1000 WORDS: Mosuo Woman

From Lili Almog's series in Economica, "The Other Half of the Sky," which features working women in rural China. View the whole series >>

UN Women and MDGs: Toward Progress and Change?

Part 1
UN Women: A New Entity Paves a New Path

This week and next bring pivotal United Nations announcements and meetings. While the 600 page report on Rwanda’s possible act of genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo stalled until October 1, reports are now focusing on the appointment of former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to head UN Women, the United Nations' new agency for promoting women's equality. Also at the top of the UN’s agenda is the UN Summit, a high-level plenary meeting being held early next week in New York City to assess the progress of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

In July, the creation of UN Women hit major news sources. The BBC's piece, "UN to Set Up Agency Promoting Women's Rights," quoted the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moo as saying, "UN Women will significantly boost UN efforts to promote gender equality, expand opportunity and tackle discrimination around the globe."

Her Blueprint's "United Nations Creates a New Women's Rights Coalition" explained that the creation of UN Women came out of four years of intense negotiation and struggle, but was a major step toward change because it unifies four UN divisions into a single and more powerful entity to deal directly with women's issues. Paula Donovan, Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, an international advocacy organization committed to speaking up for people affected by AIDS, as well as advance the causes of social justice and promote the human rights of people, particularly women, recently asserted how important the new UN Women entity.



“This year, the international community finally came to the realization that it will never be possible to achieve peace and social justice — or any of the hundreds of targets within those broad goals — if we continue to work with and in the best interests of just half the human population. The establishment of a UN women’s agency is also global recognition that the subordination and exploitation of women are not just unethical: they are ubiquitous, destructive, tenacious, varied, complex and at this point, so commonplace as to be invisible. Therefore, we need experts who have studied gender, its history, causes and consequences, and its inescapable, prejudicial and overwhelmingly destructive involvement in every facet of our lives, from child care to macroeconomic policy formulation, from literacy and numeracy to nuclear disarmament, from cancer research to violence prevention, and from agricultural production to mining, transportation, language and the arts."

After the establishment of UN Women so began the search for its leader. Last week, the AP broke the story of the strongest candidate for the new agency with Official: Chile's Bachelet Frontrunner for UN Post. This week, on September 14, Michelle Bachelet, pictured here, was officially appointed as Under-Secretary-General (USG) of UN Women. As the former President of Chile (the country's first) and with an extensive background in health and public service, her appointment is perceived as a major triumph.

The GEAR Campaign is a network of over 300 women’s, human rights, and social justice groups around the world formed to gain UN Member States and UN Secretariat approval for creation of a larger more coherent coordinated UN agency to further gender equality. GEAR released the following statement yesterday. “Michelle Bachelet is a top notch choice and has long been one of GEAR’s dream candidates. An effective leader of great integrity, Bachelet has demonstrated strong commitment to women’s empowerment and the ability to shape gender equality policies in a variety of areas. She also has the stature to mobilize the resources crucial to make UN Women a success.”

However, even while the announcement of Bachelet as USG of UN Women is celebrated, the selection process itself is said to have continued embracing older UN protocols. AIDS-Free World's Paula Donovan her thoughts on Bachelet’s selection process and her appointment. In the positive, Donovan says, “We have an excellent, high-profile, progressive USG with the profile and experience to take on this significant role.”

But, Donovan also highlights the flawed system of choosing the highly-favored Bachelet as being made “in the same secretive, male-dominated, patronage-ridden, dangerously outmoded way that all senior appointments at the UN are made.”

Donovan further clarifies, “There will be rejoicing that in this instance, a dreadful process resulted in a great outcome, and deep concern that people not see a cause-and-effect relationship between the process and the outcome.”

None of this quells the obvious anticipation and wealth of opportunity due to finally having a strong, unified body lead on women’s issues at the UN. Yet one question on everyone’s mind is: Now that UN Women has been created, will it also be properly funded so as to ensure true change?

In a rousing statement, the GEAR Campaign shares their current hope for UN Women after the appointment of Michelle Bachelet. “This landmark decision comes at a critical juncture as the UN reforms its internal systems and has recently been seen as an exhausted and under-resourced international institution. UN Women can provide new vision and hope and will need to bridge governments and civil society as we progress into the 21st century and the GEAR Campaign will be there to support its leadership and maintain visibility throughout the transitional period and beyond.”

Monday, September 20 begins the UN Summit, a high-plenary meeting in New York City to assess the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Read Part 2 and Part 3 of Kate Stence's UN Women and MDGs.

