Gendering 'universal' human rights: international women's activism, gender politics and the early cold war, 1928-1952

[摘要] This dissertation analyzes how transnational feminist advocacy and ideas about gender shaped modern human rights doctrines that remain central to this day. After World War II, United Nations delegates drafted and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). During this process, international feminist activists disagreed about how to incorporate women's long-standing rights claims into the emerging human rights framework. Fiery interwar debates about laws and standards that regulated female labor persisted, prompting influential U.S. feminists to oppose the inclusion of gender-specific rights. To challenge U.S. opposition, key delegates to the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) forged an unofficial coalition. Despite the fact that these CSW delegates held competing ideas about gender and represented distinct national governments, they collectively crafted a significant but little-known women's human rights agenda and lobbied UDHR drafters to adopt it. Their proposals not only included political and civil rights, but also promoted particular economic and social rights for women as a group. They maintained, for instance, that child care and maternity leave should be obligations of the state. Indeed, the CSW insisted that recognition of their women's human rights agenda was essential to building a socially-just postwar order. While Anglo-American women dominated interwar NGOs, the CSW showcased myriad international voices and won critical allies among liberal and conservative UN delegations by linking the advance of women's human rights to notions of modernity and democracy. As a result, the CSW made substantial political and civil rights gains, such as the guarantee of equal rights in marriage and divorce. Yet feminist delegates had to juggle their internationally-minded agenda with the interests they were to serve as national representatives. This task was further complicated by nascent Cold War politics and a growing anti-feminist backlash at the UN. In this context, UDHR drafters ultimately rejected the CSW's call for women's economic and social rights--a social revolution for women--in favor of the perceived stability of the traditional family. By the early 1950s, anti-communist pressures led the CSW to sever the pursuit of women's rights from the developing human rights framework at the UN. Feminists' absence from the UN human rights debates over the next several decades removed a forceful challenge to U.S.-led efforts to privilege political and civil rights over economic and social rights, and fostered a tacit hierarchy of rights that persists to this day. This dissertation places the CSW's competing vision of universal human rights

[发布机构] University of Iowa