Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth‐century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self‐determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.

the East German approach to women's rights, the future looked far more uncertain.An article in the communist party newspaper Neues Deutschland by Edith Oeser, a professor of international law who had represented the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in the 1980s, warned that the GDR's impressive achievements with regards to women's rights would be threatened by unification with West Germany. 3he fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to open up a new chapter in the history of women's rights globally as well as nationally, just as the reunification of Germany was seen as paradigmatic for a new post-Cold War international order based on liberal democracy, free markets and national sovereignty.In March 1990, the Socialist Unity Party suffered heavy losses in the GDR's first free elections.Six months later, East Germany adopted a Treaty on the 'unification' of Germany, thereby legislating itself out of existence.The GDR Family Code, which had been celebrated as a legal codification of East Germany's commitment to women's emancipation and sex equality when it was introduced in 1965, was replaced by the West German family law in a move that East German legal experts perceived as regressive. 4The imposition of West Germany's more restrictive regulations on abortion triggered mass protests in the new Bundesländer. 5These developments seemed at odds with the optimistic tone of global debates about women's rights at the United Nations after 1989.At the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, US First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton attracted global media and political attention for her speech declaring that 'women's rights are human rights', which harnessed a particular vision of women's rights to a rejuvenated US-led liberal internationalism. 6Central to this liberal vision was a focus on bodily autonomy, violence against women and reproductive rights.The Beijing Conference itself was described as a 'global feminist transformation of liberal democracy' in which the 'possibilities of self-determination, long denied at the nation-state level, may be realised by circumventing the nation-state from above or below'. 7This narrative of liberal feminist self-determination chimed with Antony Anghie's observation that debates about globalisation, international law and human rights in the 1990s all reflected the idea that 'liberal democracy had established itself as the one universal model … and that all that remained was the task of making liberal democracy a reality for all other societies'. 8his essay challenges this view of the women's human rights discourse of the post-Cold War liberal internationalist moment, by drawing on the biographies of Oeser and Helga Hörz, one a socialist international lawyer, the other a professor of ethics in the GDR, to present a new perspective on the gendered history of human rights before and after the collapse of communism.The redefinition of women's rights as human rights after the end of the Cold War was presented by influential US-based campaigners, such as the Centre for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, as the opening of a new chapter in the history of women's rights, rather than the closing of an old one.Such narratives echoed Francis Fukuyama's triumphalist assertion that the demise of communism represented 'the end of History', when the totalising vision of Marxism-Leninism had seemingly been replaced by free markets, democracy and a resurgence of liberal, western internationalism. 9For socialists like Oeser, women's rights were strongly linked to state sovereignty and collective self-determination, in order to protect a model of rights bound to a state guaranteeing -at least, formally -social equality.In this essay, I suggest that the redefinition of women's human rights as an expression of individual selfdetermination was enabled by the defeat of a different concept of self-determination -anti-colonial, anti-Western and anti-capitalist -that had underpinned the concept of women's rights in the communist world.In other respects, the vision of women's rights supported by Oeser is better understood not as the losing side of a Cold War ideological conflict, but rather as part of a twentieth-century political discourse that transcended geopolitical divides in seeing women's human rights not just as legal norms or ethical values, but as political goals anchored in a narrative of women's emancipation and progress towards equality.Threading the biographies of women such as Oeser through the grand narratives of human rights history not only makes visible the intellectual work and political activism of non-western actors that has been effaced by the focus on US-led campaigns for women's rights as human rights after the Cold War, but challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of recent histories of human rights.
More broadly, therefore, this article proposes a conceptual approach to reading the recent history of human rights through the lens of gender.At first glance, the narrative of liberal feminist self-determination seems to support Samuel Moyn's thesis that human rights since the 1970s have been reinterpreted according to a neoliberal logic of sufficiency, superseding an older principle of equality. 10According to this argument, feminism too has become an accomplice of neoliberalism, reinventing women's human rights as a question of individual bodily autonomy rather than collective economic redistribution.Sexual rights, in other words, seem to have won out against social rights.Violence against women, as a central concern of contemporary debates about women's human rights, exemplifies this shift.As Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann has compellingly argued, the focus on individual suffering as a basis for women's human rights claims meant that women were written into post-Cold War international law primarily as victims of violence. 11But this article will argue that the reinvention of women's human rights in the 1990s cannot be explained entirely as a consequence of neoliberal economic policies, nor as a complete renunciation of older commitments to social justice.Socialist conceptions of women's rights had shaped the major international conventions on women's rights during the Cold War, and continued to do so after 1989, even if sometimes with unintended consequences.Moreover, feminist challenges to the public-private divide in human rights law across the ideological divides of the twentieth-century international order suggest that the connection between citizenship rights and human rights remains closer than narratives of a human rights 'breakthrough' in the 1970s would suggest, and that even these revisionist histories of human rights continue to privilege a masculine perspective in their focus on international lawyers, intellectuals and dissidents. 12men's rights, women's emancipation: a twentieth-century project Gender has been tangential, at best, to recent scholarship rethinking the history of human rights, despite the insightful scholarship on specific aspects of women's human rights. 