Embracing the Language of Human Rights: International Women's Organisations,Feminism and Campaigns Against the Marriage Bar,c.1919–1960

This article considers four international women's organisations – the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, the International Federation of University Women and the Open Door International – and their campaigns for the right of married women to undertake paid work. It examines how each organisation adopted and engaged with the language of human rights in the late 1920s and 1930s. It is argued that after 1948, precisely because of its formal adoption by the UN, the language of human rights became less usable as a way to make the point that women still faced inequalities, and so other framings became more significant. This article contributes to historiographies on international women's organisations, offers a detailed discussion of their activism against the marriage bar, and challenges the conventional chronology of the concept and language of human rights.     

Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth-century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self-determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.     

Drought policy in Australia: gender mainstreaming or gender blindness?

Australia is experiencing a major drought, one that has devastated the landscape and people for up to ten years. This major disaster has accelerated ongoing rural restructuring and created changes in the way farm family members order and live their lives. Yet despite evidence that drought is a gendered experience, that is, that generally women and men experience and respond to drought differently, and despite a rhetorical move to gender mainstreaming in Australian policy circles, drought policy remains significantly gender blind. In this article I use the example of emergency support to poverty stricken farm families to show how agricultural departments that attend to a notional norm of family farming as a unitary male pursuit can actively discriminate against women in their efforts to preserve the farm and support their families. The article exposes gender mainstreaming as an ‘empty signifier’ that is contextually grounded and that its success is highly dependent on making these issues transparent. For gender equity efforts to reach women at local levels, I argue that gender mainstreaming requires international collaboration by gender specialists to facilitate greater attention to gender assessments by national bodies. It also requires national coalitions of gender expert units, women's organisations and academics to work together to expose culturally specific gendered issues and discriminatory outcomes.     

From Idealism to Realism: Women,Feminism and Empowerment in Nicaraguan Tailoring Co-operatives

Co-operatives have been widely promoted as the ideal type of project for women. Because of the focus on income earning, they have been seen as less threatening than more explicit attempts to organize feminist consciousness-raising groups. Based on field research conducted in 1988, this article discusses the experience of women in the Nicaraguan tailoring co-operatives. After the 1979 Revolution, these were set up on a large scale as part of a wider economic policy and grassroots political mobilization. After an initial period of expansion in which many women benefited both in improved income and access to training and management experience, the co-operatives found themselves in serious difficulty by 1988. It is argued that even without the wider economic crisis in Nicaragua, they would have faced serious problems without extensive and probably unsustainable state support. Although co-operative employment has considerable potential, the Nicaraguan case highlights the need for new thinking on ways to resolve basic tensions between economic efficiency and worker participation. It also casts doubt on their viability as a development alternative for women, without specific attention to basic gender inequalities.     

Gender equality and economic empowerment in the Solomon Islands and Fiji: a place-based approach

The economic empowerment of women is emerging as a core focus of both economic development and gender equality programmes internationally. At the same time, there is increasing importance placed on measuring outcomes and quantifying progress towards gender and development goals. These trends raise significant questions around how well gender differences are understood, especially in economies dominated by the informal sector and characterised by a highly gendered division of labour, as is the case in many Pacific countries. How well do existing international and national indicators of gender equality reflect the experiences and aspirations of Pacific women and men? What do concepts such as gender equality and economic empowerment mean in this geographical context? How might local attitudes and practices be identified and measured? In this paper, we draw on Boaventura De Sousa Santos’ call to recognise and value knowledges of the majority world that have been rendered either largely invisible or non-credible by mainstream development and human rights policy agendas. Reflecting on an action research project conducted with partner organisations in Fiji and the Solomon islands, we explore a more nuanced place-based approach to understanding and measuring gender equality and economic empowerment. This approach takes account of diverse economic practices, such as non-market transactions, and forms of non-cash exchange and unpaid labour, and recognises the imbalance in women’s and men’s household and care work.     

Legislating fear and the public health in gilded age Massachusetts

Between 1876 and 1881 Massachusetts experienced an outbreak of human rabies (hydrophobia). The entire state--the Governor, the legislature, the State Board of Health, newspapers, and the citizenry and elected officials of every town and city--reacted to the disease. Central to the response was the Commonwealth's legislature--called the General Court. Through public hearings, their own debates, and the passage of legislation, it resolved widespread fear and anger, mediated conflicting concepts of disease, and promoted social solidarity in the face of an epidemic. This article first narrates the General Court's legislative actions; it then examines the conflicting understandings of disease causality; finally, it explores the social and political rituals the legislature drew upon to deal with this public health crisis. Arguing that public health legislation is simultaneously instrumental and symbolic, this article demonstrates that attention to both enriches the study of epidemics, historical and yet to come.     

