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WHEN the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1994, one of its first edicts removed girls from school, forbade women from employment outside the home, and required women to wear garments totally covering themselves when they appeared in public. This measure was a clear abrogation of the principles set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted in 1979. It struck at the most basic of women's human rights, depriving them of economic, physical, and intellectual independence, and overturned what women internationally had been struggling to achieve for more than five centuries.
As John Stuart Mill argued in 1869 in his essay The Subjection of Women, the question is whether women must be forced to follow what is perceived as their "natural vocation," that is, home and family-often called the private sphere-or should be seen, in private and public life, as the equal partners of men. While the division of spheres, based on sex and known as patriarchy, may have been justified as a necessary division of labor in the early evolution of the human species, the system long ago outlived its functionality and has been challenged by women, and a few men, since at least the fifteenth century.
This essay traces the evolution of thought and activism over the centuries aimed at defining women's human rights and implementing the idea that women and men are equal members of society. Three caveats are necessary. First, because women's history has been deliberately ignored over the centuries as a means of keeping women subordinate and is only now beginning to be recaptured, this is primarily a northern story until the twentieth century. Second, because of this ignorance-that is, because so much is still unknown-any argument that the struggle to attain rights for women is only a northern or western effort is without foundation. Simply not enough available records exist detailing women's struggles or achievements in the southern or eastern parts of the world. The few records available to northern writers attest that women in other parts of the world were not content with their status. Third, the oft-heard argument that feminism (read the struggle for women's equality) is a struggle pursued primarily by elite women is simply another example of the traditional demeaning of women. Although history is replete with examples of "elite" male leaders, few have been so branded.
This essay aims to stimulate historians and human rights activists to delve deeper into the history of women's human rights throughout the world and further develop this neglected half of history. Such historical research would be a contribution to promoting women's human rights because it is from history, whether written or oral, that role models and traditions are created.
The historian Gerda Lerner has written: The fact that women were denied knowledge of the existence of Women's History decisively and negatively affected their intellectual development as a group. Women who did not know that others like them had made intellectual contributions to knowledge and to creative thought were overwhelmed by the sense of their own inferiority or, conversely, the sense of the dangers of their daring to be different. . . . Every thinking woman had to argue with the "great man" in her head, instead of being strengthened and encouraged by her foremothers.1
The Debate over Women's Rights
The original contributors to women's human rights were those who first taught women to read and thus to explore the world outside the home and immediate community. The idea of women's human rights is often cited as beginning in 1792 with Mary Wollstonecraft's book, Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in response to the promulgation of the naturalrights- of-man theory. Historical research, however, has revealed a much longer gestation period, beginning at least in the early fifteenth century with the 1405 publication of Le livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) by Christine de Pizan. This work stimulated what French feminists call the querelle des femmes (debate about women), which continues to the present.2
Because human life has so many facets, this long debate has been broad and wide-ranging. Much of the debate has involved the traditional demeaning of women. Over time, demeaning an individual or group-a common, often subconscious, technique used by one group seeking to maintain power over another-results in stereotyping and the denial of recognition of that group's accomplishments or contributions to society.
As the demeaning becomes customary, discrimination results, establishing a rationale for differential treatment of groups and the individuals within the particular group. With discrimination, the less powerful are deprived of their history, their self-confidence, and, eventually, their legal ability to function as full citizens or members of the larger group. The great irony is that women have been charged with-and have often found security in- maintaining customs and tradition, thus institutionalizing the discrimination against them through the education and socialization of children.
Breaking tradition, defying custom, and overcoming discrimination require courage and leadership. Leaders bent on effecting change must develop a new vision of the world, articulate the problems of the status quo and a new theory of social and political order, and, over time, mobilize a critical mass of supporters who share the new vision and new articulation of the problems. For women, taking leadership was a double-edged problem, a contradiction in terms. For most women, especially before safe and effective birth control was available, marriage, home, and family were their means of economic survival and social acceptance. Girls were groomed for marriage, for reproduction and nurturance of the human species.
While lauded in the abstract, and often romanticized, marriage and reproduction also have been demeaned throughout history. As Menander said two or three centuries before the birth of Christ, "marriage, if one will face the truth, is an evil, but a necessary evil."
As the Taliban so clearly understand, the prerequisites for development and implementation of women's human rights are education; the means and ability to make a living beyond childbearing, homemaking, and caring for families; freedom of movement; and a measure of respect as individual human beings, not prisoners of their sex.
Education involves the ability to receive, create, and disseminate knowledge. Knowledge is power, the foundation of intellectual and political development. It is gained through experience, education, and association with knowledgeable others. Expanded literacy among women allowed those who could not escape the confines of home to learn about the outside world and, through writing, to recount their experiences and express their ideas. Freedom to move in public and to travel independently, even within a limited area, allows both for gaining more experience and for exchanging experiences with others, increasing both knowledge and education. It took centuries for women to gain the right to education and the opportunity to find employment outside the home; it was only after women were afforded these opportunities that they could communicate their experiences inside and outside the home. The resulting education offered new opportunities for women, such as the ability, for sexually active women, to limit childbearing.
The beginning of women's education began with literacy. As literacy rates increased, women began to articulate their view of the world. Many wrote anonymously at first in order to have their work accepted for publication. The Industrial Revolution and the concomitant advances in science and technology contributed immensely to women's emancipation. Not only did more women find employment outside the home, travel and communication too became easier and cheaper. A major breakthrough was the development of safe, effective, and legal means of birth control. The fact that distribution of birth control information and devices was illegal in most countries until the early twentieth century, and that the term "family planning" became a substitute for birth control, is additional testimony to the dilemma Mill identified-men's belief that, for women to engage in their natural vocation, that of bearing and raising children and maintaining homes, they must be controlled by men.
With advances in health, sanitation, and medicine, an increasing number of women lived beyond their childbearing years, and more children lived into adulthood. Men's fear that women would not reproduce and that their progeny would not survive lessened, and the ability of women to participate in economic and political life increased.
By the time the United Nations was formed in the mid-twentieth century, internationally, a critical mass of women had been educated, were employed outside the home, and had obtained enough legal and social freedom to participate in public life, even at the international level. Numerous international women's organizations had fifty years of experience behind them. As a result of lobbying by these organizations, and with support from female delegates, the phrase "equal rights of men and women" was inserted in the UN Charter. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted, the word "everyone" rather than the male personal pronoun was used in most, but not all, of its articles. When the Commission on Human Rights failed to recognize women's aspirations adequately, women delegates and the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) supporting them were politically powerful and astute enough to obtain a freestanding Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).3 By 1979 the CSW, with the support of women delegates and NGOs and a new wave of feminism under way, had drafted and successfully lobbied the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
The Convention wove together all the ideas discussed during the preceding five centuries of debate and placed a strong emphasis on the concept of equality in family matters. The Convention covered civil and political rights as well as economic and social rights, and in 1980, with the requisite number of ratifications obtained, it became the international women's human rights treaty. At the 1993 world conference on human rights, NGOs focused on women's human rights brought the previously hidden issue of violence against women to international attention.
"Women's rights are human rights" became the cry. Although the debate, begun in 1405, continues, and the Taliban's edict illustrates that women's position in society can deteriorate, there is now worldwide recognition that the term "women's human rights" is not a redundancy. The drive to define women's human rights and eliminate discrimination against them can be seen as part of the worldwide democratization effort.