Madam, - Mary Robinson (December 6th) suggests that the 21st century is to be the century when women "play a leadership role". I don't think she has ever really understood the significance of what happened in 1995.
In that year, at the UN Women's Conference in Beijing, grassroots women from all over the world forced through the revolutionary resolution that all governments should commit themselves to measuring and valuing unwaged work. In the end this motion was passed despite attempts to block it by the so-called "women's leaders" of the US and the EU delegations (who thought the only need was for women to be trained and educated for the market).
Unwaged work worldwide (in the home, on the land, in the community, and largely done by women) was approximately assessed in the Human Development Report of 1995 at $11 trillion a year, not much less than the $14 trillion earned by waged work. Surely to close that unequal gap is a step towards true equality, because the ideology of competition, profit, exploitation and resource-war is built upon an invisible foundation of nurturing and caring in the home, and can only be sustained so long as the nurturing and caring remain unmeasured and unvalued, thus keeping women in a global state of perpetual poverty attempting to do a double job for one low wage.
Today the demand that unwaged caring and nurturing work should be accorded the same societal and monetary value as waged work is a revolutionary demand as well as an act of leadership because it compels us to reconsider all the values of our society. - Yours, etc,
MARGARETTA D'ARCY,
St Bridget's Place Lower,
Galway.