The Promise of Marriage Consent: Family Politics, the United Nations, and Women’s
Rights in the US, 1947-1967
by
Jessica Malitoris
Department of History Duke University
Date:______Approved:
______Adriane Lentz-Smith, Supervisor
______Jocelyn Olcott
______Sarah Deutsch
______Gunther Peck
______Emily Burrill
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University
2019
i
v
ABSTRACT
The Promise of Marriage Consent: Family Politics, the United Nations, and Women’s
Rights in the US, 1947-1967
by
Jessica Malitoris
Department of History Duke University
Date:______Approved:
______Adriane Lentz-Smith, Supervisor
______Jocelyn Olcott
______Sarah Deutsch
______Gunther Peck
______Emily Burrill
An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University
2019
i
v
Copyright by Jessica Malitoris 2019
Abstract
In this dissertation, I use women’s marriage rights as framed in the 1962 United
Nations Marriage Convention to demonstrate the contradictions contained within human rights that allow them to be coopted into the preservation of systems of power, from imperialism to Jim Crow. The treaty’s creators in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) designed it to defend women’s marriage consent. Delegates pursued a higher age of marriage and more government registration of marriage, and they specifically pushed for the abolition of child marriage, polygamy, and bride price systems. The Marriage Convention’s standards of family resonated with many delegates and policymakers, including segregationist Senators in the United States who otherwise distrusted outside intervention into domestic affairs because they found within the treaty’s human rights project an opportunity to shore up state anti-miscegenation laws.
Conflicts about what human rights were and how best to defend them took shape through the debates about the Marriage Convention, both in the United Nations and in the United States as proponents pressured the Senate to ratify it. Beginning after
World War II and ending with the 1967 Senate hearing that ended the Marriage
Convention’s future in the United States, I examine events that catalyzed transformations in human rights, including the end of World War II, the founding of the
United Nations, the Cold War, and decolonization. I focus especially on the United
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States, where these international changes dovetailed with those caused by civil and women’s rights movements domestically to make for a complex reception of human rights treaties. I use official United Nations documents, State Department and Women’s
Bureau records, newspapers, representatives’ personal papers, and the records of women’s organizations to illustrate the ways that delegates and lawmakers mobilized rights claims as they debated the Marriage Convention.
I argue that the appropriation of human rights by systems of power should not be taken as a corruption of the human rights project but as part of the process of shaping human rights concepts. All parties interested in the Marriage Convention pursued the relationship between marriage and state power to serve their own ends, whether those ends were protecting women, strengthening national governance, or preserving Jim
Crow segregation laws. I conclude that supporters of the Marriage Convention were primarily successful in advancing their cause where it coincided with the normal racist and sexist operation of US power at home and abroad. The Marriage Convention speaks to broader changes in the history of human rights, but the treaty’s specific relationship to issues of gender and race through marriage make for a story of rights unique to it.
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Contents
Abstract ...... iv
List of Abbreviations ...... ix
List of Figures ...... xi
Acknowledgements ...... xii
1. Introduction ...... 1
1.1 Finding Common Ground: Human Rights and Liberal Governance ...... 4
1.2 Human Rights History: Interventions and Argument ...... 11
1.3 Nations on the International Stage: Claiming Modernity through Human Rights ...... 18
1.4 Modernizing through Marriage ...... 25
1.5 Conclusion ...... 30
2. The “American Family” in Transition, 1945-1957 ...... 37
2.1 Containing Women: White Supremacy and Anti-Communism ...... 40
2.2 The UN as Invader: The “Race Problem” and US Foreign Policy ...... 57
2.3 Race and the Family: Immigration and Population Control ...... 67
2.4 A Crisis of Femininity? Women’s Waged Work after World War II ...... 83
2.5 Conclusion ...... 97
3. “Common Ideals of Human Freedom”?: Debating Empire and Rights in the United Nations, 1945-1956 ...... 99
3.1 A New World Order?: Gender and Empire in the New United Nations ...... 102
3.2 Global Family Law: Stabilizing and Modernizing State Power ...... 121
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3.3 The Commission on the Status of Women: A Gathering of Elite Women ...... 139
3.4 Asserting Independent Citizenship: CSW on Political and Nationality Rights .. 154
3.5 The Status of Women in Private Law: Envisioning Family ...... 161
3.5 Conclusion ...... 172
4. “In Case You’re Interested, It’s One Wife Per Man:” The Marriage Convention and the “Universal” Family, 1957-1962 ...... 174
4.1 Making “Modern” Families: Women’s Rights and the Dangers of Culture ...... 177
4.2 “Universal” Rights?: Women’s Rights and Religious Rights at Odds ...... 199
4.3 More than One Kind of Consent: Marriage and Self-Determination ...... 213
4.4 Conclusion ...... 220
5. “A very heavy responsibility for us”: Cold War Women’s Rights and the Marriage Convention in the US, 1961-64 ...... 222
5.1 The PCSW: Women’s Changing Roles in an International Frame ...... 227
5.2 Deals with the Devil: Women’s Rights and Segregationist Politics ...... 248
5.3 Internationalism is Not Enough: Reception of the Marriage Convention...... 261
5.4 Conclusion ...... 277
6. Internationalism and Moral Power: Bringing the Human Rights Treaties to the Senate, 1965-1967 ...... 280
6.1 Domestic Human Rights Questions: Continued Challenges to Segregation ...... 285
6.2 “Does the US Want the United Nations?”: International Cooperation in Crisis . 297
6.3 Insider Politics: Building a Human Rights Alliance ...... 316
6.4 Moral Internationalism and a Defense of Jim Crow: The FRC Hearings...... 331
6.5 Conclusion ...... 348
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7. Conclusion ...... 353
Bibliography ...... 366
Biography ...... 396
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List of Abbreviations
AAUN American Association for the United Nations
AAUW American Association of University Women
ACLU American Civil Liberties Union
AFL-CIO American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations
CHR UN Commission on Human Rights
CPUSA Communist Party of the USA
CSW/UNCSW UN Commission on the Status of Women
ECOSOC UN Economic and Social Council
ERA Equal Rights Amendment
FBPW Federation of Business and Professional Women
FRC Senate Foreign Relations Committee
IACW Inter-American Commission of Women
ICJ International Court of Justice
ILC International Law Commission
NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NACW National Association of Colored Women
NCNW National Council of Negro Women
NGO Non-governmental organization
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PCSW President's Commission on the Status of Women
PPFA Planned Parenthood Federation of America
PPSEAWA Pan-Pacific and South East Asian Women's Association
STJ Sojourners for Truth and Justice
UCW United Church Women
UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UNESCO UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
WIDF Women's International Democratic Federation
WILPF Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
YWCA Young Women's Christian Association
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List of Figures
Figure 1 Gladys Avery Tillett, circa 1965 ...... 6
Figure 2: PEP Vitamins Advertisement ...... 42
Figure 3 Edith Sampson and Eleanor Roosevelt ...... 65
Figure 4 Dr. Dorothy Ferebee, Judge Jean Murrell Capers, and Vivian Carter Mason .... 75
Figure 5 Ebony Magazine: Louise Williams...... 92
Figure 6 Virginia Gildersleeve ...... 105
Figure 7 Delegates at the 2nd session of the UN Women’s Commission ...... 107
Figure 8 The UN Sub-Commission on the Status of Women ...... 142
Figure 9 Isabel de Urdaneta and Dorothy Kenyon...... 144
Figure 10 Minerva Bernardino Hosting a Party ...... 149
Figure 11 Lorena Hahn, circa 1955...... 164
Figure 12 Bedia Afnan and Souad Tabbara ...... 205
Figure 13 Rachel Conrad Nason, 1954 ...... 209
Figure 14 President Kennedy meets with members of the PCSW...... 237
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Acknowledgements
This project would not be possible without funding from the Duke Graduate
School, the Duke History Department, the Duke Department of Gender, Sexuality and
Feminist Studies, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the
Louis Round Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Many people have contributed to the completion of this project. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith for her ever-helpful comments, advice, and reminders that dissertations are never perfect. I also wish to express my gratitude to Dr.
Jocelyn Olcott, who helped me develop the earliest proposals for this project and has been so helpful for understanding the history of women in the UN. Thanks, as well, to
Dr. Sally Deutsch, Dr. Gunther Peck, and Dr. Emily Burrill for their time, attention, and patience.
I would like to thank my parents, Kerry and John, and my sister Julia for their unending support, understanding, and occasional reminders that it was time to put work down for a while and take a break. I am eternally grateful to my partner Mike for his emotional support, his confidence in my abilities, and for doing the cooking and grocery shopping when I needed it. I appreciate the many friends who have expressed their faith in me and been available to support me.
Finally, I am grateful to Steve McGill for his encouragement.
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1. Introduction
In 1962, a Connecticut journalist hailed the United Nations General Assembly’s passage of a new treaty on women’s rights in marriage, colloquially called the Marriage
Convention. By pressuring states to eliminate child marriage, the bride price, and polygamy, they said the document would “bring a breath of fresh air into secluded rooms in underdeveloped countries.” The author distinguished Europe and North
America, where women had freedom, from “primitive societies,” in which “women do the work while men spend their time fighting neighboring tribesmen.” Marriage practices in such places, they claimed, were responsible for many states’
“backwardness” and could hold women in “bondage” for their entire lives. Fortunately, the new treaty would show women in such places that freedom “is within their reach if they demand it,” and consequently help them “evolve toward a condition of equality with men.”1
The Connecticut journalist grounded their article in the assumption that the US would transform the world beyond its borders with its recognition of human rights, an assumption that was shared by policymakers, lawmakers, and diplomats. After World
War II, US Americans shifted their perception of other people around the globe, participating in ongoing international and domestic rights conversations. Development
1 “A UN Treaty Seeks to Protect Women,” The Hartford Courant, 17 Dec 1962, 14, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (hereafter PQHN): The Hartford Courant, accessed 1 Aug 2017. 1
ideology and modernization were critical to reframing global hierarchy and the shape of
US power in a decolonizing world, and therefore also shaped human rights language.
On the global stage of the United Nations, US diplomats enacted a theory of national progress which placed “the West” at the pinnacle of human evolution and “the rest” at various stages along the way.
The framework of family life and social development at the heart of the 1962
Marriage Convention granted it unprecedented interest among US policymakers. The document’s approach to marriage made it the first human rights treaty that the US delegation had supported in the UN in over a decade, and almost made it the first human rights treaty ratified by the Senate. The Convention on Consent for Marriage,
Age of Marriage, and Registration of Marriages called for the abolition of “ancient laws and practices,” especially polygamy, child marriage, and the bride price. In the process, delegates defined a liberal rights model that made marriage consent a site of freedoms and defined education, responsibility, and participation in national life as important elements of “true” consent.
Delegates to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) began to develop the Marriage Convention during the body’s 1957 session as part of a modernizing project that took the family as its focus and its tool. Like the author of the
Connecticut newspaper article, predominantly Western representatives framed the preservation of marriage rights as a vehicle for development in the Third World by
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enhancing women’s lives. In the process, these delegates outlined ideal practices familiar to their own domestic contexts. They saw themselves as citizens of states that had completed their journeys to modernity. It was this human rights project that the US delegation bought into and sought to actively shape, in the General Assembly as well as the Women’s Commission, while policymakers began to campaign for ratification at home. The Marriage Convention became part of a dramatically different approach to the
UN that policymakers hoped would highlight the US’s human rights leadership in more concrete ways.
This dissertation uses the Marriage Convention as a case study to examine US
Americans’ engagements with international human rights. I track the ways that the
Marriage Convention allowed for the preservation of systems of power based in racial hierarchies even as its creators sought to protect the rights of women. In the process, I demonstrate the embeddedness of these systems of power in the UN’s human rights projects. Despite the critiques of delegates from postcolonial states and their success removing most of the document’s preservation of formal imperialism, the language of the document utilized a framework that placed supposedly modern states above those that adhered to “ancient” traditions. White supremacists in the US saw opportunities to coopt this women’s human rights project that they had not yet found in other human rights agreements. I argue that, as decolonization globally and civil rights within the US shifted discourses away from explicit racism, discourses of modern families maintained
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space for racist assumptions that appeared colorblind.2 Highlighting the interplay of foreign policy and domestic conversations, I show how all representatives to the UN sought to summarize values from their home countries in a way that was legible to a universalist language of rights, duties, and legal categories. 3
1.1 Finding Common Ground: Human Rights and Liberal Governance
Gladys Avery Tillett, US delegate to the United Nations Commission on the
Status of Women, and Samuel Ervin, Democratic Senator from North Carolina, were among the most dedicated proponents of US ratification of the Marriage Convention.
Both were active members of the Democratic Party, both considered themselves liberals, and both were from North Carolina—in fact, they were childhood friends—but they vehemently disagreed on human rights as a concept. Tillett and Ervin represent sides in
US debates about ratification of the Marriage Convention: on the one hand, those like
Tillett who pursued human rights more broadly and saw the treaty as an opportunity to defend the lives of women around the world while making a statement about US support for human rights; on the other, segregationists like Ervin who typically saw
2 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2014). 3 I operate in a similar frame to Mary Dudziak’s work on “cold war civil rights,” in which many civil rights victories arose primarily from foreign policy considerations, making for shallow changes targeted at foreign audiences. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 4
human rights treaties as encroachment upon the United States but found within marriage rights an opportunity to shore up states’ power.
Gladys Avery Tillett considered herself a staunch supporter of human rights and made waves for her defense of civil rights. A longtime supporter of the UN, Tillett and her husband had attended the San Francisco Conference unofficially to witness the birth of the organization. After her husband passed away in 1954, Tillett took on new challenges, co-chairing the North Carolina chapter of the American Association of the
United Nations.4 A deeply dedicated Democrat, she belonged to the wing of the party that supported the proposed platform shift in favor of civil rights. Tillett told critics within the Democratic Party that she felt “it was high time to place the problems of nuclear war ahead of those of the Civil War.” She represented North Carolina at the
1960 Democratic National Convention, where she made headlines after endorsing the proposed pro-civil rights platform of the DNC in an interview.5 Tillett had a sophisticated grasp of diplomacy and political strategy and she wielded her appearance as well as her words: she presented herself as a genteel Southern woman, often disarming opponents with her appearance.6
4 “Biographical Information,” Charles Walter Tillett Papers, 1853-1954, SHC, accessed Nov 13, 2013, http://www2.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/t/Tillett,Charles_Walter.html#d1e267. 5 Tillett to Frank and Marian Graham, 1960, Correspondence, 1948-1960, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 6 Sara Thomas, untitled introduction to correspondence, Jan 2001, “Correspondence, 1948-1960,” Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC (hereafter SHC). 5
Figure 1 Gladys Avery Tillett, circa 19657
Samuel Ervin, who served as Senator from 1954 to 1974, grounded in his beliefs that the government should stay out of the lives of its citizens as much as possible. He declared his love of “the Constitution and the freedoms it enshrines,” and argued that the US “cannot endure as a free Republic unless those entrusted by its men and women with the powers of government keep their oaths to support its Constitution.”8 In his interpretation of the Constitution, the federal government had no right to intervene in state jurisdiction, and Ervin interpreted any action by the federal government to set
7 Printed in, Gladys Avery Tillett, “The Status of Women in Family Law,” Kappa Beta Pi Quarterly (1965), “UN Speeches, Addresses, and Essays by GAT, Nov-Dec 1964,” box 20, folder 907, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 8 Sam J. Ervin, Jr., Preserving the Constitution (Charlottesville, VA: The Michie Company, 1984), ix. 6
policy in favor of civil rights as gross misuse of power. He was a staunch defender of Jim
Crow laws and in his autobiography Preserving the Constitution he particularly recalled the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act as examples of federal overreach.
In this dissertation I ask what brought together Tillett, Ervin, and those like them in support of the Marriage Convention. The answer lies in how the project of international human rights as framed in the treaty depended upon liberal governance in theory and execution: in consent, the Marriage Convention upheld the marriage contract, and in registration, it pronounced states as the best actors to safeguard consent.
Tillett prioritized the former and Ervin the latter, but they shared assumptions about liberal subjecthood that made their partnership possible, and they belonged to networks that also operated under a liberal logic that united their work.
Tillett depended upon the work of the Women’s Bureau within the Department of Labor and the work of its director Esther Peterson and the Secretary of Labor (later
Ambassador) Arthur Goldberg, who had similar interest in a human rights agenda. The
Women’s Bureau was a crucial site of negotiation within the government and a point of contact for women’s non-governmental organizations. Its leaders buttressed the efforts of Tillett and other US delegates to the UN Women’s Commission. The Women’s Bureau applied pressure to other government bodies and Esther Peterson suggested and coordinated the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Although the body
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focused on labor rights, between 1945 and 1967 its leaders used it as a site to promote women’s rights more broadly. What Cynthia Harrison calls the “Women’s Bureau
Coalition” included organizations such as the Young Women’s Christian Association, the National Council of Women, the National Council of Negro Women, the Federation of Business and Professional Women, and many women union leaders.9 This collection of women’s NGOs kept in regular contact with the Women’s Bureau, often calling upon its experts for information or hosting them as honored guests at their national conventions or other formal meetings. In exchange, NGOs often helped the Women’s
Bureau collect information on women’s status, shared pamphlets they made on issues relevant to women, and themselves acted as experts for Women’s Bureau events.10
Tillett does not represent all the women delegates who formulated the Marriage
Convention, but she had a great deal in common with them. Standards of women’s rights at the United Nations were never formulated exclusively by Euro-American women—the Women’s Commission itself was born primarily because of the efforts of
9 Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945-1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 10 See for example: Women’s Bureau, “Report of Conferences between Representatives of National Women's Organizations and Members of the Staff of the Women's Bureau and of the Department of State,” 17 Apr 1946, Washington, DC, Office of the Director, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, Box 62, folder 6-0-3-0-2; National Council of Negro Women, “Highlights - 14th Annual Conference - National Council of Negro Women,” 15- 18 Nov 1950, NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, folder 52, "Minutes, 1950,” National Archives of Black Women’s History, Museum Resource Center, Landover, MD (hereafter NABWH). 8
Latin American women. However, elite women from around the world were the most consistent participants in this process. Like Tillett, most delegates to the UN
Commission on the Status of Women came from at least the upper-middle class and brought considerable experience in governmental and non-governmental positions to their experiences. Frequently informed by the same networks, many members came to the UN from prominent NGOs such as the Young Women’s Christian Association and the International Alliance of Women, through which they shared, if not exactly the same assumptions about liberal individualism, at least a similar language about rights and governance.
Gladys Avery Tillett, Arthur Goldberg, Esther Peterson, and many of the delegates who fashioned human rights in the UN spoke in a similar register about rights, and in a way that placed human rights at the intersection of liberal bureaucratic governance and social contract consent. Through the Marriage Convention, they homed in on marriage consent. Political theorist Carole Pateman’s interpretation of marriage consent as the sexual contract reveals the deep ties between marriage and the operation of liberal governance.11 Delegates to the UN Women’s Commission never explicitly mentioned sex but rather gestured to it occurring within marriage, and the issue they addressed was not really rape but rather the ability to bear children and the risks of
11 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 9
doing so at too young an age. However, women delegates to the Commission on the
Status of Women took the contractual aspects of marriage seriously. They wanted to legislate “stable and happy families” on an international scale, but also considered the moment of making the marriage contract the place at which to enforce it. At an international seminar in 1961, women delegates from multiple African states explained that many of the restrictions of their rights came after a marriage had been finalized, cutting into their education, their access to political participation, and their earnings.
Marriage age served as one means of addressing the issue, but it remained unresolved in the Marriage Convention, drafted in a Women’s Commission that had no African (and limited Asian) representation until after the treaty had moved on to the General
Assembly.
Women’s Commission delegates and pro-human rights policymakers in the
United States shared a belief that women around the world were sufficiently self- possessed to allow marriage to be a contract in the liberal sense.12 Tillett and other proponents of human rights in the US saw the contract of marriage as working from the bottom up, enhancing a person’s ability to protect themselves through state mediation.
Ervin and other segregationists also worked from this assumption, and therefore
12 C.B. Macpherson critiqued “possessive individualism” in his 1962 book, but it has remained an organizing term in liberal-democratic theory. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, reprint (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Phillip Hansen, Reconsidering C.B. Macpherson: From Possessive Individualism to Democratic Theory and Beyond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 10
understood states’ power over this contractual relationship and sought to use the
Marriage Convention to reinforce states’ power from the top down. Tillett and Ervin’s efforts to determine the possible uses of women’s marriage rights and to shape US policy toward human rights tied the Marriage Convention to the operation of US power.
In the midst of the pressures of the Cold War, decolonization, and domestic civil rights movement, through their work on the treaty they participated in the process of contesting and transforming human rights.
1.2 Human Rights History: Interventions and Argument
I intervene in the history of human rights through the Marriage Convention’s specific combination of modernity, marriage and family, and human rights. I argue that human rights are a construction as I show the different ways that women delegates and representatives of postcolonial states mobilized the concept of human rights as part of their identities and in defense of their experiences. During the period that I cover, diplomats and lawmakers, women’s rights activists and imperialists (and I by no means imply that these categories are mutually exclusive) contested the concept of human rights. They repeatedly reworked human rights in multiple contested spaces that include the General Assembly floor and women’s organizations’ conference halls.
I argue that the persistence of inequalities within human rights treaties is not a corruption of intent but rather was part of the function of human rights concepts and enforcement in the United Nations. I approach human rights as a set of claims to
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protections and freedoms for people that takes the simple fact of human existence as the source of its legitimacy.13 My intention is not to trace the origin of human rights or produce an exhaustive definition. Rather, I seek here to understand how, in this moment, these actors mobilized “human rights” to reinvent the dynamics of global community and the US’s place within it. By foregrounding questions of race and gender in the creation of an international rights-bearing subject, I highlight the ways in which systems of power impact the creation of human rights. I view human rights as constantly in development, collectively built by those who make claims to it and grounded within systems of power.