13Moyn's influential argument that human rights emerged as a transformational moral language of international politics in the 1970s, in response to the loss of faith in alternative utopias -above all, revolutionary socialism, paid little attention to women's rights or gender.The Last Utopia categorised struggles for women's rights as part of an older history of citizenship rights that was superseded by the human rights 'breakthrough' of the 1970s. 14Jan Eckel placed greater emphasis on the significance of women claiming the language of human rights, concluding that campaigns for women's rights helped to revitalise human rights as a language of morality in the 1990s. 15In a different vein, Hoffmann suggested that the transformation of women's rights in international humanitarian law after 1990 exemplified a broader transformation of human rights as the 'doxa of our times'. 16The political visibility of women's human rights in the 1990s was only achieved through a focus on violence, which simultaneously 'circumscribed women's access to affirmative rights … and made them eligible for aid only through their experience of victimization'. 17And as mentioned above, Moyn referred to violence against women in his exploration of the neoliberal transformation of human rights after the end of the Cold War, suggesting that feminism had also become an accomplice of neoliberalism. 18eminist legal scholars, meanwhile, have long called attention to the marginalisation of women in the international legal order, pointing out women's 'striking invisibility' in the primary subjects of international law: states and international organisations. 19This was compounded, they argued, by the implicit masculine bias of the allegedly neutral 'universal' subject of human rights. 20Since the nineteenth century, these scholars pointed out, international humanitarian law, conventions on trafficking and labour standards had represented women in gendered terms as vulnerable, chaste and subordinate to the patriarchal hierarchy of the heterosexual family. 21The Hague and Geneva Conventions on the laws of war rested on a gendered distinction between masculine combatants, imagined as agents of honour and civilisation, and feminised civilians, who were identified by their shared suffering, sexual vulnerability and reproductive capacities. 22Even after the mass rapes of Second World War, the drafters of the 1949 Geneva Conventions remained silent on the question of sexual violence. 23Similar tropes of sexual vulnerability and civilising mission informed the earliest international conventions on 'white slavery', or the trafficking of 'white' women from Europe and North America for prostitution in Asia, Africa and South America. 24In 1921, the 'traffic in women and children' became the first human rights issue to be formally recognised by a Convention of the League of Nations, replacing the racialised term 'white slave traffic'. 25As Jeanne Morefield has recently argued, trafficking was seen as a 'non-political' problem that was ideally suited to British liberal internationalist visions for the League, by enabling a 'resolutely conservative understanding of nations as moral and familialnot political -units'. 26Protection rather than equality was the dominant approach to other League of Nations' instruments relating to women's rights. 27The 1919 Constitution of the International Labour Organization, for example, represented the normative figure of the worker as male and white, with women relegated to a secondary status as workers whose rights were conditional upon their role as wives and mothers. 28et the new international order that emerged in 1919 also opened up spaces for women to act as subjects rather than objects of international law. 29The emerging concept of self-determination was particularly important here, even in national contexts where women had not yet gained political rights as citizens, such as the plebiscites that took place in Central Europe under the auspices of the League of Nations. 30The emergence of women as a collective subject of international human rights was a product of this new international order, in which 'minorities, nationalities, mandate territories, individuals, international organizations, indigenous peoples, colonies, dominions, races and religions all emerged as candidates for international legal capacity'. 31Women's rights at the League of Nations were notoriously caught between competing ideals of equality and protection, but both were underpinned by an evolving narrative of women's emancipation as citizens of national states.After the Second World War, gender was central to the way in which universal human rights were imagined in the founding documents of the United Nations.The Universal Declaration of Human Rights included a clause on equality between the sexes, but also singled out the family as the basic unit of society deserving special protection, thereby setting up a tension between the rights of the individual and the gendered hierarchy of power relations within the family. 32A similar tension could be observed in regional rights declarations, notably the anti-communist European Convention on Human Rights, which was shaped by conservative interests in Western Europe after Second World War. 33During the 1950s and 1960s, ideas about women's status at the UN were based on concepts of equal rights, which shifted towards concerns with political and economic development during the 1970s. 34ebates about women's rights in the earliest years of the United Nations were strongly influenced by interventions from the Soviet and East European states, which along with most Latin American countries initially defended an expansive conception of human rights after 1945. 35Rights, in their view, could not be conceived of outside the state, and thus the 'civil and political status of the individual' was dependent in great measure on their social status. 36Yet they did not succeed in placing social, economic and cultural rights on an equal footing with political and civil rights.All the Communist countries represented at the UN in 1948 abstained from the final vote on ratifying the Universal Declaration.Despite this setback, the discourse of women's rights provided an early point of contact between the Second and Third World regarding human rights.International communist organisations such as the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and the World Federation of Trade Unions ran campaigns to raise awareness of women's rights internationally.The WIDF gained consultative status at the UN's Economic and Social Council and the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).It organised fact-finding missions to Latin American and southeast Asia, including one in 1950 to investigate war crimes against Korean civilians, especially women and children, by American and South Korean soldiers during the Korean War. 37Crucially, these WIDF missions conceptualised rights as more than legal concepts, approaching international law as much as a political language as a normative one.
Under Khrushchev, the Soviet and East European approach to law itself changed.Against the violence and arbitrary rule of Stalin, 'socialist legality' -meaning a state governed by procedural norms -would guarantee citizens' rights.Soviet legal scholars also modified their approach to international law, which had been strongly criticised in the early Soviet Union as a tool of imperialism.A 'socialist international law' now emerged, based on 'peaceful coexistence' with the Western world and 'proletarian solidarity' with the socialist world. 38Legal theorists in Eastern Europe accordingly rewrote the history of human rights as a story of revolutionary socialism rather than liberal democracy.At the same time, socialist governments defended a dualist approach that saw international law as regulating relations between states, while individuals were only considered subjects of national law.They also rejected any attempt to create a global system of law that would threaten state sovereignty, such as through the authority of supranational courts.
