Dartmouth Events

Defying Convention: US Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women’s Rights

Lisa Baldez: Director, Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), Professor of Government and Program in Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies

Thursday, October 22, 2015
4:30pm – 6:00pm
Haldeman 41 (Kreindler Conference Hall)
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars

Defying Convention: US Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women’s Rights

Lisa Baldez, Director, Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, Professor of Government and Program in Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies

Reception to Follow. Open to all. 

The United States is not among the 187 countries that have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Why not? What impact would the treaty have if the US ratified it? The answers to these questions lie in the emergence of the treaty in the context of the Cold War, the deeply partisan nature of women's rights issues in the United States, and basic disagreements about how human rights treaties work.

Lisa Baldez is Professor of Government and Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies and Cheheyl Professor and Director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and her most recent book, Defying Convention: US Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women’s RIghts (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Defying Convention won the 2015 Victoria Schuck Award for best book on women and politics and 2015 best book on human rights, both from the American Political Science Association.

Her work on gender and politics in Latin America and in the U.S. has appeared in numerous journals, including Comparative Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly and The Journal of Legal Studies. She is one of the founding editors, with Karen Beckwith, of Politics & Gender, the official journal of the Women and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

For more information, contact:
Sharon Tribou-St. Martin

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.