Rescaling citizenship: gendering Canadian immigration policy

Tracing the impact of public consultation on policy development is vital to theories of the state. Without investigating how civic participation is transformed into policy outcomes researchers cannot adequately account for the interaction of state and civil society. In particular researchers need to refine their explanations of policy development by highlighting how identity and scale can alter both policy application and outcome. I develop this approach by tracing how the civic participation of immigrant women in Canada advanced the rights of women in the development of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which came into law in June 2002. By tracing the consultation process between Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and Sahara and NAC, two women’s advocacy groups, I reveal how public involvement and concern with gender equity transmitted into policy change. The outcomes of this interaction do, however, present some contradictions. In particular policy changes attempt to limit one source of inequality, but in the process enforce greater state control of mobility. Despite this paradox, I conclude that this political involvement represents a partial victory for immigrant women since it succeeded in promoting concerns with gender within the ‘formal’ arena of national policy development.     

The Misinterpretation of Women's Status in the Muslim World

Spiritual equality, responsibility, and accountability for both men and women are well‐developed themes in the Qur'an. Spiritual equality between men and women in the sight of God is not limited purely to religious issues, but is the basis for equality in all aspects of human endeavor. This article's main interest is in the woman's status, and her role within the Arab countries. Islam is the main religion—its principles, values, and practices are dominant in the region. Therefore, this article introduces and discusses the misinterpretation of women in Islam, with special consideration of Muslim women's rights and their roles within the Muslim society. This will help to enhance future discussions of social behavior, values, and attitudes toward women in Islam. In the last few decades there has been a great misunderstanding in many aspects of public consciousness about the role of women in Arabic society. There is a significant gap between the status of males and females. However, this gap is more evident in rural areas. The level of women's rights and roles in many Arabic countries prevents women from improving their economic growth and development. This gender gap is the result of social, religious, cultural, and gender inequality. More specifically, it results from structural constraints faced by women. Gender inequality is not a new issue, nor is it only Muslim women who are suffering from this inequality. There is gender discrimination almost everywhere. The Qur'an is the basis of Islam, and encompasses rules, legislation, examples, advice, history, and system of the universe. It draws a picture of the earth and describes the roles of human beings. The Qur'an is the answer to the spiritual and material needs of the Islamic society, and is an exposition and an explanation of all aspects of life.     

The Ebola Crisis in Sierra Leone: Mediating Containment and Engagement in Humanitarian Emergencies

This article explores how framings of the 2014–16 outbreak of Ebola as a crisis, its causes, nature and consequences gave rise to two seemingly contradictory types of interventions within affected communities in Sierra Leone: a militarized state of emergency on the one hand, and efforts to foster local engagement and ownership on the other. Teasing out explicitly the underlying logic of these two modes of response, we are able to discern the convergence between containment and engagement approaches that are at the heart of contemporary humanitarianism. Rather than being opposed or contradictory, the article shows how they were mutually constitutive, through negotiations between different ways of knowing and responding to the Ebola crisis. The resulting divisive practices, juxtaposing ‘Ebola heroes’ and ‘dangerous bodies’, re‐ordered the landscapes that individuals had to navigate in order to manage uncertainty. Tracing these logics through to the ‘subjects’ of intervention, the article tells the story of one traditional healer's ‘epistemic navigations’ in his efforts to survive both the epidemic and its response. Bringing these dynamics and their consequences to the fore in the Sierra Leonean case invites broader reflections on a humanitarian assemblage increasingly reliant on the mutual constitution of containment and engagement, security and resilience, in its approach to managing ‘at risk’ populations.     

Humanitarianism,genocide and liberalism

The international response to genocide and human rights violations has received increasing attention by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This article explores the history of the response to mass atrocity by assessing recent work on humanitarianism as an idea and in practice in the West. It argues that the impulse to defend the rights of others historically has been tied up with geopolitical and imperial concerns that shaped European politics. The current embrace of the responsibility to protect, or ‘R2P’, and debates over whether or not to recognize and prosecute perpetrators of past atrocities from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda remain embedded in this longer history of humanitarianism and geopolitics. As recent work on humanitarian intervention, the anti-slavery movement and humanitarianism and foreign policy demonstrates, the pressing need to understand the response to atrocity has called scholars to more fully participate in the contemporary conversation over human rights by exploring its roots in humanitarian practices of the recent and not so recent past. Understanding the history of humanitarianism as it connects both with the history of human rights and liberal ideals offers an important way of reassessing the role of the nation-state and international institutions in responding to human rights crisis. The article concludes by suggesting that scholars move away from the question of the origin of human rights as an idea to focus on historicizing the response to humanitarian crisis in order to problematize the story of the rise of western-led human rights regimes.     

