Women's Legal Rights Research Articles

Ecclesiastical Divorce in the 19th Century: Implications and the Status of Women

Ecclesiastical Divorce in the 19th Century: Implications and the Status of Women Akhila Yechuri N ineteenth-century Mexico was an extremely Catholic society, and the common doctrine surrounding marital unions was that they were divine, and that those whom God united through marriage should not be parted. Divorces were rare, and only occurred in especially trying circumstances. I will be examining a divorce case filed on March 24th, 1839 in Mexico City. Dona Hilaria, the petitioner, was seeking a divorce from her husband, Felix Morales, insisting that “[t]his hellish [marriage] has become unbearable for me and I’m unable to carry on without risk to my safety.” 1 The only option available for women like Dona Hilaria, who were caught in abusive and loveless marriages, was to file for an ecclesiastical divorce, which was akin to legal separation. 2 In this paper, I will closely analyze Dona Hilaria’s petition to answer the following questions: what were the promises and drawbacks of ecclesiastical divorce, and what arguments did Dona Hilaria draw on to make her claims? Moreover, what does this petition tell us about the status of women in the early nineteenth century, just decades after Mexico’s Independence? Postcolonial Mexico was a time of great political instability. Mexico was still a young nation, and was facing inequities that it was not fully equipped to confront. The inequities were evident during the revolution and led to ideological tensions, as there were largely different agendas amongst the plebeian and elite rebels. Some indicate that the struggle for independence was less “a two-way struggle than a three-way conflict amongst the Mexican masses, the elite creole directorate... and the colonial regime.” 3 In the transition from colony to nation, the landed elite wanted to ensure their interests. Although politicians did proclaim large, sweeping reforms, much remained unchanged. Factional fighting amongst conservatives and liberals further impeded any social progress for women. Additionally, when creating a new legal code after independence, colonial laws were simply reviewed. This led to a large amount of written law that was “centuries old, [but] largely accepted in the 19th century.” 4 Many laws surrounding the legal rights of women depended on the woman’s purity, and characterized women according to their supposedly innate weakness Women were in many regards second-class citizens subject to the control of men. By virtue of their gender, women “relinquished sovereignty over most of [their] legal transactions, property, earnings, and even their domestic activities.” 5 They were not afforded autonomy or legal rights, and this ultimately left most women no choice but to comply with the wishes of the men in their lives. Dona Hilaria’s case occurred less than 20 years following independence. During this time, which saw tumultuous shifts in power, a newly conservative Santa Anna was in power. Social conservatives wanted to preserve Catholicism as the state religion and to maintain hierarchies from colonial times. Therefore, Dona Hilaria had to go through divorce while being scrutinized to archaic colonial laws. Marriage, like most Mexican societal institutions of the time, was patriarchal in nature. Men’s role was as providers. To accurately sum up power relations, one man stated, “it was the Pamela S. Murray, Women and Gender in Modern Latin America (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 50. Silvia M. Arrom, “Marital Relations and Divorce,” in The Women of Mexico City, 1790-1857(Stanford University Press, 1985), 208. Eric Van Young,Agrarian Rebellion and Defense of Community: Meaning and Collective Violence in Late Colonial and Independence-Era Mexico (Oxford University Press, 1993), 249. Arrom,”Legal Status”, 54. Ibid., 65.

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra e a formação para a igualdade de gênero

The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) was formed in 1984 with the main objective of fighting for agrarian reform in Brazil. With more than 30 years of history, the MST, in addition to organizing production and political intervention, has built an important educational work for the Landless and a formation focused on the change of values. Among these values ​​we highlight the struggle for gender equality. Thus, the main objective of this article is to present to the readers an analysis of the MST's gender policies, highlighting the connection of this type of policy with the formation of the Landless. The procedures adopted were documentary research and bibliographic research. For the collection of data, the official MST publications, texts prepared by its members and specialized literature on the subject were used. The analysis led us to conclude that the Movement, since its inception, has produced theoretical texts and developed practical actions trying to increase the participation of women in production, decision-making bodies and political coordination; Guarantee and expand the legal rights of women; Combat violence against women; And introduce gender equality in their formal education and training courses. To this end, the MST elaborated strategic proposals and created a Gender Sector focused on the promotion of gender equality and equal participation.

