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In September 1995, tens of thousands of women from around the world gathered in a sleepy town nearly 40 miles (60km) north of Beijing. The original plan had been to meet in the capital but, unnerved by such a large number of women, the Chinese authorities had insisted they stay a safe distance from the city in the settlement of Huairou, much of which was still under construction.
The government’s distrust ran deep: hotels were provided with extra blankets in case the women decided to stage an impromptu naked protest; movement between Beijing and Huairou was strictly controlled; and the unseasonal rain was blamed on a concentration of women menstruating.
But neither the weather nor the slights could dampen spirits at what proved to be an extraordinary event: the NGO Forum on Women.
Running parallel to the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women at the Beijing International Convention Centre, the forum welcomed 30,000 feminist leaders, rights advocates, Indigenous activists, NGO representatives and academics from 180 countries.
It was the largest international gathering of women the world had ever seen, and a seminal moment in the women’s rights movement. “Beijing was the culmination [of years of work]. As [feminist writer] bell hooks put it, we had been trying to move from the margins to the centre – and that’s what was so exciting,” says Charlotte Bunch, founding director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University in the US.
Participants tramped through mud in the half-built town to attend networking and strategy events in tents; they got soaked riding open-top tourist buses to the official UN conference in Bejing. But it all heightened the sense of camaraderie.
Over 11 days, issues such as affirming women’s rights as human rights; violence against women; reproductive rights; and the welfare of the girl child were discussed and debated. The result was the landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action – a document covering 12 critical areas that, 30 years on, remains the historic blueprint for gender equality.
“It was amazing – women of every colour and age and disability and race all fighting for equality and doing things in a very organised and coordinated way. We had an advocacy strategy and all this energy that felt powerful – and we really managed to influence the agenda,” says Ana Cristina González, who was a 27-year-old newly qualified doctor specialising in reproductive health when she went to China as part of the Latin American delegation.
“It made me feel [that] what I dreamed was possible. That meeting marked my entire career and my feminism,” she adds.
The sense that Beijing was transformative, personally and politically, is echoed by countless women, many of whom went on to become leaders in the women’s movement. “The atmosphere was incredible. I’d never sat with someone from Tibet or the Middle East – there was excitement and a feeling that we could achieve a lot,” says Lydia Alpízar Durán, co-executive director of IM-Defensoras, a Latin American network of female defenders. “We got a lot done in Beijing. Beyond the government agreement we built a global women’s movement. Beijing catalysed so many processes.”
It was far from easy. Months of preparation went into national and regional strategies to ensure the agenda reflected grassroot demands; debates were fierce and lengthy. The text of the declaration was pored over, word by word, until there was agreement. The Chinese authorities didn’t tolerate public protest but when women thought they were being ignored they found ways to show their disapproval – at one point the Latin American delegation blocked the escalators at the conference centre.
Indian feminist Gita Sen, founder of Developing Alternatives with Women for a New Era (Dawn), says: “One of the big moments was when the [then] president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, came in.
“Wolfensohn was viewed as more liberal [than previous presidents]; his wife was considered a feminist. I think he thought he would get congratulated but he got a shellacking – people screamed at him: ‘Do you know what you have done to our lives? You and the IMF are destroying us.’ I think he was genuinely shocked, but he went back and tried to soften some of the [bank’s] policies.”
When Hillary Clinton, wife of the then US president Bill Clinton, made her speech in Beijing declaring “women’s rights as human rights, once and for all”, the world listened – but the credit goes to the thousands of women who had worked tirelessly in the years before in their own countries and at key UN conferences, including Vienna in 1993 and Cairo in 1994.
“Up until 1980 women’s events were on the sidelines – they were not viewed at the core of anything the UN was doing. And today we are in the backlash against all those things that we were moving forward,” says Bunch.
Bunch was one of a group of women who came up with the 16 days of activism campaign in 1991. Also among them was Everjoice Win, a Zimbabwean who had been working in women’s rights since 1989. Both women went to Beijing.
