Women, Law, and Inequality: Rethinking International Human Rights

Authors

Mary Elizabeth Bartholomew, City University of New York Law School
Drucilla Cornell, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Abstract

In 1984, Robin Morgan posed this remarkable question in her historic book Sisterhood is Global. The Feminist Legal Resource Center remains but an unrealized goal of the international feminist legal community. Such a center could benefit women, especially women in the law, seeking to obtain access to information about trends and movements worldwide in the struggle to expand the rights of women. Beginning for the most part with the aftermath of World War II, when individuals became subjects of international law with the creation and proliferation of human rights law, lawyers and others concerned with the promotion of good government and world peace began using treaties and conventions as argument in creating legislation and in persuading international tribunals and municipal courts. Women's Legal Rights: International Covenants an Alternative to ERA? makes a substantial contribution to the effort to create such a library. In the continued absence of Robin Morgan's vision of that international library, this book is a must read. It is an important resource for legal practitioners, indeed, for anyone interested in the development of human rights, and more specifically, of women's rights. Halberstam and Defeis endorse the feminist hope that the more we know about each other's struggles, especially as expressed in the international treaties and conventions which directly or indirectly affect women, the more we will learn about how to use each other's strategies and to invent new ones. They agree with Morgan that information and knowledge can feed the imagination. The authors contend that because international human rights law resembles domestic civil rights law, inasmuch as both are about the relationships between states, stateauthorized institutions, and individuals, we can and should use international conventional law as authority in our courts and work toward the adoption of certain United Nations and regional human rights instruments in the effort to provide women with equal rights (p. 1, 50). Their theory is that individuals are as much the subjects of treaties to which the United States is a party as they are subjects of the Civil Rights Act and would have been to the Equal Rights Amendment ("ERA") had it been enacted (p. 4).

Disciplines

Human Rights Law | International Law | Law | Law and Gender

Recommended Citation

Mary E. Bartholomew & Drucilla Cornell, Women, Law, and Inequality: Rethinking International Human Rights, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 153 (1994).
Available at: https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol16/iss1/7