From the 1960s, the Soviet Union and Eastern European states began to combine the universal language of human rights with support for self-determination and national sovereignty in order to win favour in Asia and Africa, at a moment when civil rights struggles in the American South were causing the USA to distance itself from rights talk.As self-determination increasingly shaped the understanding of human rights in the Third World during the 1960s, the USSR and the Eastern Bloc responded by asserting, as the East German professor of international law Bernhard Graefrath wrote, that the self-determination of peoples was a 'basic human right'. 39Eastern Europeans, who had lived through recent occupation and whose countries' borders continued to be contested by the West after the Second World, recognised common interests with the colonised. 40either Oeser nor Hörz, a professor of ethics at the Humboldt University in East Berlin who represented the GDR on the UN CSW, was part of the dissident intellectual networks that have become associated with the promotion of human rights as a language of political and moral claim-making in the Eastern Bloc during the last years of the Cold War. 41Yet they undeniably shaped the history of human rights in other ways.For socialists like Hörz and Oeser, both born into working-class German families with communist political affiliations during the 1930s and socialised in the GDR, the codification of women's rights in international law was inseparable from a broader project of anti-fascist political emancipation and the construction of a peaceful international order.Although historians of international law are increasingly recognising both the significance of socialist legal theorists' contributions to international legal norms, and the way in which those contributions were erased or forgotten after the end of the Cold War, this scholarship has not fully explored the place of women's rights or gender within socialist legal theory or practice. 42As intellectuals and experts, Hörz and Oeser helped shape the meaning of 'equality' for women in both national politics and international instruments such as the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), while remaining staunchly opposed to granting oversight of its implementation to supranational legal authorities such as the International Court of Justice. 43s Ned Richardson-Little and Raluca Grosescu have observed, the socialist world has too often been presented in histories of international justice as 'the antagonistic "other", disrupting Western European and American efforts to create an international order of liberal ideals in the wake of the Second World War'. 44This perception was magnified after 1989, when the ascendancy of a particularly Western, liberal vision of international law was presented as a new universalism. 45During the Cold War era, by contrast, comparative international law was structured by the differences between Western and Soviet approaches. 46Since the 1990s, Anglo-American case law has dominated the decisions of international courts and tribunals, as well as international law textbooks, while the lawyers appearing before international courts and tribunals tend to be nationals of the United Kingdom, the USA and France. 47This shift was not solely the result of Western liberal concepts of international law being exported around the world after the collapse of communism.During the 1980s, state socialist regimes were already adopting certain liberal constitutional norms and institutions, such as the Constitutional Tribunal set up in Poland in 1985 in the midst of economic crisis and martial law, in an effort to shore up their rapidly eroding legitimacy. 48As Michal Kopeček has recently argued, these legal reforms were intended by communist party leaderships to create an authoritarian Rechtsstaat, but paradoxically resulted in creating a path within the communist dictatorships 'towards the legalist and negotiated revolutions of 1989'. 49he career of Hörz, East German delegate to the WIDF and then the UN CSW from 1976 to 1990 while holding a chair in ethics at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, exemplified this complicated relationship to international human rights.Born in Danzig (Gdánsk) in 1935, Hörz fled westwards with millions of other German-speakers in August 1945.Her family ended up in Mecklenburg.Her father, who had been imprisoned in Mauthausen during the war for his illegal political activities, worked for the Socialist Unity Party.After graduating in Philosophy from the Humboldt University in East Berlin in 1957, having married and given birth to her first child three years earlier, she worked for the Free German Youth in a factory that produced lightbulbs.In her autobiography, Hörz wrote that her experiences in this factory, where women made up the vast majority of the workforce but were hardly represented in managerial positions, shaped her future academic career. 50Her doctoral thesis focused on the philosophical and ethical dimensions of women's social role, drawing on Simone de Beauvoir as well as Clara Zetkin, and was published in 1971 as The Woman as Personality.Philosophical Problems of Gender Psychology. 51By this time, Hörz had three children.In 1986, the East German state film company produced a short documentary about her called Die Vorzeigefrau (The Model Woman).
In many ways, Hörz exemplifies the argument made by scholars such as Wang Zheng, who have demonstrated that the members of state socialist women's organisations, far from simply being the mouthpieces of ruling communist parties, are better understood as 'state feminists' who worked to advance feminist goals within the structures of the socialist state. 52A rich body of scholarship has evolved in recent years on the social and political history of mass women's organisations in the Eastern Bloc, which argues that these movements were rendered invisible by the Western bias of women's organisations during the Cold War. 53This scholarship has also done a great deal to complicate and enrich our understanding of women's international activism after 1945, such as Kristen Ghodsee's exploration of the participation of the Bulgarian official women's organisation in the United Nations' Decade of Women. 54Communist and socialist women's organisations founded in Europe and the Americas during the interwar years also sought to build links with left-wing and anti-colonialist women's movements in the global South during the era of decolonisation, within both the Eastern Bloc and the Non-Aligned Movement, although these relationships were often fraught with tension, as postcolonial women's movements pushed back against the frequently paternalist approach of the WIDF leadership. 55Moreover, the narrative of official women's organisations acting as agents of 'state feminism' does not account for either the continued influence of conservative or Catholic women's movements within the socialist world after the Second World War, nor the emergence of unofficial grassroots movements that dissented from the state socialist women's rights narrative, especially in the last decades of the Cold War.
