THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION AND RECOGNITION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS1 KAREN GARNER Abstract: Summarizing various dimensions of transformative social change sought by transnational feminists, political scientist Mary Hawkesworth wrote in 2006: “Social change includes issue creation and agenda setting, transformation of prevailing discourses, and modification of global conventions, as well as the alteration of the procedures and policies of national governments and international institutions” (Hawkesworth, 2006, p. 68).2 All these social change components were in play as feminist activists sought to transform the substance and conduct of U.S. foreign policy during the Clinton Administration, (1993- 2001). This paper assesses events that took place during the first two years of President Clinton’s tenure in office and explains how “the administration,” that is, liberal feminist allies working inside the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), responded in limited but consequential ways to pressing women’s rights issues that feminist organization activists working outside of government defined. These two years coincided with two important United Nations world conferences: the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights (HRC) and the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). In the 1990s, feminist nongovernmental organization activism coalesced around a series of UN conferences that marked the end of the Cold War era. Scholars often cite this NGO activism as the driving force that elevated gender consciousness among governments worldwide and stimulated the creation of a variety of national women’s policy offices to address social, political, and economic inequalities between women and men, as well as an array of women’s human rights issues.3 During this time, U.S. feminists successfully engaged in “issue creation and agenda setting” within State Department and USAID offices, “transformation of prevailing [foreign policy] discourses” through the rhetoric employed by the president, first lady, cabinet officers and appointed State Department officials, “modification of global conventions, as well as the alteration of the procedures and policies of national governments [including the U.S. government] and international institutions [including the UN secretariat].” To an extent not matched by previous U.S. presidential administrations, Clinton Administration officials were willing 1 This thesis and excerpts and revised versions of the text is drawn from the author’s previously published book, from Gender and Foreign Policy in the Clinton Administration by Karen Garner. Copyright © 2013 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher. 2 Hawkesworth cites Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s seminal study Activists Beyond Borders as her source. 3 See Antrobus, 2004; Alter Chen, 1996; Connors, 1996; Friedman, 2003; Meyer & Prügl, 1999; Moghadam, 2005; Pettman, 2005. Garner, Karen. (2016). The Clinton administration and recognition of women’s rights. Topos 5, 119-131. Garner, Karen. (2016). The Clinton administration and recognition of women’s rights. Topos 5, 119-131. partners in addressing violations of women’s human rights, identifying global women’s material needs, and setting goals for U.S. government actions that were intended to raise global women’s status.4 Key words: women’s rights, Clinton administration Upon entering office, the Clinton Administration made symbolic and substantive global gender policy changes. On January 23 President Clinton reversed the Reagan/Bush Administrations’ policy that had prevented all USAID monies from supporting global family planning projects and international agencies.5 A February 1993 policy study conducted for the USAID Office of Women in Development cataloged the benefits of “constructively integrating gender” into ongoing post-Cold War democracy promotion programs. Focusing on the economic and progressive political roles that women could play in former communist party states in Eastern Europe and Russia, the report concluded that to fully benefit from women’s contributions governments needed to address formal and informal discrimination against women that caused women’s unequal status worldwide and to take steps to achieve “women’s empowerment” by promoting women’s equitable access to educational, economic, and family planning resources that would allow them to direct their own lives.6 New leadership in the White House also led to bureaucratic reorganization at the State Department and the creation of a new Office of Global Affairs headed by Undersecretary of State and feminist ally Timothy Wirth.7 President Clinton appointed liberal feminist Arvonne Fraser as Ambassador to head the 1993 U.S. delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women and to serve on the U.S. delegation to the UN World Conference on Human Rights.8 Women’s rights advocate Madeleine Albright was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the UN during Clinton’s first term in office, and was appointed the first female Secretary of State in 4 This paper adopts the (imperfect) terms “global women” to refer to women living in countries that were engaged in international wars or civil wars or that were developing countries that received U.S. foreign aid and “global gender policy” to refer to U.S. foreign policies that targeted those aforementioned global women. See also “A Brief History of Gender in U.S. Foreign Policy” since the 1970s in Garner, Gender and Foreign Policy in the Clinton Administration (2013, pp. 21-67). 5 See Clinton, February 1, 1993. In January 1993, the Clinton Administration reversed U.S. policy that the Reagan Administration established at the 1984 UN World Conference on Population and lifted restrictions that prohibited some family planning organizations from receiving US funding because of abortion-related activities. See also “History of the Department of State during the Clinton Presidency (1993-2001)” (U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs). 6 See Hirschmann (1993): “In particular circumstances, the inclusion of women may bring a specific advantage to the [democracy promotion] process. … [I]n seeking creative solutions to particular problems such as chronic corruption, a culture of violence, or inter-ethnic conflict, one may consider the possibility of turning to women to end deadlocks and promote positive and peaceful momentum.” “Women’s empowerment” is defined by Linda Mayoux (n.d.). 7 See Christopher, 1993; “History of the Department of State during the Clinton Presidency.” 8 Fraser had directed the USAID Women in Development office during the Carter Administration and led the NGO International Women’s Rights Action Watch in the 1980s. 120 Garner, Karen. (2016). The Clinton administration and recognition of women’s rights. Topos 5, 119-131. Clinton’s second term.9 All these developments signaled new liberal feminist directions in global gender policy.10 To be sure, the Clinton Administration faced ongoing domestic and foreign policy challenges that certainly impacted women in gender-specific ways but were not always explicitly connected to global gender policy by government officials. A brief listing of the major international conflicts that the administration had to address immediately upon entering office will recall the administration’s delayed responses, false starts, and miscalculations due to inexperience and to completely new global configurations of power in the post-Cold War world of the 1990s. First, an ongoing ethnic civil war in Bosnia distinguished by the Bosnian Serb’s genocidal “ethnic cleansing” war policy that included massacres and torture of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, and rapes of tens of thousands of Muslim women; an ongoing bloody civil conflict in Somalia and a failed U.S. military intervention against a brutal warlord in 1993; a slow response on the part of the Clinton Administration to a repressive military coup that overthrew Haiti’s elected president that prolonged an ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere until September 1994; yet another genocidal war in Rwanda, where the massacre of over 800,000 Tutsis and rapes of an estimated 250,000 – 500,000 women and girls took place under President Clinton’s watch during a three-month period from April to July 1994 (Meyer, p. 125; UN Rapporteur to the Commission on Human Rights, 1996, par. 16). Along with this not-so-stellar international relations record the administration also facilitated peace talks in Oslo between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli government that led to the Camp David Middle East Peace Accords in 1993. These were some of the world events demanding the Clinton Administration’s attention. This partial list does not begin to include major domestic policy battles that the 9 George Gedda, “Albright Champions Women’s Rights, Issue Emerges as a Priority in Foreign Policy,” Los Angeles Daily News, April 27, 1997; International Center for Research on Women, Annual Report, 1996. As Ambassador to the UN, Albright was intimately involved with the United States-United Nations-NATO alliance’s diplomatic negotiations in the Balkans. She supported Bill Clinton’s decision to launch a U.S.-led NATO military operation to end the genocidal conflict in Bosnia in August 1995 and she participated in the international negotiations that led to the peace accords signed in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995. Among Albright’s many other contributions during the conflict resolution process,