Daniel Deronda, Marital Rape, and the End of Reproduction

Daniel Deronda, Marital Rape, and the End of Reproduction Doreen Thierauf (bio) Although her novels deeply engage with Victorian discourses concerning women's emotional needs, social function, and intellectual maturation, George Eliot did not offer programmatic prescriptions for women to follow. In her correspondence, she professed a long-standing interest in the "Woman Question" and attendant political debates that shaped the gradual extension of women's legal rights during the second half of the nineteenth century. However, in an 1869 letter, Eliot qualified her investment in projects promising to improve women's political position because she felt "too imperfect a sympathy" with feminist agitators of her time (Letters 5: 58). She recognized that women chafed against social conventions and the pressure to conform to ideological as well as legal mandates, especially those related to marriage and childbearing. But Eliot thought that "the conditions of an imperfect social state" could only be corrected through slow and diffuse improvement brought about by cooperation (Middlemarch 784). This might account for her refusal to sign John Stuart Mill's suffrage petition of 1866.1 Eliot considered women's public self-display, including that of political campaigners, to be deeply degrading and, despite her own prominence and literary achievements, harboured skepticism about openly agitatorial approaches to reform. In Eliot's later novels, depictions of power struggles between men and women, and particularly within contemporary models of marriage, markedly gain in prominence. Although, in Eliot's view, marriage and maternity represented sacred social obligations, the many unsuccessful wives, mothers, and childless women in her oeuvre indicate a concession that marriage and motherhood constitute problematic states. The maternal ideal was closely related to Eliot's lifelong advocacy for sympathy and the need to recognize alterity, yet she did not countenance expressions of female will that ran counter to the greater good. In her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), Eliot presents a double critique of unruly maidens and vicious patriarchs, whose selfish encounters endanger the continuation of the upper-middle-class family.2 If, for Eliot, the "future is suggested through progeny," as Gillian Beer notes (173), the reproduction of elite families in Daniel Deronda is critically threatened because no main character has produced legally recognized offspring by the last chapter. As I will show, Eliot employs legal and medical frameworks to situate the Grandcourts' marriage, contrasting an outdated [End Page 247] model based on patriarchal force with the implicit modern ideal of the companionate marriage. While it is not surprising that Eliot was acutely aware of the competing legal and ethical frameworks underlying marriage in the 1870s, her radically pessimistic representation of the Grandcourts' union indicates a response to, and overall agreement with, reformist political discourses that were much more focused and deliberate than we might expect. I argue in this essay that Eliot, in Daniel Deronda, offers a sustained reflection on the need for ongoing marital reform, both legal and cultural. Yet she does so in a curiously sublimated way via the clandestine plot of Gwendolen's rape, psychological breakdown, and imperfect reconstitution as a moral subject. This plot remains hidden owing to three representational barriers with which Eliot saw herself confronted: her own aversion toward openly feminist agitation; the taboo surrounding the depiction of elite men's abuse of power; and, of course, the injunction against the explicit depiction of sexually suggestive content. Nevertheless, as I will show, the novel's critique of mercenary marriage is wholly framed in terms of sadistic sexual performance, although Grandcourt, until his death, officially remains "perfectly polite" (575).3 By transferring the implied physical violence onto bodies other than Grandcourt's and Gwendolen's, Eliot mutes the connection between Gwendolen's frantic sense of entrapment and her experience of mandatory marital sexual intercourse.4 Whenever Eliot's prose confronts representational taboos erected by legally entrenched male sexual and class power, her narrator depicts Gwendolen's invaded body by means of highly conventional rhetorical devices, such as the representation of Gwendolen as hysterical or animalistic and the use of Gothic or sensationalist imagery. As medical writers of the day were unclear about many fundamental processes governing women's reproductive bodies, they resorted to morally prescriptive, and often apparently entirely...

