I also remember an astonishing discussion with an educated man in Afghanistan about the case of a girl who’d been “given in Bad” to settle a dispute. Bad is a tribal law—illegal but still practised—that basically says, if your tribe has a fight with my tribe and my tribe wins, you are obliged to give me a girl child, preferably about the age of four or maybe two or three little girls depending on the size of the harm done. The child in question was eight. She had just escaped after four years of being housed with the livestock, of being tethered to a harness and being used as a plow horse, of being sexually assaulted by the men of the house at night. I said to the man, “How can anyone treat a child like that?” His reply? “I know it is wrong, but it is our way.”
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So how is it that children’s rights, women’s rights, human rights are hailed as the way forward in some places while the concept can hardly get traction in others? The recorded human rights debate started long ago, in the thirteenth century BCE. The concept developed slowly over the centuries, and the idea that women have rights is a relatively recent invention. Women tried to change their status and even scored victories here and there century after century but were either thwarted or sold out before their elusive equality rights could become recognized.
“Universal brotherhood” and the “common good” are themes in the earliest writings about the idea of human rights. There is evidence of such laws, though paternalistic in nature, having been enacted to secure the common good in the earliest religious doctrines. For example, despite the derisive language about women in his Letters to the Corinthians, Paul the Apostle in Acts 17–19 says that God created all humankind and individuals of all races equal under his tutelage.
Although passages restrict women’s rights and even allow a man to beat his wife, the Quran’s Sura 12, 168–242 reads, “The rights of women apt to be trampled under foot, now clearly affirmed.” The Ten Commandments is a moral code that applies to men and women. So, too, the early Buddhist writings. The duties, rights and responsibilities of citizens were also written in the Hindu Vedas, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi and the Analects of Confucius.
In 300 BCE, Athenian women had no rights whatsoever, but Spartan women did. Plato’s Republic contains a defence of human rights for women at a time when women were entirely excluded from political life. His student Aristotle used the idea of the common good as the baseline for his Politics, which had a profound effect on the development of human rights, as did Cicero’s ideas expressed in The Laws. But women’s rights were not top of mind even for these intellectuals. Just as in today’s version of the debate, religious leaders relied on the Holy Scriptures for their arguments while scholars claimed that the concept of human rights was secular. In either case, women’s voices were generally excluded.
By 69 BCE, Egyptian women had taken on a political role. In her new biography of Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff offers fascinating details of the lives of Egyptian women: the right to choose her own husband, to inherit equally, to hold property, to divorce. Women lent money and operated barges, served as priests, initiated lawsuits, hired flute players and owned vineyards. Schiff writes, “As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.”
At that time their Roman sisters were expected to be silent and invisible in intellectual and political life. A Roman woman remained without political and legal rights, even though the Roman Empire devoted considerable energy to developing natural law and the rights of citizens for the next four hundred years.
The Quran began its life as a holy text by promoting women’s rights in marriage, divorce and inheritance. It also prohibited female infanticide and recognized women as full persons. How the interpretations of the Quran went from being the most progressive in the thirteenth century to the least in the twenty-first is a holy paradox.
It wasn’t until 1405, when a novel called Le Livre de la cité des dames by the French poet Christine de Pizan was published, that women’s rights got the attention needed to try to alter the status quo. Pizan has been hailed as the first female author to make her living by writing and by Simone de Beauvoir as one of the earliest feminists. In her novel, she constructs three allegorical foremothers—Reason, Justice and Rectitude. Together they create a dialogue that addresses issues of consequence to all women: a woman’s right to education and to live and work independently and participate in public life and take responsibility for herself.
The Enlightenment period that followed in the mid-seventeenth century saw the discussion of human rights moving onto centre stage. Scholars such as Thomas Hobbes sought to protect the individual’s natural right to life and security, but “individuals” were men, not women. Political thinkers from Locke to Rousseau, Kant to Robespierre were claiming individual human rights and freedom from religious authority but didn’t take up the cause of women. Then as now, it was women who had to demand that human rights be applied equally to females. The French playwright and political activist Olympe de Gouges presented her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne to Queen Marie Antoinette in 1791. In it she included the right to bodily integrity, the right to vote, to hold public office, to work for fair or equal pay, to education, to own property, to serve in the military, to enter into legal contracts and to have marital, religious and parental rights.
A year later Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and addressed the consequences of violence against women. Her husband, William Godwin, was a campaigner for women’s rights, as was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who would marry their daughter.
