FOR DECADES, THE QUEST for equal rights by women of all nations has been corseted by media-generated images that mythologize more than they inform. When women gathered for their first United Nations-sponsored conference in Mexico City in 1975, the dominant image was of fiery Western feminists burning their bras. (Women didn't really do that.) When they reconvened in Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985, it was Superwoman storming the ramparts, juggling career, husband, children and jogging schedule without breaking a sweat. (She never existed.) This week, as an expected 40,000 delegates descend on Beijing and its environs for the Fourth World Conference on Women, the media buzz is of "global sisterhood," two words that conjure images of women, arms linked, marching in lockstep across the map--and the backs of men--in pursuit of a common agenda. (It's not going to happen.)

The truth is that the women on every continent who are leading the regional, national and local battles for parity at home and work, in school and government, have long since stopped trying to squeeze into a one-size-fits-all bodice. In the decade since the Nairobi conference, practicality has largely triumphed over ideology, transforming the notion of equal rights into something useful for women the world over. Women have "abandoned the myth of global sisterhood and acknowledged profound differences in their lives," says Amrita Basu, a political scientist at Amherst College in the U.S. No longer do Westerners dominate the agenda with their focus on personal issues like abortion rights. Women from the developing world, who have formed their own regional networks, now raise their voices, demanding at home and abroad the recognition that social and economic issues, such as health care and education, are just as important.

But the gathering in Beijing serves as an apt reminder that all kinds of women's concerns become enmeshed in politics. China's recent human rights violations and military exercises aimed at intimidating Taiwan persuaded some delegates to stay home. That group threatened to include U.S. First Lady Hillary Clinton, until China announced two weeks ago that it was releasing--and expelling--Harry Wu, a Chinese-American human rights activist. Though Mrs. Clinton will now attend, the controversy may be only beginning. As an estimated 20,000 representatives of non governmental organizations arrived last week in Huairou, 52 km from Beijing, for an unofficial companion conference, complaints arose immediately that Chinese authorities were curtailing promised transportation and interfering with delegates' freedom of movement. "My fear is that the reporting of Chinese problems will overshadow the women's issues," says Christel Hanewinckel, a member of Germany's Parliament. Even that would not be entirely inappropriate, given the sorry state of Chinese women's rights.

Beneath the commotion, the delegates have a variety of urgent concerns. While those from the Middle East are most interested in making child custody, divorce and inheritance laws more favorable to women, Latin Americans and Africans are focused on poverty and human rights violations. North American and West European women want to talk about the absence of child-care facilities outside the home and the presence of corporate glass ceilings and other barriers to parity in the workplace. East Europeans worry about the economic upheaval that is eliminating their jobs and longstanding maternity and child-care subsidies, as well as provoking a suspected upsurge in physical assaults against women. Asians are caught up in the plight of women forced to feed themselves through prostitution, while Muslims object to the Western demonization of fundamentalism. "How can we be sisters when we don't understand one another?" asks Turkish journalist Hulyan Eralp.

FOR ALL THOSE DIFFERENCES, though, whether they blame patriarchy or machismo or religion, women the world over share a sense that their interests and standing remain subsidiary to those of men. Their frustration is more than just a perception; the sixth annual Human Development Report, released last month, documents gender imbalances in 130 countries. Over the past 20 years, according to the report, "doors to education and health opportunities have opened rapidly for women, but the doors to economic and political power are barely ajar." Commissioned by the U.N. and conducted by an international panel of scholars, the survey found that in no country are women offered the same education, income and health opportunities as men. Instead, two-thirds of the world's illiterate are female. And the health of women on every continent is threatened by coerced prostitution, rape and domestic violence.

Indeed, violence against women, and how to stop it, promises to emerge as a unifying challenge in Beijing. While the systematic rape of Muslim women by Serbian soldiers in Bosnia has generated international outrage, violent practices against women elsewhere continue to receive scant notice. Amnesty International, the human rights watchdog, has identified 15 countries, including Peru, Haiti and Iraq, that wield rape as a "weapon of war." Among the world's 20 million refugees--80% of them women and children--Amnesty International has found that rape by border patrols, security officials and camp guards is rampant, as is forced prostitution. Says Ayesha Khanam of the Bangladesh Women's Council: "Violence against women is an issue that begs global action."

Abusive customs, some of which go back for centuries, remain very much a part of the late 20th century. In Egypt authorities have yet to abolish female circumcision. Under Shari'a law, Pakistani rape victims can prove their cases only if they have four male Muslim witnesses; those brave enough to press charges sometimes wind up convicted of adultery. In Hungary a victim of marital rape can only bring a charge of grievous bodily harm--and she must prove that the resulting injuries barred her from functioning normally for at least eight days.

As yet the only discordant note sounded on the subject of violence against women comes from the Muslim world. When Meryem Akbal, an Islamist TV anchorwoman in Turkey, was asked whether she was shocked by the statistic that a woman is raped every five minutes in the U.S., she responded, "The reason women are raped in America is a matter of life-style and custom. If people lived according to Muslim law, the problem of rape would be solved." That comment not only speaks to the wide cultural divides that mitigate against a sense of female mutuality but also reflects the bitterness that Turkish Islamist women feel because Beijing is the first women's conference to which they have been invited. "We were not invited to the Nairobi conference," says Figen Es, a doctor of microbiology, "because Western women thought we were prisoners within our society ellipse and therefore unfit to represent Turkish women."

