Friday, May 23, 1997

JUDY MANN

The World From a Woman's Perspective

A clear majority of American voters want to reshape American foreign policy so that it addresses the issue of security by emphasizing solutions to such problems as poverty, the environment, health care, education and human rights, rather than the security of nations.

An approach that focuses on such matters as trade, military defense and nuclear arms control was favored by only 25 percent of the voters polled in a survey commissioned by the International Women's Health Coalition and released at a conference in Washington on Wednesday. A 59 percent majority wants a foreign policy that concentrates on enhancing the security of people, with 64 percent of women favoring this and 53 percent of men.

Three quarters of the 1,000 voters polled by Lake Scsin Snell & Associates say it is important to increase the number of women involved in making foreign policy, with 50 percent of them saying women bring a different perspective and can offer new ideas and solutions.

Redefining security to target individuals and families rather than nation-states is an outgrowth of several international conferences held during the 1990s on such issues as the environment, population and development, human rights and the emerging roles of women. Nongovernmental organizations, many run by women, have had an increasingly important role in the outcomes of these conferences and are infusing international relations with approaches that put women at the center of development efforts.

Wednesday's conference was sponsored chiefly by the New York-based International Women's Health Coalition, which played a pivotal role in winning international agreement on progressive reproductive rights and health policies for women at the 1994 U.N. conference in Cairo. Those policies, which underscore the links among family planning, environmental protection, education and women's empowerment, came under assault again from religious conservatives the next year at the U.N. conference on women in Beijing. Out of these battles came the idea of putting a "women's lens" on foreign policy that reflects values women care about, said Joan Dunlop, president of the International Women's Health Coalition. "When we say a women's lens, we are using that as a metaphor for a set of spectacles that I can put on and I can give them to you and you can look through them. This is not a women's foreign policy. It's a perspective on our foreign policy, looking through the lens of a certain set of values."

Part of the point of the conference, which attracted activists from leading American women's organizations as well as women involved with international relations, was to find ways of inserting these values into the foreign policy conversation. Dunlop said, in particular, that women who had returned from the Beijing conference with a new sense of "what it's like to be a good global citizen" had a strong desire "to strike out at the isolationist rhetoric that is coming out of the Congress and to say we don't think this is the way the U.S. should be.

Undersecretary of State Timothy C. Wirth called the Cairo conference a "transforming experience. What made it happen, he said, "was an understanding of what had to be done from the bottom up. . . . It had a fundamental grass-roots base. It was a women's lens . . . that made it work." And, he said, "we cannot continue to make these changes unless we have a different constituent support in Congress. It happens because women all over the U.S. are walking into their congressman's office."

James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, spoke forcefully about meeting rural women and finding out that wherever he goes, women's hopes for themselves, their families and their children's futures are the same. He made it clear that he is working hard to change the World Bank from a male-dominated culture into one that understands that women are central to sustainable development and that educating a girl is the best investment that can be made. He urged women to respond to isolationist sentiments not just by talking about our interdependency with other nations on such matters as trade, air pollution and health, but with a larger theme, as well. "We have a sense of moral and social values we care about in our country.

A foreign policy grounded in social equity and moral justice, he said, would be one "we can be proud of."

From the World Bank and the State Department, women heard they are welcome at the table. People such as Wirth and Wolfensohn have tried on the women's lens, and they like the fit. That's a big step forward for new foreign policy that puts human security at the heart of a moral core.