Memories of the 1995 Beijing World Women’s Conference – Margaret Owen O.B.E.
By Margaret Owen O.B.E. – President and Founder of Widows for Peace through Democracy (WPD).
February 2025. This article was written for HelpAge International as part of their campaign to honour the 30th anniversary of the historic 1995 Beijing Conference by spotlighting remarkable women who attended and helped shape the global gender equality agenda.
Thirty years ago I hopped on the plane to Beijing, heady with excitement, huge optimism and high expectations that finally we, the women’s NGOs of the world, had arrived where it mattered, and that at last the UN and governments would be listening to us. Unlike our reception at the previous world conferences on women in Mexico, Copenhagen and Nairobi.
In spite of the mud, the rain, the wet and the cramped discomfort of our accommodation in Huairou where we NGOs were located – 90 miles and a 90 hour bus journey from the capital – we were confident that our voices, our ideas, our knowledge and experiences were going to be taken seriously by the official delegations. And they were.
The resultant great document to emerge from the Fourth World Conference for Women, the BPFA, was destined to dominate and map our strategies and work from then on, as we struggled indefatigably to upgrade the status of women in every aspect of their lives, in the context of 12 Action Areas of the Platform and beyond.
Thus every year subsequent to that September conference, we would regularly be attending the UN CSW in New York to work in close consultation with our governments to monitor and evaluate progress on implementation of the BPFA, identify gaps and emerging issues. Soon, we were sure, we would see a dramatic reduction in violence to women and real progress in achieving gender equality, justice for women, and a better and more peaceful world. Alas, that expectation has not been realised.
I had my own “niche” reason for coming to Beijing in 1995. To draw attention to the most scandalously neglected of all gender and human rights issues, that concerning the status of widows.
It was in a tent at the NGO forum in Huairou that I hosted the very first international workshop on Widows and Human Rights. Although as a human rights lawyer and a feminist I had been deeply engaged in addressing the status of women’s issues for many years previously, I had never given a thought to the situation of widows, probably, like so many people, assuming that the majority of them were elderly women who were mostly respected and well looked after by their families. So it was not a topic that we should be concerned with.
But all that changed when my own husband died. A short time later, a Malawi lady I was helping with her case, walked into my London home and before she had even sat down exclaimed looking around my living room “You mean your husband’s brothers let you stay here and keep all these things?” Her words were the catalyst for my work since then.
In the Beijing NGO Forum those attending my workshop – in particular those women coming from Africa and South Asia – agreed that widows now needed their own international organisation to bring their voices to the international community, to the UN, donors, governments and other NGOs working in the field of gender and human rights. But little did we anticipate then that during the following 30 years the world would see such an unprecedented increase in the numbers of widows of all ages, ( and wives of the missing, the “half-widows”) struggling to survive in extreme poverty, most vulnerable to all forms of violence, including rape and sexual exploitation as well as harmful traditional practices. These increases – and there is no reliable data – are mainly due to armed conflict, ethnic cleansing, violence and the proliferation of small arms as well as the HIV/AIDand the COVID-19 pandemic.
At Beijing we set up the first international widows organisation. EWD (Empowering Widows in Development) and later after 9/11 with so many more new conflicts breaking out in the Balkans, Africa, South Asia and spurred on by the plight of Afghan widows under the Taliban regime, we founded Widows for Peace through Democracy (WPD).
And for thirty years we have been striving, through zealous attendance at every annual CSW, to at least get a mention of “widows” and “marital status” into the documents that emerge as the “Agreed Conclusions” from every session. But to our deep regret their invisibility mostly remains. We are still asking why is there such reluctance to even mention the word “ widow” when there are so many and of all ages, and other categories of women are referenced., such as older, migrant, refugees, indigenous, disabled?
I travelled to Beijing in 1995 with such hope. It was such an exciting experience. Meeting so many women from all over the world, all with the same mission, the same determination. But today I fear that all the progress achieved is being harshly evaporated.
However, there were some comical moments too. In our hastily constructed accommodation in Huairou we were woken early one morning by the sound of motor bikes. Going outside we were confronted by Chinese police bearing mountains of blankets. Apparently a rumour had spread that the western feminists gathered there were likely to strip off to their underwear and the blankets were sent to cover us up!
But what an exiting, dramatic, inspiring , memorable meeting it was. Unforgettable, and we will continue to stuggle for full implementation of that historic plan.