The history of human rights in the North American academy has flourished in recent decades, and scholars have particularly focused on the question of when human rights first appeared as “human rights.” Some scholars identify this concept as present, in some form, throughout human history, especially as born out of religious doctrine.14
Others have pointed to the Enlightenment and identified the “Rights of Man” as an early iteration of this concept.15 The Atlantic Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human
13 Sarah Snyder defines human rights during the “long 1960s” as incorporating rights to due process, freedom of religion and movement, and participation in government. Snyder, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed US Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 2. 14 Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). C.f. Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013). 15 See especially Lynn Hunt’s argument for the US Declaration of Independence as the first example of human rights. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & 12
Rights serve as proof for still other scholars that human rights emerged in the 1940s.16 In the wake of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia, new approaches to the history of human rights have drawn the line marking the origin of human rights somewhere at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.17 Identifying when human rights surfaced serves as a means to define the concept: Who makes a claim to human rights? What kind of claims are they making? Who gets to decide what counts as human rights?18 UN- focused human rights narratives often place the UN Charter (and sometimes the Atlantic
Charter) as the primary catalyst, and identify smooth progress in human rights typically through the generational model: the “first generation” of civil and political rights, often identified with the First World; social, economic, and cultural rights, identified with
Company, 2007). Costas Douzinas begins his story with Greek philosphers, as well as highlighting the contributions of Judeo-Christian theology. Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (New York: Routledge, 2007). 16 Lisa Baldez, Defying Convention. Mark Mazower locates human rights as a “return to the rights of the individual” in the 1940s: Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 318. 17 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). Moyn and Eckel’s edited volume demonstrates some of these contributors, part of what Richard Wilson called the “Moynian project”: Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Richard J. Wilson, review of The Breakthrough, ed. Eckel and Moyn, Human Rights Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2014): 915-30. 18 Roland Burke helpfully complicates the history of the emergence of human rights with his argument that scholars should look to the historiography social movements at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th which incorporated emotion into their analyses. Although not indicative of the “beginning of human rights,” he sees the affective elements of these movements as an important precursor to the evolution of human rights. Burke, “Flat Affect? Revisiting Emotion in the Historiography of Human Rights,” Journal of Human Rights 16.2 (2017): 123-141, doi:10.1080/14754835.2015.1103168. 13
Second and Third World states; and, more recently, third generation, which includes more collective rights including those to natural resources.
However, a significant number of these histories locate the impetus for human rights within Europe and the United States. Human rights scholar Joseph Slaughter calls many of these histories the “Western romances of human rights” and the birth of human rights that Moyn identifies in the 1970s not one of global “breakthrough” but rather
Euro-American “retrenchment and repossession—not dispensing human rights to the world, but taking them away from those who were already using them.”19 Histories of human rights that focus outside the United States serve as important correctives, dislodging US claims to human rights leadership and allowing greater flexibility in definition.
Some human rights histories rest on assumptions that human rights claims are those made specifically in the name of humanity writ large. As a result, these scholars exclude identity-based rights movements and anti-colonial movements from the category of human rights activism.20 However, such movements critically shaped how human rights were viewed in the US and UN. Historian Carol Anderson’s work on human rights in the NAACP of the 1940s and 1950s, for example, disrupts a narrative of
19 Joseph R. Slaughter, “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World,” Human Rights Quarterly 40.4 (2018): 736, doi:10.1353/hrq.2018.0044. 20 Moyn, The Last Utopia, 124. 14
the steady rise of human rights after 1945. Anderson demonstrates that these black activists had to abandon human rights language in favor of civil rights because the former jeopardized their political project.21 Considering identity-based rights and self- determination movements is essential to writing a history of human rights because these movements illuminate how human rights shape and are shaped by systems of power and inequality.22
Women’s rights and the histories of women’s movements contribute significantly to this history, and through the story of the Marriage Convention I bring a more critical lens to the early years of women’s history in the UN. Existing histories of women in the
UN help to fill the long-criticized gap between the “waves” of feminism, by demonstrating the persistence of women’s movements after World War II and the participation of women outside of Europe and North America.23 However, historical
21 Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 22 Power and inequality are essential to human rights history. Walter D. Mignolo, “Who Speaks for the ‘Human’ in Human Rights?” Hispanic Issues On Line 5 (2009): 7-24. Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940-70 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Glenn Mitoma, Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Rowland Brucken, A Most Uncertain Crusade: The United States, the United Nations, and Human Rights, 1941-1953 (Dekalb, IL: NIU Press, 2014); Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria, trans. Dona Geyer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Randal Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 23 Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2019). Karen Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda: Women’s Ngos and Global Governance, 1925-85 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2010). 15
scholarship on women’s rights in the UN has largely coalesced around the organization’s women’s conferences. Although these have been significant moments in feminist history, this trend leaves a gap in the years prior to the first of these meetings, the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City. Many pre-1975 histories are written by scholars who were insiders intimately involved with and invested in the UN’s project. They reflect a narrative produced by the organization itself, which asserts gradual progress toward true recognition of women’s rights, through declarations and conventions, culminating in the 1975 Women’s Year.24
Histories of women’s international non-governmental organizations have particularly enhanced these conversations. Charlotte Weber, "Unveiling Scheherezade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911-1950," Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 125-157. Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organizations (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002). Karen Offen, ed. Globalizing Feminisms, 1789-1945 (New York: Routledge, 2010). Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women's Thoughts: The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom before World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Carrie A. Foster, The Women and the Warriors: The US Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1946 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995). 24 United Nations, The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 1945-1996, The United Nations Blue Books Series, Vol. 6 (New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 1996). This arc can also be found in the UN’s Women Go Global: The United Nations and the International Women’s Movement, 1945-2000, CD-ROM, 2000. Devaki Jain, Women, Development, and the UN: A Sixty-Year Quest for Equality and Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Hilkka Pietila and Joan Vickers, Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations (London: Zed Books, 1994). Pietila, The Unfinished Story of Women and the United Nations (New York: United Nations Non-Governmental Liason Service, 2007). Anne Winslow, ed, Women, Politics, and the United Nations (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1995). Some histories focusing more on individual female representatives have also followed this narrative arc, such as Doris H. Linder’s “Equality for Women: The Contribution of Scandinavian Women at the United Nations, 1946-66,” Scandinavian Studies 73, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 165-208. 16
Maintaining such a story of women’s rights in the United Nations requires elisions that smooth away the rough edges. Although there is a robust contemporary conversation about the global-local dichotomy in enacting rights programs, parsing the ways that racism and imperial discourses were part of building the early corpus of women’s rights treaties is about historical memory.25 Collapsing women from different backgrounds and political environments into the homogenous category of “women,” at the time, had political value as women delegates sought to construct the UN Women’s
Commission as a place of calm discussion and consensus. But the elision of difference— and the way that delegates themselves saw difference—streamlines narratives that risk reproducing elements of global hierarchies rather than challenging them.26
25 Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Merry and Mark Goodale, eds., The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Kiyoteru Tsutsui, “Human Rights and Minority Activism in Japan: Transformation of Movement Actorhood and Local-Global Feedback Loop,” American Journal of Sociology, 122, no. 4 (Jan 2017): 1050-1103. Barbara Oomen, Martha F. Davis, and Michele Grigolo, eds., Global Urban Justice: The Rise of Human Rights Cities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Zakia Salime, Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011). Lisa Baldez’s work on CEDAW reflects some of the tensions between women’s groups in the US, some arguing it should be adopted because it will help women abroad and others anxious about the impact it will have on domestic politics: Baldez, Defying Convention: US Resistance to the UN Women’s Rights Treaty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 26 Clare Hemmings has written on the silences that are necessary to create smooth narratives—in her book, the erasure of black and lesbian feminist theory is often left out of dominant arcs in feminist history. Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press 2011). Louise Michele Newman has written about ways that claims of the egalitarian goals of feminist politics and assumptions of colorblindness as antiracist ignore how systems of inequality operate even within women’s rights movements. Newman, White Women’s 17
Human rights are a fantasy, made real by human action. I follow the work of scholars whose research demonstrates how deep the roots of empire ran in the foundations of the UN organization.27 However, by approaching this history through marriage rights, I demonstrate the significance of gender and race to state power in a different way. The Women’s Commission’s approach to a specific set of marriage rights invited assumptions unique to family, elevated by the apparently universal acceptance of family as the “basic unit” of all societies.
1.3 Nations on the International Stage: Claiming Modernity through Human Rights
Human rights after World War II and in the midst of decolonization also served as a means of supplementing national narratives. During this period in the United
Nations, women’s human rights declarations and treaties on topics such as voting rights and nationality directly addressed relationships between states and their citizens. States,
Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 20-21. 27 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Rowland Brucken, A Most Uncertain Crusade. Glenn Mitoma, Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power. Sylvanna M. Falcón, Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism inside the United Nations (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). Jean Quataert less dramatically identifies imperialism, pointing instead to the “’realist’ principles” that had long formed the basis of Euro-American international relations meant that “the institutional and normative advances in rights protection were inserted into this international system of power and state calculations of interests.” Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 2. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 18
in ratifying or otherwise incorporating UN human rights documents into domestic legal systems, established who qualified as their citizens and therefore merited defending. In the process, policymakers from different countries constructed narratives of their nations directed at an international audience in which adoption of human rights documents demonstrated modern and effective governance.28
In the United States, the concept of the “American Century” united US-driven human rights, democracy, and social and economic development into a narrative of
America as a nation that framed its international relations, imperialism, and exceptionalism in a new light.29 In this dissertation, I track the changes to an internationalist mentality that took place in the “logo map” United States.30
28 Nikhil Pal Singh calls nations “the quintessential artifacts of modernity--social creation engineered and lived primarily through the techniques of narration and representation.” Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 19. 29 Note, in Luce’s original call to his fellow American’s in 1941, how he united democracy and Christian ideals. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life 10, no. 7 (Feb 1941): 61-65, https://books.google.com/books?id=I0kEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_sum mary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, accessed 16 July 2018. Michael J. Hogan, The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the ‘American Century’ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Martin J. Sklar, Creating the American Century: The Ideas and Legacies of America’s Twentieth- Century Foreign Policy Founders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Bruce J. Schulman, ed., Making the American Century: Essays on the Political Culture of Twentieth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and US Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 30 Benedict Anderson created this term: Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York, 2006), 179. See also, Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” Diplomatic History, 40, no.3 (Apr 2016): 377. 19
Policymakers and diplomats spoke from the position of a metropole for which the
“colonies” were an ever-expanding formal and informal network that included military bases and battlefields as well as financial aid and trade deals. But it also, increasingly, included a belief by citizens of the United States that the whole world constituted the country’s sphere of influence, and that the US could and should intervene to preserve the peace and improve human rights standards globally. Even in such humanitarian settings, white supremacy acted as an organizing logic that informed domestic US power relations and foreign policy.31
Tillett and her fellow diplomats portraying the US on the stage of the UN as a benevolent world leader needed to be able to discuss racial difference in international terms that changed after World War II, inflected through human rights narratives.32
After the circulation in 1945 of photographs depicting Nazi atrocities, it became clear to members of the US delegation at the UN’s founding that the international community must distinguish itself from anti-Semitism and the logic of race that permitted it. US
31 I work from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s definition of it as “the totality of social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege.” Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 9. It is worth recognizing that, despite its explicit foundations in race, white supremacy also relies upon gender and other vertices of oppression. 32 I primarily use Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields’s definitions of race and racism: “race” is the “conception or doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank;” racism is the “theory and practice of applying a social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry,” as well as “the ideology surrounding such a double standard.” Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2012), 16-17. 20
American members of religious groups pursued human rights in the UN Charter on these grounds, joining African American delegates and representatives from multiple
Latin American states in their attempts to pressure states to include human rights.33
After the founding of the United Nations, the new organization became a platform for the explicit reworking of race as a category on the international stage. A UNESCO- sponsored pair of studies in 1950 and 1952—published collectively as The Race Concept— defined race for its new uses in the UN as distinct from national or religious groups. At the same time, however, the collection of scientists, social scientists, and even priests who produced the document still recognized three major “grand divisions of mankind”:
“Caucasians,” “Mongoloids,” and “Negroids.”34 The study’s participants had not quite succeeded in eliminating racism, and the logic of “race” remained, even in the United
Nations.
The concept of modernity and its siblings, “progress” and “development,” served to temporally distinguish places marked by the modern and the traditional, and with them, the people who lived there. Between 1945 and 1967, what constituted the
33 However, these photographs mobilized white Americans from multiple religious communities (including the American Jewish Committee but also members of Protestant and Catholic leadership) in unprecedented ways to press for international human rights protections. Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined, 70-3. 34 However, discussions of race qua race do not appear in the UN discussions that I analyze. UNESCO, The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 44. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 102-3. 21
modern—modern people, practices, forms of government, economic systems, and societies—was inextricable from conversations about family and nation. Tillett joined other delegates in addressing who and what could be modern, and about the urgent need for modernization. Although economic development, especially in relation to so- called “underdeveloped” or “developing” states, was an important part of modernization, many women representatives, saw social development as equally significant. Historian Daniel Immerwahr identifies modernization as a “political vision” of “a particular social configuration in which institutions are oriented toward industry, governed by urban norms, shaped by bureaucratic practices, and centralized to a significant degree.”35 Bureaucracy and centralized government proved important to policymakers and diplomats, who assumed that to modernize family and marriage practices in underdeveloped states, the new nations especially needed such systems of governance.36
35 Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), ix. Modernization was never a universally- encompassing ideology, however modernization theory critically informed many of the actors I follow, operating from deep within the heart of policy-making and diplomatic positions. Their adherence to ideas about modernization incited those who wished to influence policy and international relations to participate in similar terms. 36 Nils Gilman has written about the common, smooth narrative of modernization theory’s history and what it elides. He emphasizes that modernization theory, in the US, was frequently about making postcolonial regions “more like ‘us,’” rather than like the Russians or the Chinese. Although an important distinction, it does not eliminate the centrality of the US way of life as ideal, nor does it make the imperialist framework irrelevant. Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 3-4. 22
In opposition to modernity, “ancient” traditions placed countries and people who practiced them at the wrong end of the spectrum of development and progress.37 In conjunction with the creation of international human rights legislation, Euro-American delegates envisioned moral geographies that placed their countries at the forefront of economic, political, and human rights development.38 They sought to change societies in which they saw culture, religion, and tradition—especially in Africa, Asia, and the
Middle-East—as dominating norms and often legal systems.39 Western diplomats—even while avidly Christian—viewed themselves as members of secular societies in which traditions were subordinate to modern social norms. In the process, Euro-American delegates participated in the creation of hierarchies that figured their norms, based frequently on Christian ideologies and practices, as “good” tradition while consigning
37 I work here from Anne McClintock’s concept of “anachronistic space,” in which “geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time.” McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 40. 38 Melanie McAlister outlines moral geographies as defined by “cultural and political practices that work together to mark not only states but also regions, cultural groupings, and ethnic or racial territories.” Notably, moral geographies are frequently contested and multiple may exist at once together. They also reflect the extent to which foreign policy decisions do not hinge exclusively upon economic or political influence but also “religious affiliation, cultural power, and racial identity.” McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945, Updated Ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4-5. See also Michael Shapiro, “Moral Geographies and the Ethics of Post-Sovereignty,” Public Culture, 6, no. 3 (1994): 482. 39 Vrushali Patil, Negotiating Decolonization in the United Nations: Politics of Space, Identity, and International Community (New York: Routledge, 2008, 138-39. 23
cultural and religious Others to the category of “bad” tradition that demonstrated the need for outside intervention.40
My dissertation demonstrates ways in which my subjects use culture, religion, and practices associated with specific regions in ways that reinforce existing hierarchies that place “the West” at the forefront of human social development. Wendy Brown’s concept of the “culturalization of politics” accurately describes the ways in which
Western delegates to the UN collapsed ethnicity, race, and religion into culture, which became a stand-in for political economy, international relations, and history. Meanwhile, these delegates granted Western societies the distinction of being “political” because of their supposedly universal principles and impartial perspective.41 Saba Mahmood’s work demonstrates this distinction in religious difference, especially between secular feminists and Muslim women. Culture, Mahmood argues, takes on the role of villain in
Western, liberal feminist discourse, and is located outside of the West, particularly in places dominated by Islam.42 Following Brown and Mahmood, I highlight how delegates
40 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 296. 41 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 19-21. 42 She questions Western feminists’ belief that something should automatically predispose women to hate Islamic culture. Mahmood critiques their assumption that true agency is not possible where culture supposedly predominates and that secular societies provide the benefits of liberation and the pursuit of one’s “true will” free of coercion. Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 11. 24
expressed their racism through language that indicted “culture” within the Marriage
Convention.
1.4 Modernizing through Marriage
The Marriage Convention couched women’s family rights in the language of secular modernization and assumptions about state organization, including bureaucracy and the relationship of a government to intimate parts of its citizens’ lives.
Conversations about women’s marriage rights demonstrated collective beliefs (and disagreements) about women’s social and reproductive value to new and established states in a world transformed by decolonization and the Cold War. Even as delegates to the UN from around the world generally agreed upon family as the basic unit of society, they disagreed about what kinds of marriage practices needed protecting. Euro-
American delegates imagined a “modern” family form—nuclear, monogamous, and loving—towards which societies needed to develop, frequently with significant shifts in social and cultural norms. In the process, they excluded extended family groups, arranged marriages, polygamy, and child marriages. Modernization, therefore, required changes in individual relationships that would resonate throughout communities and states.
The preservation of healthy white, monogamous families was a cornerstone of the operation and maintenance of empires, and UN delegates of imperial states sought to use standards of family rights in similar ways and utilized modernity as a core
25
strategy. Imperial authorities sought to regulate nonwhite subject bodies and constantly defined and redefined what were and were not legitimate marriages. Concerns about proper marriages reverberated in the mainland United States, where segregationists’ defenses of anti-miscegenation laws demonstrated their fear for the purity of the white race and prompted them to turn a pathologizing eye on the bodies of people of color on the mainland and in colonial territories such as Puerto Rico.43
Tillett and other US representatives to the Women’s Commission imagined “the
Family” as a set of relationships inaugurated by and contained within loving monogamous marriage. 44 They and their counterparts in other Western states utilized it to re-inscribe imperialist ideas of social uplift by framing loving, monogamous marriage as modern. Tillett pursued women’s rights through the Marriage Convention and sought the document’s ratification by the Senate out of a belief that, as citizens of the United
43 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 44 “Marriage has played a central role in the US American political imagination and the political economy of the United States—so much so that it makes sense to view marriage as a practice of national citizenship.” Angela Harris, “Loving Before and After the Law,” Fordham Law Review 76, no. 6 (2008): 2821, https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol76/iss6/7/, accessed 10 Jan 2019. Habiba Ibrahim further clarifies the relationship of marriage to systems of inequality: “Families do not emerge prior to public policy. Rather, what makes the functionality of some families recognizable and acceptable is the inequity of caste embedded in legal and policy- driven constructions of family.” Ibrahim, Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 45. 26
States, they were in a unique position to help women in “less developed” countries and territories. Delegates from North America and Europe therefore approached conversations about legitimate marriage practices in the 1950s and 1960s from a similar perspective.45
Legal scholar Angela Harris calls marriage a “practice of national citizenship” because of its centrality to the political imagination of the US.46 While I primarily track how policymakers in the United States created and contested a narrative of a diverse and rights-respecting “America,” many other states also used private law and marriage rights to build a picture of modern nationalism. The Egyptian government, for example, co-opted women’s labor rights into a state feminism that advertised a “new Egypt”
45 Under formal imperialism, anxieties about prostitutes possibly literally infecting white married couples with sexually venereal disease provided a rationale for subjecting prostitutes, the vast majority of whom were not white, to enforced state surveillance and imperialist medical access to their bodies. This literature is extensive, but see particularly: Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003). Levine, “’A Multitude of Unchaste Women:’ Prostitution in the British Empire,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (Winter 2004):159-163. Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto-Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 46 “Marriage has played a central role in the US American political imagination and the political economy of the United States—so much so that it makes sense to view marriage as a practice of national citizenship.” Angela Harris, “Loving Before and After the Law,” Fordham Law Review 76, no. 6 (2008): 2821, https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol76/iss6/7/, accessed 10 Jan 2019. Habiba Ibrahim further clarifies the relationship of marriage to systems of inequality: “Families do not emerge prior to public policy. Rather, what makes the functionality of some families recognizable and acceptable is the inequity of caste embedded in legal and policy- driven constructions of family.” Ibrahim, Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 45. 27
using images of unveiled working women, which served to secure its political legitimacy domestically.47 Approaches to women’s rights like this one utilized gendered visions of modernity, often with reference to strengthening national family life. The translation of marriage practices into an international document echo what historian
Emily Burrill calls the “marriage legibility project” in the context of colonial Mali. Burrill ties “the codification of and concern over African marriages” to the heart of France’s imperial civilizing mission. Even as French colonial worries about marriage became tied to discourses of gender justice and rights, the codification of marriage practices simultaneously made people legible to the imperial state.48
I argue that the Marriage Convention was part of a similar project on a global scale, providing mechanisms for policing marriage practices while also encouraging people to police themselves. White supremacists in the United States feared the
“population bomb” of brown and black people would overwhelm them at the same time as decolonization accelerated Euro-American loss of power over these populations.