New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble by Pamela Tyler

Reviewed by: New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble by Pamela Tyler Natasha L. McPherson New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble. Pamela Tyler. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8071-6322-1, 225pp., paper, $39.95 In the last fifteen years, scholars have begun to carefully explore the power and influence of religious women in New Orleans history. In their efforts to promote social and religious welfare through the establishment of schools, churches, and charity institutions, devout women not only challenged conventional roles for women, but they had notable power and influence in the South. Historians Emily Clark, Virginia Gould, and Edward Brett have examined the importance of charitable works and religious instruction by Catholic nuns in New Orleans; yet, few scholars have examined the benevolent efforts of Protestant women in the city. Pamela Tyler’s book, New Orleans Women and Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble, is a welcomed volume that seeks to fill the gap in the historiography. [End Page 86] Tyler provides a detailed narrative about the Protestant women who have dedicated their lives to the care of orphan girls and elderly women at the Poydras Home for the past two hundred years. As indicated in the book’s title of the book, women are central to the narrative; however, Tyler focuses principally on the female board members and managers of the Poydras Home who administered the affairs of the institution. For its first 130 years, the women operated the Poydras Home as an orphan asylum for girls. By the 1950s, orphanages had largely given way to the foster care system, and the Poydras home transitioned into an elderly care facility, continuing its long tradition of caring for female residents. By the author’s own admission, this book is not particularly thesis-driven, but it serves as a thoroughly researched institutional history of the Poydras Home and the women who have dedicated their efforts to the home and its residents since the nineteenth century. In what is perhaps the most captivating section of the book, Tyler engages an impressive number of primary sources to reconstruct the history of the Poydras Asylum’s first hundred years. In the years following the Louisiana Purchase, a group of newly arrived Protestant women organized the Female Orphan Society in response to the social instability in New Orleans wrought by wars, disease, and the Haitian Revolution. The women established an orphan asylum for girls and named it after their generous benefactor, Julien Poydras. In 1817, the incorporation of the Female Orphan Society granted the women legal rights to establish and operate the Poydras Home as a corporate entity. This move allowed the women to buy and sell property, control their own finances, and oversee the operation of the home—all without male leadership. Through her analysis of primary documents, including annual reports, minute books, letters, memos, and case notes from the Poydras Home, Pamela Tyler demonstrates that the women did not take their duties lightly. They carefully considered the best methods for guiding, educating, and caring for their wards. The records also reveal moments of strife and discord, most notably when the women debated whether to continue accommodating both Protestant and Catholic girls. Tyler effectively brings the records to life to paint a dynamic picture of the Poydras women’s continued efforts to accommodate needy girls in New Orleans, even as the city endured civil war and political turmoil. The final two chapters, which cover the last one hundred years of the Poydras Home’s history, chart the home’s transition from girls’ orphanage to assisted living facility for elderly residents. Financial troubles combined with changing attitudes about orphanages, as well as increased intervention from the state, prompted the Poydras women to convert the home into a [End Page 87] private, elderly care facility in the 1950s. Tyler concludes her narrative about the women with a moving account of their dedicated care for their residents during Hurricane Katrina and in the storm’s aftermath, highlighting the endurance of the Poydras Home and its female leadership. The strength of Tyler’s book lies in the rich resources she draws on...

Legal Aid Service Interventions and Women Empowerment: A Case of Morogoro Rural and Kongwa Districts, Tanzania

Legal Aid Service (LAS) intervention is considered to have an influence on women empowerment through raising awareness of women towards their rights. Using Kongwa and Morogoro Rural districts as study areas, a study was conducted involving 240 women (120 beneficiaries and 120 non-beneficiaries of LAS). A cross-sectional research design was used, whereby random selection of respondents was done. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data. A Composite Empowerment Index (CEI) was used to measure the extent of women empowerment among beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries of LAS interventions. Women in the study areas were categorized at medium level of empowerment. Beneficiaries of LAS interventions were found to be more empowered relative to their counterparts. Ordinal logistic regression analysis results showed that involvement of women in LAS interventions, awareness of women legal rights, marital status and age at first marriage were the most determinant factors that influence women empowerment in Morogoro Rural and Kongwa district. Hence persistent sensitization of women about their rights is critical for reducing violence against them and ultimately achieving high levels of empowerment. Also, rigorous enforcement of existing laws and policies is required to discourage and ultimately eliminate the practice of early marriage.

