FOR WOMEN, CHINA IS ALL TOO TYPICAL

By Barbara Ehrenreich

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?

The real story from Beijing, if we were to listen to the 40,000 women gathered there, is that there are precious few female-friendly spots on earth. In fact, the real story may be something we would rather not hear at all, since it contradicts every cherished Western notion of "progress"--that instead of advancing, women, on average, seem to be losing ground. A study by the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union finds that the percentage of women elected to national legislatures has dropped worldwide almost 25% in the past seven years. Human Rights Watch reported in August that such traditional abuses as wife beating remain rampant everywhere and usually unpunished, while new problems--like the transnational traffic in female sex slaves--have grown unchecked. There is, as U.S. News & World Report put it last year, a worldwide "war on women."

But it's so easy to downplay the global nature of the problem and focus on just one place. Benazir Bhutto won high praise for using her podium time in Beijing to criticize the Chinese treatment of women. What neither she nor the press mentioned is that in Pakistan, female rape victims are subject to prison sentences for "adultery." Bhutto once promised to end this stunningly malicious practice, but backed off rather than offend the local mullahs.

And it's so easy for Americans to project their own problems onto some distant Other, in this case the perennially "exotic" Orient. The press gushed over Hillary Clinton's "courage" in denouncing Chinese violations of women's rights. But what risk was she facing, other than, perhaps, a curtailment of room service in her Beijing hotel? The politically risky--and truly courageous--thing would have been for Hillary to follow up her criticisms of China with some heartfelt reflections on the situation of women in America, herself included. She might have admitted she comes from the only industrialized nation that has refused to ratify the 16-year-old U.N. treaty on women's rights, a country where an outspoken woman in public life risks constant revilement.

When it comes to women's rights, there is no single "evil empire" that can be isolated and embargoed. Thanks to religious conservatism and official indifference, misogyny is making a comeback everywhere. Which is why the Beijing conference deserves to be treated as something more significant than the latest spot of egg on China's face. "Women of the world--and men of goodwill," should be the message from Beijing, "unite to defend women's rights!"