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By

May 9, 2018

Leticia Ramos Shahani is a name every feminist should know.

Shahani, a Philippine diplomat and lawmaker, was a pioneer in the international women’s movement. At a time when few women had a place in statecraft, she became one of the highest-ranking women at the United Nations. In her native Philippines, she made labor and rape laws fairer to women and integrated gender into all kinds of policymaking.

There were “a lot of firsts in her long life,” said Aurora Javate-De Dios, executive director of the Women and Gender Institute at Miriam College in Quezon City, where Shahani was a dean in her later years.

In the 1970s, she led the drafting of a convention on the elimination of discrimination against women, also known as the international women’s bill of rights, and defied Cold War tensions by enlisting the Soviet Union as a co-sponsor to get it off the ground.