The UNCSW took place this year from March 2nd through the 13th and followed the theme: The equal sharing of responsibilities between women and men, including care giving in the context of HIV/AIDS. This proved to be a most interesting theme, as it provided three foci for the delegates to address, with her choice of emphasis based on which of the three was particularly appropriate to her home demographics and situation.

This year there were more than 100 Anglican women and girls present, about half from The Episcopal Church and half from other Provinces of the Anglican Communion. Our days were long and sometimes frantic as we moved back and forth between the United Nations building, the UN Church Center and the Episcopal Church Center, attending early morning worship or briefings, mid-morning and afternoon plenary sessions, or any of the more than 200 workshops (known in UN-ese as parallel events). There was also training by Hellen Wangusa, the Anglican UN Observer, telling of stories from back home related to the theme, and fellowship time as we got to know one another better and planned our advocacy work for when we returned home.

Among some particular highlights were three briefings by the United States Mission team which had a wonderful new openness and a willingness to listen to specific concerns – not only from US citizens but also from women around the world who look to the United States to intervene and support them in their particular strife with the pandemic of HIV and AIDS. We heard US Mission Representative to the CSW Meryl Frank assure us that no longer would there be opposition to women’s reproductive health in any of the documents signed and/or approved and also that high on the agenda was, finally, ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which since 1979 has been ratified by more than 180 countries, with the United States the only developed country not to do so.

Another was the opportunity to hear a briefing for the top UN personnel, including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, by representatives of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on the probable drastic effects of the current economic climate on the millions of people struggling against poverty, with additional reports emphasizing its particular effect on women and children. Both presenters made it quite clear that rather than seeing the Millennium Development Goals moving closer to their goals, the progress achieved so far would dissipate and leave the world in an even worse position than before the MDGs were created.

Two exciting films were viewed: Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which chronicled the story of a small group of women in Liberia who held prayer vigils protesting the civil war in their country. They spread in numbers to the thousands – women who marched and prayed and called on their sons and husbands and fathers and neighbors to lay down their guns and bring peace to their country. Once that was accomplished, they led the political action which elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as their president – the first woman president in an African country.
The Power of Noise was shown in dozens of movie theaters across the country during our time at the UN. Produced by CARE, it told the stories of three women who made a difference in their villages; one started a school for girls, one created a care community for AIDS sufferers and their families and one started a feeding program for her village. The girls who were representing their various NGOs (four of them Anglicans) were invited as special guests of CARE and were able to interact with the panelists who followed the film, one of whom was former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

There were important lessons, especially around the issue of care giving and its effect on women and girls. In reality, the HIV/AIDS pandemic weighs heavily on the women and girls who have become the primary care givers in almost every society – from Africa to Asia to South and North America and everywhere in between. The conditions are horrendous for those caring for the ill and suffering as they are also expected to provide the care needed by the rest of the family. Far too many are grandmothers caring for ailing sons and daughters or the orphans left behind. Young girls spend the better part of their days in household tasks of gathering water and firewood, preparing meals and they too are nursing the sick and dying. In almost every instance such intense – and necessary – care giving means that girls miss out on their schooling and women forego any possibility of being part of the workforce and providing for their family’s well being. In the United States, the Labor Department has estimated that care aides will be the second fastest-growing occupation. Most home care aides are low income and minority women, many of them immigrants. Efforts to unionize home care workers can lead to improved working conditions and better wages, but there is clearly more to be done.

For those of us in the developed world, attention was also paid to the cultures of our world where little sharing of responsibilities between women and men is experienced in either our households or in the market place – witness unequal pay for work of equal value, with women still earning only 81 cents on the dollar – in year 2008 after more than 20 years of calling attention to this disparity. And in the political realm where major decisions are made in the United States Congress only 17 percent of its members are women, whereas in the Scandinavian countries the percentage of women in parliament is between 45 and 48 percent and in Rwanda, which wrote a new constitution following the genocide a number of years ago, women are 50 per cent of their parliament. One of the reasons, we learned, for this disparity is that the U.S. refuses to consider quotas while in other parts of the world countries insist on using quotas in order to assure parity.

Each year International Women’s Day falls during the CSW, and this year Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reported on the launching of his campaign to UNiTE to End Violence Against Women. He was very clear: "We need to do more to enforce laws and counter impunity. We need to combat attitudes and behaviors that condone, tolerate, excuse or ignore violence committed against women (and girls). And we need to increase funding for services for victims and survivors." He described a Framework for Action for the Member States, identifying benchmarks to be achieved by 2015: adoption and enforcement of national laws to address and punish all forms of violence; adoption and implementation of plans of action; establishment of data collection and analysis systems; establishment of national and/or local campaigns in a diverse range of civil society; and systematic efforts to address sexual violence in conflict situations, protecting women and girls from rape as a tactic of war. We hope these efforts will lead to a significant improvement in this scourge on our society.

The entire delegation was, once again, grateful to Bishop Catherine Roskam and the Diocese of New York for hosting a splendid banquet for all the delegates at a local restaurant, thus providing an evening of just plain pleasure in the midst of hard realities and hectic schedules. We were grateful also for the time she spent with us as the celebrant and homilist for our opening Eucharist; she is a gifted preacher, and the delegates from abroad, especially, delight in seeing and listening to her.

Marge Christie for the TEC Delegates