Linda Tarr-Whelan to discuss international women's rights treaty, Nov. 4

Women's rights advocate and policymaker Linda Tarr-Whelan will give a talk at Cornell Monday, Nov. 4, from 2 to 3 p.m. in the Founders Room of Anabel Taylor Hall.

Titled "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women: The Treaty for the Rights of Women Is Long Overdue," the talk is sponsored by the Feminism and Legal Theory Project and the Berger International Legal Studies Program at Cornell Law School and is free and open to the public.

While Ladies Home Journal named her one of the 50 most powerful women in the world, Tarr-Whelan is perhaps best known for stressing the powerful role that women play in economic development in third-world countries, when she served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 1996-2001. She also led international negotiations for the United States on women's concerns.

Tarr-Whelan pioneered Women's Voices, a major bi-partisan and multicultural research initiative, and created a series of women's economic summits for government, business and non-profit leaders, culminating in 1997 with the "White House/CPA Summit on Women and the Economy" under then President Bill Clinton and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In 1999 she organized a transatlantic U.S.-U.K. dialog in London, "Women and the New Economy Summit."

A women-led economic agenda developed by Tarr-Whelan was presented to Congress and the White House and served as a model in Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslav states. The editor of four policy books, most recently State Venture Policy: Women and Entrepreneurship, Tarr-Whelan was a deputy assistant to President Jimmy Carter and director of government relations and chief lobbyist for the National Education Association. She is the founder of the Center for Women in Government, State University of New York-Albany, co-founder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and former director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees-New York. She began her career as a nurse.