“I have often described the early 1990s as the golden era of transnational organising: there were these spaces – Mexico, Cairo, Vienna, Beijing – some of us went to all four [UN conferences]. But it wasn’t just going, but having an agenda collectively to influence the advancement of women’s rights. Everyone had purpose and objectives,” says Win.
The 12-point plan galvanised governments and civil society and, in 2015, informed the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). “Governments took to the [Beijing] agenda like ducks to water – with limitations. Gender mainstreaming became the approach of choice for governments,” adds Win, who went on to become the first head of women’s rights at Action Aid in 2002.
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“We put women’s rights centre of Action Aid’s agenda using some of the tools we’d got from the Beijing process. Once they understood what gender mainstreaming was we were able to influence the leadership of the organisation, making sure women were in senior roles.”
Next week in New York, the UN’s commission on the status of women (CSW) will mark the 30th anniversary of the Beijing declaration.
UN secretary general António Guterres will open the meeting on Monday with a declaration on the global state of gender equality. The statement will be based on a progress report, informed by updates from 159 governments and acknowledges improvements. Today, 122.4 million girls are out of school, down from 124.7 million in 2015. Maternal mortality has declined from 339 to 223 deaths in every 100,000 live births between 2000 and 2020. Since 1995, the proportion of women in parliaments has more than doubled from 11% to 27%. Countries have also steadily continued to remove discriminatory laws.
Such stocktakes on gender equality are made every five years, but this year the sense of urgency is greater, because, despite improvements in some areas, “cascading crises” including the climate disaster, economic shocks, rising conflict and declining democracy mean the vision of the Platform for Action – and the 2030 SDGs – remains a distant dream.
In this unstable environment, anti-women sentiment and action has thrived, turbocharged by authoritarian governments and social media. “Growing backlash has been reinforced by the hollowing out of policy mechanisms, institutions and processes that the [Beijing] Platform for Action tasked with advancing gender equality,” the report says.
The fact that the rightwing, anti-abortion Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) is holding its own two-day conference in parallel with CSW at a venue opposite the UN headquarters, is evidence of a more strategic, better funded, smarter anti-rights movement. Like many anti-feminist organisations, it has co-opted the language of women’s development with its assertions that it is “empowering women” – while welcoming President Donald Trump’s shutdown of USAid which will have devastating effects on women and girls.
“In my view, we are experiencing an epochal transformation,” says Brazilian academic Sonia Corrêa, co-chair of Sexuality Policy Watch. “There are no easy solutions. The state of the world is a very difficult problem, the conditions are being determined by neo-fascist forces in power in what is still one of the empires of the world.”
It could mean there is no intergovernmental agreement at CSW this year if the US blocks, Corrêa believes. “I don’t need to elaborate how deeply the ultra right hate the UN.”
“It’s a worrying moment,” agrees Win. “The question is: are others going to mimic the orange tyrant – I refuse to use his name – by doing what he does or [are they going to] counter him?”
But if the contemporary political landscape is very different from the 1990s “golden era” of trust in democracy, multilateralism and institutions, the lessons learned from Beijing are still relevant, say the women who were there.
“We can’t forget we were the people who pushed back an unequal world – we were pushing back and transforming. We spent years explaining and showing the world there were inequalities and that we wanted to be better. We are fighting for democracies, so we can not think only ‘how are we going to react?’ but ‘what are we going to continue doing?’” says González, who now heads Causa Justa, the group that spearheaded the campaign to decriminalise abortion in Colombia – a fight it won in 2022.
There is some comfort, they say, in stepping back from the chaos and taking a longer view. Bunch says, “I grew up in the 50s and became part of the 60s’ explosion; yes, it is scary now, the power that Trump has but there are ups and downs and we are in a down period. People fighting McCarthyism had faith there would come another time. I don’t want to dampen the energy of the outrage – but in the down period you have to be preparing to move forward where you can. This is our moment, and we have to do the best we can.”
Or as Win puts it: “Change is going to come. But we remind ourselves that change is not microwaveable – change has to be baked or roasted – microwaving ain’t going to do it.”