The notion of human rights flourished along with the concept of socialism during the Industrial Age in the 1800s, probably due to the miseries associated with industrialization, says Micheline Ishay, author of The Human Rights Reader. She lists the emancipation of women, along with the prohibition of child labour, the establishment of factory health and safety measures and universal voting rights, including a woman’s right to vote, as major advances promoted in the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and John Stuart Mill. In his 1869 essay, “The Subjection of Women,” Mill wrote, “We are continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to women her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband; no less so, as far as the legal obligation goes, than slaves.” Mill, a member of parliament, called for women to have the right to vote and in 1867 proposed that the term man in relevant legislation in the House of Commons be replaced with person.
If the Industrial Revolution set the stage for human rights as a worldwide phenomenon, it was the dawn of the twentieth century that saw the first recording of those theories in international documents. In 1902, prompted by the women’s suffrage movement, international law delegates meeting in The Hague adopted a series of conventions aimed at setting international standards for marriage, divorce and the custody of minor children. It was the start of a century of change for women.
Following the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War, the Covenant of the League of Nations was drawn up in 1919 and included legislation supporting “fair and human conditions of labour for men, women and children.” After the international catastrophe of the Second World War, the Allies and other nations set out to invent an institution that could prevent global conflict, negotiating the ground rules and charter of the United Nations. The language of that charter when it came to gender was controversial. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, balked at changing the wording “all men” to “all people” or “all human beings” because to her the term all men referred to all people. The Status of Women committee who worked on the drafting of the charter went to bat for rights-based language but was rebuffed. After much deliberation the committee agreed on “all people, men and women” but due to an error in a previous draft, the phrase “all human beings” was approved and adopted in the final report. Still, despite their best efforts, the use of “mankind” and “he” persisted in parts of the document.
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p; The next milestone came in 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. The declaration asserted that all people are equal “without distinction of any kind such as race, colour, sex, language or other status.” It was the first international agreement to proclaim sex equality as a fundamental human right. In doing so, it created a historic catalyst that sparked internationally agreed strategies, standards, programs and goals to advance the status of women worldwide.
However useful the UN charter, declaration and the covenants and conventions that have followed are in the fight for human rights, they don’t have enforcement power. The UN wields no iron fist of accountability. Even the authors of these documents knew that human rights for everyone—women as well as men, disabled as well as able-bodied, poor as well as rich—would be a tough sell. And to try to find a mechanism to make states accountable for failing to fulfil the intent of the documents and covenants that they signed was a step too far. Accordingly, the documents, while useful to the politics of embarrassment, remain dependent on the will of signatory governments to enforce them.
It’s been sixty-four years since the Declaration of Human Rights was written, almost six and a half decades of trying to make it work for “all human beings.” Despite the fact that men and women were presumed to be equal by the United Nations in 1948, equality in the home and the workplace did not follow. In most Western countries a man was not usually prosecuted for beating his wife, and a married woman could not open a bank account without her husband’s signature. Nor could she go to a hospital for treatment without her husband’s consent. Nor could she take her child to the hospital for treatment without her husband’s permission. A widow discovered that her husband’s assets did not automatically belong to her. There were quotas at universities that kept the number of female students to a minimum. Women were not allowed to play team sports at the Olympics until 1964, and then they could only play volleyball, as it was considered a non-contact sport. They weren’t allowed to compete in the marathon until 1984 because the men who ran the Olympic Games claimed that women would find it too strenuous to cover the 42,195 kilometre distance. There was clearly a lot of work to do on the freedoms and rights declared by the United Nations.
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Since most laws have been written by men, are applied by male jurists and have only very recently been analyzed in the context of the lives of women, the rights of women continue to be marginalized. Domestic life has traditionally been viewed as private and not the law’s business. Yet that is the world that women in Asia, Africa, Europe and America live in today. They share their stories over laundry at the riverside and while tending the cornfields, at the office water cooler and in quiet cafés. They whisper about abuse, neglect and oppression. Their suffering is part of a private world.
The women’s rights activists and scholars Charlotte Bunch and Samantha Frost describe the public-versus-private conundrum in their essay “Women’s Human Rights: An Introduction”: “A major effect of the gender nature of the public/private split is that human rights violations of women that occur between ‘private’ individuals have been made invisible and deemed to be beyond the purview of the state. Thus, abuses done to women in the name of family, religion, and culture have been hidden by the sanctity of the so-called private sphere, and perpetrators of such human rights violations have enjoyed immunity from accountability for their actions.”
As the second wave of the women’s movement (with its strong focus on eradicating the distinction between the personal and the political) gained momentum during the 1970s, the General Assembly of the UN declared 1975 as International Women’s Year and organized the First World Conference on Women in Mexico City. The UN subsequently declared the years 1976 to 1985 as the UN Decade for Women.
