Feminism and Universal Human Rights

Feminism is well-defined as the political, economic, and cultural movement intended to
achieve equal rights and women’s legal protection. The theory of feminism comprises
philosophies, political and sociological theories involved through the equality of sexes, and
campaigns for women’s interests and rights. Gender inequalities exist globally, extending from
the gap between men and women’s pay to work-life balance. Through the feminism movement,
people can take up the role they choose to follow and not societal pressures.
The history of feminism is divided into three waves. The first feminist wave occurred in
the nineteenth century. The second wave happened in the duration between the 1960s and 1970s,
with the third wave occurring from the 1990s to the current times (Dicker, 2016).  The theory of
feminism has changed many perspectives within the current society, stretching from culture to
law. The feminist movement has been at the lead of advocating for women’s legal rights, such as
property rights, rights of contracts, and the right to vote. The movement also seeks to protect
women from sexual harassment and rape, and domestic violence and provide workplace rights
that involve women, such as equal pay and maternity leave. As a whole, the theory of feminism a
whole seeks to fight against gender-specific discrimination against women.

History
First wave

The first wave of feminism happened in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth
century. At first, it focused on promoting property rights and contract rights for women and
opposed the chattel marriage and the possession of married women by their male spouses.
However, it changed its focus as the nineteenth century came to an end and mainly concentrated
on achieving political power, which was primary focused on the right of women’s suffrage.

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Some of the women who were leaders of the feminism movement include Susan B. Anthony,
Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The first wave of feminism in America came to an
end with the pass of the Nineteenth Revision to the Constitution of 1919, which approved
women the right to vote.

Second Wave

The second wave marks the period between the early 1960s extending to the 1980s. The
second wave was an extension of the first wave, which included the suffragettes in America and
the United Kingdom. The first wave was motivated by voting rights, while the second wave
concentrated more on other equality problems, such as putting an end to women’s discrimination.
The wave focused on women’s political and cultural inequalities, emphasizing encouraging
women to understand their lives’ various features as a reflecting sexiest power structure.

Third-wave

The third wave occurred in the 1990s, which came as a response to the second wave’s
alleged failures. The third wave was mainly focused on avoiding what it is seen as the second
wave’s essentialist descriptions of femininity, which is seen to over-stress the white woman in
the upper-middle-class experiences. The third wave also brought into the picture feminist leaders
such as Chela Sandoval, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, and other black feminists who aimed at
negotiating space within the feminist ideology to consider race-related biases. The third wave
also comprises the in-house debates between feminists who argue there are indispensable
dissimilarities among the genders and those who argue that there are no indispensable
dissimilarities among the genders and argue that gender roles are due to social setting.

Universal Human Rights

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The contemporary theory I chose universal human rights. Universal human rights are the
norms that aim at protecting people everywhere from extreme legal, political, and social abuses.
Human rights’ philosophy seeks to answer nature, existence, justification, universality, and legal
status of human rights.

How Feminism Contributes to Universal Human Rights

Since women are also human beings, universal human rights would naturally occur that
would incorporate women’s rights. Women’s rights are positioned at the periphery of universal
human rights. They maintain that women’s rights are already part of the universal human rights
law and the ones who maintain that women’s rights can not be included in the universal human
rights law. Women’s rights both contest and support the dominant universal rights model. The
universal human rights law is criticized for being a western-based and dominated project that
fails to address the third world’s concerns and the east efficiently. Women’s rights, however,
apply to every woman globally. The difference that this poses causes the two not to be fully
compatible. The other issue is that universal human rights fail to be expansive enough. It fails to
include the rights of women. However, to accommodate women’s rights, the human rights law
can be expanded through new sets of rights or reordering of the rights that exist (McLaren,
2017).
In the 21 st century, the debate of whether women are indeed humans and they have human
rights. It resulted in the revolutionary idea and created a universal human rights platform
movement, which advocates for recognizing and respecting women’s rights as human rights. In
September 1995, in China, the movement was supported by the first lady Hillary Rodham
Clinton and other world leaders. She recognized that the rights of women are human rights. The
global initiative focused on recognizing and encouraging women’s rights as human rights

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through the abolition of the longstanding invisibility of women globally, to create a means
through putting into practice of the already existing rights which will benefit the lives of women,
and also to develop, increase, and change the content and implication of such rights to relate to
the reality of women and oblige women’s equality globally.
In conclusion, feminism has come a long way to get to where it is today. The rights of
women in the world are now more recognized and including women’s rights as part of the
universal human rights goes a long way towards achieving and protecting women against the
various discriminations they face in society.

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References

Peters, J. S., & Wolper, A. (Eds.). (2018). Women’s rights, human rights: International feminist
perspectives. Routledge.
McLaren, M. A. (2017). Decolonizing Rights: Transnational Feminism and “Women’s Rights as
Human Rights”. Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization, 83
116.
Dicker, R. C. (2016). A history of US feminisms. Hachette UK.