Judge Joseph Smith and the Expansion of the Legal Rights of Women: The Dana v. Brink Trial

Judge Joseph Smith and the Expansion of the Legal Rights of Women: The <i>Dana v. Brink</i> Trial

Pregnant at Work

INTRODUCTION: Prenatal care providers (PNCP) routinely provide recommendations about work activities in pregnancy; yet there is little data on the knowledge surrounding a woman's legal rights or consensus about practice. Our study assessed PNCP knowledge and practice toward work accommodations in pregnancy. METHODS: A survey of PNCP in a tertiary care center in New York (NY) was performed. The survey included questions about PNCP demographics and their knowledge of pregnant women's legal rights. The survey also gave four case scenarios, based on real-world litigation, to assess PNCP practice patterns. RESULTS: There were 204 PNCP surveyed with a 27% (56/204) response rate. Most were general obstetricians (53%) with public insurance patients (68%), who reported that they filled out workplace forms 1–2 times a week (60%). Only 35% of PNCP knew that NY State law does not require employers to give healthy pregnant women accommodations at work; but 69% had knowledge of legislation protecting pregnant workers' rights and 88% correctly identified “reasonable accommodations.” PNCP favored having pregnant women continue to work with accommodations in all case scenarios; 10% would have women with a prior second trimester loss stop work entirely. CONCLUSION: PNCP knowledge about and practice towards pregnant women in the workforce vary widely. The majority of PNCP lack knowledge of NY State Laws but understand “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant working women; PNCP would likely benefit from further education surrounding legal rights for pregnant women in the workplace and standardization of practice surrounding this issue.

We Intend to Move Together

The story of women's participation in the ecumenical movement can indeed be described as a pilgrimage of justice and peace, as well as a story of mission. From the earliest days of ecumenism--whether in its formal, institutional structures or in the lively work and witness of local communities around the globe--questions about women's role in the churches have been intertwined with questions about the social, economic, and cultural forces that affect women's lives. With changing emphasis shaped by particular time and context, the consistent thread in the journey has been a will to respond to the call to participate in God's mission in the world in ways that contribute to wholeness and fullness of life for all God's people and to the flourishing of creation. While not always named or recognized as such, gender justice has been at the heart of this journey. Consistently, women have been seeking ecumenical space in which the diverse experiences of women, their voices and visions, and the conditions of injustice and oppression that have been the lot of many women around the world can be lifted up and addressed. And in that space, women have claimed their own agency of resistance and transformation. The story of women's work and witness in the World Council of Churches (WCC) is only one facet of this journey. Each church family and world communion could tell its own story and each local context has had times of ecumenical witness and action--often connected with global programs, but also representative of particular local needs and issues. Nevertheless, the WCC has played a key role since its inception in linking ecumenical women in local contexts with international networks and global currents. A review of WCC programmes and structures committed to the journey of gender justice reveals both the rich heritage of ecumenical women's work and the challenges and gaps that continue. Affirming the "service and status of women" In the 1940s, when the WCC was still in the process of formation, Twila Cavert, a Young Women Christian Association (YWCA) leader from the US, together with other women, gained the support of WCC leaders for a pre-assembly women's meeting and a survey of woman leaders worldwide about their vision for the work of women in the whole church. (1) The questionnaire netted detailed replies from women in 58 countries, and prompted the Reformed Church of France to request that the question of women's role be placed on the agenda of the first assembly in Amsterdam in 1948. There, the study report on "The Life and Work of Women in the Church" was received and its recommendation for a permanent commission to undertake ecumenical inquiry into issues related to women's ministry was accepted. Susannah Herzel writes of the significance of these first steps for the participation of women in churches around the world: "So the infiltration had begun. Member churches of the ecumenical movement had agents of change in their midst, and the troubling questions would be increasingly difficult to ignore." (2) The material generated by the study was developed into a book by Kathleen Bliss, published in 1952 as The Service and Status of Women in the Churches, (3) Interpreting the reports through the framework of women's various types of service--voluntary, full-time and professional, ordained, and participation in church governance--Bliss examined the contributions and limitations of each area of endeavour. She asked whether the churches were making the best use of women's gifts, or helping women to participate as Christians in the changes taking place in society as a whole. Writing during a period of flux in women's public and private roles, Bliss urged churches to recognize the implications of changing family and employment patterns. She asserted that "what is needed is ... an imaginative act of understanding ... [of the] ... revolutionary change in the place of women in society." (4) These reports from around the world provided evidence that responses to women's ministries ranged from indifference to active opposition. …

Gesture Politics or Real Commitment? Gender Inequality and the Allocation of Aid

Summary We investigate whether donors give more aid to countries with larger gender gaps in education, health, or women’s rights, and whether they reward improvements in those indicators. We find some evidence that high gender gaps in education and health are associated with higher allocation of aid in those sectors and aid overall. Greater female political representation also appears to come along with higher aid flows. While we find no systematic evidence that donors allocate funds with regard to merit, our results show that donors are more responsive to inequalities in countries that provide good legal rights for women.

