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Indeed, despite clear advances, statistics compiled by the U.N. show that women still shoulder more of the world's responsibilities but enjoy fewer of its benefits. Women perform two-thirds of the world's work but earn only one-tenth of its income and own only a hundredth of its property. They make up a third of the globe's official work force but are paid less than three-quarters of the wages men earn for similar jobs. Since few husbands do their share of the world's child-care and domestic work, women who are employed outside the home put in an exhausting double day. In Europe, a working woman has, on average, less than half the free time her husband enjoys. Said Margaret Papandreou, head of Greece's delegation and wife of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou: "I have, yet to hear a man in the [Greek] Council of Ministers banging his hand on the table and saying, 'We need more child-care centers!' He would if he had the sole responsibility of raising children."
In most countries, women are still hampered in their quest for equality by cultural, religious and social tradition. Despite laws to the contrary, for example, female circumcision and wife beating are commonly practiced in the Third World. In India, which banned dowry systems in 1961, just last year thousands of cases were reported of husbands torturing their wives to extract dowry payments or even murdering them to marry other women. "I saw the body of a girl who had been bound, sprinkled with oil and then burned" by her husband, said NGO Delegate Ranjana Kumari, a political scientist at the Center for Social Research in New Delhi. "Unless the law is understood and used, it is a dead word."
Many feminists consider a woman's most basic freedom to be the right to choose when and whether to have children, but that goal is still unrealized in large parts of the globe. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Kenya, where men's resistance to contraception has contributed to a stratospheric birthrate of 4%, the highest in the world. Birth control was a running controversy at the Nairobi meetings, where antiabortion groups and organizations opposed to artificial contraception clashed sharply with pro-choice and family-planning advocates. "Women must control their own fertility, which forms the basis for enjoying all other rights," insisted Sally Mugabe, head of the Zimbabwe delegation and wife of that country's Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe. International Planned Parenthood, charged James Deger of the Washington-based American Life League, "is bigoted and racist. Basically, its activities fall within the definition of genocide."
Without doubt, both the forum and the U.N. meeting had their cacophonous, disorganized and divisive moments. Skeptics felt that the gathering, even at its most high-minded, was fundamentally unimportant and ineffective. Before the conference took place, Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, a committed feminist, dismissed it as "one giant commemorative stamp." But for many participants, particularly those at the NGO forum, the significance of Nairobi was found less in the official proceedings of the U.N. meeting than in the peaceful and joyous way the swirling mix of women from the developed nations, the Third World and the Soviet bloc worked together on a one-to-one basis. Time after time, women linked arms and belted out what came to be the conference's unofficial theme song: "We are the world/ We are the women."