Women's Rights in Cold War Europe

Disentangling Feminist Histories

Bibliographic Data

ID7950656
AuthorsCelia Donert (0000-0002-1285-333X, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume218
Issuesuppl 8
Pages180-202
Publication date2013-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gts040
OpenAlexW2133303508
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited1

In 1945 the UN Charter became the first international declaration to refer to the equal rights of women as well as men in support of fundamental human rights and peace, and against the ‘scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind’. 1 This declaration was undoubtedly a landmark in the internationalization of women’s rights. 2 Human rights, rather than the principle of nationality that had been intended to secure the post-1919 peace, were viewed after 1945 as ‘critical for tackling the forms of chauvinism that nurtured belligerence’. 3 Yet the UN Charter was adopted just as the western-led feminist international networks that had promoted women’s rights since the mid-nineteenth century—in connection with campaigns for universal suffrage, social reform, temperance, and peace—had been thrown into disarray by the massive social and political transformation of Europe after the Second World War. 4 A still greater irony, as Karen Offen points out in her magisterial study of European feminisms from 1700 to 1950, was that during the 1950s and 1960s, as western organized feminism appeared to have fallen silent, the banner of international women’s rights was taken up by the communist regimes in the Soviet Union and central and eastern Europe ‘in language wholly reminiscent of the great eruptions of French feminist protest since the French Revolution’. 5 Communist support for women’s rights was emphatically not ‘feminist’, reflecting the Bolshevik—and Marxist—understanding of ‘feminism’ as a bourgeois ideology promoted by upper-class women seeking to advance their own interests at the expense of class solidarity. 6 Nonetheless, the inclusion of non-discrimination clauses on the basis of gender, as well as nationality and race, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the result of lobbying from the communist states in alliance with the women’s movement. 7

Ancient history · Cold war · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law

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