The Gender Perspective in Managing Knowledge through Cross-curricular Studies in Higher Education

This article investigates how universities, as transmitters of social awareness, should reflect the problem of inequality between the sexes in educational processes. It should also reflect gender studies in managing knowledge through cross-curricular studies. The European Higher Education Area has been emphasizing the need to encourage “transverse” or cross-curricular competences, primarily those relating to citizenship skills. In this context, it is evident that the twenty-first century should constitute a historical period fundamental to the process of acquisition social and legal rights for women under conditions of equality with men.

Iraqi Women in Conditions of War and Occupation

IRAQI WOMEN IN CONDITIONS OF WAR AND OCCUPATIONSince the early twentieth century, the issue of women's emancipation has been integral to Iraq's struggle for liberation and development. With the foundation of the League for the Defense of Women's Rights in 1952, women moved to the forefront of Iraqi social activism. Reflecting the official misogyny manifest at the time, the League was initially established as an underground organization. It led the struggle for the establishment of women's legal rights and championed the replacement of tribal law with civil law, realized in 1959 with the passage of the Personal Status Law, in effect catapulting Iraq into the role of a vanguard state in the Arab world on women's rights. What this reflects is that the trajectory of Iraqi development in the twentieth century from a backwater province of the Ottoman Empire to a modem state is reflected in the progress of women from tribal chattel to citizens.'The works under review here document the reverse of this trajectory in terms of the process of transformation of Iraqi women from citizens of a viable state to tribal chattel in the dystopia created by regime change. Insofar as all these works were written in Arabic by Iraqi women and published within the past decade, they bear witness to the events unfolding around them, and reflect the discourse emergent among Iraq's female intelligentsia. Due to language barriers (that affect even some specialists) and limited distribution, this discourse has not received attention outside of Iraq. These works not only provide rare attention to women's active participation in Iraqi intellectual life and in critical debates on issues facing Iraqi society but they also draw on Iraqi sources that are not readily accessible or even known outside of Iraq, such as some government documents. Taken together, these books consider the changing status of women in Iraq over the last four decades and treat their position from different, though related, vantage points, shedding light on women's material conditions, participation in the workforce, and participation in the political system. Together, they document the degradation of Iraqi women's status with the decline of the Iraqi state.Lahay 'Abd al-Husayn's book, Athar al-Tanmiya wa-l-Harb 'ala al-Nisa ' fi al-'Iraq, 1968-88, is a revised version of her doctoral dissertation (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1988). The book traces the significant shifts that occurred in women's roles in Iraqi society between 1968 and 1988, or from the Ba'ath Party's rise to power to the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) roughly two decades later. This research contributes to our understanding of an overlooked, yet formative, period in Iraqi history, one that saw the beginning of the decline of women's rights. 'Abd al-Husayn argues that the negative effects of the Iran-Iraq war on women's access to education and work outside the home foreshadowed later shifts in Iraqi women's status. These shifts occurred as a result of significant turning points in modem Iraqi history, including the implementation of the sanctions regime in 1990 and the onset of the Anglo-American occupation in 2003.The significance of this book stems in large part from the author's use of Iraqi sources. For example, 'Abd al-Husayn employs statistical data reported in the main Iraqi government statistical yearbooks for 1967 through 1988, issued by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning. This source was difficult to obtain at the time of writing and was reportedly destroyed along with other source materials in the rampant pillaging and burning during the U.S. occupation. 'Abd al-Husayn's use of this and similar sources helps to reconstruct the historical record. The author complements these Iraqi government sources with annual reports of several international agencies, in particular the World Bank and the United Nations.Through exhaustive statistical analysis, the author concludes that while development expanded women's educational and employment opportunities, the Iran-Iraq War pushed women toward more segregated work opportunities in the lower strata. …

Women's Right to and Control over Rural Land in Wolaita Zone, Southern Ethiopia

This Article critically analyzes the law and the practice of women’s right to and control over rural land in Ethiopia. The study employed doctrinal legal research and empirical quantitative methods to collect and analyse data collected from primary and secondary sources. Tools such as law review and analysis, interviewer-assisted survey questionnaire, key informant interviews and focus group discussions were used in the process of data collection. It has been found that the existing laws adequately recognize a woman’s right to equality with respect to access to and control of property (including land) in Ethiopia. However, harmful customary practices and stereotypes against women are still prevalent in the Wolaita community, which hinders an effective implementation of the legal rights of women to possess and control land. It is suggested that legal awareness education and effective legal aid should be made available for women to empower them to claim their property rights in general and a right to rural land use and administration in particular.