Although 126 UN documents were written to establish the status of women, the most definitive instrument on women’s equal rights was the creation in 1979 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which has been signed by nearly every country in the world, including places such as Saudi Arabia, Swaziland and Afghanistan. CEDAW is often used to try to bring states that oppress women to account with what is called “shadow reporting.” This is how it works: the CEDAW oversight committee meets three times a year to discuss issues that need highlighting, such as a country that agrees to provide health care for women but locates clinics so far away that it is impossible for women to access the help they were promised. In that case, the country in question files a “shadow report” written by the women affected by the issue in question rather than the government in charge. Then the CEDAW committee in New York sends a team to investigate the complaint and hold the country to account.
Two more international conferences on women’s issues were organized in the eighties—in Copenhagen in 1980 and in Nairobi in 1985. The conferences launched a new era in global efforts to promote the advancement of women by opening a worldwide dialogue on gender equality. In 1993, at the UN World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna, women were ready to present a new vision of human rights. They questioned why women’s rights and gender-based violence were left out of human rights considerations. They prepared the Vienna Declaration, which says, “The human rights of women and of the girl child are an inalienable, integral, and indivisible part of universal human rights.”
The Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 concentrated entirely on the human rights of women and girls. The resulting Platform for Action—asserting that women’s rights are human rights—was mainstreamed into all policies and programs of the United Nations. The slogan “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” went viral and became a rallying cry for women the world over.
Centuries of change have seen women move from being absent in the human rights debate to taking part in it and finally to lobbying for laws that protect their rights. But even now one problem is confoundingly persistent: in many cultures, women are taught to believe that suffering is their lot. Farida Shaheed says her research shows that women who are oppressed need a space where they can gather to share their experiences in the public sphere: “They can’t do this at home because for many women it isn’t a safe place to discuss power and empowerment. When they hear others’ stories, they realize, ‘It’s not my bad fate or bad luck that my husband beats me.’ They realize that other women have the same issues and that they can make changes in their lives. Families are the best supporter but they are also the worst oppressor. Women need to build social capital beyond their families.”
Talking to other women was key for Western women in the 1960s and ’70s. And it’s the best step toward change for women seeking change today. Women in places like Afghanistan now know that other women elsewhere in the world don’t live with inexplicable laws and suffer indefensible treatment at the hands of their fathers and husbands. The questions they are posing about the legality of tribal law and polygamy, about transparency in government and the judiciary, are starting a public conversation. Despite the protestations of the fundamentalists, such conversations are giving rise to the change they seek.
Women in countries that practise female genital mutilation are asking questions about where traditions like this came from and what the medical consequences are. These are brave steps of reform that sprung from the new definition of human rights as women’s rights. Women murmured to one another about medical abnormalities and the cost of procedures to correct them, but to go public, to actually denounce ancient customs like FGM or early marriage or forced marriage, was an invitation to ostracization. International diplomats, Western feminists and health leaders have tried for decades—for the entire twentieth century, in fact—to stop the two-thousand-year-old custom of circumcising women in Asia and Africa. But none have succeeded.
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In 1997, I visited the women of Malicounda Bambara in Senegal because I heard they had eradicated FGM, a custom that their people had been practising for centurie
s. Within a month of the people of Malicounda Bambara taking a stand, thirty more villages followed their lead, abandoning excision, as it’s known in French-speaking Senegal. I followed the work of these women, and their leader Molly Melching, for the next seven years as their cry of “Never again, not my daughter” spread to villages throughout Senegal.
I went back in 2004 to update the story because the women had extended their campaign to reform harmful cultural practices to child marriage. Could they do it again—turn the tide on a practice that was grossly damaging but fully accepted, even expected? I was in for a lesson in the power of youngsters.
The day that changed everything had started out like any other school day in the remote village of Polel Diawbe in northern Senegal. Khadia Ly, ten, was sitting in her Grade 3 classroom when suddenly there was a ruckus at the door. Khadia’s uncle pushed his way past the teacher, yanked Khadia from her desk and announced that her school days were over. Then he hauled her off to prepare her for a marriage to her twenty-two-year-old cousin. The uncle was acting on orders from her father, an immigrant worker in Ivory Coast. Her mother had had no say.
Khadia’s future was no secret. Although she was only ten years old, she’d be forced to have sex, and once she started to menstruate she’d soon be pregnant, as was the custom for all young girls. But what happened next surprised everyone in Polel Diawbe, a village of 2,666.
After the little girl had been taken away, Khadia’s friends stormed out of the school to confront the village chief at the community administrator’s office. Her teacher followed. The news travelled from one thatch-roof hut to another, and within minutes, centuries of silent obedience gave way to a call for change.
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