Anti-fascism and the experience of living in a state denied sovereignty in the international order were particularly salient for East Germans such as Oeser and Hörz, as well as their personal experiences of building academic careers as married women with children in the GDR.Grappling with a legacy of national law shaped by National Socialism and shared with its ideological enemy, the Federal Republic of Germany, East Germany was particularly sensitive to questions of self-determination in the Cold War era.National legislation on women's rights and family policy was deeply affected by these legal entanglements. 56The decade that Moyn identifies as the breakthrough for human rights -the 1970s -was the moment when East Germany finally gained recognition as a sovereign state.Oeser was forty-two years old in 1972, when the GDR was admitted as a member state of the United Nations.Three years earlier, at the age of thirty-nine, she had been appointed Professor of International Law at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the first woman to hold such a position.Born in Gera to a working-class, communist family in 1930, Oeser started to study law at the University of Leipzig in 1949.Her father, a factory worker, was persecuted by the Nazis and had to go into hiding.Her mother, a textile worker until she married, raised Edith and her siblings alone.After the war, Edith worked for the German Communist Party and the anti-fascist youth organisation in Thuringia while completing her Abitur.Since the discipline of international law was hardly being studied in the GDR in the 1950s, she began to study under a Soviet lecturer who had been despatched to East Germany for this purpose.
In the short autobiography Oeser provided as part of her personal file at the Humboldt University, she described her PhD dissertation as focusing on 'the military intervention of the Western powers in West Germany, the development of Germany since 1945, and the contravention of international law by the Paris Treaties'. 57This referred to the international agreements which established the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany after its occupation by the Allied Powers since the Second World War.The title of Oeser's dissertation cast the treaties in a different light.It referred to the role of the Paris Agreement in 'ripping' West Germany from the German federal union of states and the right to self-determination of the German people.Her Habilitationsschrift, defended in 1963, focused on the significance of the post-Second World War peace settlement for the agreement of a German Peace Treaty. 58She lived in Nicosia from 1964 to 1966 while her second husband, whom she divorced in 1970, was the head of the GDR trade mission to Cyprus.During this time, she was tasked by the East German Foreign Ministry with writing a report on the UN International Court of Justice with regard to the peaceful resolution of international conflicts. 59As a delegate to the UN Committee monitoring the implementation of the 1979 CEDAW, these understandings of national self-determination informed Oeser's defence of the East German approach to women's rights. 60nternational lawyers and other UN delegates from the socialist world made important contributions to the development of a women's rights convention at the UN from the 1960s, but in less straightforward ways than existing scholarship recognises.At the United Nations, a first draft of a Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women was presented by the Polish delegate to the CSW, Zofia Dembińska, in 1965. 61The historian Francisca de Haan has interpreted this as part of a larger story of 'left feminism' during the Cold War. 62Although Dembińska was a communist and a pillar of the Polish People's Republic, the language of the Declaration she proposed may have had the unintended consequence of strengthening what later came to be seen as a hallmark of the liberal approach to sex inequality: the concept of non-discrimination. 63The draft Declaration relied heavily on the concept of 'discrimination' as previously defined in the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).This understanding of discrimination also shaped CEDAW. 64Socialist countries, such as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and the USSR, all supported the adoption of a 'single, comprehensive convention' on discrimination against women, although so too did Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Egypt and the Philippines. 65The USA, on the other hand, only ratified the CERD in 1994 and still has not ratified CEDAW.While the socialist bloc supported UN initiatives that called attention to racial and sex discrimination in the capitalist West, socialist countries did not typically develop anti-discrimination norms or institutions in domestic law, since they argued that equality under socialism was being achieved through substantive rather than procedural measures. 66This was amplified, Barbara Havelková has suggested, by Marxist analyses of inequality and an essentialist understanding of gender difference. 67rom the perspective of socialist international lawyers such as Oeser, the quest for equality was inseparable from the construction of a strong state and the pursuit of self-determination. 68This understanding of self-determination as inextricably linked to human rights -particularly economic, social and cultural rights -provided the basis for alliances between East European states and countries in the global South during the 1960s.These alliances were still salient when the UN launched its International Women's Year in 1975, acting upon a proposal put forward by the Women's International Democratic Federation soon after it regained UN consultative status as a non-governmental organisation.The fact that the Eastern Bloc hosted its own World Congress of Women in East Berlin in 1975, a few months after the much better-known UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City, was partly a product of Cold War rivalry, but just as importantly testified to the importance of the competing internationalisms, including a socialist internationalism based on solidarity with peoples, that still characterised international politics in this period. 69At the same time, the emergence of the Group of 77 amid calls for a New International Economic Order demonstrated that the balance of power was tilting away from the Soviet Bloc, and towards the countries of the Third World.In this vein, Roland Burke has argued that the most salient cleavage at the 1975 UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City ran between the statist, authoritarian model of development championed by the G77 in alliance with the socialist bloc, and the universalist model of human rights embraced both by non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty International and western feminists. 70EDAW reflected these tensions.An initial version of the women's rights convention was drafted in 1972 by Leticia Shahani, a career diplomat representing the Philippines on the CSW, and supported by a group of socialist countries led by the Soviet Union. 