Photo credit: Casa de America

Strength in Numbers: Mobilization, Awareness, and Health

Yesterday morning at the foot of the Eiffel Tower over 20,000 women converged ready to race in the 14th edition of La Parisienne to celebrate women's health and raise awareness for myriad causes. En route to the start line from Metro École Militaire, I thought about the passage of time. I looked to the gray misting skies of Paris and remembered that sunny day nine years ago when everything my fellow New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and Washington, DC residents knew, my country knew, and I knew about safety changed.

This weekend also marked the ninth anniversary of September 11, 2001, when the United States as a country and as individuals, including my sister and myself in Manhattan, experienced one day of terrorism in an act of war. One day. Nearly 3,000 victims. It took months to recover, years to fully heal. A week after the 9/11 attacks, I vividly remember my sister and me in Grand Central Station crying in front of a sign seeking two missing sisters. Out of thousands of posted missing persons signs, we cried for those sisters because enough days had passed we knew them probably gone, but also because we knew they could have been us.

 The Healers of 9/11, by Nicholas Kristof, shares the journey of Susan Retik since she lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks nine years ago along with Patti Quigley, another widow who was pregnant with her first child when her husband was also killed that day. Though devastated and suffering post-9/11, "they realized that there were more than half a million widows in Afghanistan — and then, with war, there would be even more. Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley also saw that Afghan widows could be a stabilizing force in that country."

America has been at war in Afghanistan since October 2001, meaning Afghan women have been suffering the strife of war for almost a decade. Kristof explains that "at a time when the American government reacted to the horror of 9/11 mostly with missiles and bombs, detentions and waterboardings, Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley turned to education and poverty-alleviation projects — in the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized their lives. The organization they started, Beyond the 11th, has now assisted more than 1,000 Afghan widows in starting tiny businesses."

BIG IDEAS: Economic Jargon

You're probably familiar with the metaphor of the economy as a machine--phrases like "jump-starting the economy" or "economic engine," or the idea that the economy is something that is currently broken and in need of repair. Feminist economist Nancy Folbre says that the words we use to describe the economy are more important than we might realize, and in this podcast on Economica, she suggests an alternative metaphor:

"The [new terminology] that I’ve suggested ... is the economy as a beating heart. There are mechanical replacements for hearts, so it’s not that they don’t have certain processes which can be a little bit reminiscent of the machine metaphor. But the heart is also much more organic. And key to the idea of a heart metaphor is circulation. That is you have to keep the resources moving around to keep the economy healthy. So you bring in ideas of health. You bring in ideas of circulating and keeping things moving ... the heart is also the location of care and responsibility, so you bring in that aspect as well. ...We need to look at the fact that what we want from an economy includes a lot of things that aren’t measured in GDP. We want an economy that also allows us to spend time with our children. And for children to have interaction with care and caregivers."

What do you think? What kind of metaphor would you suggest for the way the economy works, or should work?


Economic Jargon, Nancy Folbre [Economica: Women and the Global Economy]

CLIO TALKS BACK: Women as “Patrons” of the Arts

Book cover: portrait by Sir John Laverty. www.amazon.com

Alma de Bretteville Spreckels ("Big Alma")

Clio has just finished reading a biography of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (1881-1968), a wealthy San Francisco widow and fervent Francophile who founded the magnificent museum of art and culture known as the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. This museum, which she built to honor American soldiers who had died in France in World War One, perches on a windswept hill high above the Pacific Ocean and is filled with artistic treasures such as sculptures by Rodin.

Alma’s longtime rivals, the de Young sisters, were likewise patrons of the arts. To honor their father, they founded the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, which has recently been rebuilt. Today these two distinguished museums partner in the fine arts museum network of the city of San Francisco.

“Big Alma” and the De Youngs are twentieth-century participants in a long chain of women of means who distinguished themselves as secular “patrons” of the arts. Not all of them founded entire museums, or built mansions or palaces to showcase their art, but most of them supported artists (mostly men), whether by acquiring their paintings, sculptures, and other artistic creations or securing their livelihoods by inviting the artists to live at their expense.

Centuries earlier, in the early Italian Renaissance, secular women patrons commissioned alterpieces, burial chapels, elegant furniture, and even tapestries and illuminated manuscripts. Yet for many centuries historians of art ignored these women patrons, even though many of the works they commissioned became famous. The best-known exception to this oversight was Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), called the “first lady of the Renaissance,” who presided over the court of Mantua with her husband Francesco Gonzaga and was painted by Titian.

In other city-states of Renaissance Italy, other aristocratic women also patronized the arts. Victoria Colonna, for example, commissioned Titian to produce a painting of Mary Magdalen. Queens and princesses in other realms also got into the act of commissioning works of art, while other women of wealth became collectors. They also commissioned architectural works, as had women religious who had long been patrons of architecture as well as the arts, primarily for Christian convents and churches.

