Freshly planted flowers surrounded the Baghdad Women’s centre,
one of nine US-funded centers built across the city in 2004 that aimed to
promote women’s rights in Iraq’s nascent democracy. I was there
researching my book on women in Iraq, and to see how well US feminism was
being received in this Muslim country. Western aid workers in dusty boots with
multi-million contracts hovered around, anxious to teach Iraqi women everything
from computer skills to political strategies in the hope of promoting women’s
rights in the new Iraq.
However, a week later, the centre was closed, and two aid
workers in similar centres in Southern Iraq were gunned down. Iraqi women
stayed away, frightened by rumours that the US-run centres were showing
pornography and conducting abortions.
Today, much like the centres, Iraqi women’s rights have been
shuttered. As a result of civil war and chaos begun with the US-led invasion
and toppling of Saddam Hussein, women have been driven into prostitution, are
living under ISIS and there are hundreds of thousands of widows – the clock has
been turned back 100 years for women.
Improving women’s rights and ending subjugation around the
world is slowly gaining some recognition as an important part of US foreign
policy, both for moral reasons and to promote stability and peace. Yet examples
like that I saw in Baghdad demonstrate not only that change is slow, but also
that it’s incredibly hard.
Now, the global champion for improving women’s rights, Hillary
Clinton, is coming incredibly close to becoming the leader of the free world.
Yet many international feminists who you might expect to embrace her are
hesitating. They cite her support of military action in places like Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere as so devastating for women it cancels out all
her other advocacy.
Are they overlooking a chance to make the planet’s most
powerful person a self-declared feminist, or are they right?
A new book, “The
Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy” (Columbia 2015),
seeks to untangle this question. Written by Professor Valerie Hudson of
the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University
and journalist Patricia Leidl, it gives an even-handed, deeply researched
analysis of the foreign policies of the (Bill) Clinton, Bush, Obama
administrations and that of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – tallying their
efforts on behalf of women. It also traces the international women’s
rights movement and connection between women and
national security.
The result is a highly readable, fast moving history that
covers a critical topic that most foreign policy journalists and campaign
reporters typically overlook – what Clinton as president would mean to women
around the world.
First, Hudson and Leidl give us the research showing
that the status of women and girls does really matter to
national security. For example, one study of all
armed conflicts between 1954 and 1994 found that the lower the percentage of
women in power, the higher the rate of violence. Several other studies show
that governments with stronger laws for women were much less likely to use
force first, and were much less violent once in a conflict.
In yet another study
186 Harvard Business School students were given computer games in which they
pretended to be national leaders in a conflict over a diamond mine. The
results showed that women were much less likely to use force, and much
better at resolving conflict once it starts. “Overwhelmingly”, all-female pairs
proved “significantly less likely than all-male pairs, to spend money on
weapons procurement or go to war when confronted with a crisis.”
Most of
this research falls on deaf ears. Women hold on average fewer than 20% of
Parliamentary seats in government worldwide. In the last twenty years, they
have represented less than 10 % of participants in peace negotiations and less
than 5% of signatories. Security forces are overwhelming dominated by men, even
at places like the UN, where 97 per cent of UN peacekeepers and 90 per cent of
UN police forces are still men. Even in the US, there may be “binders full of women” but they rarely appear on foreign policy panels, at the Pentagon or
in the Oval Office.
But there
has been a paradigm shift in thinking about women’s rights globally, which
started in the 1970s, as women’s groups called attention to gender-specific
atrocities worldwide. Hillary Clinton’s work as an activist First Lady
certainly helped usher in that awareness.
The Office of
International Women’s Issues was established by Clinton in 1994, and USAID
integrated gender into its programming for the first time. Funding of girls’
education overseas began in earnest. Then, media coverage of Clinton’s
Beijing speech
of 1995 raised further awareness when she declared famously, “Human rights are
women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights”, followed by the
appointment of Madeleine Albright as the first female US Secretary of State,
and the indictment of Serbian
soldiers on charges of rape in 1996, “the first time that sexual violence
against women was viewed as anything other than a natural consequence and
entitlement of soldiers who encountered civilians”, Hudson and Leidl state.
The establishment in 1997 of Vital Voices, one of the earliest
organizations to push the advancement of women
in foreign policy. This all helped usher in anti-trafficking
legislation , and the passing of UN Resolution 1325 in 2000, which called
for states to ensure women were represented in conflict resolution as well as
in security and in pushing for the prosecution of sex crimes, among many other
things.
The Bush administration, which came into power in 2001, also
made some strides for women, including strengthening laws against trafficking
of women and violence against women, appointing a female secretary of state,
and supporting the eventual creation of UN Women. Over the next 8 years, Bush
would more than double foreign aid programs to increase girls’ education,
particularly in Afghanistan.
But – as with the Baghdad women’s centres, the aid to
Afghanistan was delivered in such an insensitive and ham-fisted way, much of it
was wasted. Other books and articles have made similar criticisms, including “Imperial
Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. As Secretary of
State, Clinton would take various steps as to improve aid delivery – namely by
institutionalising “gender training programs” but whether US-led development
overseas stands any chance to be an effective tool for changing women’s lives
remains in question.
9th November, Concord, New Hampshire. photo: Hillary for America
Hudson and Leidl conclude that Clinton is not only deeply
sincere on women’s issues, but that she would do great things for them with the
muscle of the Oval Office behind her. As Secretary of State, she pushed through
the U.S.
National Action Plan for Women, Peace and Security, which prompted
countries to create specific goals for women’s advancement; funded clean cook
stoves as a way to improve global health, and actively promoted participation
of women in the countries she visited. All this and more despite having a
boss (President Obama) who showed at best a lukewarm response to women’s
rights, according to the authors who cite, in one instance, a top aide
describing efforts to promote women in Afghanistan as a “pet rock” weighing
down their rucksacks. His inner circle also failed
to include many women.
To her critics, though, Clinton is an American imperialist in
a skirt, and women are much worse off. “All of the things Hillary Clinton
has done for women gets undone by war,” said Medea Benjamin, head of a San
Francisco women’s anti-war group, in a phone interview recently from the Syrian
border where she was meeting with women. “And she has never met a war she
didn’t like.”
Hudson and Leidl vigorously
disagree, and make a convincing case that a female president like Clinton would
bring great things for women around the world. "When women are
held back, our country is held back. When women get ahead, everyone gets
ahead," she declared in her
first speech to kick of her campaign this past Spring. There are certainly many women who would
like to see her try.