Women's Rights

The concept of women's rights has evolved and expanded as it has been informed by the global activism of women's movements. The expansion of women's rights, however, has not followed the classic trajectory of the expansion of rights of citizenship as proposed by the British sociologist T. H. Marshall. Marshall described the expansion of rights of citizenship in Europe and North America from civil rights in the 17th and 18th centuries, to formal political rights in the 19th century, and [Page 1794]finally to social and economic welfare rights in the 20th century. In the case of women's rights, political equality has emerged at a slower pace. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, women generally gained citizenship later than men and sometimes even gained social rights before political rights.

As feminist political theorists like Carole Pateman have pointed out, even though citizenship and rights were often described as universal, they were premised on male norms, which have historically excluded women from participating as full citizens. Citizenship has often been equated with public participation and with rights and obligations in relation to the state, yet for women, structural inequalities in the private sphere (in the family and domestic sectors) have profoundly shaped the extent to which they can claim full citizenship in the public realm.

Thus, a major tension in both the history of women's rights activism as well as in feminist theory has focused on whether women could attain their rights through claims to equality (e.g., women need to attain the rights men have attained in order to be equal) or through claims of difference (women need equal rights in order that their particular experiences and interests might gain validation and full expression). Another debate exists between universal approaches to women's rights and those that emphasize difference through notions of multiculturalism (as was popular in the 1980s) or intersectionality (influenced by the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins in the 1990s), which viewed oppressions based on gender, class, religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, class, and disability as creating a system of intersecting, multiple forms of discrimination. Some theorists and activists have emphasized the importance of addressing women's substantive rights, because procedural rights may be insufficient since membership in local, ethnic, religious, national, and global communities may create other impediments that prevent women from exercising their rights. Finally, an influential capabilities approach pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum views rights-based frames as too limiting because they rely too heavily on formalism. Capabilities theorists focus instead on what people can be or do to realize their full capabilities and full human potential so that they can exercise their rights.