Abstract
The overwhelming evidence of women’s subordination as a global and transhistorical phenomenon is sufficient condition for supposing that it is enduring and pervasive. Despite this evidence, the forms that oppression takes in diverse cultures are dissimilar enough to limit dialogue about the definitions of oppression and its potential remedies. Is it possible to construct a coherent voice in expression of “women’s” concerns? What is international about the forms of women’s subordination, where “international” is the analytic category?2
Discrimination is most dramatically illustrated by toleration of violence against a supposedly subordinate group and acceptance of it as a cultural norm. So long as governments do nothing to stop violence against women they are, in effect, condoning such violence and thereby depriving women of their fundamental freedoms and human rights.1
—CEDAW Meeting Statement
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Notes
Sarah Brown, “Feminism, International Theory, and International Relations of Gender Inequality,” in Millenium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (1988): 461–75.
Felicia Gaer, “In Brief,” International Human Rights Abuses against Women: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations, House of Representatives, 101st Cong., 2nd Sess., Mar 21 and July 26, 1990, p. 70: “while the international human rights community continues to struggles with the appropriateness of intrusion into private life—seen as possible rights violations—the CEDAW convention seeks precisely such intrusiveness. Moreover, while international human rights law and implementation mechanisms are ill-suited to deal with issues of covert structural violence, the CEDAW wants—indeed needs—to address such matters to extirpate many forms of gender-discrimination.”
Belinda Clark, “The Vienna Convention Reservations Regime and the Convention on Discrimination against Women,” in The American Journal of International Law, vol. 85 (1991): 282. “As of December 31, 1989, one hundred states were parties, of which forty-one had entered substantive reservations.”
Rebecca Cook, “Reservations to the Women’s Convention,” a paper presented to the International Women’s Rights Action Watch (IWRAW) Loes Brunott Seminar, 20 January 1992, New York City.
Riane Eisler, “Human Rights: Toward an Integrated Theory for Action,” Human Rights Quarterly vol. 9, no. 3 (1987): 287–308.
Hilkka Pietila and Jeanne Vickers, Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations (London: Zed Books, 1990).
Angela Miles, Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions 1960’s–1990’s (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 93–97.
Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright, “Feminist Approaches to International Law,” in American Journal of International Law, vol. 85 (1991): 621.
Clark, 1991, p. 284. See also, Margaret Galey, “International Enforcement of Women’s Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 6 no. 4 (1984): 463–90.
Kathy E. Ferguson, “Women, Feminism and Development,” in Women, International Development and Politics, ed. Kathleen Staudt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 291–303.
Jack Donnelly, International Human Rights (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993).
Natalie Hevener, in her International Law and the Status of Women (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1983), uses three analytical categories to describe and assess laws pertaining to women. These categories (protective, corrective, and sex-neutral) are offered as a perspective on the attitudes toward the rights of women in their respective countries.
Kathleen Staudt, “Gender Politics in Bureaucracy: Theoretical Issues in Comparative Perspective,” in Women, International Development, and Politics, ed. Kathleen Staudt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
David Matas, “The Canadian Council for Refugees—Twelve Recommendations on Gender Persecution,” Human Rights Tribune vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 32. (In the United States, there are several states that do not recognize spousal rape as a crime).
Margaret Galey, “International Enforcement of Women’s Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 4 (1984): 463–90.
Leslie Calman in “Are Women’s Rights ‘Human Rights’?” (Barnard College: working paper # 146, 1987), p. 10, notes: “The 1979 Convention [CEDAW] is a significant improvement over the 1967 Declaration [DEDAW] in that it omits any language that proclaims the primacy of the family over the rights of the individuals who make up the family.” And later, “The language giving priority to the family, however, has a much longer tradition in international law, and whether the feminism of the 1979 document will be extended in the future remains to be seen.” But as Calman says very clearly, “ This is not to say that the family per se is the cause of all this; the family, in the socialist feminist critique, is an agent of control for much larger social forces, specifically capital and the state. Nonetheless, to strengthen the power of the family unit does not seem a strategy likely to benefit women; instead it would benefit those men who control women’s labor and its products.”
Johannes Morsink, “Women’s Rights and the Universal Declaration,” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 2 (1991): 229–256.
C. B. Macpherson, Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 21.
Pietila and Vickers, 1990, p. 73: “Thus, IWY is one example of an NGO initiative taken up by the UN System—one which on this occasion exceeded all expectations, developing into a process with dimensions and repercussions such as the initiators had hardly dared to dream of [sic].”
Chilla Bulbeck. One World Women’s Movement (London: Pluto Press, 1988), pp. 119–125.
Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1977).
See, Rosalinda Mendez Gonzalez, “Distinctions in Western Women’s Experience: Ethnicity, Class, and Social Change,” in The Women’s West, eds. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).
Also Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984).
Angela Miles, Integrative Feminisms (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 109–117.
Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It (Cambridge: VanVactor and Goodheart, 1983).
Elise Young, in Keepers of the History: Women and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York and London: Teacher’s College Press, 1992), p. 6, says: “Women struggle for the right to equal access to male constructs: to economic systems, justice, education. They struggle within a social system and social reality defined and controlled for the benefit of those men with the most access to male power.”
Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 38–39.
See Jane Flax’s argument in Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship; Feminist Politics; Female Subjectivity, eds. Gisela Bock and Susan James (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 193–210.
Chilla Bulbeck, “Equality, Politics and Gender,” One World Women’s Movement (London: Pluto, 1988).
Nancy Hartsock, “Feminist Theory and the Development of Revolutionary Strategy,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Z. R. Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pp. 56, 58.
Congress, House of Representatives, International Human Rights Abuses against Women: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations (“In Brief,” by Felicia Gaer), 101st Cong., 2nd Sess., March 21 and July 26, 1990.
Barbara Lewis, “Farming Women, Public Policy, and the Women’s Ministry: A Case Study from Cameroon,” in Women, International Development, and Politics, ed. Kathleen Staudt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 180–200. Not until the World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, in 1995, were the productive and reproductive efforts of women included in the overall gross national product of their specific countries.
Zillah Eisenstein, The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Eisenstein argues, for instance, that every woman has a universal human right to control her body, yet this right must be specified in terms of a woman’s differing circumstances, such as her ability to get pregnant.
Jack Donnelly, in “Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly vol. 6, no. 4 (1984): 403, recognizes that universal-ism and cultural relativism lie along a continuum, but, he says, “A cultural relativist account of human rights, however, seems to be guilty of logical contradiction. If human rights are based in human nature, on the simple fact that one is a human being, and if human nature is universal, then how can human rights be relative in any fundamental way?”
Women, International Development, and Politics, ed. Kathleen Staudt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
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© 2000 Diana Zoelle
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Zoelle, D.G. (2000). Globalizing Concern for Women’s Human Rights. In: Globalizing Concern for Women’s Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299699_4
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