Claiming a Space in the Law School Curriculum: A Casebook on Sex-Based Discrimination

INTRODUCTION We are gathered here today to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Justice Ginsburg's appointment in 1972 as Columbia's first woman law professor. That auspicious date also marks the beginning of my collaboration with her on a law school casebook published in 1974 on the newly-created subject of sex-based discrimination. (1) Linda Kerber traced the general history of this and other casebooks that appeared about the same time (2) in her wonderfully insightful historical essay, Writing Our Own Rare Books, presented at a symposium held at Yale School in April 2000. (3) In recalling those heady times today, I will offer a more detailed account of how our first edition came into being, as well as a comparison of how its coverage--and the subject itself--has changed over the ensuing thirty-eight years. I. How the RBG-KMD-HHK Collaboration Came About and Why It Was Published as the KMD-RBG-HHK Casebook The demand for law school courses on and the Law followed closely after the rapid increase of women law students beginning in the late 1960s, (4) who did notfind the legal issues that affected them covered in the traditional curriculum. All three of us responded individually to requests from our students to create such courses. In 1971, Kenneth M. Davidson was an Associate Professor at SUNY Buffalo, where he was teaching a course on Women and the Law, primarily focused on sex discrimination in employment, to law students and undergraduates, and using his own mimeographed materials. A year earlier, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had launched a course on Women's Rights: Sex Discrimination and the Law, at Rutgers, Newark. She thus explained: Around 1970, women students whose conscience had awakened at least as much as mine, women encouraged by a vibrant movement for racial equality, asked for a seminar on Women and the Law. I repaired to the Library. There, in the space of a month, I read every federal decision ever published involving women's legal status, and every law review article. That was no grand feat. There were not many decisions and not much in the way of commentary. Probably less altogether than today accumulates in six months time. (5) Berkeley women students brought a similar request to me at about the same time: in 1970, I helped them persuade a practitioner, Colquit Meacham Walker, to offer a Women and the Seminar by promising to attend all of the class sessions. No casebooks existed for such a course. Ken wanted to turn his materials into a casebook, but he also wanted to recruit co-authors to join the project and add materials on other areas where sex discrimination was beginning to make itself felt. He sent his materials to me. I read them and was immediately struck by how well a chapter on Family would work with Ken's employment materials: the connections between the stereotypes ingrained in the roles of and office wife (which were just beginning to be explored) were even then too clear to overlook. Ken welcomed my participation, and we both agreed that the projected casebook would need the collaboration of an expert on Constitutional Law. Both of us thought of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who as the Director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project was already litigating the path-breaking Equal Protection cases before the United States Supreme Court that would ultimately write women into the Constitution for the first time in its history. Neither of us knew her personally, so we arranged to meet her at the AALS-sponsored Conference on The School Curriculum and the Legal Rights of Women that she had helped to organize which was to take place at NYU School on October 20-21, 1972. (6) A major topic of discussion at the Conference was whether the subject of Women and the should remain a stand-alone course, or whether coverage of the subject should be distributed more broadly across the curriculum. …

The Economics and Politics of Women's Rights

Women's rights and economic development are highly correlated. Today, the discrepancy between the legal rights of women and men is much larger in developing compared with developed countries. Historically, even in countries that are now rich, women had few rights before economic development took off. Is development the cause of expanding women's rights, or conversely, do women's rights facilitate development? We argue that there is truth to both hypotheses. The literature on the economic consequences of women's rights documents that more rights for women lead to more spending on health and children, which should benefit development. The political-economy literature on the evolution of women's rights finds that technological change increased the costs of patriarchy for men and thus contributed to the expansion of women's rights. Combining these perspectives, we discuss the theory of Doepke &amp; Tertilt (2009) , who find that an increase in the return to human capital induces men to vote for women's rights, which in turn promotes growth in human capital and income per capita.