From Feminising to Engendering Development

Feminists have been crucial in challenging the gender-blindness of development discourse and practice. In the process, they have shaped the move from the feminisation to the engendering of development over the last three decades. This article explores this broad shift, focusing on the recent transformations within gender and development discourse and feminist approaches to development relating to diversity and representation, human rights, and the incorporation of men and masculinities within the development agenda, all set within the context of a globalising era. It highlights how women from the South have been critical in reshaping contemporary feminisms to celebrate difference and plurality and challenge Western hegemony. At the same time, feminists have also emphasised the commonalities among women in the name of addressing gender inequalities, evidenced in a recent upsurge in forging transnational alliances facilitated by the contradictory processes of globalisation.     

Public Production of Anti‐Retroviral Medicines in Brazil, 1990–2007

This article examines Brazil's experience with the public production of anti‐retroviral drugs (ARVs) and highlights the important role of the state in guaranteeing access to life‐saving medicines and fulfilling human rights commitments. The key to understanding the government's successful intervention in the pharmaceutical market and provision of treatment rests on the synergistic, albeit political, relationship between reform‐minded public servants and civil society activists. This article argues that three key factors led to the government becoming a direct producer of ARVs: 1) a pre‐existing infrastructure of public laboratories that have served the public health system to a greater or lesser degree since the 1960s; 2) strong civil society pressures, including public health activists both inside and outside the government; and 3) a pharmaceutical sector characterized by high prices and controlled by transnational drug companies.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Islam,Human Rights and Interfaith Relations: Some Contemporary Egyptian Perspectives

Abstract

This paper explores current discussions and debates on Islam, human rights and interfaith relations in Egypt through an analysis of the public statements and writings of various religious scholars and spiritual teachers and the textbooks used to teach Islam in public secondary schools. It is well known that Islamist perspectives have become mainstream in Egypt, a largely devout and socially conservative country that is also the source of most of the major Islamic trends and political ideologies that have impacted the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, there is a broad tendency in government-issued textbooks on Islam and in the population at large to equate Islam with democracy and human rights, despite the authoritarianism of the state and the contradictions between traditional interpretations of Islam and international human rights norms. The rhetoric of democracy and human rights is linked to the threat of terrorism, which is labeled un-Islamic. Among ordinary Egyptian Muslims, even those who support Islamist politics, there seems to be a new concern to eradicate Islamic extremism and more openness to unconventional Muslim approaches. The most liberal example of this is an association that teaches the unity of all religions from a somewhat Sufi perspective, promotes interfaith dialogue, and advocates reinterpreting the Shari'a to promote gender equality and equal human rights for all Egyptians.     

Global Governance: Poorly done and Poorly Understood

A set of ethical issues—tensions between democratization and globalization, about some ways in which the global inequalities have increased, and about gross failures of contemporary international cooperation—provide reason to consider our understanding of global governance and the political forces organized to support or transform it. Many scholars agree on the existence of a global polity characterized by the dominance of neo-liberalism, the growing network of both public and private regimes that extend across the world's largest regions, the system of global intergovernmental organizations, and transnational organizations both carrying out some of the traditional service functions of global public agencies and working to create regimes and new systems of international integration. Scholars who emphasize the historically contingent social construction of human institutions and who focus on the transformative potential of transnational social movements have provided the greatest insight into what can be done to confront the ethical issues raised by contemporary global governance. Almost all analysts agree that the current great powers cannot be relied upon to facilitate progressive change, although that is only one reason why global governance is likely to remain inefficient and incapable of shifting resources from the world's rich to the poor, even though it may continue to play a role in promoting liberal democracy and the empowering of women.     