71This was the year when President Marcos imposed martial law in the Philippines, although Shahani claimed to have pursued her own agenda rather than her government's with respect to the women's rights convention.Originating in conventions on the political rights of women and the nationality of married women, CEDAW emphasised the principle of non-discrimination and legal equality, focusing on discrimination against women rather than on all discrimination on the basis of sex. 72The convention addressed substantive as well as formal equality, including articles on economic and political inequalities between men and women, educational disparities, political participation, employment, health and the special difficulties faced by rural women.States parties were required to eliminate discrimination in the public domain and the family.CEDAW deliberations unfolded amid debates about sex equality and sex differencewhether women should have protective labour legislation or equal work opportunities, for example, and whether women's issues should be deliberated in separate spaces such as the CSW or in integrated spaces such as the more powerful Human Rights Commission.As the first East German delegate to the UN CSW, Hörz was immediately involved -upon arriving in Geneva in September 1976 -with finalising the text of the Convention, including heated debates about its Preamble. 73y this time, the idea of self-determination as a cause connecting the Second and Third Worlds had disintegrated, and opposition movements in Eastern Europe were reinterpreting human rights as part of a reform movement that would hold state socialist regimes to account for their violations of the human rights conventions to which they had committed themselves. 74In East Germany, the Marxist interpretation of human rights centred on social justice, solidarity and self-determination embraced by the ruling Socialist Unity Party was being challenged by a host of grassroots movements calling for alternative interpretations of peace, rights, socialism and democracy.Across the socialist world, unofficial women's and feminist movements, as well as gay and lesbian activists, and advocates for minority rights, were contesting the dominant vision of women's rights and the homogeneous concept of 'woman' that underpinned it.Yet many of the figures perceived as leading 'dissidents' in the West, such as the Czech playwright and leader of Charter 77, Václav Havel, were outspoken in their anti-feminism, while some female dissidents felt that gender inequality was subordinate to the broader struggle against communist oppression.The neglect of gender and women's rights in the historiography of dissidence since the 1970s, not only in Eastern Europe but also in Latin America, has also occluded their presence in global histories of human rights.
Throughout the crisis-ridden decade of the 1980s, socialist delegates to the UN continued to defend a vision of women's rights based on substantive equality and strong states.In 1986, East Germany lauded CEDAW as the 'the first extensive human rights covenant that recognizes the unity of all human rights, including social and cultural as well as political and civil rights', while arguing that equal rights for women would only be guaranteed by 'a halt to the arms race, arms limitation and disarmament, the establishment of a new international economic order and the safeguarding of world peace on the basis of sovereign equality of States and the peoples' rights to self-determination'. 75 In her work at the CSW, Hörz cooperated with western delegates who shared her views on aspects of women's rights, but not her political beliefs, such as Hannah-Beate Schöpp-Schilling from West Germany, or Marcelle Devaud of France, while at the same time proposing statements that reflected the foreign policy of the East German dictatorship.One example was the Preamble to CEDAW.Another was the UN Declaration on the Participation of Women in Promoting International Peace and Cooperation, adopted by the General Assembly in 1982, which called for women to contribute to the 'eradication of apartheid, of all forms of racism, racial discrimination, colonialism, neo-colonialism, aggression, foreign occupation and domination and interference in the internal affairs of States'. 76This was rooted in calls since the 1975 Mexico Conference for a declaration supporting women's participation in the 'strengthening of international peace and security and in the struggle against colonialism, racism, racial discrimination, foreign aggression and occupation and all forms of foreign domination', reflecting the language of the Mexico Declaration although not repeating its comparison of Zionism to apartheid.An early draft prepared by the GDR was criticised by the USA as overly political and lacking 'consensus' and 'broad-based international interest and support', unlike CEDAW. 77For Hörz, however, the adoption of this UN Declaration, in the wake of the enormous protests sparked by the Euromissiles crisis, was a source of particular pride, since it reflected her commitment to integrating women as a collective subject into socialist foreign policy. 78hroughout Oeser's term as GDR delegate to the CEDAW Committee, East Germany along with other socialist countries strongly resisted measures that would infringe on state sovereignty, such as the provision in CEDAW authorising the International Court of Justice to settle disputes concerning a state's failure to implement the Convention.For the socialist countries, this provision was 'at various with the principle of non-interference in internal matters of other countries, which represents one of the basic principles of international co-operation and international law'. 79This was only one of the many points of conflict facing the Committee, which included a consistent lack of resources as well as the ongoing question of states' reservations with respect to the Convention.As the Canadian delegate pointed out in 1988, the Women's Convention covers both civil and political rights which are the jurisdiction of the Human Rights Committee and the economic, social and cultural rights which are the jurisdiction of the Committee of Experts on those particular rights.Thus I think it is clear to say that the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has twice as much work to do each time it sits as either of the other two supervisory bodies. 80reover, an unusually high number of states parties -nearly half -had not unconditionally accepted the Treaty's terms on grounds of 'incompatibility' with issues ranging from services for rural women to family values.As a 1987 report by American international lawyers Rebecca J. Cook and Suzanna Stout on behalf of International Women's Rights Action Watch observed, 'The substantive issue of incompatibility may be more political than legal'. 81n February 1989, the Soviet Union withdrew its reservations regarding the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in relation to the UN Conventions on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) and the Political Rights of Women (1953), as well as another four human rights conventions -on genocide, trafficking, racial discrimination and torture.82 As a result of Gorbachev's policy of perestroika, the strict Soviet doctrine of sovereignty and nonintervention -reflected in its strongly dualistic approach to international and domestic law -was giving way by the late 1980s to a greater willingness to consider the primacy of international over domestic law in the name of building a socialist Rechtsstaat.This also entailed a reassessment of human rights, with social rights no longer being seen as taking priority over political rights, and an acknowledgement of the international legal personality of the individual, opening the door to a new era of liberal internationalism.This marked the end of the socialist defence of self-determination, once the keystone of a communist internationalism that celebrated a militant anti-capitalist solidarity with oppressed peoples.It was the end of this world of competing internationalisms that Oeser was observing, and not simply the sudden entry of the former communist world into the globalised West, when she wrote her article in Neues Deutschland in March 1990.

