“Women’s rights are human rights.” This simple passive tagline of the feminist echoed throughout the late eighties and early nineties. Women of the global south and global north banned together on this catchphrase, making it the basis of the thesis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights petition in Vienna 1993. Charlotte Bunch explains the strength in this phrase throughout her preface entitled “How Women’s Rights Became Recognized as Human Rights”, and she calls it “… an organizing tool for feminists to provoke discussion of why human rights were not already systematically seen as including women’s rights…” (Bunch 30). She claims that via this “organizing tool” or catchphrase that “human rights abuses of women and girls moved from being seen as lamentable (read: ‘inevitable’) problems to being the responsibility of governments who would be held to account for redressing them” (Bunch 36) after several conventions engraving and soaking it into the framework of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Her story appears heroic– feminist women from the global North and South discuss the issue of women’s rights in a human rights framework with “few disagreements by region” (Bunch 34). The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women spurred as a result of women’s rights appearing as a hot topic, and CEDAW worked to draft women’s rights in regard to gender in “… areas including refugees and asylum, socioeconomic rights, torture, armed conflict, and transitional justice” (Bunch 36).
Noting these justices in women’s rights, I wonder how we devolved from these triumphs. Even now, in the torrential storm against women’s rights in partisan politics, some the women I speak to regarding “women’s rights” think the fight is over. Many of my family members giggle that I’m a Gender and Women’s Studies major. In one of my early gender and women’s studies courses in the beginning of my academic career (at UW-Madison), I overheard two females discussing “women’s rights”. One declared it futile (the word she used: stupid), claiming embarrassment to even be seen in the class. The other said, “Feminists are scary.”
This scene is obviously embarrassing to all womenkind, at least the informed ones. Despite the grand effects of framing women’s rights as human rights– propelling such new international entities like the International Criminal Court, the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences, and CEDAW– women’s rights are still not fully human rights… especially in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Despite CEDAW’s implementations to help achieve less violence against women, the U.S. has not ratified this document, and thus young eighteen year old girls sitting in their 101 courses are not safe via the only global body seeking to decimate violence against women. Essentially, these female students in front of me scoffing at women’s rights live in a country that has turned their back against their basic rights, their human rights.
This mis-education of my peers baffles me, and I wonder if the long scrutinized feminists of today can rally again behind a catch-phrase, something to help them achieve what the feminists of yesterday started. Can we even begin if “women’s advocates have found themselves needing to focus on defending previous gains rather than advnacing ton the difficult tasks of implementing these rights” (Bunch 38).
I really hope we’re not all doomed.
Gender, Torture, State in Crisis 