Both of the Dartmouth students who participated in the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women last term agreed that the conference was "incredible."
Amy Westpfahl '96 and Miranda Johnson '97 attended the
UN conference titled, "The World as Seen Through Women's Eyes," which was a forum of Non-Government Organizations held during late August and early September last year in the suburbs of Beijing.
"The power and vitality of the women at the conference was incredible," Johnson said. "I saw people from all walks of life, from rural areas to highly industrialized areas, all serve as leaders of major organizations in their respective countries."
Johnson represented the Institute for Women on Social Change and the Feminist Majority, a non-profit women's rights group based in the Washington D. C. area.
"I saw women who were very energetic, get together to form a global sisterhood and cross-cultural understanding to see how to help each other," Johnson said.
"A major accomplishment of the conference was to bring together so many women and to create networks among them and to follow up on commitments made by the governments," she said.
Westpfahl, who represented the Global Alliance of Women's Health, shared Johnson's enthusiasm for the people in the event.
"I've never seen a group of people work so hard and so passionately about what they were doing," she said.
"There were women there of all ages; young women, middle-age women, and even women in their 90's. They were working 12, 13, 14 hour days because they believed in their work," Westpfahl said.
"It inspired me to come back here to write my honors thesis related to the conference and to organize the 'Bringing Beijing Home' panel," she said. "A lot of people don't realize what the conference means to women."
History Professor Navarro, who attended the conference with Johnson and Westpfahl, represented three NGOs at the conference: The Ms. Foundation for Women, The Catholics for Free Choice, and The Global Fund for Women.
"A great deal was accomplished at the conference. Thousands of people worked on the document that was approved," Navarro said.
At a discussion held last October on her experiences at the conference, Navarro said the 160-page document dealt with issues of human rights, violence against women, health and inheritance rights.
"Not all governments are going to use the document the same way but it will be what the whole world has agreed should happen to women," Navarro said.
Johnson said that one of the function of NGOs is to make sure governments do follow up on their agreements.
"It is common for governments to talk on about responsibilities that they do not adhere to," Johnson said.
Johnson noted that what viewers saw at home on their television sets was not a reflection of the reality of what was going on.
Johnson said she thought the news coverage did not concentrate on the issues and the accomplishments of the conference.
"CNN International covered much of the event. However, the reports had too much focus on the attitude of the Chinese government towards the participants of the conference," she said.
Although the two students said they had remarkable experiences, Johnson said "there was a definite problem with the way the conference was run."
"The Chinese government should have had a more balanced approach. But for that to become the focus of the attention was wrong," she said.
"Beijing as a city had nothing to do with the organization of the conference. The Chinese government didn't know how to deal with the logistics of the conference," Westpfahl said.
"As a communist country, they felt very nervous about having so many women there advocating human rights," she said.
But Professor Navarro said, "It didn't matter because the women who went there took the conference in their hands and did what they wanted to do."
