In a society that privileged religion, women were also casualties of biblical interpretations that emphasized their original sin: Eve over Deborah, Jezebel over Sarah. Women were “civilly dead,” in the words of the Declaration of Sentiments, the document that emerged from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first women’s rights convention in the United States. Should women receive more than a primary education? Should they control their own wages? Should they enjoy guardianship rights with respect to their children? And of increasing concern, should they have the right to vote? Nearly two centuries later, a version of this discourse still exists in the United States, where Americans often speak of “women’s issues.” There is no corollary for men’s matters.įrom the republic’s earliest days, women were constrained by a British inheritance: the common law, which dictated that women were essentially the charges of their husbands or, if unmarried, of their fathers or brothers.

They were instead relegated to what was known in the nineteenth century as “the woman question,” which was really a bundle of questions, the answers to which were generally no. Yet the fact that it was necessary to make explicit such an anodyne sentiment spoke to the troubling reality that for decades, the conventional wisdom held that women’s rights had nothing to do with human rights. But in the United States and elsewhere, the phrase resonated-and still does.

State Department were nervous about her address, believing that even such a seemingly benign mention of human rights would irritate the Chinese hosts of the UN-sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women. As Hillary Clinton proclaimed near the end of a fiery speech delivered to an international audience in Beijing in 1995, “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” Some officials at the U.S.

Vanguard martha s jones