Gender, Women’s Rights, and Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the literature on authoritarianism and women’s rights globally. This literature reveals the contradictory strategies of authoritarian regimes, which may outright repress women and ignore or retract women’s rights while at the same time advancing legal or other reforms that ostensibly support women’s rights. It shows how many such regimes instrumentalize women’s rights in the service of domestic and international agendas, motivated by political, economic, and symbolic gains. State feminism in many parts of the world has produced top-down strategies, sometimes in response to women’s rights activists and movements. However, women and their interests may be sidestepped in the regime’s pursuit of legitimacy and the staying power of the ruling party. The chapter looks at authoritarian regimes historically in the case of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and Latin America, as well as contemporary dynamics especially in Africa, the Middle East and North Africa.