30 years ago the World Conference of Women of Beijing

HUairou, the suburb of Beijing, about sixty kilometers from the capital. In a torrential rain, because it is full season of the monsoons, On August 30, 1995, a flood of over 30 thousand women who want to change their condition and that of all “starting from our women’s eyes” converges here, from two hundred countries of the world.. For ten days, at World Conference of Women of Beijing Women of all ages, religions, skin color, women of pacifist movements and for the rights, feminists, NGO activists, women of the University, research, unions, local authorities will work together to generate the most advanced plan ever written for gender equality, still reference for policies and actions, when there are many countries in the world. “A stormy tide”, he called her the journalist Natalia Aspesi, who appeared among the three thousand journalists who came to China to document that epochal event.

World Conference of Women of Beijing: the dream of changing the world

Today, exactly thirty years later, the memory of that mixture of bodies, stories, colors, cultures, the pride of wanting to contribute to the progress of humousness and tenacity in pursuing its realization they still excite who was there. «In those unforgettable days we lived the common dream of changing the world. But we had not only hope: we glimpsed the conquest of crucial results »he says Luisa Festa, sociologist, photographerwho took the images of these pages. Starting with two cameras and 35 roller races, she returned from China with over nineteenth -century shots, many of which now in the photographic volume Looks of women (Delta 3 editions).

«I participated and, meanwhile, I narrated through the images. There was an incredible creative charge, the hunger to know and do, very crowded encounters in which we shared ideals, ideals, political practices: we communicated incessantly. 500 meetings per day also appeared on the programit was very difficult to choose where to be! ” He says again. «Western women were a minority; The African, the Asian, the South American constituted the large colorful, showy, angry, determined majority, because more than us oppressed and often humiliated: they were the ones who improvised more lively and frequent events. We had news from signs that we found hanging on the curtains set up, the walls, the branches of the trees ».

The dawn of the empowerment

The 1995 Beijing Conference was crossed by a contemporary word still: Empowerment. “Wherever the desire to shout the right to a full and truly incisive existence in the evolution of humanity was revealed,” comments Luisa Festa. «Women in Beijing asked to access political structures and to strengthen their presence in decision -making places. They proposed a world in which their word has the same weight on the issues concerning the planet, the peace and well -being of each individual ».

If Huairou had been chosen to host the forum of non -governmental organizations, in the following days, from 4 to 15 September, The world conference of women also moved to the capital, to much more institutional places, For the conference of governments, which collected the proposals generated in Huairou and summarized two documents still considered watershed, the declaration and the Beijing action platform. The platform includes 12 areas of crisis and, for each, the articulated diagnosis of the problem follow the strategic objectives that governments, international organizations and civil society must pursue to overcome it. These are the areas on which the UN then called to work: women and poverty; Education and training of women; Women and health; Violence against women; Armed women and conflicts; Women and economics: women, power and decision -making processes; Institutional mechanisms to encourage women’s progress; The fundamental rights of women; Women and media; Women and the environment; The girls.

Aware of making history

«The World Conference of Women of Beijing represented the peak achieved by the international women’s movement. And in fact then they were no longer made of it, “says Linda Laura Sabbadini, statistics, former director of Istat and currently Chair of Women 20, the official G20 group that promotes gender equality. She was also at the Beijing conference. “The action platform that was born indicates objectives that have been signed by 189 countries and which, largely not achieved, are still very advanced: at that moment, the governments of the world have felt all the strength and weight of the world movement of women” he says. “He inaugurated the event Gertrude Mongella, the general secretary of the conference, a charismatic Tanzanian who, starting from scratch, from a poor and lost village, had managed to study thanks to the nuns, until he became minister. At the Beijing stadium, listened to by thousands of women, he proclaimed: “A revolution started! And then in Huairou, a few days later Hillary Clinton, wife of the President of the United States, arrived, who in a memorable speech stated that women’s rights are human rights. Many had remained out because they had not found a place. They were there, in a pouring rain and they didn’t go away. I think that the World Conference of Women of Beijing has generated, internationally, a concentrate of conquests comparable for impact on that generated, in Italy, by feminism in the seventies, when pushed the reform of family law, the law on divorce and that on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, the law that established family counsels “says Sabbadini.

A new vocabulary

Then the first researcher of Istat, Sabbadini in Beijing brought, in thousands of copies, different times, made together with Rossella Palomba for Istat and the commission for equality, chaired by Tina Anselmi, and translated into four languages: the results of an investigation that for the first time, in a very in -depth way, measured the immense weight of the unpaid work of women, carried out throughout their lives.

Together with “Empowerment”, the terms “genre and difference” and “mainstreaming” emerged from the works of Beijing, which marked a change of approach and strategy in the policies of many countries, and which remain focal points of all the actions taken for gender equality. “While the concept of Empowerment definitively overcome the idea of ​​protection and focuses on the autonomy and skills of women, that of gender and difference embraces the concept that the differences of the female and male gender must be recognized and enhanced, just as they must be recognized as different – and inequalities – their living conditions” he explains Livia Turco, who in 1995 succeeded the lawyer Tina Lagostena Bassi, present in Beijing, as president of the Equality and Equal Opportunities Commission. “As for mainstreaming (which can be translated as” transversality “, editor’s note), it was another epochal passage: with that approach of any resolution and action put in place – political choices, programming, institutional actions – the impact that may have on women and their needs will be analyzed upstream and at the same time as the contribution generated by women enhances them”.

And he continues: «The Beijing conference acted as a yeast on the culture of Italy, as well as on political action. A few months after that event, the Ministry for Equal Opportunities was established and approved by all parties the law on sexual violenceAnd, a law with a very long genesis, which began in the seventies, after the crime of the Circeo. In the eyes of those who had lived the spirit of the Beijing Conference, it was completely intolerable that Italy considers sexual violence to a crime against morality. The yeast of the World Conference of Women nourished the female transversality importantly, which became the figure that accompanied the great achievements of women “underlines Livia Turco. Constant reviews of the action platform are done globally and local. The Annual Commission on women’s status (CSW), the UN body dedicated to empowerment and gender equality, has made periodic updates of the platform, to verify its implementation state and identify the unresolved issues to be included in the world agenda for the following years.

The inheritance to make fruit

The last commission was held in New York last March and in the Beijing Action program +30 He indicated six urgent directions of action, plus one: to put women at the center of sustainable economic development; fill the gender digital gap; put an end to violence against women; promote female leadership in decision -making processes; increase its responsibility in peace, security and humanitarian action; commit to climatic justice. “The +1 reflects the inclusion of young people in these efforts” comments in the introduction to the relationship Sima Bahous, Executive Director of a Women. “By involving young people in the six actions, we multiply the impact and guarantee that today’s decisions shape the world of tomorrow».

The European Union has also taken on the Beijing action platform as a compass. EIGE (European Institute for Gender Equality), an autonomous body of the European Union, draws up research and relations on the state of implementation of the platform. Every year calculates and publishes the gender equality index, a synthetic measurement tool – it ranges from 1 to 100, where 100 represents full equality – which photographs the degree of gender equality reached in the European Union and in the different countries: in the last detection, of 2024, Sweden stands out with 82 net points; Italy is fourteenth, with 69.2 points out of 100. The European Union totals a total of 71 out of 100, with an improvement of 0.8 points on the previous year. The fact remains that, at the moment, in no country in the world has equity between men and women have been achieved.

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