*This is Women’s History Month, y’all. The 39th designated highlighting of what are often neglected or simply ignored – or deliberately buried – stories of women’s contributions here and abroad. Every time I see the acronym ICYMI I think it’s either a talent agency, or a film platform and then I remember, it’s In Case You Missed It. Oy vey. Language and language forms changing in real time. In this instance, it’s an in case you missed it from the coulda been, shoulda been 45th POTUS, HRC, a loss I am reminded of again this week as she was required to testify before congress on Epstein, but the current POTUS and his first/third lady don’t, despite so much evidence to the fact of their very close relationship to Jeffrey E, including that the 1st time they fcked was on his plane (I think I may have just vomited a little in my mouth)? Argh.
Women’s rights, HRC said in 1995, are human rights. She is expanding on that basic principle here, courtesy of The Foreign Affairs website/magazine, and in a completely accurate and logical manner. As women grow in power and wealth in the U.S., as well as around the globe, there is a concomitant backlash, ala trad-wife and conservative talking points re: women should lose the vote, or let’s have ‘family voting’ which is a roundabout way of saying only the father/husband decides. Hey, a$$holes, you can pry my vote out of my cold, dead hands, If You Dare. It’s brief, and worth reading. Thanks for joining, and following along!
Autocracies now outnumber democracies, and nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives under authoritarian rule. Over the past decade, dictators in China and Russia consolidated their control. Hungary, Turkey, and other fragile democracies tipped further into illiberalism. A wave of coups in Africa toppled legitimately elected leaders. Even in the United States, a democracy since its founding, the rule of law weakened and the threat of authoritarianism surged. This trend has crushed hopes that blossomed after the end of the Cold War about the permanent triumph of liberal democracy and has spurred much debate about what went wrong.
These developments can’t be understood, let alone reversed, without grasping a crucial element at the heart of the authoritarian wave: the persecution of women. Across cultures and continents, women champion democracy, and tyrants target them as part of their playbook for amassing power. Failing to treat the repression of women as the crisis it is all but guarantees that democratic erosion will continue unchecked.
More than 30 years ago, I declared at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” It was a controversial statement at the time but reflected the reality that women were on the frontlines of the “third wave” of democratization that brought down the Iron Curtain and liberated millions of people around the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Across the Soviet bloc, women-led activism, from labor strikes in Poland to grassroots environmental and civic movements in East Germany and Hungary, helped erode communist control. In Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, women’s movements emerged from the shadows of dictatorships to reshape politics. Argentina was the first to enact a national electoral quota for female candidates, in 1991. Guatemalan women helped bring peace in 1996 after decades of civil war. The women of the African National Congress in South Africa helped end apartheid.
Today, with democracy in retreat, it’s clear that women’s rights have been a canary in the coal mine. Around the world, attacks on women’s rights, opportunities, and full participation in society have seemingly been ignored. What follows is rapid democratic decay: institutions hollowed out, dissent criminalized, and power concentrated beyond accountability. This is not by accident, but by design.