Where the future was built: Fifty years of feminist advocacy at the United Nations

Overview

The fifty-year history of the global feminist movement and the United Nations is often untold and yet remains a critical foundation for global feminist advocacy today. This article explores the origins and evolution of feminist advocacy at and with the UN from 1975 to 2025, beginning with the UN World Conferences on Women. Within a multilateral movement-building infrastructure, women’s rights advocates and their allies worked across regions and issues, through “inside-outside solidarity” strategies, cross-pollinating ideas to shape and advance a progressive agenda on gender equality, and spark a global movement that continues to evolve in its intersectional power.

The UN has always been an imperfect mirror of the world and a geopolitical battleground for norms, with important and material implications for people’s lives. There is no other connective global mechanism that offers the opportunity for feminist advocates to interface with their governments at multiple levels to foster accountability, to connect an agenda with significance from the grassroots to the global, and everything in between.

Through qualitative research and analysis of the history of feminist advocacy at the UN over a fifty-year period, this article argues that UN processes, shaped by feminist advocates and their allies, provided a unique movement-building infrastructure for feminist advocacy and critical cross-pollination across sectors, regions, and relationships. Ebbs and flows in this history resonate with contemporary questions for feminist advocacy and the global gender equality agenda, including Global South and North divides, geopolitical conflicts, and backlash to women’s rights and multilateralism. This article illuminates the ways in which the UN and feminist movements have shaped each other across five decades of complex engagement and poses questions for feminist advocacy today.