Women's rights as human rights after the Cold War
In March 1990, Hörz was attending a meeting of the CSW in New York when she was approached by a new member of the East German delegation, a representative of the Round Table that was now sharing power with the communists.The delegate called Hörz an embarrassing relic [Altlast] of the old regime and promised to have her removed from her UN role forthwith. 83In her autobiography, Hörz writes with deep feeling about this incident, which was swiftly followed by early retirement from her academic position at the Humboldt University.The abrupt end of Hörz's career foreshadowed larger changes.The fall of the Berlin Wall, and with it the socialist bloc's stubborn defence of anticapitalist self-determination and social rights, combined with an increasing emphasis on sexuality over other causes of gender inequality in western feminist movements, was opening up opportunities for the redefinition of women's rights in international law and politics.Although the United Nations had begun to recognise the importance of women's human rights during the UN Decade of Women (1975-1985), only after the end of the Cold War were women's rights accorded significant attention in major events on broader themes, such as the 1993 United Nations Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, or the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.
Violence against women, particularly sexual violence, became central to post-Cold War campaigns aimed at mainstreaming women's human rights.The twentieth-century struggle for equality and nondiscrimination was seemingly being displaced by campaigns centred on sexual harm and sexual rights.Violence against women had, however, been a central concern of women's movements for decades.In 1976, feminists staged an International Tribunal on Violence against Women in Brussels, where the campaigner Diana E. H. Russell coined the concept of 'femicide'. 84At the same time, feminist legal scholars in the USA such as Catherine MacKinnon were reframing sexual harassment and pornography as sexual discrimination and thus a civil rights issue. 85Women's movements in the global South were also driving grassroots campaigns to support victims of sexual violence.By 1985, violence against women had become a major theme at the Third World Conference on Women at Nairobi but was still marginalised as a 'women's issue' in the broader world of the UN's human rights work. 86The term 'violence against women' (VAW) was deployed to globalise a large number of disparate local campaigns, from the USA to Latin America, Africa and Asia, around rape, domestic violence, female genital mutilations, sexual slavery, dowry death or the torture of political prisoners. 87ts success seemed to rest on linking the protection of female bodily integrity, which was central to liberalism, to 'core understandings of human dignity in many other cultures'. 88Yet its success as a mobilising symbol for transnational advocacy networks that were increasingly associated with western liberal internationalism arguably also effaced the massive amount of grassroots activism originating in the global South.Meanwhile, the centrality of the VAW agenda in redefining women's rights in international law simultaneously brought human rights into much closer dialogue with international humanitarian and criminal law. 89n 1991, the New York branch of the Center for Women's Global Leadership led by Charlotte Bunch at Rutgers University and the International Women's Tribune Centre launched a petition for the 1993 UN Human Rights Conference in Vienna to recognise 'women's human rights at every level of its proceedings' and to recognise 'gender violence, a universal phenomenon which takes many forms across culture, race, and class … as a violation of human rights requiring immediate action'.90 During the 1993 Vienna Conference, Bunch's centre hosted a 'Women's Rights are Human Rights Tribunal', which deployed witnesses and individual testimonies to underscore how harmful and often fatal forms of gender-based violence passed under the radar of human rights campaigns because they occur in the private sphere of family or community and are generally perpetrated by non-state actors such as spouses and family members.91 Irish political scientist Niamh Reilly, who coordinated the 16 Days of Violence campaign in 1991 while a doctoral student at Rutgers, saw this as an example of 'transnational feminist advocacy (TFN)' embodying a cosmopolitan feminism defined by its 'commitment to public international law, especially human rights norms and law', while challenging the 'legalist bias' and 'public-private configurations in international law'.92 If CEDAW had conceptualised 'women' as a collective subject of rights, feminist legal scholars in the USA now saw women posing an epistemological challenge to the entire field of international law.'Women are the paradigmatic alien subjects of international law', wrote CUNY Professor of Law Celina Romany wrote in 1993.'To be an alien is to be an other, an outsider'.93 Horrific reports of mass rape during the wars in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, as the US legal scholar MacKinnon argued in a speech to the 1993 Vienna Conference, illustrated the convergence between ways of thinking about women and ways of thinking about international law and politics … : the more a conflict can be framed as within a state -as a civil war, as domestic, as private -the less effective the human rights model becomes … The closer a fight comes to home, the more 'feminized' the victims become, no matter their gender, and the less likely it is that international human rights will be found violated, no matter what was done.94 Further, MacKinnon provocatively claimed: 'Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina are being treated like women, like women being gang-raped on a mass scale'.95 Sexual violence was recognised as a crime against humanity in the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.Yet this focus on violence, as Zain Lakhani has argued, simultaneously 'circumscribed women's access to affirmative rights .. and made them eligible for aid only through their experience of victimization'.96 The