Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T15:17:02.963Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2011

Carola Sachse
Affiliation:
Institute for Contemporary History, University of Vienna
Atina Grossmann
Affiliation:
Cooper Union, New York

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Human Rights, Utopias, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Europe
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See von Braun, Christina and Matthes, Bettina, Verschleierte Wirklichkeit. Die Frau, der Islam und der Westen (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 Klinger, Cornelia, Kämper, Gabriele, and Sachse, Carola, “Im Gespräch mit … Cornelia Klinger,” Feministische Studien 27, no. 2 (2009): 258267Google Scholar. See the issue for papers from the Vienna conference focused on visions of “utopia.”

3 Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 187Google Scholar. See also Hunt's, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Scott, Joan Wallach, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

4 See Zahra, Tara, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, for an excellent discussion of nationalism and “national indifference” in central Europe.

5 See Popa, Raluca Maria, “Translating Equality between Women and Men across Cold War Divides: Women Activists from Hungary and Romania and the Creation of International Women's Year,” in Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist East and Central Europe, ed. Massino, Jill and Penn, Shana (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 5974CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zinsser, Judith P., “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi: The United Nations Decade for Women 1975–1985,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 139168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Grimm, Dieter, Recht und Staat der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987)Google Scholar.

7 Gerhard, Ute, Menschenrechte und Frauenrechte. Überlegungen zu Gleichheit und Geschlechtergerechtigkeit im Islam, vol. III, Schriften des Essener Kollegs für Geschlechterforschung 4 (2004), 2022Google Scholar; Rumpf, Mechthild, Gerhard, Ute, and Jansen, Mechthild M., eds., Facetten islamischer Welten. Geschlechterordnungen, Frauen- und Menschenrechte in der Diskussion (Bielefeld: transcript, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 On the origins of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see among many sources Glendon, Mary Ann, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001)Google Scholar.

9 See Okin, Susan Moller, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed. Cohen, Joshua, Howard, Matthew, and Nussbaum, Martha (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 724Google Scholar; and Okin, Susan Moller, “Multiculturalism and Feminism: No Simple Question, No Simple Answers,” in Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights, and Diversity, ed. Eisenberg, Avigail and Spinner-Haley, Jeff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6789CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 In her theoretical discussion of an “intersectional concept of violence,” Birgit Sauer refers above all to acts of violence against migrant women occurring in the overlapping spaces of migrant and majority societies. See Sauer, Birgit, “Gewalt, Geschlecht, Kultur. Fallstricke aktueller Debatten um Traditionsbedingte Gewalt,” in Zwangsfreiheiten. Multikulturalität und Feminismus, ed. Sauer, Birgit and Strasser, Sabine (Vienna: Promedia Verlag & Südwind, 2008), 5259Google Scholar.

11 Young, Iris Marion, “Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference,” in Multiculturalism and Political Theory, ed. Laden, Anthon Simon and Owen, David (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6088Google Scholar, cited in Sauer, “Gewalt, Geschlecht, Kultur,” 58.

12 Remarkably, the first studies in this context deal with communist women or with women in “state socialist” societies. See, for example, de Haan, Francisca, “Hoffnungen auf eine bessere Welt. Die frühen Jahre der Internationalen Demokratischen Frauenföderation (IDFF/WIDF) (1945–1950),” Feministische Studien 27, no. 2 (2009): 241257Google Scholar; and Popa, “Translating Equality,” or Zinsser, “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi.” For the nineteenth century, see, for example, Gerhard, Ute, Verhältnisse und Verhinderungen. Frauenarbeit, Familie und Rechte der Frauen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978)Google Scholar; and Gerhard, Ute et al. , eds., Differenz und Gleichheit. Menschenrechte haben (k)ein Geschlecht (Frankfurt am Main: Helmer, 1990)Google Scholar; as well as Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, and Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution.

13 On Eleanor Roosevelt, see Glendon, A World Made New, and Black, Alida, Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

14 Eckel, Jan, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 437484Google Scholar. For an important earlier review essay by the late and much missed Cmiel, Ken, see his “The Recent History of Human Rights: Review Essay,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 117135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 This argument is developed by Moyn, Samuel in his critical study of human-rights ideology and historiography, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

16 Garling, Marguerite, The Human Rights Handbook: A Guide to British and American International Human Rights Organizations (London and Worcester: Writers and Scholars Educational Trust, 1979), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in Eckel, “Utopie der Moral,” 458.

17 Eckel, “Utopie der Moral,” 479–82.

18 Mazower, Mark, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 389392Google Scholar. See also his essay collection, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

19 Mazower, “Strange Triumph,” 393.

20 Kelsen, Hans, “The Preamble of the Charter—A Critical Analysis,” Journal of Politics 8 (1946): 134159CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in Mazower, “Strange Triumph,” 393.

21 Mazower, “Strange Triumph,” 394–397.

22 See, for example, Moyn, The Last Utopia, or Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. Quataert's, Jean H. new book Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)Google Scholar explicitly considers the “gender factor” in the social history of human-rights politics, but focuses on the era starting with the Cold War. See also her The Gendering of Human Rights in the International Systems of Law in the Twentieth Century, American Historical Association Series in Global and Comparative History, general ed. Adas, Michael (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 2006)Google Scholar. For a different approach not directly focused on the origins of the United Nations human-rights regime that does integrate gender, see Zahra, Tara, Lost Children: Displaced Families and the Aftershocks of World War II in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Uta Ruppert notes that current women human-rights movements are open to all categories of human rights and reject a hierarchization of those rights. Moreover, they particularly reject a splitting of those rights relevant to the public political sphere from those referring to a sphere culturally constituted as private. See Ruppert, Uta, “Frauen Menschenrechte. Konzepte und Strategien im Kontext transnationaler Frauenbewegungspolitik,” in Handbuch Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung. Theorie, Methoden, Empirie, ed. Becker, Ruth and Kortendiek, Beate, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008)Google Scholar, 912 ff.