So far the only clear lesson to come out of the U.N. women's conference in Beijing is that China is run by a band of ill- mannered male chauvinist control freaks. The major U.S. news outlets have dwelt, with morbid fascination, on the abuses of women in China, from forced sterilization to the strong-arm tactics of the Chinese police. This is valuable information, especially for the one-quarter of the world's women who are Chinese. But did 40,000 women have to travel to Beijing just to confirm what one man, Harry Wu, more or less established a couple of weeks ago?
Well, critics of the Beijing site say if we didn't want the country to swallow the conference, it should have been held in a more female-friendly place. But where exactly would that be? Saudi Arabia, for example? Imagine the logistic problems that would have arisen in a country where women are not even permitted to drive. Iran can be similarly eliminated, unless you think conference goers like Bella Abzug would happily go about in chadors. Algeria, of course, would be a security nightmare: in the past year there, more than 500 have been killed by armed factions--some for being known feminists, others for merely showing their unveiled face.
You can scratch most of the postcommunist world too, where the advent of market economies has been a decidedly mixed blessing for women. Female unemployment is up, female-supportive services like public child care are getting as scarce as public portraits of Stalin. In Poland women have lost their right to abortion. In Russia it's a fact of postcommunist economic life that an office job can include a responsibility to sleep with the boss.
And surely it would have been insensitive to hold the conference in Brazil, where wife murderers routinely get off with a slap of the hand...or India, where the number of women killed by husbands and in-laws eager to collect a second dowry is more than 6,000 a year and growing...or Bangladesh, where a fatwah remains in force against writer Taslima Nasreen...or Ireland, where divorce is still prohibited no matter how violent and life-threatening the marriage.
There's always the U.S., of course, the very birthplace of organized feminism. But how welcome would the delegates feel in a country where the leading Republican candidate for President has denounced the conference for what he sees as its "left-wing ideological agenda"? And wouldn't it be depressing to meet in a land where abortion rights are under violent assault, where affirmative action looks to be doomed, and where the percentage of congressional seats held by women is sinking back toward the single-digit level?