Gender Equality and a Culture of Peace

Abstract

While the norms of gender equality have developed both in individual states and in the international system, the realization of gender equality remains far behind in most states. The first wave of the women’s movement in the 1800s eventually led to women’s suffrage, but it did not lead to full gender equality, nor did it lead in the short term to increases in other forms of equality and justice, as some had hoped and some had feared. Norms of gender equality were further strengthened when, in 1945, the preamble to the United Nations Charter reaffirmed a faith in “the equal rights of men and women,” with Chap. 1 stating as one of the purposes of the UN “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.…” Women’s equality, later gender equality, continued to be important as part of the basic human rights approaches within the UN, from the initial 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the proclamation that “women’s rights are human rights” in the context of the UN’s 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights and 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women. The interweaving of women’s social movements for equality and efforts in the United Nations has been an important part of the changing norms of gender equality. Women’s political participation, in the various forms of voting and standing for election, was not realized until almost the start of the twentieth century. Most