Women in the UN framed marriage rights as a matter of eliminating “ancient” cultural impediments to personal freedom, and delegates of imperial states leapt on board,
47 Laura Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). Mervat F. Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 2 (May 1992): 231-251. 48 Emily Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 4. 28
whether explicitly or silently, to maintain control over subject people who they believed could not be trusted to uphold proper marriage standards by themselves. For imperialists, demographic and political changes made the need for policing of any kind imperative from a policy perspective.49
Marriage and family-making serve as the gateway to national futures through their populations and acted as an important boundary-marker of modern families and states in the UN.50 Marriage acts as a critical point of contact between citizens and state, one which allows state actors to exercise some measure of control over what the future nation will look like. The biopolitics of marriage on a global scale brought marriage practices to bear in the process of shaping global citizens.51 The Marriage Convention identified polygamy, child marriage, and the bride price as the principle obstacles to
49 Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconceptions: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). Foucault’s “governmentality” also becomes helpful here as it describes governing people by teaching them to govern themselves Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978 translated by Graham Burchell, edited by Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 50 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 2. In the US, such distinctions had long served as a means of marking different groups of immigrants as fit or unfit for citizenship. See for example: Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 51 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books Ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). Ann Laura Stoler has famously reexamined biopower in the Dutch colonial context, tying it directly to the formal operations of imperial power as well as the informal interpersonal negotiations based on race and gender. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. Though he describes the term in several places, his lecture series, Security, Territory, Population has been the most helpful and interesting for relating biopower and biopolitics to governmentality. 29
women’s marriage rights because they limited girls’ and women’s access to education, work, and political participation. For segregationists, marriage served as particularly important for shoring up racially-pure white families through anti-miscegenation laws.
As a site of biological and social reproduction, the households created through marriage determined the legal and economic status of the next generation and, as delegates to the
Commission on the Status of Women routinely declared, produced the educated minds of the next generation of voters.
1.5 Conclusion
Representatives of the United States, an empire struggling with race relations around the world, had to maneuver diplomatically to frame the country as an anti- imperialist world power committed to diversity. Reluctant to fulfill civil rights promises, leaders in the federal government identified women’s right to marriage consent as a comparatively low-risk way for the US to demonstrate its human rights credentials. This dissertation begins in 1945 with the end of World War II and the founding of the UN to explore conversations about family life in the US and abroad that informed the creation of the Marriage Convention. It concludes with the Senate hearings in 1967 that ended any hopes of the Convention’s ratification in the US, and with it, the possibilities for more participation in human rights in the immediate future.
Throughout this period, US delegates participated in the process of defining the global citizen. UN representatives pronounced the family to be the foundational unit of
30
all societies, and as such made family the basic unit of a global society. Through the
Marriage Convention, delegates framed a global family model that also defined what women specifically looked like as global citizens. By defining “modern” and “traditional” families in opposition to each other, delegates demonstrated who could participate on the international stage: those who enacted modernity in their intimate, personal lives by proxy performed global cosmopolitanism; those who persisted in following “traditions” needed policing by those inside and outside their societies who acted from the position of modern, cosmopolitan subjects. Postcolonial delegates questioned the extent of this framework, seeking to explain how their marriage practices could remain traditional while also demonstrating respect for women’s rights.
“The modern” was and is a contested category. On the one hand, it served as an important legitimizing discourse for many delegates in the United Nations, including those from postcolonial states who laid claim to the ability to be modern on their own terms. However, for white westerners it also became a vehicle for carrying imperialist civilizing missions into a world that was whittling away the legitimacy of formal empire. Delegates of the United States and Europe coopted women’s rights in marriage as part of this new civilizing mission and reinforced the racial categories that would structure the ideal modern citizen.
In this dissertation, I argue that the 1962 Marriage Convention and the conversations that arose around it actively incorporated or made space for the
31
preservation of systems of inequality. Race was as important to how its contemporaries read the document as gender, and in the US both categories were important to its reception and possible ratification. Discussions of women’s family and marriage rights dovetailed with widespread debates about changes in family life and nations more broadly. This relationship makes the Marriage Convention and the assumptions that informed it a critical lens for evaluating perceptions of the United States of America as a nation on the world stage.
This dissertation is a story of an almost-success, and the smaller successes and failures that led to the failure of the Marriage Convention in the United States matter because they tell a much broader story about rights, power, and inequality. In chapter 1,
I demonstrate the interplay between these three elements in the United States in marriage and family after World War II. The changes and perceived changes in marriage, family, and gender roles would make an international human rights agreement on marriage both meaningful and threatening in the United States. For segregationists, disruption of “normal” white family life reflected the ways that they saw US power— and through it, their power—limited in new ways, however small. Communism, federal recognition of civil rights issues, and the establishment of the United Nations all posed threats that could be met in family life as well as in the halls of Congress. I put segregationists’ concerns about family life into conversation with women who pursued the opportunities created by changes in their lives after World War II.
32
World War II and early decolonization created space for and required new ways of addressing family, rights, and power within many states and across national boundaries. I show in chapter 2 how contestations over different categories of human rights in the nascent United Nations were directly tied to postwar shifts of power globally and to the transformations in family law around the world. Leaders of new states especially knew how critical organizing national family life was to establishing state power and took steps to make policies on family and marriage clear. As women delegates to the United Nations began to outline international women’s rights, they also incorporated assumptions about their own roles in global systems of power that gave them the right and ability to make prescriptions about women’s rights all over the world, even in regions they did not represent.
Through marriage rights, members of the UN Women’s Commission made statements about how marriage should work that revealed assumptions, as well, about how states should work. In chapter 3, I show the emergence of the Marriage Convention out of conversations between delegates predominantly from the Americas and Europe, alongside only a few Asian women representatives, in which they debated family forms in the context, not just of personal choice, but development and modernity. As the document moved into General Assembly committee, delegates from a broader array of states blew up these debates around “modern” family life to encompass religious rights, self-determination, and condemnation of the continuation of imperialism. Through the
33
Marriage Convention, I demonstrate the broader contours of human rights negotiations: decolonization and the expansion of membership to include more postcolonial states forced shifts in how the United Nations as an organization would approach human rights.
As the United States entered the 1960s, the new Kennedy administration seemed poised to tackle human rights questions and participate more fully in the internationalism of the United Nations. To women leaders within the government, such as Gladys Avery Tillett and Esther Peterson, Kennedy’s establishment of the President’s
Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) appeared to be a promise of broad treatment of human rights. In chapter 4, I tie women’s human rights under the Kennedy administration to a broader internationalist set of policy goals that paradoxically was designed to overshadow the administration’s weakness on civil rights issues. Tracing the work of those who sought ratification of the Marriage Convention, I demonstrate how members of the administration hoped to salvage the United States’ image of human rights leadership by elevating a largely whitewashed image of women’s rights above the civil rights movement and increasing racial tensions. Segregationist Senators Samuel
Ervin and John Sparkman even hoped that the Marriage Convention would reinforce anti-miscegenation statutes through its framing of state power over marriage. The
Marriage Convention’s inability to disguise new eruptions in racial violence and the
34
black freedom struggle meant that the treaty was shelved—its international appeal was not enough.
Kennedy did submit a package of human rights treaties to the Senate, although it did not contain the Marriage Convention: treaties on slavery (especially sexual slavery), forced labor, and women’s political rights were all included in the first iteration of human rights that the Senate considered. I demonstrate in chapter 5 how significant these treaties became as the US relationship with the United Nations deteriorated.
Through Senate consideration of human rights treaties, I show the centrality of domestic politics to debates over the foreign policy question of ratification. The Marriage
Convention was not under consideration, but its value continued in the form of the
Supplemental Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, which also framed regulation of marriage practices in a way that would reinforce state authority over marriages and thereby shore up anti-miscegenation laws. Senate approval of this treaty was a matter more of what segregationists would allow than a resounding victory for human rights.
Nevertheless, the conversations about human rights within the US federal government sparked by the Marriage Convention represented important change in US approaches to human rights: even as the Johnson administration withdrew from human rights as a foreign policy initiative, the Senate ratified the first UN human rights treaty.
35
The Marriage Convention is not the first nor most prominent example of an emancipatory project harnessed to racist assumptions and imperialist perspectives.52 In a
1963 address, “Human Rights—Some Next Steps,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
Richard Gardener proclaimed that the US had a long history of pursuing human rights.
With the Declaration of Independence, he said, “the United States dedicated itself to preserving and enlarging individual human rights.” He also placed the Bill of Rights and the Emancipation Proclamation in this narrative of the US as a nation that had always sought to protect human rights.53 His argument, however, assumed that human rights were exported from the US and Europe to less “developed” states. With the
Senate ratification of human rights treaties, he argued, the US could lead the way for these states to do the same. But I argue that, especially in the context of human rights history, it remains imperative to show how white supremacists participated in constructing the system of rights. They did not pursue their own downfall but rather found new ways of maintaining systems of power within and through liberation.
52 Ann Stoler says this particularly well: “Racial discourse is not opposed to emancipatory claims; on the contrary, it effectively appropriates them.” Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 90. 53 US Department of State (DoS), “Human Rights—Some Next Steps,” by Richard N. Gardner, Sept 1963, “UN Correspondence, Jan-Feb 1965,” Folder 870, Box 19, 1-2, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 36
2. The “American Family” in Transition, 1945-1957
“It is right that I a woman black Should speak of white womanhood. My husbands, my fathers, my brothers, my sons Die for it, because of it, And their blood, chilled in electric chairs, Stopped by hangman’s noose, Cooked by lynch mob’s fire, Spilled by white supremacists’ mad desire to kill for profit Gives me that right. …
“They said, the white supremacist said, That you were better than me, That your fair brow should never know the sweat of slavery. They lied. White womanhood, too, is enslaved, The difference is degree.” -Beah Richards, “A Black Woman Speaks, Of White Womanhood, Of White Supremacy, Of Peace,” 19511
“They were having this peace conference in Chicago,” African American actor
Beah Richards (neé Beulah Richardson) recalled. The 1951 American People’s Peace
Congress held a competition for the poem that best expressed the idea of peace, and
Richards read hers at the Conference’s Women’s Workshop, which gathered over 500
1 Beah Richards, “A Black Woman Speaks,” A Black Woman Speaks: And Other Poems (New York: Inner City Press, 1974). Beah Richards, Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, film, directed by Lisa Gay Hamilton (New York: Women Make Movies, 2003). The details that would allow proper citation of her performance of “A Black Woman Speaks” in 1975 remain elusive; Hamilton’s documentary contains some clips from this performance. 37
women identifying as liberal, progressive, and communist.2 As Richards read her poem,
“you could hear a pin drop,” she said. “Then, when I finished it, all of a sudden there’s this scream…five hundred women, screaming…they’re screaming, they’re crying, they have their arms around each other…People all over this convention hall hear them, and they think we are being attacked by the police. They come running; and say, ‘What’s the matter, what has happened?’ They said, ‘A woman read a poem.’”3 Richards won the poetry contest.
Richards had found inspiration upon meeting Rosalee McGee, wife of Willie
McGee, who had recently been executed by the state of Mississippi for the alleged rape of a white woman. Richards also identified with the struggles of Rosa Ingram, who was arrested after killing the white man who attempted to rape her out of self-defense. “A
Black Woman Speaks” addressed white women directly, laying the blame for lynchings like McGee’s at their feet while claiming that white supremacy wronged them, as well.
The sexism that undergirded white supremacy, Richards argued, enslaved white women through marriage and domestic life. Drawing upon the history of the Antebellum South,
Richards took up the role of an enslaved woman speaking to the woman of the house.
“If they counted my teeth,” Richards said, “they did appraise your thigh/ and sold you
2 Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 46. 3 Richards, Beah: A Black Woman Speaks. 38
to the highest bidder/ the same as I.” The intent of the piece nevertheless resided securely in the present. Images of motherhood buttressed Richards’ appeal to white women, connecting peace to equality as she asked them to “take my hand/ and the hand of Rosa Ingram, and Rosalee McGee.”4
Beah Richards wrote and performed “A Black Woman Speaks” in a world undergoing profound change. The 1940s transformed the lives of US citizens: The Soviet
Union shifted from an ally to an enemy; the founding of the United Nations altered US approaches to foreign policy; the independence of several colonial territories required at least superficial responses to the US “race problem”; women’s participation in industry during World War II adjusted women’s relationship with labor. Still influenced by Jim
Crow, the dominance of the male breadwinner family model had been weakened by women’s wartime participation in the wage labor economy.
The combination of external and internal pressures created an environment in which the fabric of US life seemed to many not simply changing dramatically, but also intensely scrutinized. For segregationists, The Family—white families—appeared to be under assault from all angles. Women workers, communism, homosexuality, and civil rights all seemed to pose an existential threat to white family roles, stability, and security. Many women sought to harness these changes in support of stable families and
4 Beah Richards, “A Black Woman Speaks.” 39
more expansive roles for themselves. The experiences and activism of black women, however, demonstrate different concerns about family life and stability, especially as they navigated problems of rape and lynching far more explicitly than most white women activists. These shifting discursive frameworks about women and family would inform US involvement in United Nations conversations about family and created the environment into which the Marriage Convention would enter in the 1960s. “A Black
Woman Speaks” represents the battleground that family life became, in terms of citizenship and women’s and civil rights.
2.1 Containing Women: White Supremacy and Anti-Communism
Had they read or listened to “A Black Woman Speaks,” many policymakers and segregationist leaders would have likely been alarmed at its indictment of both white supremacy and patriarchy in the form of white family life. Maintaining women’s domestic roles and the existing racial hierarchy seemed to many people, especially segregationists, the antidote to paranoia and anxiety generated by a growing Soviet menace. In 1946, diplomat George Kennan famously recommended the “policy of firm containment” intended to “confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching on the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”5 For many, the US itself was a front on which they needed to counter Russian
5 Telegram from George Kennan to George Marshall [”The Long Telegram”], 22 Feb 1946, Harry S. Truman Administration File, Elsey Papers, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, 40
influence. Though the Red Scare and the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) are best remembered as part of containment at home, many domestic US containment policies pertained specifically to US American homes—what Elaine Tyler
May has called “domestic containment.”6
The heteronormative, male-breadwinner model represented the purest form of liberal democratic family life and responses to communism within the US reflected discomfort with transformations already under way in family life. Anticommunism provided an opportunity to shore up (or create out of whole cloth) wholesome, old- fashioned white families. Changes in gender and race relations therefore precipitated the need for kinds of “containment” that would preserve social relationships that were uniquely American, anticommunist, and white.
https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/6-6.pdf, accessed 14 Jan 2017. 6 The idea of “domestic containment” initially used by Elaine Tyler May has generated some critique. May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 3rd Ed. (New York: Perseus Group, 2008), 109. Andrea Friedman, for example, has explained how “containment” can serve to “overstate the extent of consensus and to minimize the contradictory nature of American political culture in the postwar years.” Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent (Boston: University of Massachusetts, 2014), 6. I by no means try to claim that this term represents a consensus, but I continue to find the containment policy a useful means of describing my subjects’ approaches to communism throughout this period. To diplomats, policymakers, advocates, and organizers, containment represented a way of approaching international and domestic politics, including family life, which particularly became important as these actors held up what they saw as uniquely American womanhood in response to the USSR’s working women. 41
Figure 2: This vitamin advertisement combines assumptions about both masculine and feminine roles with the racial purity of the happy white home.7
The image of the white, suburban stay-at-home mother has become iconic of the
1950s, but her participation in middle-class normality represented one battleground in the war over the preservation of American life.7 Images of family that placed women
7 “Kellog’s PEP: ‘So the harder a wife works, the cuter she looks!’” ‘Mad Men’ premier: Sexist ads from the era of Don Draper. New York Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/sexist-ads-mad-men-era-gallery- 1.1050013?pmSlide=1.1049993, accessed 10 Mar 2018. 42
securely within domestic life, aided by a consumer economy that allowed her to look pretty and to complete household chores easily, became a means of securing the US against communism on an individual level.8 Sexual relations after World War II were in flux, although they still held to familiar patterns of morality: sexual enjoyment represented a significant aspect of happy, stable marriages, and yet premarital or homosexual sex remained taboo. Violations of the male breadwinner and female homemaker roles would cause “sexual and familial chaos” and consequently “weaken the country’s moral fiber.”9
The trope of the white lesbian wife represented one threat to male-breadwinner heterosexuality. Mainstream audiences imagined gays and lesbians through a flourishing industry in homosexual exposés and pulp novels that painted them as part of an expanding homosexual underworld.10 The white lesbian wife character appeared
8 By the end of the decade, Vice President Nixon would insist upon the suburban home, with its carefully-delineated gendered roles, as the key to American cultural superiority. May, Homeward Bound, 20-21. 9 Ibid, 112. 10 Nancy MacLean, “Postwar Women’s History: The ‘Second Wave’ or the End of the Family Wave?,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, edited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), Blackwell Reference Online, 10.1111/b.9781405149846.2006.00015.x. Donna Penn, “The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 358-381. It is worth recognizing the fact that the very concept of homosexuality as identity rather than tendency was solidifying at this time. See Penn, “The Sexualized Woman” and Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 43
in popular magazines and paperbacks throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Though lesbianism after World War II was a cause of increasing concern, the lesbian wife, indistinguishable from the ideal white, middle-class, suburban housewife on the surface, represented a special danger. Her position threatened the welfare of, not just other women she might seduce, but her children, her marriage, and “the household’s sanctity.”11 The “symptoms” of the lesbian wife highlighted her deviance from heterosexual norms, including sexual frigidity, distaste for housework, resistance to motherhood, and the upper hand over her husband. These supposed warning signs of lesbianism could be turned on real housewives to adjust their behavior and served as an important element of the Cold War domestic “containment” of women. As politicians deepened welfare policies, reinscribing the male-breadwinner family model in law, women’s failure to recognize their responsibilities within such a model could spell disaster, for the nation as well as individual families. The white lesbian wife represented womanhood gone wrong even as it spelled out the boundaries of acceptable feminine behavior and independence.12
Concerns about women who were too independent emerged partly from white, middle-class women who did not see the goals of homemaker and wife and of career
11 Lauren Jae Gutterman, “Another Enemy Within: Lesbian Wives, or the Hidden Threat to the Nuclear Family in Post-War America,” Gender and History 24, no. 2 (10 July 2012): 475-501. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2012.01692.x. 12 Margot Canaday has also written on the specific use of antilesbian policies to police women in the armed forces. Canaday, The Straight State, 174-213. Gutterman, “Another Enemy Within,” 495. 44
woman as mutually exclusive. The federal government began hiring female professionals during the 1930s as the New Deal increased the need for staff to fill the plethora of new agencies. Their inclusion, however, was modulated through policies that favored the male breadwinner role. With the rise of McCarthyism, many younger women employees held increasingly tenuous positions. Their frequent approval of sexual liberalism, their rejection of maternalist arguments that men and women were inherently different, and their support of desegregation put these women on much shakier ground in the 1950s.13 Many of these women, such as future director of the
Women’s Bureau, Mary Dublin Keyserling, experienced fear and humiliation at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Second Red Scare.
Frequently, they were not on trial for communism but rather for their approaches to gender and race relations that were subversive and in need of containment. Gays and lesbians in the federal government faced persecution that arose from anxieties around the subversion of heterosexuality. The “Lavender Scare” that began in 1950 disproportionately affected men because of the associations with effeminacy, but homosexuality in general came to represent a threat on par with communism.14 Women who worked in the civil service, according to the popular Lait and Mortimer exposés,
13 Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, 7-10. 14 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 91. 45
did men’s work, thought like men, and were “sometimes driven to take the place of men—in the proscribed zones of desperate flings of love and sex.”15 The Lavender Scare both fed off and generated fears about the poisoning of the appropriate order of gender and family, and these concerns were easily folded into extant fears of subversives and communists within the federal government, adding to the list of suspect behaviors.
But the existence of organizations like the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) reminded US Americans of communism’s clear and present threat. The WIDF, through its US branch the Congress of American Women, united many leftist women after World War II. A global organization with an explicit agenda of disarmament and decolonization, the WIDF often framed its work for women’s rights and world peace in maternalist terms that would have been familiar to women elsewhere on the political spectrum. They portrayed their 1955 World Congress of Mothers, for example, as “a cry of warning from all women struggling to protect their children, big and small, from the evils brought on by war and the preparations of war.”16 Though often accused of being a “Soviet front” organization, its members were not even always communist. Founded in 1945, the WIDF
15 Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, Washington Confidential (New York: Crown, 1951), 77. 16 “World Congress of Mothers: News and Information No. 1,” WIDF, World Congress of Mothers, Lausanne, 1955, 1, Series III, box 2, folder 1, Women's International Democratic Federation Records, Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Young Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA (hereafter SSC). 46
argued that nuclear war was the largest threat of the twentieth century and that women, as mothers, had both a right and duty to work toward world peace.
However, the organization’s anticolonialism resulted in their removal from the
United Nations after they sent a fact-finding commission into Korea. Their report, We
Accuse, was published in twenty languages and detailed United States atrocities and abuses against the people of Korea.17 Boasting a membership of women “of divergent opinions and beliefs from Africa, Asia, America and Europe,” the commission that published the report demanded that the military commanders responsible for mass murder and torture be “charged as war criminals as defined by the Allied Declaration of
1943.”18 The commission recorded stories of mass rape and torture of pregnant women and their unborn children.19 We Accuse claimed that US atrocities exceeded those of Nazi
Germany, and the WIDF president Eugénie Cotton forwarded the organization’s report to the UN Security Council.20 The US responded by maneuvering alliances in the UN to strip the WIDF of its consultative status in 1954.21 As a result, membership in the
17 Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam, The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945-1960 (Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 195-96. 18 Women’s International Democratic Federation, We Accuse: Report by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (Berlin: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1951), 2, Women and Social Movements, International – 1840 to Present (accessed 9 Mar 2018). 19 Ibid, 41-42. 20 Ibid, 6, 48. 21 Francisca de Haan, “The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991,” Women and Social Movements, International, 1840 to the Present, 2016, 47
Congress of American Women dwindled in the face of HUAC investigations, and it became defunct in 1951.22
Founded in the same year, however, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ) represented a different indictment of US governance in relation to women’s bodies, rallying around resistance to rape. STJ consisted of black leftist women who recognized the devastating influences of white supremacy on the African American family. Claudia
Jones, a leader both in CPUSA’s women commission and the STJ, argued in her 1949 article “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Woman!” that black women experienced “triple oppression.” As working black women, Jones argued, they suffered the most under capitalist, patriarchal systems. As a result, they were in a special position to resist white supremacist capitalism as Black women had, historically, “been the guardian, the protector, of the Negro family.”23 This argument was borne out in the case around which the STJ initially organized, in opposition to the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Lee
Ingram and her two oldest sons after she killed the white man who attempted to rape her. Following Jones, the STJ positioned black women as the natural guardians of their families against white supremacy, insisting upon their inherent humanity through their
http://wasi.alexanderstreet.com/help/view/the_womens_international_democratic_federation_wi df_history_main_agenda_and_contributions_19451991, accessed 1 May 2017. 22 De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (2010): 547-573. 23 Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs 30, no. 3 (June 1949), reprinted by National Women’s Commission, CPUSA (1949), 3. 48
resistance on behalf of their children, their families, and themselves. Ultimately, the
Sojourners met the same fate as the Congress of American Women. Never a large organization, the STJ were left without institutional support after the NAACP refused to allow the Sojourners to participate in civil rights campaigns and as the CPUSA made clear its ambivalence towards their membership of all-black women. Closed off from major avenues of expansion and unwelcome within anticommunist networks, the STJ disbanded in 1952 after only a year.
