The Women's Rights Treaty in the United States: CEDAW Resistance and Implementation

• In Event: 512 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 12. Exploring Gendered Rights

Abstract

The United States has had an ambivalent relationship with human rights treaties despite First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's leadership in formulating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. A case in point is the women's rights treaty, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). President Carter signed CEDAW in 1980 but the U.S. Senate has never ratified the treaty despite U.S. global leadership on women's empowerment. This paper explores the complex relationship of the U.S. to the women's treaty. Several presidents from Carter to Obama have supported the treaty but conservative resistance around the issue of abortion has stymied efforts at ratification. In the process CEDAW has become a partisan issue, further complicating ratification efforts. The result is that the United States is absent from United Nations deliberations on women's rights in the CEDAW forum. Some American feminists have turned away from ratification to focus on local implementation of the treaty such as San Francisco's innovative policies. Others point to increased female representation in the Senate as an indicator of a shift in the political winds. Our paper suggests avenues to increase U.S. commitment to women's human rights such as raising awareness of CEDAW in the classroom and engaging students with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Authors

• Susan Hagood Lee, Boston University

• Barret Katuna, University of Connecticut