Elizabeth Wilson, the Bible, and the Legal Rights of Women in the Nineteenth Century

In 1849, Elizabeth Wilson (fl. 1849-1850) published an impassioned defense of women’s rights entitled A Scriptural View of Woman’s Rights and Duties. Her work critiques patriarchy in church and society, arguing in favor of women’s social and legal rights within marriage. Challenging prominent male biblical commentators, Wilson asserted that male and female were created as equal co-sovereigns over creation. She claimed that biblical patriarchs and matriarchs exercised equal authority within the marriage relationship. Wilson’s most striking example is Abigail, who distributed household property, an extravagant gift of dressed sheep and other food, to David, against her husband Nabal’s wishes (1 Samuel 25). Wilson uses this story to prove that wives have equal right to administer marital property. Thus she offers an incisive critique of American property and inheritance laws biased against wives and widows.

Universal Women's Rights Since 1970: The Centrality of Autonomy and Agency

This article reviews the development of universal women's human rights since 1970. It begins by discussing how the international feminist movement influenced the development of women's legal human rights, and continues by reviewing three debates in the literature on women's rights. The first debate is whether human rights as originally formulated were actually men's rights; the second debate is about the relationship between culture and women's rights; and the third considers the effects of globalization on women's rights. The author defends a liberal approach to human rights via the principles of equality and autonomy for women, but also argues that the socialist approach is very important for women to achieve their economic human rights. Autonomy, moreover, is the means by which women can negotiate their own way between “Western” style personal liberation, and participation as they see fit in their own religions and cultures.

Power Behind the Veil: Princesses of the House of Saud

Saudi Arabia's princesses possess substantial political influence — even though none of them hold important formal positions. Whoever has the king's ear has the potential to have influence, and fewer are closer to a Saudi king than his mother, sister, wife, and daughter. The areas that the female members of the Al Saud actively seek to influence are related to women's education and job opportunities, and women's health and legal rights. Even more important is their role when it comes to keeping the ruling Al Saud family united and, hence, securing its grip on the power. The princesses perform three important roles in the cohesion of the royal family: they play a key role in the socialisation of young royals, which is an essential precondition for cohesion within the royal family; they are responsible for organising gatherings that bring the extended family together; and some intervene to resolve problems and mediate disputes within the royal family.

The Economics and Politics of Women's Rights

Women's rights and economic development are highly correlated. Today, the discrepancy between the legal rights of women and men is much larger in developing compared to developed countries. Historically, even in countries that are now rich women had few rights before economic development took off. Is development the cause of expanding women's rights, or conversely, do women's rights facilitate development? We argue that there is truth to both hypotheses. The literature on the economic consequences of women's rights documents that more rights for women lead to more spending on health and children, which should benefit development. The political-economy literature on the evolution of women's rights finds that technological change increased the costs of patriarchy for men, and thus contributed to expanding women's rights. Combining these perspectives, we discuss the theory of Doepke and Tertilt (2009), where an increase in the return to human capital induces men to vote for women's rights, which in turn promotes growth in human capital and income per capita.

Democracy, Gender Equality, and Customary Law: Constitutionalizing Internal Cultural Disruption

Customary law often includes gender discriminatory rules that violate women’s rights under constitutional equality guarantees. Dialogic democracy theory offers valuable tools that can help a legal system both to protect customary law and to protect the equality of its women citizens. By focusing on the need for challenge and on the dialogue within the cultural community, the legal system can create incentives and conditions to support the capacity of women to shape the customary law of their own communities. This approach is necessary because legal rights for women, when imposed by the larger society, often result in backlash within minority communities. In the long run, the structural inequality of women cannot be addressed by legal rights alone, but must be addressed by programs that seek to give women the power within their communities to achieve their own equality.

When Do Governments Promote Women's Rights? A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Sex Equality Policy

This essay proposes a framework to analyze cross-national variation in women's legal rights. To explore the distinct logics of policy change, we disaggregate sex equality policies on two dimensions: 1) whether they improve the status of women as a group or alleviate gender-based class inequalities, and 2) whether or not they challenge the doctrine of organized religion and the codified tradition of major cultural groups. We show that policies promoting gender equality seek fundamental social change and therefore challenge historical patterns of state-society interaction concerning relations between the state and the market; the respective authority of the state, religion, and cultural groups; and the contours of citizenship. Different issues, however, challenge different aspects of these relations. What's more, the priorities, strategies, and effectiveness of advocates and opponents of change (including women's movements, left parties, international NGOs, and organized religion) are shaped by state capacity, policy legacies, international vulnerability, and the degree of democracy.