Despite their political disagreements on many topics, the Sojourners for Truth and Freedom shared an insistence upon black women’s bodily integrity with more centrist black women. Although it has been critiqued by activists and scholars, the politics of respectability represent an important element of the NCNW, especially as it served to establish black women’s right to bodily safety. Encompassing appropriate behaviors regarding gender, sexuality, and sociality in general, respectability as the province of white people under-girded Jim Crow. African Americans frequently
“struggled to have black women reclassified as good women,” but, as Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham has argued, a respectable black woman had a responsibility to uplift the race. In other words, a respectable black woman was also a politically active black woman.24 Adopting respectability as a black woman had greater implications than
24 E. Francis White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 35-36. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “The Politics 49
simply assimilating to ideals of middle-class white womanhood: it could be a strategy of resistance, survival, and political agency. Especially at a time when anticommunism created an environment hostile to difference, clear performances of religiously-grounded womanhood were important for black women in the public eye.
The National Council of Negro Women was the most prominent space for black women’s organizing from the 1940s to the 1960s.25 Their founder, Mary McLeod
Bethune, had served as president of its predecessor the National Association of Colored
Women (NACW) from 1924 to 1928. Bethune deviated from the NACW’s position that women should remain in the background of the black freedom struggle. Critiquing both sexism and racism, Bethune believed African Americans needed greater unity to resist white supremacy.26 In 1935, Bethune hosted a meeting at the Harlem branch of the
Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) with the intention of creating a new council for black women. The new NCNW gathered its first members from the YWCA,
NAACP, NACW, and the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.27 Through Bethune’s influence— the “First Lady of Black America”—NCNW’s star rose throughout the 1940s. By the
of Respectability,” Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880- 1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 185-229. 25 Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Kate Dossett, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896-1935 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). 26 Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Political Activism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 105-7. 27 Dossett, Bridging Race Divides, 59-60. 50
war’s end, “Mother” Bethune had cultivated a cohort of smart, ambitious, and dedicated
“daughters.”28 The presidents that would follow Bethune—Dr. Dorothy Ferebee (1949-
1953), Vivian Carter Mason (1953-1957), and Dorothy Height (1957-1998)—built upon her legacy but also drew from their own leadership experience in black sororities, the
YWCA, youth councils, Planned Parenthood, and a host of other groups.
Black women’s organizations often coopted the imagery of elite white social events as demonstrations of their respectability: silver and golden jubilees (twenty-five- and fifty-year anniversaries) resembled debutante balls; the NCNW’s International
Night mirrored US diplomatic dinners; and groups frequently incorporated fashion shows as part of fundraisers. The NACW’s fifty-year anniversary celebration at its 1946 national convention opened in the Metropolitan A.M.E. church with a procession of fifty girls “beautifully gowned in white, marching with crowns adorning their black heads, bearing the inscription of the years of organization.”29 This procession also emphasized the innocence and purity of those processing, a purity so often denied to black girls.
The defense of black women’s respectability also took the form of titles: “Mrs.” held a powerful place before the names of African American women. Black club
28 Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, 105. 29 National Association of Colored Women, Inc., “Minutes and Records of the Golden Jubilee 50th Anniversary and 25th National Convention of the National Association of Colored Women, Inc.,” 27 July-2 Aug 1946, Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Washington, DC, Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1895-1992, Black Studies Research Sources and Research Collections in Women’s Studies, Part 1: Minutes of National Conventions, Publications, and President’s Office Correspondence, Microfilm, Reel 2, 12-13. 51
women’s use of the title was identical to that of white club women, but this was precisely the claim they made by using it: that black women possessed the same respectability as wives, safely confining their sexuality within marriage. Members of the
Sojourners for Truth and Justice, in their defenses of Rosa Lee Ingram, consistently referred to her as “Mrs. Ingram” or “Mrs. Rose Ingram” and played up, not just her defense of her own sexual purity, but her actions as a mother.30
The defense of Mrs. Ingram dovetailed with another element of respectability politics: black women’s insistence upon their sexual respectability. Black YWCA branches around the country, especially in parts of the south, created space to preserve black women’s bodily integrity. They took over former residential buildings, maintaining bedrooms in upper floors for “emergency transients,” who were generally younger women moving from rural to urban areas.31 The National Council of Negro
Women’s Council House in Washington, DC maintained living arrangements for officers who passed through the city. These organizations recognized the dangers that faced black women traveling alone; it would be too easy for white men to treat them as
“loose women,” and so these organizations created safe places for their members to stay.
Even as white sexual mores regarding marriage relaxed in the twentieth century, marital
30 Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads, 87. Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 166. 31 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 193. 52
values for African Americans remained comparatively reserved as part of their deliberate attempts to counter the image of the black “Jezebel.”32 In this sense, some black women’s political aspirations in the 1950s appear conservative. Their valorization of family life often echoed the middle-class white ideal, featuring male breadwinners and their homemaking wives. For many black women, however, the fulfillment of their desires to live out white ideals of femininity represented the violence done to African
Americans by the racist society in which they lived. In the face of lynchings, black women had been fighting for the right to create safe homes for their children since the late nineteenth century.33
After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, black women's activism became both more difficult and more necessary than ever. The combination of foreign policy-driven change and white supremacist resistance made for hair-trigger anxieties on issues of racial relations, particularly in relation to family life. Segregationists frequently articulated their opposition to federal intervention on civil rights in terms of the sanctity of states’ domestic jurisdiction. With its Brown v. Board decision, the
Supreme Court declared school segregation to be unconstitutional, launching a firestorm
32 Christina Simmons, Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 154. See also: Melville J. Herskovits, “The Negro's Americanism,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925); Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 33 Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism, 80. 53
of violence from white men in response to what they perceived as a loss of power.
Working black women nevertheless continued to push for school desegregation. They dominated the Montgomery bus boycott that began in December 1955, out of efforts to desegregate public transit, but also in response to their frequent experiences of rape and violence at the hands of white men, especially police officers. Black women had grown tired of the constant risk of violence, and the Montgomery bus system served as a focal point for much of their frustration. Rosa Parks’s arrest set light to a fuse ten years in the making, and the prominence of black women workers among those walking to work together testified to the centrality of black women to the boycott.34 Anticommunist policing of leftist organizing served as a justification for racial violence intended to check anti-racist activism. Discourses of white supremacy had become expensive for the
US diplomatically, but white supremacists at home bitterly resisted attempts to restructure the US racial hierarchy.
Civil rights in the 1950s generated fears of foreign invasions—at international, national, and state levels—that stacked like Russian nesting dolls: in the UN, the United
States faced the constant threat of being taken to task for its “race problem” by other countries, especially the Soviet Union; the human rights violations to which activists in
34 Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 101. 54
the US called attention threatened to bring the system of UN oversight to bear on the US; and the federal government’s still-limited support for desegregation and other aspects of civil rights raised the hackles of segregationists who felt that the federal government overstepped its bounds.
The Supreme Court decisions produced a distrust of the federal government as itself a kind of foreign invader. Senator Samuel Ervin (NC-D) claimed that many “Negro leaders” in his home state demanded “that all governmental powers be diverted from their proper functions to force the involuntary mixing of races.”35 Some organizations, like the White Citizens’ Council, institutionalized sexual violence as a tactic to silence opponents of segregation.36 After the Brown v. Board decision, reports of rape or attempted rape included language directed against the Supreme Court. In one instance, a man attempting to rape a school girl shouted that he “wasn’t going to stand for” his children going to school with black children. By sexually dominating the girl he would demonstrate that “the Supreme Court can’t run my life.”37 Many segregationists feared that civil rights activism threatened to invert natural sexual relationships and the sanctity of the white family, and they leaned into the familiar trope of the black male rapist. Southern judges and politicians like Louisiana judge Leander Perez insisted that
35 Karl E. Campbell, Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007), 135. 36 Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 93. 37 Quoted in McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 136. 55
if “You make a Negro believe he is equal to the white people…the first thing he wants is a white woman.”38 As a result, black men who dared to even exist in proximity to white women could not escape the threat of lynching.39 In 1944, 15-year-old Willie James
Howard was lynched for sending a Christmas card to a white girl. Emmett Till, lynched in 1955 at age 14 for allegedly flirting with a white woman, is often cited as a key case that catalyzed movements for civil rights.40 Others, such as Jesse James Payne and Leroy
Bradwell, would die in the following years for quarreling over rent or asking a white woman on a date. Well into the 1950s, white men could twist rent disputes into rape accusations and justifications for horrific violence.41 By the end of the 1940s, white supremacist violence, which had always had a significant sexual dimension, had become even more explicitly about interracial marriage and sex.
Domestic containment, founded upon white supremacy as much as anti- communism, enclosed women in different containment categories. Although white supremacists sought to control white women’s ability to engage in public spaces and
38 Leander Perez, quoted in Reese Cleghorn, “The Segs,” in Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties, ed. Harold Hayes (New York: McCall, 1969), 656. Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 9. 39 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008), 378-82. 40 Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). 41 Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 251. 56
debate, they—and many white women themselves—mobilized white women’s purity to violently enforce racial boundaries. Non-white women, on the other hand, were fair game. In fact, the availability of black women’s bodies to rape by white men served as an important tool as segregationists sought to contain black activism.
The relationships of white and black women to domestic containment set the stage for different approaches to consent long before the creation of the Marriage
Convention. As white women contemplated institutional enforcement of consent to marriage as a legal category, black women’s widespread experiences of rape in proximity to state power made for divergent ideas of who needed “protecting,” and from whom.
2.2 The UN as Invader: The “Race Problem” and US Foreign Policy
Segregationist resistance to federal intervention into state politics extended to supranational bodies. The distrust generated by Supreme Court decisions and instances of federal intervention to uphold them only enhanced existing white supremacist worries about the influence and potential scrutiny of the United Nations. As a result, lawmakers coordinated attacks on the ability of the executive branch to force US participation in the UN system.
Despite some policymakers’ concerns that it might pave the way for greater international scrutiny of the “Negro question,” the US had approved the 1945 UN
Charter, which included a nondiscrimination clause. The issue of discrimination became 57
relevant as South Africa found itself under attack for its apartheid policies. The newly elected National Party pointed to the US to demonstrate that other nation-states also had
“racial and minority problems.” Even more troubling from the perspective of US policymakers was the fact that people of Indian descent under South African apartheid had been able to get their case before the UN, which suggested that civil rights leaders in the US might be able to do the same.42 African Americans did take advantage of the US commitment to the nondiscrimination clause to leverage change at home: in 1946,
William Hastie, NAACP attorney and dean of Howard Law School, invoked the UN
Charter as he argued for the desegregation of interstate transportation before the
Virginia State Court of Appeals. By ratifying the Charter, he declared, the US had modified its national policy to include “a prohibition against racism” and had “pledged itself to respect fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” Segregation, Hastie argued, was now against national policy.43
William Patterson, civil rights and Marxist lawyer, author, and activist, similarly sought to bring United Nations influence to bear on the US by arguing that crimes against African Americans constituted a violation of the UN Genocide Convention. In
1951, he presented a legal study, We Charge Genocide, to the General Assembly on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress. Citing the Genocide Convention, which included any
42 Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 86-87. 43 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 407. 58
attempts to destroy a national, racial, ethnic, or religious group in whole or in part,
Williams petitioned the UN to intervene on behalf of African Americans. He and other members of the Civil Rights Congress charged the US government “with mass murder of its own nationals, with institutionalized oppression and persistent slaughter of the
Negro people in the United States on a basis of ‘race.’”44 The document earned Patterson the ire of the US government and resulted in more centrist black activists—including
Ralph Bunche and much of the NAACP leadership—distancing themselves from
Patterson in hopes of maintaining some access to government contacts. Patterson’s efforts also amplified white supremacist concerns about the Genocide Convention and
UN treaties more generally. The resistance of Senators to ratification of the Genocide
Convention emerged from their fears of the treaty’s applicability to crimes being committed against African Americans.45 We Charge Genocide also provided what
Southern Democrats saw as proof that US involvement in the UN threatened to dissolve state-based segregation laws.
Senators had already taken steps to establish legal avenues of resistance to the
US’s involvement in the UN with the Connally Reservation a few years prior to the
44 William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Patterson, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations For Relief from a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People, 3rd Ed. (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1952), 3, HeinOnline, http://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.death/wchageno0001&i=1, accessed 12 Mar 2018. 45 Gerald Home, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 128. 59
creation of We Charge Genocide, limiting the country’s acceptance of the oversight of the
International Court of Justice. Senator Tom Connally (D-TX), Chair of the Foreign
Relations Committee (FRC), added a short but important reservation to US acceptance of the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).46 It declared that the acceptance of ICJ jurisdiction would not apply to “disputes with regard to matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States of America as determined by the United States of America.”47 This reservation declared that the accepting country—the US—had the ability to determine whether a subject fell under its domestic jurisdiction, and therefore whether it could be subject to ICJ oversight.
Connally feared that the ICJ might lay claim to “such vital matters” as the Panama
Canal, tariffs, and immigration.48 Through the Connally Reservation, the FRC also sidestepped the possibility of establishing a precedent of recognizing UN treaties by concluding that US acceptance of the ICJ did not constitute a United Nations treaty, “but rather a unilateral declaration having the force and effect of a treaty as between the
United States and each of the other states which accept the same obligations.”49
46 Carsten Stahn, “Connally Reservation,” Oxford Public International Law, last modified December 2006, http://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e23. 47 US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, International Court of Justice, S.Res. 196 as passed by Senate and report of Foreign Relations Committee thereon, by Elbert Duncan Thomas (D-UT), 79th Cong., 2nd Session, July 25 and August 2, 1946, 1. 48 Frank B. Ober, “The Connally Reservation and National Security,” in American Bar Association Journal 47, no. 1 (Jan 1961): 63-67. 49 Foreign Relations Committee, International Court of Justice, 12. 60
The Bricker Amendment also frustrated internationally-minded activists and reformers. Senator John W. Bricker (R-OH), proposed a constitutional amendment in
1953 and 1954 that would have severely curtailed presidential authority to conclude international agreements, especially treaties. As with the Connally Reservation, the proposed amendment resulted from concerns about the federal government and other countries interfering with state laws, especially regarding segregation. Several versions of the Bricker Amendment appeared in Congress from 1951 to 1954. The Eisenhower
Administration fought every version of the draft that reached the Senate floor, but in
1953 conceded by announcing that the president would not submit any human rights treaties or covenants—most notably the Genocide Convention—to the Senate for ratification, nor would the US delegation participate in General Assembly committees drafting the conventions. This move simultaneously reduced US ability to influence the final form of human rights agreements and damaged US prestige in the UN.50
The domestic tensions surrounding racial relations had a significant impact on
US policies and positions within the UN. In 1946, Truman established the President’s
Committee on Civil Rights. In its 1947 report To Secure These Rights, the Committee argued that the time had come for a reexamination of the state of civil rights for three reasons: discrimination was “creating a kind of moral dry rot” that ate away at the
50 James Wurst, The UN Association-USA: A Little Known History of Advocacy and Action (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016), 60-1. 61
foundations of democracy; discrimination harmed the economy by depressing the income of minority groups; and “our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle” to US foreign policy goals.51 The Committee also emphasized that, although
“Mexican American and Hispano groups” and “our citizens of Oriental descent” comprised relatively small groups, they were “kin” to millions of people living in other countries. And even more seriously, “the treatment our Negroes receive is taken as a reflection” by people all over the world “of our attitudes toward all dark-skinned people.”52 Improving race relations in the US would therefore improve its status in the eyes of countries that were at risk of falling under Soviet influence.53 The Committee felt the eyes of millions of people on the United States.
In the UN, the Committee’s concerns proved well-founded as the Soviet Union and its allies took ample opportunity to highlight ongoing racial tensions in the United
States. Citing the UN Charter, the Soviet representative in 1949 declared that, “the
General Assembly must condemn the policy and practice of racial discrimination in the
United States.”54 The Soviet representative to the Security Council further questioned US claims to a “century-old struggle for the freedom of man” in light of the “bloody
51 Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 79-81. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1947), 139, 141, 146. 52 President’s CRC, To Secure These Rights, 147. 53 Ibid, 148. 54 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 92-93. 62
aggression” of the Korean War that killed, not just Koreans, but “Negro soldiers who are submitted to racial discrimination” for the purpose of “the colonial enslavement of the peoples of Asia.”55 US delegates could rail against Soviet propaganda all they liked, but the problem remained that representatives of the USSR could use the “race problem” to counter US claims.
As a result, some African Americans themselves became important weapons against Soviet claims of US racial policies. Edith Sampson, Chicago lawyer and the first black woman to serve as a US delegate to the UN, was among those who represented the cream of educated, middle-class black society.56 Sampson became a walking billboard for the shifting racial terrain of her home country and a spokesperson who could directly refute Soviet accusations among people in the Third World who were, according to the US, most susceptible to communist persuasions. Her international role began because of her position at the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). The State
Department sponsored a global speaking tour for the radio program America’s Town
55 “Excerpts from Verbatim Record of U.N. Security Council Meeting: Before Yesterday’s Security Council Debate on Korea,” Special to the New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Sept 1950, PQHN: The New York Times, 12, 111572723 (accessed 18 Mar 2018). 56 Note that she was not the first African American to serve in the UN: Ralph Bunche joined the UN in 1947, but not as a US delegate. Helen Laville and Scott Lucas, “The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NAACP, and African American Identity in the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 565-590. Ralph Bunche, who became head of the UN Trusteeship Division, has often been studied in this capacity as well. Charles P. Henry, Ralph Bunche: Model Negro or American Other? (New York: New York University Press, 1999). “The Drive to Decolonize,” Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey, PBS and William Greaves Productions, Inc., 2001, http://www.pbs.org/ralphbunche/decolonize.html. 63
Meeting and turned to civil rights activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune as the face of black women in the US. Bethune, whose health was rapidly declining, tapped
Sampson as her replacement.57 The only other African American in the group, Walter
White, so easily passed for white that the darker-skinned Sampson went from being a largely unnoticed part of the tour to the Town Meeting’s face of black Americans to the world. Sampson’s success earned her the distinction of being, in 1950, the first African
American representative to the UN—although the Pittsburgh Courier noted that she was
“nosed out of” the two available permanent slots of the five permanent delegation seats by Senators Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) and “vocal Negro-hating Democrat of
Alabama” John Sparkman.58 Truman’s UN appointments balanced the need to counter
Soviet claims about black Americans and the participation of Southern Democrats.
57 Bethune chose Sampson both for the younger woman’s position as chair of the NCNW International Relations Committee and for her ability to cover her own expenses. Laville and Lucas, “The American Way,” 571-72. 58 Julie A. Gallagher, “The National Council of Negro Women, Human Rights, and the Cold War” in Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945-1985, edited by Kathleen A. Laughlin and Jacqueline L. Castledine (New York: Routledge, 2011), 82. Laville and Lucas, “The American Way,” 568-71, 573-74. “Truman By-Passes Negro in UN Deal,” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Sept 1950, Newspapers.com, https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/40799459 (accessed 19 Mar 2018), 1, 4. 64
Figure 3 Edith Sampson, right, sits with Eleanor Roosevelt, likely in the General Assembly chamber between meetings.59 Roosevelt was an important contact for black women, both inside and outside the UN, and often helped black women solidify their political standing.
Sampson’s international trips continued through the 1950s. As a representative to the UN and in more informal capacities, Sampson’s anticommunism drove her fervent defense of the US and the progress it had made on the “race question” as a result of its democratic society.60 Sampson’s position made her a significant figure for black
59 “Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Sampson at the United Nations in New York," New York, 21 Sept 1951, from NARA: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Public Domain Photographs, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/196115, accessed 12 Mar 2018. 60 Laville and Lucas, “The American Way,” 574. 65
women’s rights organizations during the 1950s, but it also allowed the US to claim that, whatever others might say about racial tensions in the US, black men and women were granted access to the education and resources that would allow them to take their place among cosmopolitan global elites.
Maneuvers designed to play up the presence of African Americans in the upper echelons of US society and government represent the kind of “Cold War civil rights” that focused on a positive image rather than substantial policy changes. A pamphlet published by the United States Information Agency in 1952, The Negro in American Life, explained the history of slavery in the US and admitted that a longstanding system of racial inequality was the result. It presented international audiences with a narrative of redemption, demonstrating at a stroke the openness of the government for publishing this shameful history, the progress that “the Negro” had made in the previous 50 years, and the virtues of democracy as the sole type of government that could create this progress.61 Despite the picture painted in The Negro in American Life of a country on the road to ending the “racial crisis,” policymakers and non-governmental advisors, such as
Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard University, still advocated managing appearances rather than attempting to solve the problem of racism in the US.62
61 Published circa 1950. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 49-51. Henry, Ralph Bunche, 160. 62 Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956- 1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 63. 66
US debates about the role of the US in the UN and the value of the UN to the US were compounded by the visibility of the racial crisis abroad. To many, the UN seemed an inappropriate place for the airing of dirty state laundry and doing so would lead to greater distrust of the organization among citizens and those who drove the creation of law and policy.
