Ascent of Women (31 page)

They formed an ad hoc committee and hit the telephones to call women together for what turned out to be a history-making event. Women came from all regions of the country: urban and rural women, Aboriginal women, francophone women, women of colour, older and younger women. They took buses, trains, planes and cars to Ottawa. They wanted to send a message to the government that they wouldn’t be dictated to. Women politicians such as Flora MacDonald and Pauline Jewitt joined together across party lines and used their parliamentary authority to book a room in the House of Commons for the conference. More than six hundred women turned up, and by the end of a single day had reached consensus on the key changes that needed to
be inserted in the Charter document to ensure women’s equality.

That conference forced the government to listen to women—half of Canada’s population. It also led to Sections 15 and 28 being added to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Those are the sections that guarantee women and girls protection from discriminatory laws, government regulations and government programs. The Charter says, “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” With Sections 15 and 28, the document established unequivocal equality rights for women and girls.

Marilou McPhedran, one of the authors of Section 15, says this constitutional effort wasn’t a one-off bit of activism: “It was the culmination of a decade of social mobilization of women and resulted in new tools available to use in the legal arena.”

Then women’s organizations needed to learn to use those new tools, and the new Charter protections needed to be tested in the courts in order to set legal precedents. Since the existing women’s groups certainly couldn’t afford the legal fees of constitutional challenges headed for Canada’s Supreme Court, the solution was to form an organization that could fund and fight such cases. That led to the birth of the Legal Education and Action Fund, known as LEAF, in 1985. Its mandate was to make real the paper guarantees of equality that women had fought for and won in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That meant conducting education and awareness-building programs for judges, lawyers, the public and the police so that the equality guarantees got up off the paper and entered into people’s daily lives.

Two groundbreaking cases came up almost immediately. One established that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination, and the other that discrimination on the grounds of pregnancy is also a form of sex discrimination. Until those cases were heard, there was actually some doubt about whether a woman could complain about sex discrimination to a human rights commission or in the courts and get the appropriate hearing. Similarly, if a woman had been fired from her job because she was pregnant, there was no guarantee that the Charter would work for her. Those sound like self-evident principles of fairness today, but in fact they were the first steps in extending the protection of the law to many women from many walks of life.

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As much as women prepare the research, deliver the documents and demand change, there continue to be obstacles to equality, some of them from unexpected places such as the United Nations. The UN is supposed to be the epitome of change-making institutions, responding to the needs of the people and holding meetings among nations. At the fifty-sixth meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, held in February and March 2012, the opposite was true. The pathetic report filed after the Status of Women meeting ended in failure sends two clear messages: the UN has serious problems, and women are still easily betrayed.

The focus of the 2012 meeting was to find ways to ensure that rural women would be fully empowered to reach their potential. Rural women make up one-quarter of the world’s population and are vital economic agents who, if empowered, could unleash
improvements to reduce poverty and boost food security, so ameliorating their situation was the goal of this conference.

Typical for conferences of this nature, the participants had already met through e-mail exchanges and had shared research and decided which measures they wanted the meeting to endorse. But to their immense surprise and disappointment, none of the agreed-on reforms were approved. The session ended without a conclusion. Why? Because the meeting got derailed by delegates unnerved by the subtext of many reforms, which was about women having control over their own sexuality: the promotion of reproductive and sexual health, family planning and reproductive rights, and the elimination of harmful practices, such as early and forced child marriage. Some of the delegations had decided to repudiate the terms that had already been agreed on and ignore the legal reforms and services that had been prepared in advance, in spite of the colossal expenses incurred to house and feed the delegates for nineteen days in New York City.

The executive director of UN Women, Michelle Bachelet, said the delegations were unable to overcome “a disappointing inability to reach consensus.” The chair of the conference, Marjon Kamara from Liberia, put it more bluntly: “I will not hide my great disappointment that we have found ourselves in this position. If we really want to tell the truth about it, I’m not sure that we all came with a spirit of compromise.”

At the end of the conference, delegations from twenty countries rose to express their regret: the Norwegians spoke for many when their representative said they could not accept the use of religious, cultural and moral concerns to block negotiations on documents that would protect women’s rights and, in some cases, save thousands of lives every year.

But in no document, on no website, in no press release does the commission state who opposed what or why the meeting ended in failure. The debacle brings new impetus to the need for women to make changes themselves. Indeed, education allows women to know what the law says and doesn’t say, and as illiteracy rates drop in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan and in much of Africa, where women’s rights are still challenged, new knowledge is giving women the power to speak out. As for Iran, a country that boasts a high literacy rate but draconian measures to keep women subservient, its homegrown Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi says, “Iranian women may very well be the force that brings down the oppressive regime that controls Iran.” And the world watches with bated breath each time Iranians go to the barricades, hoping that this will be the time they break through.

