We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History.
- Authors
Donert, Celia
- Abstract
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.
- Subjects
WOMEN'S rights; HUMAN rights; FEMINISM; WOMEN; WOMEN'S history; GENDER inequality; AUTONOMY (Psychology)
- Publication
Gender & History, 2023, Vol 35, Issue 3, p862
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1468-0424.12729