How Women's Rights Became Human Rights: Gender, Socialism and Postsocialism in Global History, 1917-2017

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'Women's rights are human rights.' Few people would openly disagree with this statement today. Yet the United Nations did not recognise the centrality of women to its vision of universal human rights until 1993. Forty-five years after the UN adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna affirmed the need to protect the rights of women. This breakthrough is typically associated with the success of US-led feminist advocacy networks at a moment when the end of the Cold War seemed to promise a new era of global democracy based on universal human rights. But, as this research project will reveal, that is only part of the story. The scope and meaning of women's rights - in employment, education, public life, marriage, reproduction, or bodily autonomy - remain deeply contested around the world. These conflicts are historical as much as they are cultural. To understand the politics of international women's rights today, we need to look back to the past. This international research project will tell the story of struggles over women's rights during the twentieth century from a new perspective. Looking beyond the history of western feminism, it asks how Second and Third World socialist women debated women's rights from the October Revolution of 1917 until today. The promise of radical emancipation for women was a central pillar of socialist ideology during the twentieth century, although there was a striking gap between the rhetoric of equality and the reality of life for women in socialist regimes, political parties, or social movements. While contemporary human rights discourses frequently present women as suffering victims of trauma and violence, socialism claimed to create women as political subjects by liberating them from structural oppression. From the perspective of post-Cold War global history, this project will revisit the role played by global socialism in internationalizing its vision of women's emancipation and asks how this reshapes our understanding of the recent history of human rights. By establishing an international network of scholars working on the history of women and gender in global socialism, the project will create a unique body of expertise that can ask how the promise of women's emancipation was interpreted in diverse but interconnected cases including official women's organisations in state socialist Eastern Europe, communist and radical leftist movements in Western Europe or the USA, Mao's cultural revolutionaries, Maoist movements in South Asia or Latin America, and socialist (including communist) parties and movements in colonial and postcolonial Africa. This project will shed light on historical actors who are marginalised within histories of globalisation. It will also allow us to reflect on the politics of writing this contested and contradictory history from the perspective of post socialist memory and nostalgia. It will explore these questions through public history workshops and by engaging local NGOs, social enterprises and secondary school pupils in debates about the global history of women's rights as human rights in the twentieth century. This will provide a basis for future collaboration between the research team and secondary school teachers of History.Through a series of academic conferences, free public events and workshops for secondary school pupils, a monograph and journal articles, and online briefing papers and video reports, this project will make a timely contribution to current debates about the history of human rights, internationalism, and humanitarianism. It seeks to transform this scholarship by exploring the alternative moral visions that were shaping global notions of rights and international order outside the liberal democratic West, and by revealing the 'problem of women' discovered by the UN in 1993 to have been central to the global history of human rights throughout the twentieth century.