At the Nobel Women’s Initiative Conference held in Montebello, Quebec, in May 2011, Ebadi told a story about dealing with the authorities in Iran that likens the change process to catching flies with honey. “The legal status of women is very discriminatory, and this has been the result of bad laws that were passed against women after the revolution.” The slightest criticism of the law or practice of government in an Islamic country is considered critical of Islam and labelled heresy by the government. Anyone who fights for human rights, especially women’s rights, is caught in that heresy trap. “You cannot speak of logic with Islamic fundamentalists,” Ebadi says. “Their prejudice won’t permit it. So I bypassed religion and found common ground with the government. My strategy is this: I ask the government to perform the obligation it accepted when it acceded to the UN conventions on human rights and to enforce them. When I tried to defend women’s rights, they said, ‘Get out of here, you feminist,
you liberal, you defender of human rights.’ So I started with the Rights of the Child—a document the government had signed and had to go along with. By the time the government knew I had tricked them, it was too late.” She reminds the women from Islamic lands to choose their words carefully, to avoid any terms that could be found insulting to Islam and to never, ever suggest that Islamic laws are bad. “Don’t talk in a way that Islamists won’t accept you or call you a non-Muslim or non-believer. It weakens your struggle. The fundamentalist Muslim women were against me when I started. Sometimes I thought I was alone. But thirty-two years later, the women who opposed me are on my side—sometimes they are even more radical.”

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A lot has changed. Gloria Steinem cites a classic example of lost opportunity due to gender blindness. “One of the great debacles during the Vietnam War came about because when the peace talks began in Paris, the U.S. government thought the Vietnamese weren’t taking the negotiations seriously because they sent a woman.” Twenty years ago rape wasn’t a war crime; violence against women wasn’t on the development agenda. Now it’s included in the planning of every government and NGO intending to offer humanitarian aid.

What the world is also making inroads in today is improving the welfare and education of girl children. That new emphasis was sparked a dozen years ago when NGOs such as World Vision hosted events that brought girls together to dream bigger dreams and plan better plans. Now the girl has become the poster child for turning the economy in the village around. Consider this:
based on World Bank research and UNESCO education statistics, the estimated economic cost to sixty-five low- and middle-income and transitional countries of failing to educate girls to the same standard as boys is a staggering US$92 billion each year.

Numbers like that speak volumes. And they have become the basis for marketing programs that aim to alter the lives of girls. Plan International’s Because I Am a Girl initiative has become a social movement to unleash the power of girls in the developing world. It has attracted a host of well-known supporters, and the money is flowing into the projects for education and health care as never before. Why? Because according to Plan International, when a girl is educated, nourished and protected, she shares her knowledge and skills with her family and community. But more than that, she builds a powerful sense of self-esteem and self-confidence, which can change the status of a nation.

Another outside-the-box campaign is Walk a Mile in Her Shoes: the International Men’s March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault and Gender Violence. The popular marches in Canada and the United States are most often led by men wearing red stilettos. Though its organizers were criticized initially for mimicking the way women dress, the march was soon seen for what it was: an opportunity to bring attention to a topic most people don’t want to talk about—gender relations and sexual violence. Actors and journalists, radio and TV personalities, sports heroes and firefighters lead the marches and invariably tell hilarious stories about walking a mile in four-inch heels but also deadly serious stories about stopping violence against women. As the organization’s motto says, “First you walk the walk, then you talk the talk.”

The march also sends the message that it’s time men as well as women talked about sexual violence. Some people still don’t
want to know it exists. Others say the statistics are rigged. Still others—the victims—often want to hide from the memory. The marches are doing what women’s groups have tried to do for decades—shine a hot light on the problem and get the community talking about it. Watching goofy six-foot-four-inch male broadcasters walking down the streets of Toronto wearing red stilettos has a way of doing precisely that. The organizers also hand out pamphlets for preventive education and community services available for anyone who needs help.

Marketing savvy is playing an increasingly important role in the lives of game-changers, who can now mobilize and message with lightning speed, as they did during the Arab Spring. Experience has taught them to spot an absurdity at a thousand paces and react to it before the press conference is over, as they did in Afghanistan when President Karzai “pardoned” a woman who was in jail because she had been raped.

In February 2012, the mother of all David and Goliath stories was splashed across the newspapers and broadcast almost incessantly on radio and TV in the U.S. when the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation dumped its annual donation to Planned Parenthood. The brouhaha blew up because the juggernaut that is the Komen Foundation, the ones who created the pink ribbon campaign to cure breast cancer and raised more than $1.9 billion since its inception in 1982, was beating up on Planned Parenthood, an organization that received grant money from Komen to provide mammograms for poor women in the U.S.

Here’s what happened. On January 31, 2012, the Komen Foundation announced that it was cutting its funding to Planned Parenthood. According to its own press release, the foundation said it was because Planned Parenthood was under investigation
by Florida representative Cliff Stearns, the staunch anti-abortion campaigner who runs an aggressive propaganda machine to annul
Roe v. Wade
, the court case that secured abortion rights for women in the United States and established a woman’s right to control her own body. Stearns claimed that he was trying to find out if Planned Parenthood was using public money to fund abortions. Some thought he was in cahoots with a newly hired member of the Komen Foundation who had similar views about abortion rights. The truth is that although Planned Parenthood and their affiliates do fund abortions, the money they have received—$680,000 per year—from the Komen Foundation is used to provide about 170,000 clinical breast exams and 6,400 mammograms mainly to low-income and minority women. The foundation board had recently made a resolution that any organization under investigation could not receive their funding. No one knew why the board of directors had made such a decision or how they thought it applied to Planned Parenthood. But everyone suspected that the funding cut was a direct assault on abortion rights.

Overnight it became a headline story of epic proportions. Critics hurled accusations of political interference. Pro-choice groups denounced what they regarded as more of the same old attacks from anti-abortion groups. Insiders noted that Planned Parenthood was the only grantee among two thousand other organizations whose funding had been cut off because of the new policy. Some foundation board members resigned.