rhetoric of victimisation also recalled older colonial discourses about 'native subjects' in need of protection and moral reform.97 Many activists and scholars who wrote about women's right to protection from violence, Sally Engle Merry pointed out, identified culture and tradition as the source of the problem.98 Like the colonial state, human rights regimes demonised non-western cultures as they sought 'to move ethnically defined subjects into the realm of rights-bearing modernity'.99 If the recognition of sexual violence as central to women's human rights challenged the public-private divide and resulted in new mechanisms for the monitoring and prosecution of such crimes, it also created metrics used to evaluate the validity of women's claims as refugees and asylum seekers at a moment when Western governments were reducing their material commitments to state-based humanitarianism.100 In the field of reproductive rights, the early 1990s witnessed a shift away from earlier discourses of population control and towards a recognition of women's reproductive and sexual self-determination as a basic health need and human right.101 The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, and the 1995 Beijing Platform of Action, reflected years of efforts of women's health movements around the world.Advocates saw this, at the time, as a defeat of Vatican and fundamentalist efforts to universalise a traditional patriarchal view of family, reproduction and sexuality; and a repudiation of neo-Malthusian views of population growth (especially excess births) as the main cause of global economic and environmental crises.Unlike the documents adopted at the population conferences in Bucharest (1974) and Mexico City (1984), the Cairo programme included a whole chapter devoted to Gender Equality, Equity and Empowerment of Women.Moreover, it rejected the view of women's equality as simply a means to the ultimate goal of fertility reduction, stating: 'The empowerment and autonomy of women and the improvement of their political, social, economic and health status is a highly important end in itself… [and] essential for the achievement of sustainable development'.102 It urged governments to take measures to end rape, domestic violence, sexual exploitation and female genital mutilation, all presented as forms of violence against women that not only violated their basic human rights but adversely affected their health.Yet at the same time, women's NGOs from the global South criticised the silences in the Programme of Action regarding issues of sustainable human development, particularly the impact of structural adjustment policies, foreign debt, trade inequities, international financial institutions and transnational corporations on women's health, poverty and social programmes.As political scientist Rosalind Petchesky noted at the time: 'Lamenting the disproportionate time and energy devoted in the conference deliberations to debating abortion and reproductive rights as opposed to all of these crucial macro-economic and social issues, they ask rhetorically, "where is the D [Development] in ICPD?"'. The commodification and exploitation of sex, domestic and care work increased as European borders become more porous and labour more flexible, with the former socialist countries catapulted into the global economy and women disproportionately affected by unemployment and the loss of social benefits.105 Women's rights across post-socialist Europe -East and West -slipped between notions of personal and national self-determination, as the controversial constitutional debates over abortion in post-unification Germany demonstrated.Women's employment, child care, pensions and divorce regulations were all affected by radical revisions to public policy by post-socialist governments during the 1990s, in ways that were often detrimental to women.106 The former East Germany has been seen as a laboratory for neoliberalism in the 1990s, with scholars arguing that relative gender equality and the acceptance of work as the primary mode of societal integration during state socialism paved the way for a neoliberal model in which East German women, who took their economic independence for granted, were transformed into low-paid, precarious, migrant workers or the needy recipients of unemployment benefits.107 At the same time, the East German transformation opened the floodgates for the simultaneous transformation of the West German labour market model, which was still reliant on a gendered division of labour between male breadwinners and female housewives.108 At a conference of the East German Autonomous Women's Movement in the Thuringian city of Weimar in September 1991, nearly two years after the fall of the Wall, an activist took the stage to declare that 'in comparison to the Federal Republic of Germany the GDR was a feminist paradise.Now every woman has to struggle for economic independence, for a nursery place, against Article 218 [regulating abortion] and the most wide-ranging discrimination -rights that had become so taken for granted in the GDR that they were hardly mentioned any longer'.109 A statement made by women from the East European Caucus at the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing reflected these concerns.The Conference produced a Platform for Action that was presented as a comprehensive 'blueprint' for women's human rights.For Hörz, however, the Platform represented a step backwards, a sign of 'stagnation and repression' on the path to equality.110 Similar concerns were voiced by far-left socialists from the global South, such as Indu Agnihotri, a leading member of the Indian mass left-wing women's organisation AIDWA, who viewed the collapse of the socialist bloc as resulting in the 'trivialisation of women's issues' with concerns about economic justice being replaced by an overly restrictive focus on abortion, rape, sexual abuse and the 'panacea' of gender mainstreaming.111 At the plenary session, a number of feminist groups within the East European Caucus issued a 'Statement from a Non-Region', referring to their perception that the status of women from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe were not being adequately considered at the conference.
