A few decades of social activism can dull a person's capacity to be surprised. I came to the United Nations this week to help welcome women from around the world to the latest UN review of our condition, but I didn't expect to learn much. And the opening ceremony was the familiar sea of colorful clothing and smiling, singing faces of every shade. But as I talked with women who had traveled thousands of miles for this gathering and women who had walked over from around the corner, I began to see something new. The whole context has changed.
Women are now on the world's agenda.
The controversy that surrounds everything we do is proof. Some 25 years ago, abuses such as bride-burning, female genital mutilation, human trafficking, forced marriage, and ordinary domestic violence used to be shrugged off as unavoidable, as cultural traditions, as private matters, or as too widespread to try to stop. Violence against women is now condemned rightly as the violation of human rights that it has always been. Even sexual harassment is so unacceptable in the United States today that young women find it hard to believe my tales of what life used to be like for women here, especially in the music business. This is not to say that the abuses have ended.