In the fall of 1989 the Women’s Rights Project, as it was then called, had just been established at Human Rights Watch and I had recently returned from a year monitoring Namibia’s transition to independence from South Africa. By a rare stroke of luck, I got the job as the Project’s founding director. I was exactly thirty years old.

I am now fifty-one and can only marvel at all that the Women’s Rights Division, as it is now known, has achieved. In our first full year of operation, we had one and a half full-time employees, including me, and a small budget from generous donors who believed in the cause of women’s human rights. Today, the division is vastly expanded and it has a full-time staff of a dozen highly qualified women’s rights advocates and researchers covering all the continents of the world.

The journey from 1989 to 2011 was arduous for the Women’s Rights Division and for the women’s human rights movement as a whole. The former was in many ways a microcosm of the latter; the movement’s fortunes quite often shaped our own. In 1990, especially if you lived in the United States or Western Europe, you could be forgiven for thinking that no global women’s human rights movement existed. In fact, as Charlotte Bunch’s landmark 1981 essay, “Copenhagen and Beyond: Prospects for Global Feminism,” made clear, its foundations were already well laid by the anti-dictatorship feminists of Latin America; the anti-colonial ones of the Americas, Africa, and Asia; the anti-Communist ones in Central and Eastern Europe; the anti-fundamentalist ones in North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East; and indigenous women’s movements throughout the world. Those of us working in the West and the North, with the exception of indigenous women and some pioneering civil and economic rights activists, were among the last to make the women’s-rights-to-human-rights connect. Indeed, Human Rights Watch, then fifteen years old and one of the world’s premier international human rights organizations, had never done any systematic reporting on the rights of women.

The belated uptake of women’s human rights by Western activists and groups initially made my position as a North American woman working at the largest US-based human rights organization extremely awkward.