2.3 Race and the Family: Immigration and Population Control
White supremacist concerns about the white family under siege were further exacerbated by the idea of a “population bomb” among black and brown people that would result in the gradual disappearance of the white race. Immigration laws that prioritized certain approaches to marriage, family education, and family planning all offered options for mitigating the threat to white families and informed perspectives about how to create “healthy” and modern families in the United Nations. Concerns about the kinds of bodies comprising the American nation manifest throughout conversations on family life but became most visible in the direct applications of state power to the population under its control. People of color and people from imperial or recently independent territories became collateral damage in worldwide attempts to change the ways that family life could be regulated.
The 1954 pamphlet by wealthy businessman Hugh Moore, “The Population
Bomb,” provided the metaphor for overpopulation that would last for decades, in which
67
population posed a profound threat to humanity in the same way that nuclear war did.63
The so-called lesser races posed a threat to the American national family, but immigration laws could control the influx of these populations by prioritizing “modern” family structures to identify and enforce racial categories. Immigration law protected the
US from “invader” immigrants and dovetailed with conversations about overpopulation that expressed fears that people of color would blot out whiteness altogether, through greater and interracial reproduction.64 Despite the discovery of Nazi eugenics programs, eugenics after World War II had not been discredited. “Differential fertility” between the northern and southern hemispheres, between white people and people of color, and between elite and working-class people seemed to place elite white Westerners at a disadvantage. Men like Hugh Moore constituted a significant portion of the leadership of emerging population control organizations, and they sought to reduce the birth rates of those with “dysgenic” mental and physical capacities.65 White elites dreaded
63 Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconceptions, 1-2. Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 6-7. 64 These ideas were certainly not new. Lothrop Stoddard wrote of the risk to “white world- supremacy” if reproduction by people of color was left unchecked. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921). 65 For example, Alva Myrdal, mother of the Swedish welfare state, oversaw a committee that debated whether differential fertility would lead to a lower quality population. She was also the wife of Gunnar Myrdal, who is also known for his role in creating the Swedish welfare state, but in the history of racial politics in the US, he is famous for his commentary on American racial politics: Myrdal, Richard Sterner, and Arnold Rose, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944). 68
“becoming a small, persecuted minority in a world overrun by nonwhite hordes,” and transmuted these fears into policy by promoting population control as a surefire way to jump-start modernization for “underdeveloped” countries.66
After World War II, white supremacists reframed eugenics under the guise, increasingly, of humanitarianism. Elite Westerners like John D. Rockefeller III and
William Vogt—national director for the US Planned Parenthood Federation— encouraged regulating and rationalizing reproduction. Governments of many countries, including India, Pakistan, and South Korea, bought the modernization pitch and pursued population control programs throughout the 1950s.67 The Planned Parenthood
Federation of America (PPFA) served as a long-time base of operations for family planning advocates in the US. The Population Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation all served as important sources of funding for studies of overpopulation and strategies of population control. The pursuit of “high-quality” populations meant that studies of the “qualitative and quantitative aspects of population” could also include nonconsensual sterilization of women with “bad hereditary history,” which could include criminality, lack of intelligence, and promiscuity. Nevertheless, blatant discrimination would not get the movement for
66 Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconceptions, 115-120. 67 Ibid, 154. 69
population control anywhere, and its supporters had greater success during the 1950s peddling development and maternal and child welfare instead of eugenics.68
US colonial holdings, like Puerto Rico, became laboratories in which experts from the US could field-test population control technologies and discourses, especially hormonal birth control. Among both US citizens and elite Puerto Ricans, lower-class women appeared particularly problematic. White liberals in the United States believed it was their calling to rescue these women from the endless motherhood imposed upon them by “macho” Puerto Rican men. Meanwhile, conservatives saw these women as dangerously fecund “demon mothers,” who hastened the decline into poverty through their excessive reproduction. The two camps found common ground in the pursuit of birth control and justified US intervention in reproductive health through the need for modernization.69
The combination of eugenics debates and women’s rights ideals culminated in the development of the birth control pill in 1955. Puerto Rico became the staging ground for clinical trials that would result in public distribution of the pill. Dr. Gregory Pincus had been working on hormonal birth control for years, but two major pharmaceutical companies declared that before researchers had any sense of the pill’s side effects, human trials would be dangerous and unethical. The Searle Company nevertheless
68 Ibid, 159-66. 69 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire,116-121. 70
partnered with Pincus and took his experiments to Puerto Rico. The wealthy activist
Katherine McCormick joined Pincus in his willingness to study populations whose consent was not entirely necessary, what she called “a cage of ovulating females.”
Puerto Rican residents of a housing project and hospital patients became early subjects specifically to test the usefulness of the pill for those who needed birth control most: working-class women in underdeveloped countries experiencing overpopulation.70 In such ways, family planning became one facet of modernization programs in the
“developing world.”
In the US mainland, family planning programs and discourse turned to family education to control the social aspects of parenting. “Parent education” emerged in the
1920s and 1930s, uniting enthusiasm for social science with child rearing. Despite the gender-neutral nomenclature, such programs primarily targeted mothers, enhancing their mothering with the benefits of all that scientific advancements could offer. 71
70 The idea of hormonal contraceptives had existed since the early twentieth century, with studies confirming that estrogen and progesterone inhibited ovulation in the 1920s and 1930s. It should be noted, the trials continued even after early studies demonstrated the wide variety of side effects that came with hormonal birth control use. Ibid, 129-140. Elaine Tyler May presents a very different picture of these trials: willing and eager subjects seeking reversible and accessible birth control, carefully monitored and offered regular medical attention far superior to that which they normally received. Although May argues that the studies were “scrupulously conducted” “by the standards of the day,” Puerto Rico’s position within the US empire is essential to this history as it effected the attitudes of researchers and birth control advocates toward the women who participated in the studies. Elaine Tyler May, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 29-31. 71 Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 168-69. 71
During the 1940s and into the 1950s, the descendant of these programs, “family education,” moved out of the exclusive control of social scientists. Planned Parenthood’s
25th anniversary dinner in January 1946 highlighted “Religion’s Responsibility in
Marriage and Parenthood,” declaring monogamous, committed marriage to be the basis of western civilization. Only in “backward areas of our country” did students lack any kind of marriage education.72 One speaker emphasized not simply “imparting the facts of life” but also the “principles of life.”73 Women in groups such as the YWCA offered family education programs to instill good values, a sense of responsibility, and practical know-how to young women. In 1952, the organization outlined proposals to expand a program for young women workers to include guidance on “the first full-time job and subsequent vocational choices, the search for a mate, engagement, marriage.”74 Their programs also sought to eliminate prostitution, teach social hygiene, and prevent
72 This would have included especially “sex hygiene,” homemaking for girls, and shop work (largely carpentry and tool basics) for boys. 73 Barnett R. Brickner, “Education for Marriage,” in “Religion's Responsibility in Marriage and Parenthood,” pamphlet, 23 Jan 1946, 9-16, Planned Parenthood Federation of America Papers, box 34, folder 6, Religious Aspects, 1936-64, SSC. 74 The proposed program expansion recommended, as well, including “the struggle to become a person and to find meaning in life, whether or not one marries.” In a sense, this shows their radicalism, a recognition that women’s lives may be fulfilling without including a husband or children. At the same time, their focus on the other elements demonstrates how important the YWCA National Board believed it was to have good, productive marriages if you were going to create a family. YWCA-USA, “Work Book: Preparation for the 19th National Convention,” 19th National Convention, YWCA-USA, Chicago, IL, 1952, YWCA-USA, Series III. Conventions, box 278, folder 5, Pre-Convention Materials 1952, 22-23, SSC. 72
promiscuity.75 Morality represented a critical element of family education for those who sought to strengthen marriages in the present and future.
However, many of the women who pursued birth control and family planning also subscribed to principles of eugenics and shared a faith in imperialist narratives of democratization and modernization. Women’s rights and birth control activist Margaret
Sanger pursued these causes because of her upbringing in a working-class family with eleven children. In 1914, she declared that limiting childbirth could be a method of resistance for working-class families, “by refusing to supply the market with children to be exploited.”76 By the 1920s, however, Sanger had learned the importance of using the discourse of eugenics, as opposed to emphasizing women’s control over their own bodies.77 In 1935, she berated President Roosevelt for his lack of action on birth control, warning that the New Deal welfare programs allowed “the procreative instinct” to run rampant, and that “grandiose schemes for security may eventually turn into subsidies for the perpetuation of the irresponsible classes of society.”78
New conversations about “family planning” that emerged in the following decades softened the concept of eugenics by portraying birth control as a means to greater “freedom of choice” in family size, although proponents preferred prosperous
75 Ibid, 54. This issue existed, as well, on the international level and continued into the 1960s; it will be discussed more in these contexts in chapters 2 and 3. 76 May, America and the Pill, 17-18. 77 Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 91. 78 May, America and the Pill, 19-20. 73
couples with four or more children to working-class families of the same size. In 1939,
Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau and the American Birth Control League merged to create what would become the PPFA.79 The organization, under Sanger’s direction, provided the early funding for Pincus’ work on contraceptives. Sanger herself continued to promote a simple, inexpensive, and effective form of birth control that would give women, especially poor women, control over their own bodies. She nevertheless maintained that there should be national sterilization of “dysgenic types” that only survived because of the welfare programs that supported them.80 Such ideas kept eugenics as an important part of family planning conversations throughout the 1950s.
But white women like Sanger and their white male allies did not have a monopoly on discourses of family planning. One of the most prominent black women in the 1940s and 1950s, obstetrician and activist Dr. Dorothy Ferebee, was also an avid supporter of planned parenthood.81 As a close companion of Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Ferebee gained momentum as the organization did throughout the 1940s. The NCNW seized the distinction of being
79 Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 102-9. 80 Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 132. May, America and the Pill, 20. 81 One of the greatest tragedies of Ferebee’s life was the unexpected death of her daughter in December 1949. Aware of the fact that “the morals of African American women were placed under the microscope,” and having just ascended to the presidency of the NCNW, Ferebee could never have announced the cause of death: uncontrolled bleeding due to a botched abortion. Diane Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer (Lincoln, NB: Potomac Books, 2015), 169-71. 74
the first national women’s group to endorse contraception, and members appointed
Ferebee to their national Committee on Family Planning in 1941. Under her influence, it soon resolved to “aid each family to have all the children it can support and afford, but no more,” seeking “better health, greater security, and happiness for all.”82 Addressing the Birth Control Federation of America (PPFA) the following year, Ferebee presented family planning as a treatment for crime, poverty and disease.
Figure 4 Dr. Dorothy Ferebee at a NCNW event, flanked by Judge Jean Murrell Capers (left) and Vivian Carter Mason (right). Likely taken during International Night at the NCNW Annual Convention. Note the evening wear and flags display
82 Ibid, 104-5, 128. 75
that marked their organization as one comprised of respectable, elite, cosmopolitan women. (Circa 1943)83
In a speech she delivered in Chicago several weeks later, “Planned Parenthood as a Public Health Measure for the Negro Race,” Ferebee demonstrated that her highest hopes for family planning lay in their possibilities for African American families. Both personally and as a doctor, Ferebee truly believed family planning was a solution to the problems of black mothers and families. In the face of statistics which showed that
African American mothers and babies died at 2 times and 2.5 times the rate of their white counterparts, Ferebee advocated better prenatal care and pregnancy spacing.
Realizing that some black women feared that white activists simply sought to eliminate them, she stood as a vocal African American advocate for birth control. A friend and admirer of Margaret Sanger, she agreed that fewer babies led to higher-quality children—not by virtue of their “stock,” but rather as a result of the effort, education, resources, and love that could be given to them. Ferebee joined Sanger’s National Negro
Advisory Council, formed in 1943, which boasted some of the most prominent African
American leaders and showed the support and respect the issue commanded.84
83 Savana Crafton, "I Carried the Torch of Leadership: The Legacy of the National Council of Negro Women,” Powerpoint, National Park Service, http://slideplayer.com/slide/1432701/, accessed 223 Mar 2018. 84 Dr. Paul Cornely (Howard University), Walter White (NAACP), Dr. Midian Othello Bousfield (National Medical Association and the US Army’s Station Hospital), Mary Church Terrell (NACW), W.E.B. DuBois (formerly NAACP), E. Franklin Frazier (sociologist), Claude Barnett (journalist), and Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York City Councilman, shortly US Congressman). The group focused on birth control education and access for African American 76
Nevertheless, white supremacy and eugenics primarily informed approaches to family planning, especially at the level of policy. The language that many family planning proponents used about modernizing states and preserving civilization served as guides for adjustments in immigration law. US immigration law had long been racist, but it took on a new form in the 1950s with explicit reference to race and family life.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, claims to preserve and spread civilization created an intimate relationship between immigration and family models.
Having banished polygamy between Mormon citizens in 1887 with the Edmunds-
Tucker Act, policymakers were loath to allow non-white people to bring it and other practices “similar to slavery” from their home countries.85 Racial categories proved critical to evaluating fitness for immigration, but state actors struggled to solidify a framework for understanding race. On the one hand, a 1911 immigration commission report outlined five major races; on the other, the immigration bureau recognized 45 races among the immigrants that entered the US, 36 of which came from Europe.86 This
communities. Ibid, 128-130. Vanessa Northington Gamble and Theodore M. Brown, “Midian Othello Bousfield: Advocate for the Medical and Public Health Concerns of Black Americans,” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. 7 (July 2009): 1186. US House of Representatives, Office of History and Preservation, Committee on House Administration, “Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.,” History, Art, and Archives: United States House of Representatives, Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007, http://history.house.gov/People/Listing/P/POWELL,-Adam-Clayton,-Jr-- (P000477)/#bibliography, accessed 23 Mar 2018. 85 Sarah Barringer Gordon, “’The Liberty of Self-Degredation’: Polygamy, Woman Suffrage, and Consent in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 3 (1996): 815-847. 86 Mathew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 78. 77
alone represents the slippery nature of racial categories, even as the threat of allowing
“uncivilized” races into the US made racial codification imperative. As a result, the US turned away potential immigrants from origins as varied as India, Holland, and Russia on grounds of polygamy.87 This approach set a precedent in the field of immigration law, where consent and the morality of family formation became one language through which racial distinctions were articulated and given meaning. It would be fine-tuned in the decades to come, as these moralizing discourses mobilized state power to justify institutionalized racism.
Marriage and its power to potentially grant citizenship came into play during the creation of immigration law and in association with women’s suffrage. Laws that granted US citizenship to foreign women who married US citizens and stripped it from
US women who married foreign men spawned a women-led movement on the issue of the nationality of married women. Ironically, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 also set in motion the restoration of women’s independent citizenship, as
Congress sought to disenfranchise non-European brides of US male citizens. Whereas prior to the Amendment, immigrant wives could only affect home lives, they now had secured access to the vote merely by marrying an US citizen.88 The 1922 Cable Act, also called the Married Women’s Independent Nationality Act, rescinded automatic
87 Nancy Cott, Public Vows, 134-35, 139. 88 Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own, 5-9. 78
naturalization for foreign wives of American citizens, and the Johnson-Reed Act that followed in 1924 largely sealed off access to US citizenship for women whose racial backgrounds (implemented as national origin) made them “unassimilable” into white
US society.89 The Johnson-Reed Act established immigration quotas based on country of origin. These quotas severely restricted immigration from southeastern Europe and cut off immigration from Asia entirely. Those who championed the 1924 immigration act tied the requirements of sexual modernity to fitness for entry, favoring consenting couples over the “savage” practices of arranged marriage and polygamy.90 The 1924 act legally separated those that Congress deemed assimilable from those who were not. For resident male citizens, the Johnson-Reed Act advanced their non-citizen wives’ position by moving them outside of country quotas, although women from Asian countries remained excluded.91
On the surface, 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act offered an olive branch to reformers in response to a global environment more critical of explicitly race-based legal discrimination. Racial bars to citizenship had become a
89 Ibid, 93. 90 Pamela Haag discusses some of the ways in which recognizing women’s consent to marriage could backfire, in the case of Japanese “picture brides” who supposedly married too easily for convenience and practicality rather than love. The greatest risk to the US was in their entering prostitution in order to support themselves. Haag, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 110-11. 91 Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own, 120-21. 79
liability for those who proclaimed that American democracy “valued racial equality.”92
But its sponsors, Senator Pat McCarran (D-NV) and Representative Francis Walter (D-
PA), sought to continue the work of the 1924 Act to minimize immigration of populations that would not, they believed, assimilate into the culture of white America.93
McCarran, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on immigration, had already earned attention with the anticommunist Internal Security Act of 1950, which he folded into the new immigration laws.94 Although the Immigration and Nationality Act loosened national origin quotas and allowed immigrants from
Asian countries, these quotas were still extremely restrictive. The quota system continued to favor immigrants of Northern and Western Europe: Great Britain and
92 Canaday, The Straight State, 216-17. 93 Truman, in his statement vetoing the bill, proclaimed that “The bill would continue, practically without change, the national origins quota system, which was enacted, into law in 1924.” Harry S. Truman, 182. Veto of Bill To Revise the Laws Relating to Immigration, Naturalization, and Nationality, 25 June 1952, Harry S. Truman Papers, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=2389, accessed 20 Mar 2018. “House Bars Change in Immigrant Bill: Rejects Charges That New Code Will Cause Hardships -- Vote Expected Today,” Special to the New York Times, 25 Apr 1952, 14, PQHN: The New York Times, 112239701. 94 C. P. Trussell, “Senate Unit Votes New Bill on Aliens: Full Revision of Immigration, Naturalization Laws would End Barriers to Orientals,” Special to the New York Times (29 Jan 1952), 7, PQHN: The New York Times, 112551028. The 1950 act, too, was divisive. See for example: Walter H. Waggoner, “M’Carran Law on Visas Opens a Sharp Dispute: Barring of Eminent Scientists Held a Serious Blow to This Country,” The New York Times (16 Dec 1951), 165, PQHN: The New York Times, 112046913. 80
Northern Ireland had the largest annual quota of 65,361, compared to 100 from each
Asian country.95
Supporters frequently elevated the McCarran-Walter Act’s immigration expansion in debates, but critics called the elimination of racial immigration bars mere technicalities, paving the way for greater injustices. President Truman had hoped to pass a law eliminating racial and national immigration limitations, and he refused on June 25,
1952 to sign the Act. He cited the perpetuation of “injustices of long standing against many other nations of the world,” impairment of US foreign policy efforts to “rally
[people] to the cause of freedom,” and the intensification of “the repressive and inhumane aspects of our immigration procedures.”96 Others took issue with the Act’s expansion of reasons to exclude future immigrants, to deport legal immigrants, and to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens. Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the
American Jewish Congress, claimed that the law would “draw an Iron Curtain” around
95 An Act to Revise the Laws Relating to Immigration, Naturalization, and Nationality and for Other Purposes, Public Law 414, U.S. Statutes at Large 66 (1952): 163-282. US DoS, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Historian, “The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran- Walter Act),” Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act, accessed 21 Mar 2018. “House Acts to Give Asians Citizenship and End Race Bars: Approves Measure to Codify Immigration Laws and Set New Admittance Quotas; Senate Test Now Awaited; Disputed Bill Voted 206 to 68 - - Foes Charge It Would Curb Rights in Deportations,” Special to the New York Times, 26 Apr 1952, 1, PQHN: The New York Times, 112325757. 96 Truman, 182. Veto. 81
the US.97 Opponents to the bill in the House feared the expansion of “unreasonable and arbitrary cases for deportation,” and claimed that “racial discrimination, said to be eliminated by the new bill, would be accentuated.” And yet, many newspaper articles celebrated the law’s extension of citizenship to Asians and the end of “race bars” to immigration.98
The preservation of appropriate, heterosexual marriages also formed a central pillar of the McCarran-Walter Act, however. Morality restrictions maintained prohibitions against the entrance of polygamists and prostitutes.99 The 1952 law also expanded some of the changes made in 1924, favoring family unification to the point of fully freeing spouses of US Americans from country quotas.100 Japanese war brides offered one example of how the US might safely transition into a new era of immigration law. Postwar discourses that began to reconfigure Japanese-Americans as a “model minority” highlighted Japanese women, who seemed obedient and elegant antidotes to the postwar “New Woman.”101 Amid concerns about desegregation and awkward attempts to resettle interned Japanese Americans, the war brides represented the redemptive qualities of cultural pluralism and proved that it could stabilize rather than
97 “Pending Bills to Curb Immigration Assailed As Putting Iron Curtain About United States,” The New York Times, 20 Feb 1952, 13, PQHN: The New York Times, 112521013. 98 “House Acts to Give Asians Citizenship,” Special to the New York Times, 26 Apr 1952, 1, 15. 99 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 212(a) 11-12. 100 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 205. 101 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 21. 82
disturb. The partial incorporation of Japanese war brides into the ranks of US homemakers elevated heterosexual middle-class ideals alongside the valor of World
War II soldiers.102 But in addition to preserving married couples, the 1952 law explicitly prohibited the entrance of homosexuals. Provisions against “moral turpitude” had been part of immigration law since 1891, but a new clause against “psychopathic personalities” specifically targeted “homosexuals or sex perverts.”103 The law specifically forbid entrance of those “coming to the US to engage in any immoral sex act.”104
Immigration law maintained a focus on preserving “the American family,” but the form of the threatening family alternative had changed. State power operated through scientific language while it maintained moralistic frameworks of acceptable family.
