Feminist Perspectives Across Cultures

These two statements are taken from the Declaration and Platform for Action prepared by the delegates during the Beijing Conference in 1995 aiming to achieve greater equality and opportunity for women. This aim, which was expressed a quarter of a century ago, still maintains its validity. On International Women’s Day in 2021, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Women Executive Director, asserts that “We need women’s representation that reflects all women and girls in all their diversity and abilities and across all cultural, social, economic, and political situations. This is the only way we will get the real societal change that incorporates women in decision-making as equals and benefits us all” (UN Women, 2021). This assertion is the vision of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals and the vision of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. As is clear from the endeavors of women worldwide, in spite of many advances in the history of the feminist movement and thought, male domination still exists in most cultures affecting the lives of both women and men and shaping their perspectives of the world. Thus, the agenda of feminism has always been to call for aradical social change so as to liberate women, children, and men from the domination and violence of patriarchy.