 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Wednesday, June 07, 2000
As the U.N. Special Session, Women 2000, continues its weeklong look at progress since the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, a survey the Aspen Institute commissioned has found that American women are more likely than men to frame their foreign policy concerns around global social issues like health, poverty and human rights. Here is a sampling of reaction to that survey and the conference assessments:
"What this [Aspen] poll tells us is that American women understand that the well-being of themselves, their families and communities are increasingly intimately connected with the well-being and stability of other countries."
-- Rockefeller Brothers Fund fellow Joan Dunlop, a director of the Aspen Institute Women's Lens on Global Issues project
"Foreign policy requires a new conceptualization. It is no longer as narrow as defined by the literature as well as by the foreign policy professionals -- and they're resisting. When we said that AIDS was an international security issue, they went crazy."
-- U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala
"The issue we are dealing with right now is whether or not these governments are going to recognize that both the [AIDS] epidemic and trafficking [in women] are driven by men's demands for sex. If we're going to deal with that issue, we have to deal with both ends of the equation; namely, we have to recommit ourselves, as we did in Beijing, to recognizing women's sexual rights and men's responsible sexual behavior."
-- Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition