National Bureau
UNITED NATIONS -- Warning that the feminization of poverty is a serious global problem, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton claims center stage at the United Nations today as a special session of the General Assembly opens on the progress of women on the bumpy road to equality.
Because women make up 70 percent of the world's poor, Clinton has become a major advocate of giving women small loans--called microcredit--to permit them to open small businesses to take control of their lives and feed their children. Although it was adopted by the 1995 women's conference at Beijing five years ago, microcredit is not a universally popular idea.
A number of conservative religions say that if it becomes globally accepted, it will undermine the traditional role of women as homemakers supposed to obey their husbands.
Clinton, in the middle of an impassioned quest to become a U.S. senator from the state of New York although she just recently moved to Westchester County, will also urge that more nations give higher priority to educating women.
By far the most popular speaker in Beijing, she is credited with helping to raise awareness on the economic plight of women around the globe.
About 11,000 women--a far cry from the nearly 40,000 who paid their way to Beijing for the women's conference sponsored by the United Nations five years ago--are in New York City in every form of female clothing from Western pants suits to saris to gauge the progress women have made toward gender equality in the past five years.
Organizers of the dozens of forums, film festivals, news conferences, formal U.N. ceremonies and seminars this week are worried about being too arcane for many people to follow the thousands of statistics, polls and findings that will pour forth about the status of women.
Nearly every form of social problem will be addressed.
Yesterday, for example, mothers and daughters walked 1.5 miles through Central Park to protest the increase in teen-age smoking. For six hours women from around the world spoke at Columbia University in passionate protest about lack of human rights for women in many countries.
Across town the problems of girls were addressed as dozens of girls and young women from such groups as UNICEF's Working Group on Girls, Girl Scouts U.S.A, Save the Children, Girls, Inc. and the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts talked about such problems as female genital mutilation, date rape and low expectations for girls that often mean their brothers go to school but they don't.
The representatives to the conference in pre-meeting sessions already have agreed to rubber-stamp the agenda from Beijing, despite the opposition of Islamic groups and the Vatican. Such opponents don't like the emphasis on more reproductive freedom and wider sex education for children and young teens. As a result, the U.N. documents on such issues note that there is no universal agreement on them.
Such opponents also make clear they don't approve of the presence of some openly lesbian couples at such conferences or the acceptance of non-traditional families.
Technically, the special session this week was called to highlight progress -- and lack if it -- by 189 countries that signed on to the recommendations of the Beijing conference. But the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, reviewing the "action plans" of various countries on how they were meeting the goals set in Beijing, complains that almost none of them contained budgets for how they were to meet those goals.