Such resentments about Western domination of earlier conferences are hardly uncommon. "I am beginning to think that Western women lack a deep understanding and global perspective of women's issues," says Asma Jahangir, chairwoman of Pakistan's Human Rights Commission. Ela Bhatt of India's Self-Employed Women's Association complains, "They ask for abortion rights; we ask for safe drinking water and basic health care." Khanam of Bangladesh says more caustically, "We don't wish to undermine their causes, but we have far more critical concerns than lesbian rights."

There is also brewing resentment about the composition of many of the delegations. "The delegates to the Beijing conference will no doubt be academics who have no real contact with the grass roots," says Margaret DoNGO, a Zimbabwean activist. Basu of the U.S., who believes that "sisterhood defines itself locally, but there is continual interplay between the local and the global," concurs that members of the professional class are overrepresented at international gatherings because they are the ones who can afford the plane ticket and hotel room. "Unfortunately," she says, "it often ends up that [women in general] are represented by middle-class women." Some countries, however, have made efforts to prevent such a situation. Half of India's 400-member delegation, for instance, are grass-roots activists.

Even as strains emerge in Beijing, they are likely to be more muted than at conferences past. Over two decades, the international women's movement has matured beyond the issuing of bombastic proclamations to a truly mutual evaluation of directions and concerns. Bella Abzug, a former U.S. Congresswoman, says of Third World women: "We don't have to open their eyes; their eyes are already open." In helping develop the agenda for the NGO conference, Abzug took pains to include women and issues from all regions. "First World women still play a role, but they are no longer major players," she says. "There has been a dramatic change from the 1970s, when there was a dispute over First World women imposing their views on Third World women."

Part of that change stems from Western women's recognition that they have much to learn from their Third World counterparts. This year's Human Development Report found that an economic problem shared by women worldwide is access to credit from banking institutions. As of 1990, only 5% of the $5.8 billion allocated globally for rural credit to developing countries had reached women. The best response to this endemic problem has come from India and Bangladesh. In 1974 India's Self-Employed Women's Association began extending credit, ranging from $2 to $100, to impoverished women. Since then, SEWA has helped more than 250,000 women in six Indian states, and its loan-repayment rate is a remarkable 95%. And in the past 12 years, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh has extended more than $1.3 billion in credit to nearly 2 million women.

Now the West is paying close attention. Bhatt, who is SEWA's general secretary, visited New York City and Chicago to lend her expertise on credit extension to the urban underclass. "The Third World is taking a lead in finding solutions to urban poverty," she says. Just over two years ago, 27 organizations from different parts of the world, including the U.S., decided to try to emulate SEWA's success. Uniting under an umbrella organization called the International Coalition of Women and Credit, the groups aim to assist 100 million families by the year 2000 by extending credit to women.

In today's global economy, such initiatives are crucial. The austerity imposed on many debt-burdened countries by multilateral lending institutions has typically come at the expense of social programs. Women take the hardest hits, as health, family-planning, maternity and child-care subsidies shrink. India's delegation, which plans to focus its efforts in Beijing on the negative impact of economic globalization, is coming armed with data that show that in countries where lenders' terms have led to cuts in domestic spending--among them the Philippines, South Korea and many African nations--women's nutrition has declined, as has the likelihood of their delivering a baby that will live.

No matter what the region, women are the most vulnerable to economic downturns. In Eastern Europe the collapse of communism has meant mass unemployment--with women's jobs almost always the first to be eliminated. In Central America, where one-third of all families are headed by women and 75% of families are poor, Mar¡a Su rez of the Costa Rica-based International Feminist Radio Endeavor says, "What we are seeing is the feminization of poverty."

Globalization has altered the traditional rich-poor divide. Indian economist Gita Sen, a founder of the Third World network called Development Alter natives with Women for a New Era, notes, "Within the geographic north, there is a south, and within the south, there is a north." Sen argues that the elite women of New Delhi consume, pollute and exploit just as voraciously as the high-living rich of the West, and, conversely, that the New York City ghetto resident suffers just as much discrimination, poverty and insecurity as the Bombay slum dweller.

While the developing world has provided valuable lessons to developed countries, so too have Third Worlders picked up ideas from First Worlders. "We have learned from them how to lobby with the government for change," says Asha Ramesh, who helped coordinate India's delegation. "Americans are so systematic and well organized," adds SEWA's Bhatt. "They do their homework well." And they are often more than eager to share their resources. The Association for Progressive Communication in San Francisco, for instance, has in recent years helped regional women's organizations get together through electronic mail. The number of women now online through the association's efforts has mushroomed from 1,000 five years ago to about 10,000 today.

Such efforts ensure that the talking, sharing and debating will continue long after the Beijing conference concludes on Sept. 15. In the process, perhaps, women can increasingly learn to respect cultural differences while sharing knowledge that is useful in any culture. Ultimately, the goal is to bring into the discussion more and more of the men who still dominate politics and business. Women the world over look forward to the day when all issues surrounding the home, body, workplace and government have become human concerns--rendering the very term women's issue obsolete.

--Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington, Anita Pratap/New Delhi and James Wilde/Istanbul, with other bureaus