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.     

A Ceramic Assemblage from the Seabed near Kinlochbervie, Scotland, UK

An assemblage of pottery and bricks recovered during two seasons of diving has been sorted by fabric and vessel type, quantified and analysed. A substantial quantity of Italian maiolica, including examples in the grotesque style, and others from Montelupo and other Italian manufactories, has been considered from an art historical perspective, while a range of more utilitarian earthenwares, including olive jars and micaceous redwares, are also present. The chronology of this assemblage is discussed, together with the functions of particular types and an interpretation of the origin of the ship on which they were carried.
© 2004 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

Impacts of an Iron and Steel Plant on Residential Property Values

The hedonic price method is used to estimate the relationship between residential property values and proximity to an integrated iron and steel plant located in the outskirts of Gijón, a city in the north of Spain. Empirical results suggest that there is a statistically significant negative relationship between housing values and the distance from the iron and steel plant. From a partial equilibrium analysis, increasing the distance from the plant, decreasing plant production or dismantling the plant would lead to an increase in the value of the housing units. The results show as well that the housing units located nearest to the factory would be the most favoured by applying the aforementioned changes.     

Introduction: Women's Rights as Human Rights: Global Contestations over the Longue Durée

This short essay introduces the forum on ‛Women's Rights as Human Rights: Global Contestations over the Longue Durée’. It briefly outlines the state of the field, a new agenda for research in the area and the topics of the articles in the forum. The forum derives from a symposium on the same topic sponsored by Gender & History and held at the University of Sheffield in spring 2022.