WOMS202 Chapter 15: WOMS Keck and Sikkink Reading Journal
6 May 2018
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Keck and Sikkink Reading Journal
1. How did 'violence against women' become an important international issue?
● It became an important international issue because it shows how two
previously separate transnational networks around human rights and
women's rights began to converge and mutually trans form each other.
The network built around violence against women thus could draw upon
pre existing communication networks that were receptive to the "new
ideas of the incipient movement.”
● In 1975 Fran Hosken founded Women's International Network (WIN)
News, a quarterly journal of information on women's issues excerpted
from correspondence and other publications, which began with discussion
of domestic violence as a crucial international issue
2. What benefits do international conferences provide for women's networks? What are
potential drawbacks?
● the emergence of modern international organizations provided more
arenas for women's issues
● International conferences did not create women's networks, but they
legitimized the issues and brought together unprecedented numbers of
women from around the world. Such face-to-face encounters generate the
trust, information sharing, and discovery of common concerns that gives
impetus to network formation; established a network
● But at the same time that the Mexico conference encouraged network
formation, it also revealed a major division among women's organizations.
The conference disintegrated into a heated debate among feminists from
Western countries who stressed discrimination, and women from the
developing world who stressed what they considered the more pressing
issues of development and social justice that affected both men and
women.
3. On p. 171, Keck and Sikkink write that feminists had to create 'violence against
women.' What does that mean?
● Creating the issue ‘violence against women’ in part through naming,
renaming, and working out definitions, whereby the concept "violence
against women" eventually unified many practices that in the early 19705
were not understood to be connected.
● The category "violence against women" had to be constructed and
popularized before people could think of these practices as the "same" in
some basic way.
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