2.4 A Crisis of Femininity? Women’s Waged Work after World War II
Where immigration and family planning reflected racist concerns about transformations in US families, women’s labor simultaneously challenged assumptions about gendered family roles. World War II brought tremendous change to US labor relations, especially in the field of women’s labor, in ways that belie the idea of middle-
102 Caroline Chung Simpson, “’Out of an Obscure Place’: Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 3 (1998): 47. 103 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 212(a) 9. Canaday, The Straight State, 217-21. 104 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 212(a) 13. 83
class suburban housewives as typical.105 Even though the male breadwinner family model remained largely entrenched after the war, these white housewives do not reflect the experiences of all women.106
Production boomed in the US during the Second World War; employment climbed to unheard-of rates as an unprecedented number of workers joined unions. By the war’s conclusion, union memberships had leapt from 9 million to 15 million. After the war ended, Southern and Southwestern industrialists and Northern businessmen promoted a states’ rights program in hopes of limiting union power by restricting federal involvement.107 The Taft-Hartley Act required union officials to swear anticommunist oaths and prohibited secondary boycotts, and a coalition of Republicans and business-allied Democrats passed it over Truman’s veto in 1947.108 In addition to the
Taft-Hartley Act, many Southern states promoted right-to-work laws, which prohibited
105 Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Joanne Meyerowitz has written a particularly potent critique of Friedan’s depiction of women in the 1950s and of the historiography that relies too heavily upon it. Meyerowitz, “Beyond The Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958,” in Not June Cleaver, 230-262. Low-income women at the time critiqued Friedan themselves, frustrated at the unspoken fact that by “getting advanced education and ‘meaningful’ jobs,” they would need to hire other women to clean their homes and care for their children. MacLean, “Postwar Women’s History.” 106 Nancy MacLean calls these “myths” “insofar as they claimed to describe rather than prescribe behavior.” MacLean, “Postwar Women’s History.” 107 Tami J. Friedman, “Capital Flight, ‘States’ Rights,’ and the Anti-Labor Offensive after World War II,” in The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 80-1. 108 Secondary boycotts were a refusal to handle products of companies with which the union had no primary dispute. 84
unions from making union membership a requirement for work in an organized shop.
Particularly in the Southern states, states’ rights arguments arose from the desire to reinforce existing racial hierarchies and with an eye toward preserving the power of the agricultural elite. Politicians framed right-to-work laws as a means of preserving economic growth, democracy, and individual liberties. Although right-to-work laws did not pass in every state, they ate away at the stability of unions and convinced many voters from middle and working classes that going it alone, rather than joining a union, was in their best interest.109
Though weaker in the 1950s than they had been during World War II, unions nonetheless provided a platform for the mass of new women workers to make claims for working women’s rights. Women represented a significant portion of the 6 million members that unions gained during the war, and for the first time, the average working woman was more likely to be married with children than single and childless. Although the desperate need for workers during World War II lessened hostility toward married female labor, it did not change the fact that women were considered secondary workers, often subject to dismissal before their male colleagues.110 The male breadwinner model of family life helped to maintain this status.
109 Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “’Is Freedom of the Individual Un-American?’ Right-to-Work Campaigns and Anti-Union Conservatism, 1943-1958,” in The Right and Labor in America, 114-136. 110 Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 72. 85
Throughout much of the 20th century, the masculine role of breadwinner served as an “organizing mythology” for social life, forming the groundwork for healthy families and therefore a healthy nation.111 During the Great Depression, this mythology merged with financial desperation to increase hostility toward working women in dual- income households, who came under fire for “double-dipping” into an already small job pool. In 1932, the federal government sought to limit dual-income households with the
US Economy Act, which prohibited the government from employing more than one person from the same family. In the first year, they fired 1,500 people, almost all of whom were women.112 The Social Security Act of 1935, as part of President Roosevelt’s
New Deal, enshrined male-breadwinner households in federal law. This act established federally managed old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, social welfare, and aid to impoverished children. The system did not cover domestic workers, seasonal or part- time workers, agricultural laborers, or housewives. In the case of housemaids and farm workers, the intervention of Southern Democrats removed these positions— overwhelmingly jobs held by black workers—from the protection of Social Security.113
Lawmakers soon incorporated need-based relief programs founded on the idea of the
111 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 18. 112 Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005), 219. 113 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013), 259-260. 86
“family wage,” by which men were paid more with the assumption that they were also supporting a family.114 Changes to federal income taxes in 1948 also reasserted the primacy of this model. The joint filing system for married couples allowed them to split their income, regardless of how little the secondary earner made, shifting the couple into a lower tax bracket.115 Taxation therefore incentivized single-earner households, and given that men could typically expect a better income, couples that pursued this strategy often had a male-breadwinner household. In the face of this family model, women workers struggled to find the kind of validation—like government-supported childcare—that would allow them to both care for and provide for their children.
Although many women found themselves pushed out of industries by the war’s end, their presence in industry had already begun to transform it. At the peak of wartime productivity, 3 million women belonged to unions, as opposed to only 800,000 in 1940. Numbers began to climb again in the late 1940s, reaching 3.5 million women union members in 1956, and doubling the population of women workers to 18 percent of
114 S. J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 249. 115 Coontz, Marriage, a History, 221-23. By the 1960s, movements for African American equality would also politicize the breadwinner model by laying claim to this role for black men as productive workers and family heads, an argument that would take on new proportions after the publication of the Moynihan Report in 1965. The male breadwinner model paradoxically fueled arguments both for racial equality and in opposition to it, as segregationists claimed that a man who needed help to take his place at the head of a family was not a proper man at all. Self, All in the Family, 19. 87
all union members.116 Membership swelled in unions within industries, like telephone, hotel and restaurant service, or garment production, that were dominated by women.
Having been laid off from what many considered to be men’s industry jobs, women returned to the “pink collar ghetto” and solidified their positions there.117 Labor differentiation by gender helped women, especially when they began agitating for equal pay. In male-dominated fields, women could only count on employment where they were paid less than men. The industries in which women had become the majority gave them better leverage to protect their jobs and improve their wages because they did not have to compete with men in the same way for better wages and job conditions.118 For women of color, unions served as important platforms from which they could contest systemic discrimination that held them back. Especially for black women, a history of coercive waged labor meant their interests lay, not in access to work, but rather in more
116 Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 17. 117 Although many were laid off, women never again fully left “men’s” fields, which were largely in manufacturing. For example, women had comprised 49 percent of United Electrical Workers during the war. Layoffs afterward still only brought them down to 40 percent of union members, giving them substantial leverage within the UE. Cobble, “Recapturing Working-Class Feminism: Union Women in the Postwar Era,” in Not June Cleaver, 59. Some women, like those who worked for the Radio Corporation of America, held their positions because of employers’ assumptions about “women’s patience” and women’s “nimble fingers.” Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, paperback edition (New York: The New Press, 2001). 118 Cobble, “Recapturing Working-Class Feminism,” 61-62. Married women workers gained legitimacy within unions, as well. The United Auto Workers women’s conference in 1944 represents the transformations taking place in labor politics as its members discussed the importance of protecting all women’s rights to wage work, including those of married women. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 72. 88
work rights and protections and in greater access to higher-prestige and higher-pay positions.119
Responses to the tremendous expansion of wage work among women workers, particularly married women, varied considerably. One man repeatedly wrote to
Women’s Bureau director Frieda Miller in 1953 on the problems with working women.
Though acknowledging that sometimes women needed to work to support their families, he took issue with women who “work for ‘spending money’ only” and treated single women worker’s desires for “independence” and “freedom” with derision.120 He could not understand why they would not give up the convenience of prepackaged foods and “volunteer to spend two to three extra hours in the kitchen each day, learning how to be women again.”121
Nor was this writer alone in his discomfort with the idea of women working.
Sally Luther, one of two women in the Minnesota House of Representatives, reported to
Miller on the status of a proposed bill that would have allowed working mothers to deduct child care from their income taxes as a business expense. Although it passed in the Minnesota House, the bill did not make it onto the Senate floor. The opposition
119 MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 120 Clement Droz to Frieda Miller, 14 Feb 1953, Box 27, Folder 3-0-9, Office of the Director, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, Records of the Women’s Bureau, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (henceforth NARA II). 121 Clement Droz to Frieda Miller, 20 Jan 1953, Box 27, Folder 3-0-9, Office of the Director, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, 7, NARA II. 89
believed that women should draw state Aid to Dependent Children support and stay home instead; they did not want the state to “help pay the housekeeping expenses for a divorcee who might already be receiving alimony.”122 A woman’s financial contribution to her home remained, from the perspective of these Minnesota Senators, secondary to her husband’s. Supporting childcare for divorced women, these opponents seemed to believe, was akin to allowing those women to game the system.
Many nevertheless took a much rosier view of the changes in women’s roles, among them working women themselves. Experts in the Department of Labor acknowledged their increasing wage work, supported it, and sought to change public opinion and policy in working women’s favor. The National Manpower Council, established in 1951, brought together a wide variety of experts who took this approach.
Representatives from industry, virtually every labor union, a broad sampling of core women’s organizations, educational institutions, and government officials came together to discuss the expansion and strengthening of US industry.123 Businesses that included a significant number of women within their ranks—retailers, telephone
122 Sally Luther to Frieda Miller, 27 Mar 1953, Labor Department, Office of the Director, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, Box 20, Folder 2-0-1-2, NARA II. 123 These organizations included the Federation of Business and Professional Women, the American Association of University Women, the National Association of Colored Women, the American Nurses Association, and the YWCA. The ultimate purpose of the Council was to expand and strengthen industry in order to maintain a military strong enough to deter enemies and to permit rapid full-scale mobilization. Susan M. Hartmann, “Women’s Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years,” in Not June Cleaver, 87. 90
companies, and hospitals—were disproportionately represented on the Council. The combination made for a particular focus on womanpower.124
The Council’s investigations supported the presence of women in the labor force.
It made recommendations regarding domestic life, as well, pressing for less gender differentiation in tasks at home. However, the Council concluded that women’s priority should be “protection of the human relations in the home, the family unit.”125 Their mixed response in regard to what women’s primary goal should be speaks to the continued power of domesticity in women’s roles. Nevertheless, women in the 1950s increasingly heard that they could have their cake and eat it, too. Although popular magazines like
Ebony and the Ladies’ Home Journal included stereotypes of femininity that upheld gender distinctions, these magazines also celebrated women’s career achievements.
Ebony’s 1948 article on Mrs. Louise Williams, the only black American Airlines mechanic, described a typical day at work, during which “the calm Negro mother of two children coolly changed” a defective airplane part. Declaring “She’s as Good on Motors
124 One of the Council’s most important outcomes was an amendment introduced to Congress in 1951 and 1952 making childcare expenses tax deductible for working women. Director Frieda Miller argued that federal income tax—presumably referencing the 1948 changes—discriminated against single-parent households and households where both parents worked out of necessity She compared the cost of childcare to other business expenses, like office clerical or cleaning work. “Federal legislation which would allow employed persons responsible for care of their children to deduct the expenses of such care from their federal income tax.” Another example of “gender neutral” language that actually targeted women. Frieda Miller to Donald Taylor, 12 Sept 1951, Labor Department, Women's Bureau, Office of the Director, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, Box 20, Folder 2-0-1-2, NARA II. 125 Hartmann, “Women’s Employment,” 87-89. 91
as Baking Chicken Pot Pie,” the magazine celebrated Williams’s union participation, excellence on the job, and her loving home life.126 Such articles demonstrate media’s embrace of women’s ability to fulfill themselves within and without their family roles.
Figure 5 Louise Williams excelling at work and at home, demonstrating a device she invented (left) and showcasing her happy home life (right).127
The Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor addressed public responses to women’s involvement in labor after World War II, and with it concerns and questions about women’s new roles in family life. The Women’s Bureau also served as a foot in the
126 Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique,” 233. “Lady Plane Mechanic,” Ebony 3, no. 3: 28- 31, EBSCOhost, 0012-9011, accessed 24 Mar 2018. 127 “Lady Plane Mechanic,” Ebony, 29, 31. 92
door of governance and policy for women’s organizations and frequently worked with these organizations to educate and mobilize citizens on women’s status. The body promoted many aspects of women’s experiences, supporting housewives alongside paid workers.
The YWCA was one of the Bureau’s strongest non-union allies, helping the
Bureau to build programs encouraging women to consider careers alongside families. In consultation with the YWCA, the Women’s Bureau drafted a brochure in 1948 targeting girls and young women. “Your Job Future After High School” provided its readers with advice on job fields and balancing the pursuit of a job and marriage, and suggested other sources of advice around them, including parents, school advisors, and pastors.
Although the YWCA recognized that some young women intended to marry rather than pursue a career, the brochure’s authors actively encouraged its readers to cultivate marketable skills in case economic necessity required them to work. The pamphlet recommended stereotypical women’s jobs: stenography, garment and food processing work, waitressing, telephone operation, etc.128 In addition to simply being practical recommendations, these women-dominated fields had women-dominated unions, which would give any young women who joined greater leverage upon entering their
128 Women’s Bureau, “Your Job Future after High School,” Leaflet 8, Revised 1952, Washington, DC, Office of the Director, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, Box 55, folder 4-6-2-1, 4. 93
fields. During the pamphlet’s first publication in 1949, the Bureau realized their initial order of 25,000 copies was insufficient and had to request another printing, and it remained so popular that the Bureau was still receiving requests for it in “amazing [sic] large quantities” in 1953.129 Its success speaks to how young women or and the women who advised them believed women could find fulfillment in both work and family.
The Women’s Bureau also participated in the decades-long battles over the Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA) and, through it, disagreements over what constituted womanhood, women’s roles, and women’s rights and how they should be protected.
The roots of the ERA lay in the gender-equality approach of the National Women’s Party
(NWP). Introduced into Congress in 1923, the proposed amendment would establish women’s and men’s complete equality in law. Although NWP members initially debated including a clause to preserve gender-based protective labor laws, the draft that went before Congress did not contain it. The proposed amendment made enemies of working-class women, for whom protective labor laws improved their access to work, work standards, or pay, and thereby exposed class-based fault lines in women’s organizing.130
129 Mildred Dougherty to Elise F. Moller, 5 Oct 1948; Adelia B. Kloak to Frieda Miller, 22 Jan 1953; Leta H. Galpin to Miller, 22 Apr 1949; Helen H. Ringe to Miller, 6 May 1949; Office of the Director, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, Box 55, folder 4-6-2-1. Order numbers can be found in the same folder, Adelia B. Kloak to Miller, 12 Oct 1949. 130 Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 60. 94
The leadership of the NWP was almost exclusively comprised of upper-class women and the organization tended to take an economically-conservative approach to women’s waged labor that favored individualism over collective bargaining. The NWP had done itself no favors, alienating potential working-class allies by rarely pursuing legislative measures that improved wages and working conditions for women. Indeed, the organization’s members were suspicious of unions, without which they believed women workers could have contracted on an equal footing with men. As a result, union women were reluctant to listen to their arguments on behalf of the ERA.131
Flourishing interest in the proposed amendment brought upper-middle and working-class women’s visions of how best to protect their rights into conflict. In 1946, the ERA passed out of committee and onto the floor in both branches of Congress for the first time since 1923. The document that Congress worked from had been amended in
1943 but remained extremely simple. The first clause declared “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” and the second announced that Congress would have the power to enforce the first clause “within their respective jurisdictions, to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”132 The sudden surge of success for the proposed amendment prompted
131 Women workers’ promotion of gender-based protective labor laws should not be interpreted as a reflection of their more “traditional” approach to family or gender. Rather, as already mentioned, women unionists had been able to use gender differences to their advantage. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 136-40. 132 US Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, The Proposed Equal Rights Amendment: 95
labor women and their allies to respond in 1947 with the Women’s Status Bill. Garnering support from a long list of prominent women’s groups and unions, the bill targeted discrimination against women by seeking a presidential commission on the status of women to mirror that which Truman had created on civil rights.133
Gender also factored into attacks against proponents of the ERA, who were sometimes labeled as “barren” (and therefore incomplete as women), bitter, or even neurotic. Conservative lawmakers and other women’s rights activists joined union women in their opposition to ERA, primarily because of the amendment’s phrasing of equality, which seemed to be trying to erase gender differences.134 Enmity between proponents and opponents of the amendment continued with its annual re-introduction into Congress into the 1950s. Women’s Bureau director Frieda Miller entered the fray, as well, criticizing the “leisure-class women” who sided with employers over workers. In a sense, she was correct: ERA supporters in government and business included some of those for whom states’ rights arguments and right-to-work laws were appealing, seeking
Contemporary Ratification Issues, by Thomas H. Neale, R42979 (2018), 8. 133 These groups included the AAUW, the AFL-CIO, United Auto Workers, all three of their Women’s Auxiliaries, the League of Women Shoppers, the National Consumers’ League, the NCNW, the National Council of Catholic Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, the YWCA, and the League of Women Voters. “The Road to Equality,” pamphlet, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, Box 18, folder 2-0-0-3. 134 Women workers’ promotion of gender-based protective labor laws should not be interpreted as a reflection of their more “traditional” approach to family or gender. Rather, as already mentioned, women unionists had been able to use gender differences to their advantage. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 136-40. 96
greater freedom from government control. Neither the Women’s Status Bill (which
Congress abandoned in 1954) nor the Equal Rights Amendment (which ceased receiving serious Congressional consideration from 1956 to 1971) achieved success in Congress.
They do reveal, however, fundamental differences in the goals of women’s rights proponents.135
2.5 Conclusion
Beah Richards’ plea in 1951 for white and black women to join hands looked both forward and back, recalling a feminist history of missed—or rejected—connections even as she imagined what they might accomplish together. Although Richards delivered “A Black Woman Speaks” from the standpoint of black left feminism, it nevertheless reflects significant elements of women’s organizing in the late 1940s and early 1950s: trends toward more integration in women’s organizing; a focus on families, especially regarding threats to African American families; and an emphasis on civil rights that was distinct from male-dominated civil rights campaigns.
Debates about women and women’s rights in the late 1940s and early 1950s emphasized their family roles. In addition to peace, family planning, and labor rights, they increasingly adopted civil rights programs. Black women and their organizations
135 Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 61-66. 97
were important actors in this process, using their positions in interracial organizations to push issues that were important to them among white allies.
US conversations on family life proved critical to the development of new discourses on rights in the United Nations, especially regarding women’s rights.
Religious organizing and discursive holdovers from earlier provisions against “practices similar to slavery” would critically inform the Marriage Convention’s logic and vocabulary.
98
3. “Common Ideals of Human Freedom”?: Debating Empire and Rights in the United Nations, 1945-1956
At the first session of the new United Nations General Assembly, Eleanor
Roosevelt, serving as a formal representative of the United States and informal women’s representative, read an “Open Letter to the Women of the World.” All the organization’s seventeen women—delegates, alternates, and advisors alike—had cooperated to draft an address to the “women of our various countries.” Recognizing that the UN offered a fresh start to replace the League of Nations, the statement that Roosevelt read pointed to crucial differences in this new effort. Unlike the previous organization, the “joint efforts of men and women” had established the United Nations to incorporate “common ideals of human freedom at a time when the need for united effort broke down barriers of race, creed, and sex.”1
The concept of “human freedom” formed a central pillar of what many hoped the UN would achieve, and reformers, diplomats, and activists pursued a human rights agenda that would recognize all freedoms—including the freedom of self-governance.
While the letter went on to outline important ideals for women’s rights in the UN, particularly emphasizing the need to give women access to the kind of civic motherhood
1 “’Open Letter to the women of the world’, read by Eleanor Roosevelt, representative of the delegation of the United States of America, to the first session of the General Assembly; and statements made by representatives on the participation of women in the work of the United Nations and the creation of a committee on the status of women (extract),” 12 Feb 1946, A/PV.29, in The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 103. 99
that would let them and their children participate fully in national and international life, it also framed the breaking down of racial and religious barriers as a completed project.
Although the UN foundational documents included ideas about gender and racial equality, they mark much more profoundly the embarkation of people and governments upon a new and shifting conversation about what significance gender and race held after World War II.
Despite its critical role in the history of international human rights, the establishment of the United Nations represents important transformations in global approaches to power and power relations that were in progress, not complete.2 Some— not all—of the women who helped to shape the UN’s foundations claimed that the defense of women’s human rights required recognizing the unique challenges they faced, whether as a result of social assumptions or biological differences from men.
“Race” did not yet hold a comparable position in UN discourses; instead, delegates and advisors to the UN clashed over recognition of self-determination as a human right and the possibility of dismantling empires. Representatives of imperial states moved away from explicit claims about race by positioning their states at the peak of political and social development while questioning the backward practices of subject peoples. In both
2 Elizabeth Borgwardt’s discussion of the Atlantic Charter also highlights this document as an important Anglo-American vision that enhanced the role of the individual in international systems and paved the way for human rights. I do not include a discussion of the Atlantic Charter here, however, because of my specific interest in race and gender. Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005). 100
cases, however, delegates and activists struggled to understand how the world had changed—and, through the Cold War and the beginnings of decolonization, continued to change. Their efforts to define human rights in multiple dimensions reflect the ways in which citizens and states jostled each other to re-evaluate their relationship in the light of new international laws.
Delegates from around the world fought to commit the United Nations to decolonization and a strong system of human rights. Women involved in the drafting of the UN Charter insisted upon a shift from the language of “Man” to signify all of humanity to one that recognized “men and women” equally under its umbrella. But new approaches to race, gender, and individual rights should not be considered a complete departure from politics of the past. The UN remained overwhelmingly committed to the preservation of empire, taking over the trusteeship system from the
League of Nations, and representatives concerned for human rights of any kind had to maintain constant pressure for those rights to even be named.
Delegates of many United Nations member states participated in work in their home countries to get a handle on governance after 1945, frequently through private law and family rights. They therefore came to conversations about and within the new
United Nations Organization already thinking through the relationship between state power and gendered roles in their domestic contexts and how that should translate on an international stage. In the decade preceding the first attempts at drafting a Marriage
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Convention, representatives to the nascent Women’s Commission had already begun to make decisions about what gendered rights should look like in the United Nations.
3.1 A New World Order?: Gender and Empire in the New United Nations
Despite sweeping claims about the creation of a new world order at the founding of the United Nations, many activists soon discovered that the organization would not support the rights of all people. The 1945 San Francisco Conference, featuring delegations from fifty countries from around the world, met from April to June in an attempt to establish a new international peacekeeping organization. The United Nations
Charter that it produced did mark a break from previous systems of international law, although it was criticized for not going far enough. Human rights mechanisms made space for citizens as global actors alongside states.3 Women who attended the
Conference achieved explicit recognition of women’s equal rights in the Charter, but those who fought for human rights more generally had mixed results, and anti- imperialists who sought an institutional renunciation of empire realized that the states whose delegations had taken the lead in the UN did not consider self-determination a human right worth recognizing.
