Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Who were the non-Western women delegates who took part in the drafting of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) from 1945 to 1948? Which Member States did these women represent, and in what ways did they push for a more inclusive language than the Rights of Man in the texts? This book provides a gendered historical narrative of human rights from the San Francisco Conference in 1945 to the final vote of the UDHR in the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948. It highlights the contributions by Latin American feminist delegates and the prominent non-Western female representatives from new Member States of the UN.
Rebecca Adami is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education, Stockholm University and Associate Researcher at SOAS University of London.
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Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Rebecca Adami
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Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Rebecca Adami
First published 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Adami, Rebecca, author.
Title: Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights / By Rebecca Adami.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. | Series: Routledge research in gender and history ; 32 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018031815 (print) | LCCN 2018034203 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429437939 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138345355 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429437939 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Women (International law)History. | WomenLegal status, laws, etc. | Womens rights. | United Nations. General Assembly. Universal Declaration of Human RightsHistory. | United Nations Human Rights Council.
Classification: LCC K644 (ebook) | LCC K644 .A93 2018 (print) | DDC 341.4/8dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031815
ISBN: 978-1-138-34535-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-43793-9 (ebk)
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To
any woman or girl
who aspires
to reach higher
According to Maud Eduards1 women transgress the limit for what is permitted when they act as a group. They increase the definition of what is legitimate experience and what is politics and not.
Note
. See further, Maud Eduards, Rethinking Change: Current Swedish Feminist Research (Uppsala: Swedish Science Press, 1992).
What united the nations was the victory of defeating National Socialism.
The National Socialist Party, known as Nazism in Germany, had denied the basic rights of all deemed a threat to the principle of the primacy of the nation state during the Second World War: Jewish people, Romani people, homosexuals, dissidents, the disabled, and everyone not aligning themselves with its ideology.
Testimonies from one of the largest death camps in Poland started to reach the public eye in 1944. A year later, representatives were invited to San Francisco to draw up the founding Charter of the United Nations. A Jewish correspondent in the Red Army, Vasily Grossman, was one of the first to document what had happened at Treblinkahow even trained dogs would not obey the Nazi soldiers on the death walk to the gas chambers. Children were able to breathe for a longer time than the grown-ups,1 he writes.
What had happened was such an industry of systematic horror that, to restore any faith in humankind, the inclination to attempt to move on from the devastating facts and images, rather than to remember what human beings are capable of, must have been strong.
The survivors testified to facts that are too terrible to graspthe number of millions dead and human actions too vicious to understand. The Red Army, when reaching the death camps, confronted villagers who had lived only kilometers away from the enormous genocide that had taken place, forcing them to see what had occurred close to their homes, demanding them to acknowledge the dreads. Hitlers plan had been to rid the camps of all traces and keep thousands of witnesses to the genocide silent, but what had happened could not be buried.
After the Second World War, nations on the victorious side declared themselves to stand united and to act early on any future signs of governments turning against their people, which had so forcefully eroded the ethical principles of human equality and dignity. Equality and dignity were not won by victory in war; the respect for the ethical principles had to be regained through international deliberations, law-making, and politics based on human rights. The genocide had occurred in the middle of Europe, within industrial complexesstill the world had not reacted.
Inhabitants of the village of Wlka, the one closest to Treblinka, tell that sometimes the screams of women who were being killed were so terrible that the whole village would lose their heads and rush into the forest, in order to escape from these shrill screams that carried through tree trunks, the sky and the earth.2
