Generations of Italian Communist Women and the Making of a Women’s Rights Agenda in the Cold War (1945–68)

2020 ◽  
pp. 82-101
Author(s):  
Eloisa Betti
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
The Cold War

History and Human Rights

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Katherine M. Marino
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Cold War

The Epilogue demonstrates how the UN Charter’s women’s and human rights promises inspired feminists throughout the Americas, and how the Cold War stifled the movement and largely erased the historical memory of inter-American feminism. Paulina Luisi and Marta Vergara helped organize an inter-American feminist meeting in Guatemala in 1947 that articulated broad meanings of inter-American feminism and global women’s and human rights. However, the Cold War’s pitched battle between communism and capitalism narrowed both “feminism” and “human rights” to mean individual political and civil rights. The Cold War also contributed to historical amnesia about this movement. The epilogue explores how Cold War politics affected each of the six feminists in the book. Each woman sought in different ways to archive the movement and write inter-American feminism into the historical record. The epilogue also provides connections between their movement and the global feminist and human rights movements that emerged in the 1970s through the 90s. It argues that the idea that “women’s rights as human rights” was not invented in the 1990s; rather, it drew on the legacy of early twentieth-century inter-American feminism.

scholarly journals The cold war and the Women’s International Democratic Federation: defending women’s rights and inspiring women with achievements of the state socialism?

2020 ◽  
pp. 172-185
Author(s):  
Yulia Gradskova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
State Socialist

This paper is dedicated to the history of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (further WIDF), the influential transnational organization of the period of the Cold War. The scholars who were dealing with the history of this organization have different opinions about its activities and historical role. Indeed, several researches have shown that the federation realized a lot of solidarity work; the federation was important not least with respect to the anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles as well for cooperation between women from inside and outside Europe. But on the other hand, historically this organization was seen as dependent from the Soviet Union or as the organization where Communist ideas and Soviet bloc’s geopolitical interests have played an important role. The aim of this paper is to explore some of the contradictory aspects of the WIDF’s ideology and activities. I use the WIDF’s official publications, first of all, the federation’s journal Women of the Whole World/ Zhenshchiny mira (published from 1951 in English, French, Russian and, later on German, Spanish and Arabic) vis-à-vis the material from the archive in Moscow, belonging to the WIDF’s member organization from the Soviet Union (GARF, Fond of the Committee of the Soviet Women). In this paper I discuss the federation’s use of the achievements of the state socialist countries on the way to women’s emancipation as well as WIDF’s main political concepts and some of their interpretations. Thus, I explore the contradictions with respect to how the concepts as human rights, democracy and women’s rights were used in WIDF’s documents from different periods as well as discuss conflicts connected to their use.

Gender and Women's Rights in the Cold War

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Laville
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Global Improvement ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter, which examines the issues of gender and women's rights during the Cold War, discusses how the United States and the Soviet Union used the status of women as a measure of national progress. It explains that the United States promoted women's domesticity and consumerism while the Soviet Union maintained that the measure of woman's status was her equality to men, which should be measured in terms of equal pay and the number of women in the workforce. The chapter also discusses the factors that led to the breakdown of the Cold War paradigms for women's rights, and describes how non-aligned countries challenged the early Cold War agenda and worked toward a more nuanced approach to the global improvement of women's status.

Muslim Women Leaders and Legal Reform in Postcolonial Kenya

Hawwa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-77
Author(s):  
Ousseina Alidou
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The One

The post-Cold War conditions created new socio-political spaces in Kenya for new articulations of Muslim women’s public activism and leadership. This essay focuses on two such Muslim women in terms of their leadership responses to issues of Muslim women’s rights in Kenya as framed within a secular paradigm, on the one hand, and within an Islamic one, on the other. In spite of their differences, the essay concludes the efforts of the two leaders complement each other in fundamental ways, especially with regards to their contributions to the national debates on theShari’aand the reform of the Kadhi’s Court.

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