A small cohort of women debated the significance of naming women as women in the United Nations Charter. Of San Francisco’s 521 delegates, representing 49 countries,
3 Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 3. 102
only 14 official representatives were women, and only four of the 140 signatories of the
UN Charter were women—Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic, Bertha Lutz of Brazil, Wu Yi-Fang of China (Taiwan), and Virginia Gildersleeve of the US.4 Even so small a group found sources of disagreement, but they also managed to insist upon an important departure from the kind of Enlightenment humanism that claimed “Man” represented all of humanity. The Charter in its final form would assert “the dignity and worth of the human person” and “the equal rights of men and women.”5 As US representative Dorothy Kenyon claimed in 1947, women delegates recognized that they were participating in the creation of a “standard and a guide in a new world,” and at the
San Francisco Conference they declared that “women are people and women’s rights are human rights.”6
Despite the limited number of official representatives, women members of NGOs and women-focused organizations had a much more substantial presence and were able
4 Female members of other delegations included Cora Casseman of Canada and Jessie Street of Australia, but neither signed. Karen Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda, 139. Devaki Jain, Women, Development, and the UN, 12. Throughout the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, the United Nations— primarily because of US influence—refused to recognize the People’s Republic of China and therefore referred to Taiwan (Republic of China) as “China.” 5 Charter of the United Nations and Statute of the International Court of Justice, San Francisco, 24 Oct 1945, United Nations, Preamble, available at https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/ctc/uncharter.pdf, accessed Apr 16 2017. Established many of these ideals at the United Women’s Conference in May 1945. Falcón, Power Interrupted, 33. United Women’s Conference, Women’s Share in Implementing the Peace (San Francisco: Executive Committee of the United Women’s Conference, 1945). 6 Dorothy Kenyon, “Victories on the International Front,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 251,1 (1 May 1947), doi 10.1177/000271624725100104: 19. 103
to affect decisions through advisors. The Women’s Bureau coalition from the US had an opportunity to influence the creation of the Charter as women from the State
Department and Bureau served as advisors to the US delegation. They were augmented by members of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the General
Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Federation of Business and Professional
Women (FBPW), the National League of Women Voters, and the Women’s Action
Committee for Victory and Lasting Peace.7 In countries like the US, NGOs had a substantial impact on women’s rise to positions of leadership after World War II.8
Not all women’s experiences were created equal, however. Virginia Gildersleeve of the US had earned distinction as a leader in organizations like the AAUW, the
International Federation of University Women, and the Commission to Study the
Organization of Peace (CSOP), which certainly contributed to her selection as a member of the US delegation. Equally important, however, was her unwavering support of US participation in the war. Although members of the Young Women’s Christian
Association (YWCA) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
(WILPF) held equivalent or even more impressive resumes, these organizations’ vocal
7 Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda, 139. 8 Christy Jo Snider, “Planning for Peace: Virginia Gildersleeve at the United Nations Conference on International Organization,” Peace & Change 32, no. 2 (April 2007): 168-85. 104
criticisms of US engagement in World War II dimmed their members’ prospects for joining the delegation.9
Figure 6 Virginia Gildersleeve, member of the US Delegation to the San Francisco Conference, addresses an audience at a rally sponsored by the Free World Association and Americans United.10
9 Snider, “Planning for Peace,” 176. For her membership in the CSOP, see Glenn Mitoma, Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power, 37. Gildersleeve’s appointment as representative is both indicative of the need for Truman’s administration to satisfy women’s organizations and the state policing of reformers and activists; those who wanted something from the administration would have to earn it through their support. Snider, 179. 10 UN Photo, The San Francisco Conference, 25 April-26 June 1945, Apr 30, 1945, United Nations News & Media, New York, NY, http://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/150/0150394.html. 105
Women elsewhere in the world combined participation in NGOs with experience in diplomacy and intergovernmental organizations. Latin American women, especially representatives of Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, brought their experience in the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) to bear in San
Francisco. Acting as central members of their delegations, they were among the most vocal advocates for language that specifically addressed women and women’s equal rights. Although an inter-governmental organization, the IACW proved as valuable as
NGOs to women activists, and its conventions on women’s political rights and married women’s nationality would inspire the UN Women’s Commission’s early focus on these subjects. Minerva Bernardino, who would preside over the Women’s Commission as president for five out of the ten years she served in the Commission, attended the San
Francisco Conference even while serving as IACW president and member of the
International Alliance of Women. Bodil Begtrup, who would become one of the strongest advocates for a women’s body in the UN and the Sub-commission’s chair, had worked in the League of Nations women commission and was a member of the Danish resistance during the war.11 Bertha Lutz, who had been an intimate friend of Carrie
Chapman Catt, also had extensive personal experience with women’s internationalism through the International Alliance of Women.12
11 Jain, Women, Development, and the UN, 13. 12 Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 30, 199. 106
Figure 7 Delegates at the 2nd session of the Women’s Commission: (from left) Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic), Dr. Ophelia Mendoza (Honduras), and Amalia C. de Castillo Ledón (Mexico).13 Bernardino and Ledón in particular were instrumental in securing explicit statements of women’s human rights in the UN Charter.
However, Virginia Gildersleeve’s vision of human rights proved far more limited than that of her peers from other states, and other women criticized these limitations, sidestepping her ideas to achieve women’s rights recognition in the Charter.
Gildersleeve initially maintained that she was at the Conference on her own merits and not as a token woman to satisfy women activists and reformers in the US. Ruth
Woodsmall, General Secretary for the World YWCA, reflected that Gildersleeve at the
13 UN Photo, United Nations Commission on Status of Women Opens Its Second Session, Jan 5, 1948, United Nations News & Media, New York, NY, http://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/407/0407261.html. 107
Conference was “rather indifferent” to many women’s issues, a member of a class of women “who have achieved and are not particularly concerned about promoting the forward advance of women,” beyond themselves serving as an example for women’s progress.14 Bertha Lutz of Brazil and Jessie Street of Australia led the charge for gender- specific language in the Charter. The pair faced off against Gildersleeve, who addressed
Lutz with the hope that “she would not be so vulgar and unladylike as to ask for anything for women in the charter.” Women of the US, in general, disappointed those in attendance from other countries by disagreeing about how to win equality. To Lutz, this signified that the “mantle [of women’s rights leadership] is falling off the shoulder of the
Anglo-Saxons,” and women of other countries, especially in Latin America, would have to take up the torch.15
Despite her earlier claims, Gildersleeve nevertheless quickly realized that she had been appointed as the woman in the US delegation. A lack of experience in formal diplomatic positions (as opposed to the informal diplomacy of international women’s organizations) earned her out-of-the-way roles in the committee that drafted the
Preamble and in the committee that dealt with international economic and social cooperation. She fully recognized her appointment to the latter committee came about
14 Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda, 140. Quoting Ruth Woodsmall to Marianne Mills, 11 Aug 1945, box 291, Papers of the World YWCA, Geneva, Switzerland. 15 Rupp, Worlds of Women, 222-23. Quoting Bertha Lutz to Carrie Chapman Catt, 21 May 1945, National American Women’s Suffrage Association papers, reel 12. 108
because of its “suitable feminine” agenda, and to the former because no one else in the delegation cared about the Preamble.16 One wonders if Gildersleeve saw the irony, when she asked about the inclusion of gender equality in the Charter at a US delegation meeting, as advisors claimed that the issue of women’s rights was “completely dead” because of how much progress women had made since the Versailles Treaty.17
The small physical presence of women at San Francisco spoke to the relatively minimal presence they would have throughout much of the UN’s history. Women always maintained an important presence, especially in the General Assembly—Vijaya
Lakshmi Pandit of India is most prominently remembered as the first woman president of the General Assembly in 1953—but they frequently served as symbols of their countries’ recognition of women, rather than reflecting a true acceptance of women into the UN. Women rarely surpassed five percent of the total representatives, even with the addition of new member states. ECOSOC had even fewer female delegates, and for much of the UN’s history women have been rare exceptions in the Security Council.18
Nevertheless, explicit statements in the Charter of men’s and women’s equality constituted a foot-in-the-door for women internationalists who sought to bring discussions of women’s rights to the world stage.
16 Snider, “Planning for Peace,” 179-80. 17 Snider, “Planning for Peace,” 180. 18 Margaret E. Galey, “Women Find a Place,” in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, 11. 109
However, the disagreement between Gildersleeve and Lutz about women’s rights demonstrates broader disagreements about human rights at the San Francisco
Conference. Arguments about the form of the Trusteeship Council brought together those who argued that self-determination was also a human right and garnered the most attention among African Americans who attended the Conference. Dr. Dorothy Ferebee recorded a merry gathering of black US leaders on the train that took them across the country to San Francisco. Walter White of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McLeod
Bethune of the NCNW, and John Sengstacke, Charles Browning, and Metz Lochard of the Chicago Defender shared excitement for “the momentous history making aspect of this great” Conference.19 As Bethune’s special physician, Ferebee had the opportunity to witness the creation of the United Nations first-hand. In addition to tracing hers and
“Mrs. B’s” steps across the US and on tours around San Francisco, Ferebee took notes on many speeches delivered at the Conference, especially those delivered on the creation of what became the Trusteeship Council. Ferebee’s record of the Conference echoes the perspectives of many African Americans who looked to the UN as an opportunity to fight colonialism at home and abroad. “As it now exists,” she wrote in response to negotiations about the structure of the Trusteeship system, “only public opinion can
19 Dorothy Ferebee, “Notes and Impressions en Route to San Francisco – Calif for the United Nations Conference on International Organization April 19 to May 10,” NABWH_001_B34_F499, 10, NABWH. 110
force mandatory powers to live up to agreements.”20 Ralph Bunche, an African
American political scientist (and future Principal Director of the UN Trusteeship
Division), specifically took up the question of decolonization at the San Francisco
Conference. Frustrated at the lack of progress on the topic at the Dumbarton Oaks meeting, Bunche in particular strove to redirect the trusteeship plan already in the works toward more concrete statements creating a path to independence. When US delegates waffled in the face of diplomatic commitments to Great Britain, he slipped his proposals to the delegation of Australia, which had been more open to discussions of decolonization than either of the other governments.21 Though not everyone who attended the San Francisco Conference began with total optimism, the UN Charter dashed the hopes that many had held for an international commitment to decolonization.
Among the delegations dedicated to human rights, the Latin American countries constituted a formidable bloc. Representatives of Panama, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, the
Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela banded together in pursuit of human rights protections and peace at the San Francisco Conference. Latin American states in general had extensive experience with producing international human rights accords. The Pan
American Union (reconstituted as the Organization of American States in 1948), parent
20 Ibid, 145. 21 Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 52-53. 111
organization of the IACW, had adopted a variety of rights covenants.22 The dearth of human rights provisions in the UN blueprint fabricated at Dumbarton Oaks sparked protests in several countries and, in February and March, the Pan American Union hosted the Chapultepec Conference in Mexico City. There, delegates vocally advocated international human rights protections, and called for an Inter-American Human Rights
Commission. Their representatives—including Minerva Bernardino and Bertha Lutz— arrived at San Francisco prepared to defend the inclusion of their principles in the charter for the new organization. The Panamanian delegates, for example, brought drafts on an International Declaration on the Essential Rights of Man in hopes of adding them to the Charter.23 Smaller states, in general, also shared concerns that the US, Soviet
Union, Britain, and France might use internationalism as a cloak for “a new world directorate.” The focus given to the creation of the General Assembly, the preservation of human rights, and anticolonialism represented attempts to limit the extension of an imperialist framework into the United Nations.24
Nevertheless, anti-imperialists struggled to weaken the position of empire within the UN system. The Mandate system under the League of Nations had granted
22 “Our History,” Organization of American States, http://www.oas.org/en/about/our_history.asp, accessed 20 Apr 2017. 23 Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 43. Juan Pablo Scarfi and Andrew R. Tillman, Cooperation and Hegemony in US-Latin American Relations: Revisiting the Western Hemisphere Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 212. 24 Mazower, Governing the World, 210-11. 112
authorization to a member state to govern the former colonies of Germany and the
Ottoman Empire, which had been declared not yet ready for self-government after
World War I.25 Drafting the Trusteeship system two decades later was fraught with problems for those, like Ralph Bunche, who hoped to institute changes to transition away from empire. Ecuador had proposed using a two-thirds vote by UN members to lead states toward independence, but the delegation’s attempts were squashed. When the Philippines attempted to include a commitment to independence for colonial territories within the Charter, representatives of the US took over their delegation
(although the Philippines still achieved independence in 1946). The final form of the
Trusteeship system only differed from the Mandates system in name.26
Despite the best efforts of anticolonialists, the Trusteeship system that emerged from the Conference reflected an attempt to stabilize imperialism. The wording of the
Council’s functions and duties carefully implied the possibility of independence for
Trust territories without making any real provision for transitions of power. Its primary responsibility was oversight of the territories, about which it “shall formulate a questionnaire on the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the
25 Though theoretically under the oversight of the Permanent Mandates Commission, it had little in the way of ability to enforce its will on member states. League of Nations, The League of Nations: The Mandate System (Geneva: League of Nations Secretariat, 1927). Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 28-65. Susan Pedersen, “Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations,” History Workshop Journal 66 (Fall 2008): 188-207. 26 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 62-63. 113
inhabitants of each trust territory,” to be answered in reports from the administering governments. The Charter also required “periodic visits to the respective territories at times agreed upon with the administering authority.” The Council might also accept petitions which would be examined in consultation with the administering government.
The system therefore established oversight to preserve the idea of empire as a civilizing mission in keeping with the humanitarian veneer of the UN, but these clauses guaranteed Council oversight on the administrating state’s terms.27 On the subject of
Non-Self-Governing Territories—the official wording used to describe colonies—the
Charter similarly contained no mention of independence. The closest the document came to doing so was a statement of the obligation “to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement.”28 The UN Charter therefore qualified the cultivation of self-rule for the inhabitants of colonies with assumptions that people of color did not inherently possess civilized qualities.
27 UN, Charter, Chapter XIII, Article 87-88. 28 Ibid, Chapter XI: Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories, Article 73-74. Vrushali Patil, Negotiating Decolonization in the United Nations, 56. 114
For those who had hoped to make the Charter a foundation for decolonization around the globe, therefore, the response to the San Francisco Conference was chiefly one of frustration. In the US, African Americans met to debrief and discuss their next steps. Mary McLeod Bethune, then vice president of the NAACP as well as NCNW president, argued that the Conference had made powerfully clear the “common bond” between colonial peoples and African Americans. Black people in the US, she said, held
“little more than colonial status in a democracy.”29 For these civil rights leaders and many others, the Charter represented, not the creation of a new world order but attempts to freeze racial and cultural hierarchies into global systems of power.
The drafting of what would become the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, therefore, provided an opportunity for reformers to continue these debates.
Development of the document pitted imperialist and anti-imperialist delegations against each other through the question of universality. For women, the UDHR was not just a victory but also a legal precedent upon which they could draw as they sought to make claims about women’s human rights in the future.
Even in the earliest stages of drafting, however, delegates disagreed about how to approach a “universal” project of human rights. The initial drafting body was a four-
29 Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 56. Quoting Mary McLeod Bethune, “Statement of Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune,” June 23, 1945, Box 3, Folder 17, Mary McLeod Bethune Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans. 115
person committee, with Eleanor Roosevelt as chair, Peng-chun Chang, a Western- educated Chinese nationalist, as vice chair, Charles Malik, a Christian lawyer from
Lebanon, and John Humphrey, permanent director of the Secretariat’s Division of
Human Rights, as the liaison to the Commission of Human Rights (CHR).30 Even in this small form, disagreements began to emerge about how to approach human rights.
Roosevelt hosted tea for the group, “thinking that our work might be helped by an informal atmosphere,” and Dr. Chang brought up the question of cultural relativism.
The Declaration, he said, “would have to reflect more than Western ideas,” and, in a spirit of fun, proposed that the Secretariat should spend several months learning the fundamentals of Confucianism.31 Although written to reflect a light atmosphere, underneath the informal philosophical debate lay a set of questions that returned in the more hostile atmosphere of an expanded drafting committee.
The debate about cultural relativism versus universality would endure for decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, questions about the possibility of providing universal human rights protections emerged from warring sides in decolonization. Charles Malik pursued an inclusive approach to human rights, which recognized that the “developed world” did not have a monopoly on these ideas and discourses. This differs greatly from arguments that many imperialists used about cultural relativism into the late 1960s.
30 Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 51. 31 Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, 316-17. 116
They declared that human rights were “’quite useless’ to the ‘primitive inhabitants’ of
Asia and Africa.”32 Having promised to uphold human rights in their Trust or colonial territories, governments sought to evade their obligations “through a feigned reverence for the traditional culture of indigenous inhabitants.”33 In the development of the
UDHR, however, other state delegations made claims about inclusivity similar to
Malik’s.
The drafting committee expanded after the USSR complained that the perspectives of the initial group were too narrow, creating space for a broader range of human rights perspectives. CHR added delegates from Australia, Chile, France, the
USSR, and Britain, but the larger group also allowed for greater oversight from observing representatives. Delegates from postcolonial states that had been rebuffed at
San Francisco took the opportunity to voice their positions. Dr. Hansa Mehta of India and General Carlos Romulo of the Philippines were among the most vocal.34
Once the document had passed out of CHR, it left the Economic and Social
Council with little trouble and progressed to the General Assembly’s Third Committee, the chief body for review of humanitarian covenants. There, Roosevelt was once more forced to confront the question of universality as, in the final vote before passing the
32 Roland Burke has written on the development of the cultural relativism v. universality debate. Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 112. 33 Ibid, 114. 34 Quataert, Advocating Dignity, 51-52. 117
draft out of committee, four Muslim countries abstained, “explaining that they believed the article on religious freedom was contrary to the Koran.” On the General Assembly floor, Saudi Arabia once more raised the problem of interpreting the Qur’an. Muslim representatives and delegates of predominantly Muslim states became a unique voting bloc in human rights discussions, insisting upon universal application that took account of laws, practices, and systems unfamiliar to predominantly Judeo-Christian states like the US.35 Particularly in family law, Muslim-originated arguments about inclusivity would have a substantial impact on human rights approaches in the years to come.
Despite controversy, however, the Universal Declaration passed on December 10,
1948 by an overwhelming majority. Afghanistan, Egypt, China (Taiwan), India, Pakistan,
Liberia, Lebanon, Thailand, and the Philippines gave their support, reflective of some measure of global acceptance even though the UN only had 58 member states at the time.36 Several of the representatives who fought for the universality of human rights over the course of the following decades would also serve in the Women’s Commission, pursuing women’s specific human rights. Dr. Mehta and her successor, Lakshmi Menon, sat in India’s seat on the Commission; Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic vocally defended human rights and women’s rights as human rights as CSW’s
35 Roosevelt, Autobiography, 318. 36 Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 4. 118
representative to CHR.37 These women once more had to fight to include gender-specific and gender inclusive language, heading off the possibility that gender-neutral language might be used to exclude women from the document’s rights protection in the future.38
For those who served in the Women’s Commission, the passage of the UDHR provided an international precedent that would serve them for years to come. The document’s pronouncement that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” gave those who made claims about women’s rights a foothold.39 As women delegates discussed family rights in particular, the document’s provisions proved to be significant precedents that allowed them to make many claims about women’s rights.
Declaring the right of “men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion” to marry and found a family, requiring the “free and full consent of both parties,” and pronouncing the family as the “fundamental group unit of society,” article 16 in particular provided a legal and theoretical foundation for women delegates’ future attempts to mobilize the UN in on women’s rights in family.
37 Ibid, 115. 38 Jain, Women, Development, and the UN, 20. 39 United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 Dec 1948, Article 2, available at http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. 119
For those who, once more, hoped for some declaration against imperialism, the
UDHR represented disagreements over what constituted human rights. Recognizing rights “without distinction of any kind,” regardless of country or territory,
“independent, trust, or non-self-governing,” the document nevertheless declined to comment on achievement of self-government or the right to self-determination.40 Despite declaring the right to participate in government, which should be guided by “the will of the people,” and the right to “life, liberty, and security of person,” the document made no statements on imperialism.41 In considering the “liberty” to which people were entitled, even the intervention of anti-imperial delegates was insufficient to push the
UDHR toward recognition of self-determination as part of this freedom.
The relative success for women’s rights advocates and lack thereof for anti- imperialists, first in the Charter and then in the UDHR, invites consideration.
Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, delegates to the Commission on the Status of
Women would frequently make claims about the apolitical nature of the rights they worked to protect. Their statements to this effect allowed delegates to the Women’s
Commission to keep some control of their rights projects. Although careful to craft documents that echoed language used elsewhere in the UN, these women delegates could use this declaration of women’s rights political neutrality to limit debates in
40 Ibid, Article 2. 41 Ibid, Article 21.1, 21.3, 3. 120
ECOSOC or the General Assembly to implementation rather than the nature of rights.
The arguments of delegates like Charles Malik, Hansa Mehta, or Ralph Bunche that self- determination qualified as a human right, on the other hand, threatened the political foundations of empire, and therefore, the new United Nations Organization. As would become clear throughout the 1950s, however, independence, self-governance, and the structure of women’s roles and rights in marriage had a close relationship, as governments new and old sought to shore up state power.