In the mid-fifteenth century, one aspiring laywoman in Siena, the widow Caterina Piccolomini, commissioned and directed the construction of a palace, the Palazzo delle Papesse, which was conveniently paid for by her brother, Pope Pius II. According to A. Lawrence Jenkens, who has studied this case (see his article in Reiss & Wilkins), the records attest that Caterina seems to have controlled the whole project: “she bought the property, she employed Federighi and others to build her residence, and it was to her that the monies from the papal purse were disbursed.”

Sometimes these “women’s actions sustained the political and economic interests of their male relatives” (see Prologue to Reiss & Wilkins, p. 7), but in other cases (particularly as widows) they acted on their own interests and occasionally even against the expressed wishes of male kin, including their deceased husbands.

www.nwma.org Wikipedia

National Museum of Women in the Arts

Historians continue to dig out and publish the stories of these remarkable women, who lavished their resources on the promotion of the arts. Yet only rarely did they patronize or highlight the arts produced by their own sex. Such initiatives had to wait until the late twentieth century with the foundation by Wilhelmina Cole Holladay of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Would it then be appropriate to refer to Holladay and Sackler as “matrons” of the arts?

Since works of art are created by women as well as by men (and we now know that such has long been the case), and women are now bankrolling women’s art and fostering its display, surely we should no longer use the term “patronage” (derived from the Greek word for father, or pater) to describe women’s participation in promoting and underwriting the arts. What do you think?

Can you think of other examples of women patronizing the arts, especially women’s art, in other parts of the world? What suggestions do you have for women’s promotion of the arts of women today?

Further suggested reading:

Bernice Scharlach. Big Alma: San Francisco’s Alma Spreckels. San Francisco: Scottwall Associates, 1999.

Sheryl E. Reiss & David G. Wilkins. Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy. Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, Vol. LIV. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001.

Cynthia Lawrence, ed. Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs. University Park: Pennsulvania State University Press, 1997.

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay. A Museum of Their Own: National Museum for Women in the Arts. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2008.

Lengthy UN Report Possibly Cites Hutu Genocide

Last week in the French countryside, life was comprised of rain storms, running, a family, more running, butterflies, and a return to children. While crossing the lush green landscapes turned almost unearthly by sunrise and sunset, I continuously hoped that the upcoming 600 page UN report to be released sometime in September about Rwanda, titled Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993-2003, will reveal a truth that is a long time coming.

According to RFI, Le Monde first broke the story of the anticipated and lengthy UN report by citing that it “will detail mass killing of Hutu refugees by Rwandan forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s.”

Thus, the report is possibly anticipated to confirm the otherwise taciturn act of genocide in Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) against the Hutus. Courtesy of RFI and AFP pictured here are Rwandan troops in the DRC.

According to the NY Times article U.N. Congo Report Offers New View on Genocide, the Rwandan government is outraged, claiming that “it is immoral and unacceptable that the United Nations, an organization that failed outright to prevent genocide in Rwanda and the subsequent refugees crisis that is the direct cause for so much suffering in Congo and Rwanda, now accuses the army that stopped the genocide of committing atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Yet, Le Monde’s article confirms the UN remains cautious because UN Secretary General “Ban Ki Moon is uneasy with any use of the term ‘genocide’ in the final version of the report - and that he has warned its authors to verify the legal basis of any accusations they make.”

September marks a filled month for the UN due to the Rwanda report finally being released alongside the happening of the UN Summit, plenary meetings of high-level UN officials in New York City on September 20 - 22, 2010 to assess completion of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG), due to be fulfilled in 2015. Also, extremely important is the upcoming UN Women, a new UN entity, which could be exceptionally paramount in advancing achievement of the MDGs depending on funding and construct.

Look for more in-depth coverage on UN Women in Kate Stence’s next Her Blueprint post.

1000 WORDS: Blue

A seaweed farmer in Zanzibar, from Joanna Lipper's series for Picturing Power & Potential,
"Growth vs. Stagnation."

Slaves by Another Name Clear of Charges in NY

Pic courtesy of Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine

Victims of human trafficking are finally getting further rights under a recent New York state policy, and it’s about time. Under the new law, women will have the right to clear their names of prostitution charges.

The business of sexual slavery and human trafficking is growing around the world. It is one of the many negative impacts of global financial meltdown, and perhaps one of the most overlooked issues of our times. It can also be said that forced labor flourishes in times of disaster and financial distress. A perfect storm of economic hardship in an increasingly post-industrial, globally integrated world, modern day slavery impacts women and children the most. According to the U.S. State Department, in 2007, 50% of transnational victims were children, and 80% were women and girls.

Recently I came across an article about the sex trafficking industry in the small Mexican town of Tenancingo. An economically depressed town with a large Indian population valuing forced marriages, many men have lured women into forced sex work by first proposing marriage and then kidnapping them. The Washington Post reported that as many as 3,000 people, of a total population of 10,000, are directly involved in the sex trade there. Oftentimes, the women are smuggled into the U.S. where their work will support a lavish lifestyle for their captors back home in Mexico.

