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

“妇女权利就是人权。”今天很少有人会公开反对这一说法。然而，直到1993年，联合国才认识到妇女在其普遍人权愿景中的核心地位。在联合国通过《世界人权宣言》45年后，在维也纳举行的世界人权会议确认了保护妇女权利的必要性。这一突破通常与美国领导的女权主义倡导网络的成功有关，当时冷战结束似乎预示着一个基于普遍人权的全球民主新时代的到来。但是，正如这个研究项目将揭示的那样，这只是故事的一部分。妇女在就业、教育、公共生活、婚姻、生育或身体自主方面的权利的范围和意义在世界各地仍存在深刻争议。这些冲突既是历史的，也是文化的。要理解当今国际妇女权利的政治，我们需要回顾过去。这个国际研究项目将从一个新的角度讲述二十世纪妇女权利斗争的故事。它超越了西方女权主义的历史，探讨了从1917年十月革命到今天，第二和第三世界的社会主义妇女是如何辩论女权的。对妇女彻底解放的承诺是20世纪社会主义意识形态的核心支柱，尽管在社会主义政权、政党或社会运动中，平等的修辞与妇女的现实生活之间存在着显著的差距。当代人权话语经常将妇女描绘成遭受创伤和暴力的受害者，而社会主义则声称通过将妇女从结构性压迫中解放出来，将她们塑造成政治主体。从冷战后全球历史的角度出发，本项目将重新审视全球社会主义在将其妇女解放愿景国际化过程中所发挥的作用，并探讨这如何重塑我们对近期人权历史的理解。​以及殖民和后殖民时期非洲的社会主义（包括共产主义）政党和运动。这个项目将揭示在全球化历史中被边缘化的历史角色。它也将允许我们从后社会主义记忆和怀旧的角度来反思写这段有争议和矛盾的历史的政治。它将通过公共历史讲习班和让当地非政府组织、社会企业和中学生参与关于二十世纪妇女权利作为人权的全球历史的辩论来探讨这些问题。这将为未来研究团队与中学历史教师的合作奠定基础。通过一系列学术会议、为中学生举办的免费公共活动和讲习班、专著和期刊文章、在线简报和视频报告，该项目将及时为当前有关人权、国际主义和人道主义历史的辩论做出贡献。它试图通过探索在自由民主的西方之外塑造全球权利和国际秩序观念的另一种道德愿景，并通过揭示联合国在1993年发现的“妇女问题”来改变这一学术成果，这一问题在整个20世纪的全球人权史上一直处于中心地位。

'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.