NYWLC's Day Two’s Opening Plenary, Feminism Without Borders, Just Wrapped

Day two’s opening plenary, Feminism Without Borders, here at the National Young Women’s Leadership Conference has just wrapped. With increased economic globalization there is an increasing need for women worldwide to come together to fight for the rights of all our sisters.

The plenary speakers did a wonderful job of explaining the historical context of the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), an international treaty aims to give women equal legal standing according to the laws of each nation, and the current situation of Afghan women and girls with the first hand accounts of courageous Afghan activists of various ages.

Did you know? Even though Americans helped to author CEDAW, they are among a handful of nations worldwide including Sudan, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia that have not ratified the treaty. We need to push now for the Senate to ratify this treaty!

We were also shocked to learn that 1 in 6 women in Afghanistan die during childbirth compared to 1 in 2,500 in the US. Afghan women have had acid thrown in their faces while trying to go to school and dozens of schools have been destroyed to prevent women and girls from attending, all while about 85% of the country’s women can not read or write.

The daily atrocities faced by women both domestically and internationally cannot be addressed unless women step up and speak out for themselves. Plenary speaker Mavis Leno summed it up very well by saying, “If women don’t speak up for women, no one speaks up for women. It’s us or no one!”

We will be continuing to blog from the conference and tweeting. Make sure to follow us on the conference twitter widget; we will be using the hash tag #nywlc for all conference-related tweets.