Women’s national leagues: does CEDAW go far enough?
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, CEDAW on the Elimination of All Forms ofDiscrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 1249 U.N.T.S. 13, 1979) states the goals of equality between men and women in sports. However, today there are only a limited number of women’s national leagues in the world, but hundreds of men’s national leagues, which seems to go against CEDAW’s edict of equality. This paper will consider the issues relative to the goals of CEDAW with regard to equality as specifically applied to the idea of women’s national professional sports leagues and whether or not CEDAW goes far enough in supporting this goal.
Deconstructing CEDAW’s Article 14: Naming and Explaining Rural Difference
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is the first human rights instrument to recognize explicitly rural-urban difference. It does so by enumerating specific rights for rural women in Article 14 and also by mentioning their needs in relation to Article 10 on education. In this Essay, I examine the Convention’s Travaux Preparatoires to better understand the forces and considerations that led to the inclusion of Article 14 and its recognition of rural people and places. I also assess Article 14’s particular mandates in light of both that drafting history and CEDAW’s other provisions, and I consider the assumptions implicit in the Convention’s embrace of rural exceptionalism. In addition, I offer some thoughts on the expressive significance of the particular rights accorded to rural women, as well as of the explicit acknowledgment of this group – and, by extension, rural populations in their entirety – in this widely ratified treaty. I thus discuss what CEDAW implies about the character of rurality and rural-urban difference. Finally, I argue that CEDAW provides a framework for spatial equality, in addition to the more obvious and comprehensive one for gender equality. This Essay therefore fills a void in the legal scholarship on CEDAW, which often mentions Article 14 in inventories of the Convention’s provisions, but which has largely ignored both its meaning and significance.
Negotiating the cultural and economic outcomes of sport heritage attractions: the case of the National Baseball Hall of Fame
ABSTRACT Contemporary museums must balance their roles as commercial entities and repositories of various, and often dissonant, heritages and histories. Sports museums in particular often have clear commercial and nostalgic aims, particularly through tourist visitation, though the extent to which they represent more challenging narratives remains unclear. This paper examines how one of the most famous sports museums in the world, the National Baseball Hall of Fame (NBHF) in Cooperstown, New York, balances its dual role as tourist attraction and repository of baseball's sometimes checkered past. It was found that different sections of the museum provide greater or lesser degrees of engagement with more controversial issues, although the commercial outputs and appeal of the museum remains clear throughout. Utlimately, the NBHF demonstrates that balancing veneration and critique in collections can be commercially prosperous, and can provide a template for other sport and popular culture museums who may be wary of incorporating more challenging narratives in their exhibits. Furthermore, the symbiotic relationship between the Hall of Fame and the village of Cooperstown, particularly in creating and maintaining cultural and economic outputs, requires further exploration.