Washington Gathering Stirs Memories of Magic of Nairobi

When Sally Motlana, president of the Black Housewives League in South Africa, finished her keynote address to a standing ovation from nearly 800 women gathered in the ballroom of the Sheraton Washington, a teary-eyed Mary Grefe, president of the American Assn. of University Women’s Educational Foundation, thanked her.

At Grefe’s suggestion the audience joined hands and raised their arms victoriously as a gesture of support for Motlana’s struggle. Then Grefe turned to Motlana, put her arms around her and clung to her, eyes shut tightly, weeping quietly, unwilling, it seemed, to release her.

Not a typical scene from the world of conferences, but then this one, sponsored by the AAUW Educational Foundation, with 60 co-sponsoring women’s organizations, was called “Equity by 2000: Meeting the Nairobi Challenge.” There were several moments at this conference that brought back the magic of Nairobi, the scene of last year’s world gathering of women that marked the end of the United Nations Decade for Women.

And as in Nairobi, so in Washington--the emotions that sometimes brought tears, brought them not so much out of sentimentality as an awakening sense of solidarity. Women have been finding it powerful stuff.

Motlana’s speech on how the public policy of apartheid influences private lives had been powerful stuff.

Equity by 2000? She was talking about the particulars of apartheid, about women in rural areas of South Africa, forced to remain there with their children while their husbands worked in cities. One of the many tasks in their heavy workloads is building the family mud hut. Often rains destroy them and the women have to rebuild them. One of the many tasks of Motlana’s self-help group was to teach the rural housewives to make more durable huts out of bricks with straw and mud, Motlana told the middle-class feminists seated in the air-conditioned ballroom.

By now Americans are familiar with passbooks and the laws of influx control in South Africa, which were supposedly abolished earlier this year only to be reintroduced in a different fashion. It was another story to have Motlana hold her passbook up before them and call out, “ This is the book that controls my movement. This is my badge of serfdom.” Visibly shocked, the women started and gasped audibly.

She thanked them for inviting “an insignificant woman like me. I feel elevated. In my country I am but nothing. Here I feel like somebody.”

The invitation to Motlana was an unmistakable sign, as were those extended to other speakers from Kenya and Sri Lanka and panelists from Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe, that the AAUW, a 175,000-member organization with 1,900 chapters in 50 states, sees itself as part of an international women’s movement.

This was, after all, a conference, as described by Sarah Harder, AAUW president, “to translate ideals from Nairobi into practical planning at home . . . (to) identify tangible two-year objectives for women working together.” The reason for inviting women from about 30 other countries to join them, she said was so that “our U.S. objectives will be infused with a global reality.”

The Nairobi conference ended with the unanimous adoption by 157 nations of a plan of action called the Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, with the year 2000 set as a target date for their implementation. The Strategies have been widely described as radical if abstract, recommending everything from family planning services, to the inclusion of women as decision makers in development plans and programs, to shelters for abused women and laws against domestic violence, to including women’s unwaged work in the home and agriculture in countries’ gross national products, to encouraging governments to bring women into international diplomacy and arms negotiating.

Little Progress

The Strategies are not law for any nation. Moreover as AAUW conference leaders and literature made clear, there has been little progress over the decade in the United States, and in the year since Nairobi, with stagnation or setbacks at the governmental levels in such matters as child care, parental leave, pay equity, equal education, health care.

Therefore, Harder said, “real progress for women is in our hands. We will hold ourselves accountable for exploiting the possibilities related to the Forward Looking Strategies.”

Although conference participants were mainly middle-class women from mainstream organizations, the agenda went far beyond “how to make it up the career ladder,” and there were reminders throughout not to forget, as Mary Grefe put it, “the faces of women who are not here, who are domestic workers scrubbing floors, farm wives, single mothers raising children.”

Dorothy Height, whose National Council of Negro Women played a large role in the conference, reminded people that women headed 47% of black families and that 58% of those families were poor.

“There is no way to improve life for black families in the United States without improving life for black women,” Height said, “and there is no way to improve life for women unless we eliminate racism.” In the course of the decade, she said, although there was little tangible progress, American women had at least come to realize that “world affairs are our affairs,” and that “we may have come here on different ships but we’re all in the same boat.”

Some progress has been made, most conference participants agreed, but it has been slow and examples are isolated.

Worldwide, one recent hopeful sign, Harder said, was that Barber Conable, new president of the World Bank, said that integrating women fully into development programs, ensuring that they both contribute to them and benefit from them, would be one of the bank’s five priorities.

‘More Consequences’

“That will have more consequences than any number of little laws,” she said. “That’s a shift in mind-set.”

Within the United States, Harder cited pay equity laws in 13 states and 100 municipalities, among them Los Angeles; and the Family Medical Leave Bill, not yet passed by Congress but “going to be passed, no question,” she said, calling the bill “directly attributable to Nairobi, less to the Forward Looking Strategies as to the fact America women in Nairobi were listening to other women.” (The bill started out as maternity leave, but was revamped, she said, as parental leave to care not just for children, but sick family members, especially aged parents.)

Rep. Claudine Schneider (R-R.I.) said the old statement that women earn only 59 cents to every dollar men earn is now incorrect. It’s up to 63 cents, she said, and at that rate would reach 74 cents by the year 2000. Likewise, with women at 51% of the population, there were two women in the Senate and 23 in the House. It would take 410 years, not 14 years, at the current rate of progress for women to reach equity in Congress.

But what to do about all this?

As she often has said when addressing women, Harder told this group, “We do not need to rewrite the strategies. We do not need to name problems, list needs.” She warned against making the conference a “memorial tribute to Nairobi.” They needed instead, in the course of the two-day conference, she said, to use the workshops to identify a few areas to work on that were viable, responded to critical need, and had the likelihood of public support.

The areas AAUW selected for the conference to work on were listed as “women’s work/women’s worth; closing the education gap: from literacy to higher education; health issues of concern to women; peace as a women’s issue; and women, development and the environment: U.S.”

Under the first issue, AAUW itself has commited to conduct a study of the unpaid work of women, an issue that the International Wages for Housework Campaign lobbied for successfully over the course of the decade to have included in the Strategies. AAUW’s national time/work study, Harder said, will attach a dollar value to it.

For all the encouragement to do likewise and be specific, however, the workshops resulted in few concrete suggestions. Most recommendations for action that came out of the workshops were vague abstractions about educating the public to an issue, conducting media campaigns, raising awareness, lobbying Congress, running for office.

“I know,” Harder said afterward, “we still don’t know how to do it. But we’re learning.” The tendency was to start building “language pyramids” of abstractions, but she saw some hopeful signs.

Women had begun to talk about successful programs on such issues as domestic violence and pay equity and what could be transplanted elsewhere.

One workshop resolved to lobby ABC to include them in discussions following the airing next year of the controversial miniseries “Amerika.” One women’s organization decided to identify those cities among its chapters where there were no rape hot lines or shelters for battered wives. They would lobby for them. And out of all the workshops came a unanimous realization, paraphrased by Harder as, “We’ve got to get our act together with the media.”

Harder left them with the message she found on her now favorite greeting card, a sign hanging on the door of a rose-covered cottage: “If you don’t find me at home accepting the things I cannot change, I’m probably out, changing the things I cannot accept.”