Entitled to Health? Social Protection in Chile's Plan AUGE

In theory everyone has the right to health. However, in reality many low income households are unable to fully access health services and therefore cannot fully claim their rights. Recently, in an attempt to overcome these limitations, health reforms in Chile under the Plan AUGE have proposed a series of legal entitlements to health care that are available to everyone regardless of income level. While this is an important starting point in ensuring more universal access to health, the process has raised a number of important issues, particularly on how these entitlements have been defined and how far they will be able to transform (gender) inequalities within the health system. Looking at this from a gender perspective enables us to see that despite the shift from a health care system based on redistributive rights towards one based on the right of recognition, certain sectors of the population remain excluded. Decision‐making processes have remained technocratic, and women's groups have been marginalized from the debate around the reform. Moreover, health policy makers continue to ignore the role of the unpaid care economy in health care provision. The current reform has served to reinforce the gender roles around health care.     

‘Fit Only for the Scrap Heap’: Rebuilding Returned Soldier Manhood in Australia after 1945

This paper examines the expert and popular discourses that sought to construct and disseminate the idea that Australia faced a masculinity crisis with the return of servicemen at the end of the Second World War. It explores how these discourses proposed a process of remasculinisation to ensure the successful reintegration of returning servicemen. These discourses were directed primarily at wives, mothers and fiancées, who were seen to bear the responsibility for rebuilding the manhood of returning men. Doctors played an important role in producing this prevailing discourse on the looming post‐war masculinity crisis, identifying its symptoms and proposing solutions. This crisis discourse filtered into popular culture through many means, predominantly, however, advice literature and romance fiction. While some of these expert and popular discourses constructed a backward looking ideal of domesticity for women, romance fiction in particular explored more modern possibilities of companionate marriage. The dissemination of a discourse about an impending masculinity crisis created different possibilities for the reconstruction of relations between men and women. The remasculinisation project could look both backwards (through ideals of women's subservience to damaged men) and forwards (through notions of marriage as a partnership) in imagining post war gender relations.     

Persistent pasts,present struggles,imagined futures: Gender geographies in South Africa after apartheid

Abstract

Any analysis of South African gendered performances, identities and inequalities confront past and present experiences of and struggles with race, colonialism, post-colonial development and sexuality. These tensions shape gendered geographical work, highlighting the importance of histories of race, class, and sexuality, as well as the ways in which gender itself can be approached as an analytical category and epistemic framing in South Africa. In this paper we focus on two avenues that have engaged scholars since the end of apartheid, namely: gender and development; and gender and geographies of sexualities. The former articulates the particular ways that the historical spatially exclusionary trajectory of the country has impacted especially on women and their ability to engage with state and national building projects post-apartheid. The latter explores how South African geographies (despite the country’s progressive post-apartheid constitution with regard to LGBT rights) continue to reflect and (at times) enable spatial segregation and inequalities related to gender. A key strength of research in South African gender scholarship is that it complicates and challenges how we might approach gender and gender-based inequalities, and the diverse ways in which gender categories and framings can be imagined, deployed and troubled in post-colonial states and cities.     

The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy

This article argues critically that the consequences of a binary system of gender norms is experienced as a kind of gender tyranny both for those who transgress gender in their daily lives, but also for those whose lives are lived within such constraints. Feminist geographers and urban theorists have argued that space is gendered and that gendering has profound consequences for women. This article extends this analysis and shows how rigid categorizations of gender fail to include the intersexed and transgendered populations, a small and highly marginalized segment of the wider population. This article uses autoethnographic methods to illustrate the ways that those who transgress gender norms experience a tyranny of gender that shapes nearly every aspect of their public and private lives. The nature of these consequences is explored using citations from the transgender and queer literature as well as the lived experience of this tyranny by the author in a continuum of public to private spaces, including: parking lots, public restrooms, shopping malls, the workplace and the home.     

Political Philosophy and the Problems of International Order: Machiavelli,Kant, and Aristotle

Although international order is a consistent concern for both statesmen and citizens, it has received only rare attention from political theorists. In this essay I evaluate the contemporary international order in light of political thought, specifically with reference to Machiavelli, Kant, and Aristotle. Contemporary international order and its historical roots in the Peace of Augsburg find theoretical expression in the writings of Machiavelli, especially insofar as he advocates for overturning classical political thought. By rejecting classical political thought and the notion of natural right, along with Christian doctrine, Machiavelli set the stage for the political absolutism that underlies the concept of state sovereignty, as it was expressed at Augsburg. Kant, in rejecting Machiavelli's political absolutism, prepared the ground for international human rights. In doing so he provided theoretic ground for the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But while human rights may provide a welcome balance to state sovereignty, they undermine international order insofar as international order relies on state sovereignty. I suggest that the current theoretical and legal inconsistencies that come about from making room for both state sovereignty and human rights may have their origins in modern political theory's rejection of Aristotelian political thought.