Women’s Rights and Human Rights International Historical Perspectives Edited by Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake grimshaw/94622/crc 15/1/01 5:22 pm Page 1 Women’s Rights and Human Rights grimshaw/94622/crc 15/1/01 5:22 pm Page 2 Also by Patricia Grimshaw AUSTRALIAN WOMEN: Feminist Perspectives (co-editor) CREATING A NATION (co-author with Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly) FAMILIES IN COLONIAL AUSTRALIA (co-editor) FREEDOM BOUND I: Documents on Women in Colonial Australia (co-editor) PATHS OF DUTY: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii THE HALF-OPEN DOOR (co-editor) WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IN NEW ZEALAND Also by Katie Holmes FREEDOM BOUND II: Documents on Women in Modern Australia (co-editor with Marilyn Lake) SPACES IN HER DAY: Australian Women’s Diaries of the 1920s and 1930s Also by Marilyn Lake A DIVIDED SOCIETY: Tasmania during World War I AUSTRALIANS AT WORK: Commentaries and Sources (co-editor) CREATING A NATION (co-author with Patricia Grimshaw, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly) DOUBLE TIME: Women in Victoria, 150 years (co-editor) FREEDOM BOUND II: Documents on Women in Modern Australia (co-editor with Katie Holmes) GENDER AND WAR: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (co-editor) GETTING EQUAL: The History of Australian Feminism THE LIMITS OF HOPE: Soldier Settlement in Victoria, 1915–38 grimshaw/94622/crc 15/1/01 5:22 pm Page 3 Women’s Rights and Human Rights International Historical Perspectives Edited by Patricia Grimshaw Max Crawford Professor of History University of Melbourne Victoria Australia Katie Holmes Senior Lecturer Women’s Studies and History LaTrobe University Victoria Australia and Marilyn Lake Professor of History LaTrobe University Victoria Australia grimshaw/94622/crc 15/1/01 5:22 pm Page 4 Editorial matter and selection © Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake 2001 Chapter 3 © Patricia Grimshaw 2001 Chapter 17 © Marilyn Lake 2001 Chapters 1, 2, 4–16 and 18–19 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–80195–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women’s rights and human rights : international historical perspectives / edited by Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–80195–4 1. Women’s rights. 2. Human rights. I. Grimshaw, Patricia. II. Holmes, Katie. III. Lake, Marilyn. HQ1236 .W6529 2000 305.42—dc21 00–053056 10987654321 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents Acknowledgements viii Notes on the Contributors ix Introduction xiv Marilyn Lake, Katie Holmes and Patricia Grimshaw Part I Legacies of Imperialism 1 British Women, Women’s Rights and Empire, 1790–1850 3 Clare Midgley 2 Nationalism, Colonialism and Women: the Case of the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Japan 16 Noriyo Hayakawa 3 Reading the Silences: Suffrage Activists and Race in Nineteenth-Century Settler Societies 31 Patricia Grimshaw 4 Women, Individual Human Rights, Community Rights: Tensions within the Papua New Guinea State 49 Anne Dickson-Waiko 5 Na˜Wa˜Hine Kapu: Divine Hawaiian Women 71 Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa 6 Reconciling Our Mothers’ Lives: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Women Coming Together 88 Jackie Huggins, Kay Saunders and Isabel Tarrago 7 Margaret Mead and the Ambiguities of Sexual Citizenship for Women 105 Dolores Janiewski Part II Negotiating National Citizenship 8 Re-Rooting American Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives on 1848 123 Nancy A. Hewitt v vi Contents 9 Women’s Suffrage, Citizenship Law and National Identity: Gendering the Nation-State in France and Germany, 1871–1918 138 Leora Auslander 10 Women’s Rights, Gender and Citizenship in Tsarist Russia, 1860–1920: the Question of Difference 153 Linda Edmondson 11 Emily’s Dream: a Women’s Memorial Building and a History Without Walls: Citizenship and the Politics of Public Remembrance in 1930s–40s New Zealand 168 Charlotte Macdonald 12 From Communal Family Rights to Individual Rights in Women’s National Citizenship in Norway, 1888–1950 184 Ida Blom 13 Social Citizenship and Women’s Right to Work in Postwar America 199 Eileen Boris and Sonya Michel 14 The Status of Widows in Bangladesh 220 Shirin Akhtar Part III Women Working Internationally 15 Nationalism and Feminism in the Black Atlantic 231 Deborah Gray White 16 Women’s Rights or Human Rights? International Feminism between the Wars 243 Karen Offen 17 From Self-Determination via Protection to Equality via Non-Discrimination: Defining Women’s Rights at the League of Nations and the United Nations 254 Marilyn Lake Contents vii 18 South Sudanese Refugee Women: Questioning the Past, Imagining the Future 272 Jane Kani Edward 19 Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Grassroots Women Redefine Citizenship in a Global Context 290 Temma Kaplan Index 309 Acknowledgements Chapter 16, Women’s Rights or Human Rights? International Feminisim between the Wars includes material from European Feminisms, 1700– 1950 by Karen Offen. It is reproduced by permission of the publishers, Stanford University Press © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Chapter 6, Reconciling Our Mother’s Lives: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Women Coming Together, by Jackie Huggins, Kay Saunders and Isabel Tarrago, appeared in an earlier version in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, edited by J. Docker and G. Fischer published by UNSW Press, Sydney, 2000. viii Notes on the Contributors Shirin Akhtar teaches modern South Asian, Southeast Asian and South Pacific history in the Department of History, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her original research focused on the land control system and the landed society of pre-British Bengal which earned her a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1973. She has a number of publications on the administrative history and heritage of pre-modern Bengal. Her recent publications include post-Cold War political developments in Southeast Asia. She has recently become interested in the study of gender. Leora Auslander teaches European history at the University of Chicago, where she was also the founding director of the Center for Gender Studies. She writes in the fields of gender history and theory, material culture and social history. Her current research is on the rela- tionship between everyday life, citizenship law and national culture in France and Germany from 1890 into the 1930s. Ida Blom is Professor of Women’s History at the University of Bergen, Norway. Among her books are studies of family planning (1980), of lying-in practices (1988) and of voluntary organisations in the fight against tuberculosis (1998). She has edited and co-authored a three- volume women’s world history (1991, 1992), and a one-volume Norwe- gian history from a gender perspective (1999). Her research now centres on the importance of gender for nation-building as well as for the construction of the welfare state. Eileen Boris is Professor of Studies in Women and Gender and Coordinating Editor, Iris: a Journal about Women at the University of Virginia. Among her books are Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (1994), which won the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, and Voices of Women Historians: the Personal, the Political, the Professional (1999) which she co-edited with Nupur Chaudhuri for the thirtieth anniversary of the Coordinating Council for Women in History. Her current project on mothers and other workers is tentatively called Citizens on the Job: Gender, Race, and Rights in Modern America. ix x Notes on the Contributors Anne Dickson-Waiko teaches history and gender studies at the University of Papua New Guinea. She researches and writes on women’s political history in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. Her major work is her doctoral dissertation entitled ‘A Woman’s Place is in the Struggle: Feminism and Nationalism in the Philippines’. She combines research and activism with her work with local and regional women’s groups. Linda Edmondson is Research Fellow at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. She has worked for many years on the history of women and gender relations in Russia, and on the problem of rights and citizenship in Russian history. She is the author of Feminism in Russia, 1900–1917 (1984) and editor of Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (1992). She is co-editor (with Olga Crisp) of Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (1989) and (with Peter Waldron) of Economy and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1860–1930: Essays for Olga Crisp (1992).