Our group of countries is a Non-Region because there is no recognizable political or geographic definition for the region composed of countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.We are bound by the common problems associated with the transition to democracy.In this difficult and uneven transition, the most serious problem is the consistent and drastic decline in the status of women. 112ey disagreed with the Beijing Platform of Action's characterisation of the post-socialist transition to democracy as 'rapid and relatively peaceful', instead calling attention to the risks posed to women by threats to abortion rights and the feminisation of poverty. 113hile the new language of women's rights in post-socialist Europe was partly disseminated by international donor-funded non-governmental organisations, this was not simply a case of 'feminismby-design', with the western export of cultural feminism acting as a corollary of neoliberal economic transformation. 114Gender issues, along with human rights and environmental protection, were among 'the new areas of global regulation' that private foundations such as the Open Society Institute funded with a view to securing economic globalisation. 115Gender mainstreaming and affirmative action for women were presented as mechanisms to overcome social and cultural obstacles to women's participation, and gender representation became a measure of the inclusiveness of the new postsocialist democracies.In addition, a new set of institutions was created to mediate the implementation of formal commitments of government to gender equality, although the efficacy of these formal guarantees of legal equality was limited at a moment of rapidly increasing economic inequality. 116he 'gender agenda' has recently become a target of populist and right-wing parties throughout post-socialist Europe.But the new Gender Studies institutes established in post-socialist Europe were not solely a product of western philanthropy or international donor initiatives, emerging rather from their interaction with a longer history of feminist and gender critique within as well as outside the structures of the socialist state. 117Nor did women's mobilisation around abortion rights, domestic violence, discrimination or bodily autonomy simply bang another nail into the neoliberal coffin of post-socialist Europe, but in their rejection of the public/private divide within the human rights idea, challenged the logic of neoliberalism. 118

Conclusion
The collapse of communism in 1989 created opportunities for women's movements in the global North to redefine the language of women's human rights around violence against women, thereby privileging questions of sexuality and bodily harm over older commitments to social and economic justice.The paradoxes that result from individual suffering being used as the basis for human rights claims on behalf of women would be very familiar -as Hoffmann notes -'to historians of the 19th century female moral reform movement or the struggle for women's citizenship rights'. 119The rhetoric of victimisation obliged women to make claims based on bodily harm rather than political rights or economic justice.At the same time, the centrality of violence against women to the ethical rights turn of the 1990s also helped bring human rights into closer dialogue with international humanitarian and criminal law.Debates about the international prosecution of wartime sexual violence and the revival of humanitarian intervention reflected this shift.But while the end of the Cold War undoubtedly saw women's human rights transformed by the liberal internationalist turn in international human rights, humanitarian and criminal law, is it fair to say that feminism also enabled their 'neoliberalization'?
The history of human rights activism by male dissidents in communist Eastern Europe has been central to some of the most influential historical narratives about global human rights in recent years, but this essay reminds us that the story might look rather different when told from a gendered perspective.This essay suggests, however, that the contributions of socialist experts such as Hörz cannot be explained entirely as a story of 'left-feminist' activism. 120Nor does the essay suggest that East European state socialism was the best system for women, in contrast to the neoliberal exploitation of the present-day USA. 121Socialist states championed international declarations on the elimination of discrimination against women at the United Nations from the 1960s as a means of shoring up support for statist visions of substantive equality and collective self-determination.Originally envisioned as a means of attacking the liberal democratic west for its failure to tackle inequality, these campaigns had unintended consequences, eventually contributing to the construction of a liberal international order that interpreted 'discrimination' as a question of procedural equality rather than economic justice.After 1989, post-socialist states would be obliged to adopt anti-discrimination legislation that was perceived to have no basis in domestic law. 122Such measures were increasingly associated with the neoliberal governance of the European Union rather than the human rights universalism of the United Nations.
The post-Cold War feminist challenge to the public-private divide in international human rights law was enabled by the ethical human rights turn of the 1990s, the liberal internationalist commitment to cosmopolitan feminism and the protection of female bodily autonomy.But this moment was short lived.One year after the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the United Nations celebrated the International Year of the Family.The global civil society imagined by supporters of human rights was paralleled by reminders, as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated, that the 'family was the natural and fundamental unit of society', entitled to protection 'by society and the State'. 123Meanwhile, the neoliberal transformation of post-socialist economies reshaped gender relations across the region.However, the argument that western cultural feminism was simply complicit with the neoliberal hollowing out of human rights seems misplaced.New forms of feminist internationalism emerged at the UN and in other arenas in the first decades of the twentyfirst century, as Dorothy Sue Cobble has recently argued, such as the anti-globalisation protests in Seattle, the World Social Forum, or the International Trade Union Congress, the result of a merger between the two major communist and capitalist-affiliated labour federations of the Cold War era. 124While the idea of 'women' as a collective subject of human rights has been fundamentally challenged by nonbinary understandings of gender difference over the past three decades, the story of women's rights as human rights nonetheless reminds us that the minimalist, neoliberal human rights 'breakthrough' from the 1970s was only one part of a more complex human rights history.

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C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S * This article is a revised version of the 2022 Gender and History Annual Lecture, delivered at the University of Sheffield in May 2022.I am grateful to the symposium participants, and to Julia Moses, Adrian Bingham and especially the two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly thoughtful and helpful comments.The research was supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship ('How Women's Rights became Human Rights: Gender, Socialism and Postsocialism, 1917-2017, AH/P008852/1) and a Gerda Henkel Stiftung Research Fellowship.O R C I D Celia Donert https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1285-333XE N D N O T E S