Thirty-five years ago, I was a young staffer at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with a ringside seat on its board meetings since I took the minutes. A female board member ran for the organization’s presidency as a symbolic gesture and got all of five votes, which may have represented most of the other women then on the eightythree- member board. Not too long before that, it was hard to get the (mostly male) staff and board members of the organization to see women’s rights as an issue sufficiently serious to warrant a place on the agenda of the leading rights watchdog in the US.

I joined the staff of Human Rights Watch at the same time as Dorothy Thomas, the founding director of what was then called the Women’s Rights Project, and a fellow contributor to this anthology. That was barely twenty years ago, but it’s easy to forget that there was considerable skepticism about the effort in many quarters of the organization, from staff and board members (including some of its female leaders), who feared that an emphasis on women’s rights would dilute the organization’s focus and cost it credibility with key partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. (As I learned a few years later when working to expand Human Rights Watch’s mandate to include lesbian and gay rights issues, it was often the case that our traditional local “partners” were themselves unaware of the strong and vibrant work by women’s and LGBT groups in their own countries.)

Thomas and her women’s rights staff had to earn their credibility just as the parent organization had to a dozen years earlier—with painstakingly researched reports (such as early ones on honor killings in Pakistan and impunity for rape in Brazil) based on airtight documentation and concluding with pointed and achievable policy recommendations.

In short, even in progressive rights organizations, those working on women’s issues had to be twice as good—constantly fending off internal challenges, just to survive. And of course, they were, aided by the star quality of founding leaders such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the ACLU and Dorothy Thomas at Human Rights Watch.