MAKE CHANGE: Support Team Congo Paris

According to Run for Congo Women, "Congo presents one of the world's deadliest emergencies to date. More than 5.4 million people have died since 1998. Gang rape and brutal torture are a daily reality for the women and children of Congo. Women as old as 80 and as young as five have been victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence. 38,000 continue to die every month, 1200 a day. Half of these deaths are children under the age of five years."

On 10.10.10, Team Congo Paris will race/walk the 20 KM de Paris for Run for Congo Women and Women for Women International (WfWI). WfWI has officially been operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 2004. According to the WFWI web site, "the organization has helped thousands of female survivors of war, civil strife, and other conflicts rebuild their lives and regain their sense of self. Through their one-year programs, women are given the tools they need to get back on their feet and contribute to their community. For example, in 2008, 86% of the participants reported having improved their economic situation, 88% of women expressed increased self-confidence, and 83% reported having a greater knowledge of their rights."

Contribute at the Team Congo Paris fundraising page, join the team by contacting Kate Stence at kstence@gmail.com for details, or learn more here.



Web ad design: Nicole Fischetti

Resiliency, Congo, and Rape As a Weapon of War

Last week in London’s Tate Modern, I was just as enthralled with their collection as always, but it was Magda Cordell’s Figure (Woman) pictured here, that I kept returning to because the plaque beside the painting shared that although her work was originally seen as a “break with traditional representations of women,” more recently, it has been regarded by critics as “images of heroic femininity with the distortions signifying the resilience of the human body against injury and change.”

Those last words have run through my head many times this week as I heard radio reports and read CNN and BBC articles reporting “allegations of rape as a weapon of war” in the Congo and the UN’s and major politicians, hopefully, mounting response. These women and children are resiliency. Their bodies and beings have been pushed far past that word’s very definition.

According to Feminist News, on August 13, Margot Wallstrom the UN’s Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, stressed in an interview with reporters that sexual violence during war is, “one of the greatest security risks of our time,” and she cited it “no more acceptable nor inevitable than committing mass murder.”

That same day Wartime Rape No More Inevitable, Acceptable than Mass Murder, appeared on CNN.com, and the article quotes Letitia Anderson, women’s rights specialist with the UN’s Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict initiative as sharing, “Rape is being used by armed groups to reignite flames of conflict and to terrorize and humiliate communities in Africa.”

BOOKS: I Am an Emotional Creature

Eve Ensler, acclaimed author of The Vagina Monologues, has a lot to say about women, and now, girls. After promoting her theatrical hit around the globe and in turn creating the "V-Day" movement, Ensler has come back with I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World.

Emotional Creature finds Ensler channeling the voices of adolescent girls and penning confessional first-person narratives inspired by the young women she experienced on her travels. Through poetry and journal entries, she imagines the plight of girls from the U.S., Iran, The Congo, China, Palestine, and more. To older readers and Ensler fans, these works may come across as overly simplistic and less than thought-provoking as she tackles eating disorders, human trafficking, teen sex and child labor through adolescent voices. But overall, the project is commendable, and notable for the author's ability to find a common emotional thread connecting young women around the globe.

Gay Marriage, Women's Suffrage, and the American President

Photo courtesy of Change.org

Today The New Republic came out with a thought provoking Op-ed comparing U.S. President Barack Obama to President Woodrow Wilson, who was in office just a few years prior to the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote. Both were liberal American presidents who wanted to be known for their progressive stances. Both were also populists, and therefore wanted to appease citizens across the political spectrum. But both presidents, in doing so, wavered on civil rights issues and compromised liberal causes.

And both presidents, in the view of TNR writer Richard Just, are destined to have tarnished legacies as a result of their failure to clearly and actively support civil rights issues.

In the years leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Wilson became cagey and tried in vain to avoid the question of whether or not he supported a woman's right to vote. Instead of taking a stand, he deemed women's rights a local rather than federal issue. Just writes that this moment in history now seems oddly familiar:

"An evasive stance on a controversial civil rights issue from a liberal president; an insistence that the issue is primarily local, rather than national, in character; a complete failure of sincerity, nerve, and will: If these things sound familiar in 2010, it is because Barack Obama is taking exactly the same approach on gay marriage."

I'd like to think that Obama cannot simply be reduced to an ineffectual, spineless Woodrow Wilson of his day. But his lack of support for gay marriage positions him to the right of republicans Laura Bush, Cindy McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; as well as 52% of the American people, according to a recent CNN poll.

What do you think? Is Obama destined for less-than-greatness on civil rights issues?