3.2 Global Family Law: Stabilizing and Modernizing State Power
The Universal Declaration’s incorporation of marriage and family rights reflects urgent and apparently global desires in the aftermath of World War II. In many states, family law and its place within legal frameworks allowed governments to make specific claims about morality, human rights, and modernity. Many member states debated internally whether family law should be under the sole jurisdiction of religious or state authorities and how those laws should frame gendered relationships in relation to individual rights. While the United Nations announced that “the Family” was the basic unit of society, governments throughout the world debated how the family unit should change or remain the same, and with these debates came attempts to solidify societal values and assert and consolidate state power. Regardless of how long a government had existed—for centuries or for only a few years—women’s status in marriage and the prevalence of monogamous, companionate marriages became the center of arguments
121
about what rights states should and could protect as an extension or demonstration of state power. In some cases, policies enacted during the 1950s created an entirely new relationship between the practice of marriage and governments as states claimed the right to legislate, know about, and sanctify marriage.
Although conversations in the UN did not always explicitly mention
“modernity,” representatives often drew upon ideas about modernization and progress that had taken root within many countries. Modernization theory, though typified by
MIT economist Walt Rostow’s 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-
Communist Manifesto, was well under way by 1950.42 This approach to development framed industrialization as the goal and markets as the key, with state governments responsible for the creation of physical infrastructure and financial incentives to support market-led growth.43 Despite the economic foundations for “development,” ideas about progress in the 1950s also had significant roots in imperialist civilizing missions, which brought social and cultural changes within the purview of modernization.
The US and USSR, as dueling superpowers, incorporated arguments about women’s roles in the family into their respective images as rights-protecting states. As I have already explored in the US context, debates about family life brought together
42 Mazower, Governing the World, 291. Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 2-11. 43 Peggy Antrobus, The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues, and Strategies (London: Zed Books, 2004), 30. 122
opposing views about what women’s roles in society could and should be. Policies and provisions for women workers reflected the fact that married women were in the workforce and would stay there, even as many citizens asked questions about what a capitalist working woman would look like. As an imperial state, the US struggled to provide the public health and resources in territories like Puerto Rico that would justify its claims to empire, while identifying black and brown women and their rapidly reproducing children as problematic, in both colony and metropole. The need to compete with the USSR as a world leader in women’s rights—as in every field—would become apparent in the UN Commission on the Status of Women as representatives emphasized the rights women had already achieved in the US.
The Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of World War II also needed to come to terms with the expansion of married women’s public contributions as a result of the war. Unlike the US, however, the USSR had been devastated by Nazi Germany.
Around half of the war’s 50-60 million dead had been Soviet citizens, with a further 25 million left homeless. The economy had suffered, as well, with the destruction of industrial enterprises and large sections of railways. Fiction of this era reflected social questions about what women’s moral responsibilities were—to themselves, to their families, and to the nation—in the face of an economy that needed women to work and a
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nation that needed them to produce children and care for wounded husbands.44 A new code of family law in 1944 limited divorce access, state allowances for unmarried mothers, and financial support after divorce.45
However, the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 contributed to the transformations taking place after World War II and resulted in a policy shift in women’s favor. Nikita
Kruschev came to power in 1955, and in the same year, the legalization of abortion eliminated “compulsory motherhood” typical of the more conservative family laws under Stalin.46 In the years that followed, legislation increased access to divorce and lengthened paid maternity leave, and the government doubled down on protective labor laws.47 Discourses of morally responsible motherhood also intensified after Stalin’s death, highlighting women, as welfare recipients, not just as producers of children but also educators of future citizens.48 In terms of diplomatic interests, therefore, the Soviet
44 Lynne Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 1922-53 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 149-60. 45 Yulia Gradskova, “Soviet People with Female Bodies: Performing Beauty and Maternity in Soviet Russia, 1930-1960s,” PhD diss., Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, 2007, DiVA Portal, 279. "The Soviet Family Law of 8 July 1944, decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR" in The Family in the U.S.S.R, ed. Rudolf Schlesinger (London: Rutledge, 1949); reprinted in Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents: 1880-1950, vol. 2, ed. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 407-11. 46 Ibid. 47 Barbara Evans Clements, A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 254. 48 Gradskova, “Soviet People with Female Bodies,” 97. 124
Union both emphasized maternalist women’s rights arguments and the importance of equal pay and equal right to work legislation.
In both Britain and France, the need to replenish depleted populations contributed to discussions of family life and women’s roles. In the UK, the Royal
Commission on Population, established in 1949, expressed concern about the fate of
Western civilization as a whole if the British birthrate did not improve. Immigration, according to the report, could only assist with replenishing the population “if the immigrants were of good human stock and were not prevented by their religion or their race from intermarrying with the host population and becoming merged into it.”49 The
Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce that followed, established to study rising divorce rates, declared that “the Western world has recognized that it is in the best interests” of the community, of marriage partners, and of children, “that marriage should be monogamous and that it should last for life,” and that both of these conditions were necessary for “a secure and stable family life.”50 The welfare system that had developed in the interwar years was premised on a male breadwinner system similar to that in the US, and the expansion of married women’s work outside the home created similar tensions. Family allowances stayed small, women continued to be considered
49 Royal Commission on Population, Report, Cmnd. 7695, 1949, p. iii. For a deeper analysis of the report, see: Michael Peplar, Family Matters: A History of Ideas about Family since 1945 (New York: Pearson Education, 2002), 18-19. 50 Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, Report, Cmnd. 9678, 1955, paras 35-7. Again, see: Peplar, Family Matters, 21-22. 125
secondary workers, and housewives’ status in regard to insurance remained determined by their husbands’ position.51
French welfare programs focused on children rather than male breadwinners, and the result was a form of family support that gave married French women more flexibility to choose between homemaking and paid labor.52 Women earned suffrage from the Consultative Assembly, still in exile at the time, in 1944. A clause granting women equal legal rights was added to the constitution of the Fourth Republic in 1946 and in 1958 the Fifth Republic declared women’s right to vote again. The Union of
French Women, founded in 1945, outlined a program of women’s responsibilities that highlighted their civic duties to produce, raise, and educate children as future citizens.53As in the UK and Soviet Union, the government worried about a depleted population. In the aftermath of occupation by Nazi Germany, refugee children with
French fathers offered a prime demographic to replenish France, and, “in the process, help guarantee the future peace and security of Europe.” Framing the restoration of its prewar population as necessary to the preservation of the French state, which would serve as a buttress against future hostility from Eastern Europe, the Fourth Republic
51 Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914- 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 419-20. 52 Ibid, 420. 53 Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 381-83. 126
sometimes resorted to kidnapping children.54 The French demographic emphasis meant that there were no further reforms in the status of married women until the 1960s.55 In both Britain and France, marriage, family, and reproduction remained inextricably linked to the healthy operation of the nation.
As imperialist states, Britain and France continued to assert both their ability to maintain their empires and their “commitment to the moral obligations of colonial rule” through attention to women’s and children’s health in their territories. In practice, colonial administrators frequently had a clear sense of how much they also could not exert control over family life.56 The Mau Mau Rebellion shook British Kenya from 1952 to 1956. A 1956 ban on female circumcision in the Meru district led to conflict over the colonial state’s ability—and desire—to regulate girls’ bodies. The British commissioner and Kenyan men’s regional leadership council, which had been incorporated into mechanisms of colonial governance, formulated the ban, which served as a test of the council’s ability to exercise power. However, the central government, still preoccupied with the rebellion, feared that a formal ban on female circumcision throughout Kenya would further weaken their already contested hold on the territory.57Similarly, in French
West Africa, the “codification of justice”—including reforms intended to make
54 Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 146. 55 Offen, European Feminisms, 385. 56 Thomas, Politics of the Womb, 75. 57 Ibid, 87-88. 127
marriages look more familiar as marriage to French administrators—created “the illusion that human rights were being upheld.”58 The 1939 Mandel Decree had established consent as the basis of marriage in French West Africa and set the minimum age of marriage as 14 for girls.59 The Jacquinot Decree, which followed in 1951, built upon this legal approach to marriage by stating that a divorced woman over the age of twenty-one had the right to choose her own spouse. It established greater state intervention in the marriage process, requiring formal registration of marriages with the colonial government and requiring men seeking a polygamous union to declare it as they registered for marriage. The law’s application, however, was sporadic at best. In 1956, only 109 marriages were registered in the populous Sikasso region. Colonial administrators in French West Africa recognized the limited application of reforms outside urban colonial centers.60 A state that could regulate the personal practices of its subjects could control its subjects, and the conflicts over personal practices in British and
French colonies demonstrate the limitations of their power
Imperial states were already preoccupied early in the 1950s with the forms that marriage took, even in the metropole of Great Britain. In the Commission on the Status of Women, such representatives frequently focused on political, civil, and economic
58 Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage, 4. 59 Ibid, 127. 60 Ibid, 153-54. 128
rights. Frequently declaring that their home states already protected many of these rights, representatives of the US and USSR in particular made a show of pursuing these rights for other women. Nevertheless, economic rights—women’s right to work, married women’s rights to make contracts and own property, etc.—were also consistent concerns for delegates from these countries.
Women delegates from Latin American states frequently shared these desires, although that also more readily took the lead in proposing international conventions to legally bind states into preserving these rights. Although they hailed from quite different political environments, family laws in these states relied, similarly, on assumptions about gendered roles that assigned women domestic roles in opposition to a male breadwinner. Women in Mexico, for example, having earned the vote in 1953, still struggled against a masculine political culture.61 Mexican family life continued to be dictated by the 1917 Law of Family Relations and article 2 of the 1928 Civil Code, which prevented “any restriction in the acquisition and exercise of [a woman’s] civil rights.”
However, men could prohibit wives from working if it interfered with their domestic
61 The 1950s brought the fight for women’s suffrage in Mexico to prominence again after a powerful defeat in the 1930s. Though suffragists were successful in 1953, women gained the vote under far more paternalistic and patronizing male guidance than they had hoped. Male political leaders declared that women should use a “civic broom” to sweep out unworthy political parties and vote in those who would “serve [Mexico] with manliness and truth”—although the law granted women the ability to run for political office, the realm of politics was still considered a masculine one. Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 233-34. 129
duties.62 As the state confronted the problem of single mothers in the 1940s and 1950s, programs such as mothers’ clubs, maternal and child welfare centers, and day care centers allowed these women more flexibility as working mothers. Programs taught single mothers gender-specific skills that would prepare them for jobs appropriate to women—and keep them out of the evolving industrial sector. Nichole Sanders has interpreted these policies as a means of placing the Mexican state in the role of the male breadwinner, supporting women while maintaining—or perhaps itself helping to construct—their roles as homemakers as much as possible. Such policies “modernized patriarchy,” enhancing patriarchy as a system through the state-replication of the family which allowed for the preservation of traditional gender roles.63
Conversations and policies that tied state power to the regulation of marriage and family life also took place in recently independent countries, but under very different circumstances. Many states, especially those with predominantly Muslim populations, argued about whether to adopt or resist the Western family model.
Legislation on gender roles in the family frequently became a point on which states demonstrated their participation in discourses of modernization and the ways in which political power operated. However, the “personal laws” affecting family also often
62 Ibid, 19. 63 Nichole Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a Postrevolutionary State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 7, 88-89. 130
served as a vehicle for revaluing the varied cultures that existed within many postcolonial states.64 Whether states retained different family practices within different communities or consolidated all control over family law under the power of the government, the conversations that produced these decisions reflected attempts after independence to frame an indigenous form of modernity in governance.
Egypt took a secularizing approach, utilizing images of unveiled, working women as symbols of the new Egypt even as the government folded religious authority over family life into state-run courts.65 Nasser’s administration co-opted women’s rights into what Mervat Hatem has called “state feminism,” which established Egypt’s
“progressive credentials” and served to enforce the government’s political legitimacy.66
The 1956 constitution granted women the franchise, and in the years that followed, the state also protected women’s right to education and to work outside the home. Labor laws in 1958 and 1959 aimed to protect womanhood by making “the role of the working woman…compatible with her role as wife and mother.”67 As representations of the country’s triumph over “colonialism and backwardness,” women and their legal status signaled the state’s “arrival at the end of history.” The family ideal, at least in the eyes of
64 Narendra Subramanian, “Making Family and Nation: Hindu Marriage Law in Early Postcolonial India,” The Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 (Aug 2010): 771. 65 Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, 56. 66 Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,”. 67 Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, 30, 59. 131
government administrators, became nuclear families founded on monogamous love marriages with a strong, male breadwinner.68
However, discussions of Egypt’s family law, the Personal Status Laws, led to no change in women’s legal status in the family. Women reformers’ efforts to transform these legal codes failed precisely because the gender roles and family relationships that the laws espoused fit into the gendered approach of Egypt’s state feminism. Contrary to pitting Islam and Westernization against each other, state mechanisms fit the Personal
Status Laws into a postcolonial, modern state.69 Without changing the religious family codes, which had largely been in place since 1920, the national government claimed full legal sovereignty by incorporating religious judiciary into the unified court system.
Gender within family as defined by these codes therefore remained as a compromise between the state, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, and individual citizens.70
Tunisia and Morocco serve as opposing examples of approaches to consolidating state power through marriage laws. Tunisia gained independence in 1956, and like
Egypt, the new government shifted independent judicial power away from Muslim religious authority in the process of consolidating a post-colonial state. The major focus remained on elevating state power. Utilizing language that condemned “archaic”
68 Ibid, 62-63. 69 Ibid, 85-86. 70 Ibid, 107-08. 132
structures or mentalities, leaders passed reforms on family life that included restrictions on the privileges of extended kin in family matters, prioritizing the interests of urban- based elites in social and economic changes that included the secularization of marriage law and attacks on collective ownership of land.71 Morocco, on the other hand, relied upon tribal-based, patrilineal kinship ties. Morocco became a monarchy after its independence in 1956. As the new government consolidated power in 1957 and 1958, the king sought to stabilize his power by forging ties with tribal groups.72 Debates about family during and after independence revolved around the question of whether to adopt exclusive, monogamous conjugal units or remain open to polygamy. Arguments for reform of family law early in the 1950s sparked a religious backlash that was ultimately cemented in the codification of family law after independence. Consolidating legal systems entailed eliminating customary laws specific to different communities, and
Shari’a law became the foundation of the nation-state’s legal system. Women were granted no formal legal equality after independence; a woman’s verbal consent to marry was unnecessary, although a bride price was. The minimum age of marriage for girls was set at fifteen, although the court could make allowances for younger brides, and marriage registration was optional.73 The two opposing examples demonstrate the
71 Mounira M. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 211-12. 72 Ibid, 147. 73 Initially, the family codes required registration of marriages, with the showing of identification at a registration office; this was problematic, however, for men who did not want their daughters 133
different ways in which the new states approached the relationship between state and religious power to outline gender roles and marriage laws.
In Pakistan, Prime Minister Ali Bogra’s marriage to a second wife sparked debates about marriage rights that pitted individual-based rights ideals against arguments about serving society. In the foreground of these debates, the country’s chief women’s organization, the All-Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA) represented much of the individual rights faction. Founded in 1947, the group of elite women had previously focused on the uplift of lower-class women, teaching basic skills to make them economically independent, providing support for adult education and knowledge of handicrafts (knitting, embroidery, and sewing), and advocating the creation of industrial houses and women’s unveiling.74 Alarmed by the rise in second marriages since partition, the APWA demanded a revision of marriage laws “to ensure that women could enjoy the status granted them by the Qur’an,” but also so that women could “play their part in the national life.” Educated Pakistanis were receptive to women’s push for an individual rights-based interpretation of Islam that would create a modern Islamic democracy. Three camps evolved out of these debates: the “agitators,” largely elite women, who completely opposed polygamy; traditionalists, who were totally in favor;
seen by strangers, even for the checking of identification, and a 1962 law made marriage registration optional. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights, 159-66. 74 Fareeha Zafar, “A Feminist Activist,” in Changing Lives: The Stories of Asian Pioneers in Women’s Studies, edited by the Committee on Women’s Studies in Asia (New York: The Feminist Press, 1995), 81-90. 134
and those in the middle, largely “modernists,” who claimed that Islam stands for a well- ordered society and cannot simply focus on the “supposedly aggrieved first wife.”
Polygamy, they argued, “may be necessary for the preservation of society as a whole,” but monogamy should be considered the rule. The agitators were frequently accused by conservatives of being “monopolistic” in regard to their husbands and were told that they should have “charity” toward women in general. These women, meanwhile, grounded their arguments in an interpretation of the Qur’an and Muslim legal theory that enabled them to claim that Islam aimed for the gradual elimination of polygamy.
The women and moderates proved successful; the Prime Minister established the
Marriage Commission, whose recommendations led directly to a 1961 law.75 The Muslim
Family Laws Ordinance required the registration of marriages and divorces and significantly limited polygamy, forbidding it except in the case of the explicit permission of one or more existing wives supplied in court.76 Debates in Pakistan included questions about whose needs the state should primarily recognize, as elite women advocated recognition of individual rights and both conservatives and moderates claimed to prioritize the needs of society as a whole.
75 Freeland Abbott, “Pakistan’s New Marriage Law: A Reflection of Qur’anic Interpretation,” Asian Survey, 1, no. 11 (Jan 1962): 26-29. 76 Parliament of Pakistan, Pakistan: VIII of Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, 1961, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, refworld, http://www.refworld.org/docid/4c3f1e1c2.html, accessed 23 May 2017. 135
India similarly addressed polygamy during the reform of personal laws between
1948 and 1957. Four legal codes passed in 1955 and 1956, most notably the Hindu
Marriage and Divorce Act (also simply the Hindu Marriage Act or HMA), specifically applied to Hindus, the majority religious group within India. The HMA enabled divorce within Hindu marriages, out of recognition of the “social facts of modern life,” established sixteen as the marriage age, and nominally outlawed polygamy, although polygamy cases brought to court typically forced adequate compensation for wives rather than dissolution of unions.77 The Special Marriage Act, a fifth act passed in 1954, was optional but also open to couples belonging any of India’ religious groups. It provided daughters greater access to ancestral property or inheritance than prescribed in both Hindu and Muslim law, increased women’s marriage age to eighteen, and provided greater access to divorce rights, but it also prioritized nuclear families.
Although sometimes perceived as an example of the secularization of the Indian state, the Special Marriage Act likely saw little use. Members of different religious groups largely adhered to their specific family laws, and the inheritance stipulations made parents more likely to prefer laws enabling them to leave property to their sons.78 The ruling Congress Party, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, although envisioning modern family
77 Paras Diwan, “The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Apr 1957): 263-272. Subramanian, “Making Family and Nation,” 781. Werner Menski, Modern Indian Family Law (New York: Routledge, 2013), 146-47. 78 Subramanian, “Making Family and Nation,” 782-83. 136
life based in monogamous, companionate marriages, also chiefly introduced these changes as a means of highlighting values, rather than intending immediate transformations in daily life.79 The Parliament of India’s approach to family law echoed stances that many states would take in the UN, balancing Western expectations of
“modern” family forms with the reality of its domestic web of social and cultural practices, which also deserved respect.
In the 1920s, Iran had begun adopting laws about women and family as part of modernizing practices, including, as in India, the idealization of companionate marriage.
The unveiling of female citizens, as legislated in the 1936 Mandatory Unveiling Act, also served as a point of gendered debate—both in relation to masculinity and femininity.80As in Egypt, family law remained separate and under the dominion, largely, of religious authorities. But a 1928 Civil Code had made changes in women’s lives, raising the minimum age of marriage from nine to fifteen (although thirteen remained permissible with a guardian and the court’s permission), and requiring marriage contracts to be registered in civil bureaus. This latter shift allowed women to include their right to divorce their husband if he took a second wife as part of the marriage
79 Ibid, 792-93. 80 Numerous approaches to orientalism and European imperialism in predominantly Muslim countries have highlighted the significance of “The Veil”—though it by no means takes only one form—as a symbol that has reached into contemporary politics and has “embroiled modernity and its historiography.” Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 132. 137
contract. However, a new penal code also permitted honor killings.81 In 1951, the shah’s marriage to a young woman who had been educated in Europe and adopted European fashions represented shifts that had been taking place throughout the 1940s as elite
Iranian women had eschewed veiling in favor of Western-style clothes. Their divorce in
1958, however, was precipitated by the couple’s disagreements over clashing desires in regard to marriage practices, again representative of broader social conflicts. When his wife had proven unable to conceive, in order to produce an heir, the shah suggested a second, temporary marriage which could be ended once he had an heir; the arrangement did not suit his wife, and the divorce took place in service to the shah’s duties to secure succession. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, women’s agitation for suffrage brought opposition from both the left and right as male leaders, whether religious authorities or supporters of social and economic reform, feared the impact of shaking up gender relations. The Anglo-American-supported coup in 1953, which overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister and significantly increased the anti-communist monarchy’s power, derailed women’s attempts to earn suffrage.82
Domestic contention about what “the Family” looked like in predominantly
Muslim states reverberated in UN conversations about family rights. Already pushing
81 Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 153- 54. 82 Ibid, 184-97. 138
back against sections of the UDHR that had insufficiently accounted for Muslim practices, delegates from these states, especially Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, would speak out against the wording of the draft Marriage Convention in the General
Assembly. Their arguments reached beyond the language of the Cold War and even decolonization to make an entirely different set of claims that tested the reality of UN declarations of religious freedom.
The debates about family and changes in family law in the late 1940s and 1950s contained larger questions about rights, gender, modernity, and the operation of state power. But most importantly, these conversations reveal that many countries had already begun to discuss the issues that would form the backbone of the Marriage
Convention: women’s consent for marriage, polygamy, child marriage, and the registration of marriages.
3.3 The Commission on the Status of Women: A Gathering of Elite Women
At the same meeting in which Eleanor Roosevelt read the “Open Letter,”
Minerva Bernardino, as both delegate to the General Assembly and a representative of the IACW, stood to make a statement. Hoping that more women might represent their countries at the UN, Bernardino spoke, “in the name of the women of my country…in the name of the women of Latin America, and especially those from countries that still walk in obscurity, without the inherent rights to which the dignity of their sex, and their
139
responsibilities as mothers of the race should entitle them.”83 Her words reflected the terms under which women in the UN would argue for rights in the early years, tying their arguments to civic maternalism. As women delegates and their allies in NGOs established the detailed framework that would guide efforts to secure women’s rights for the next two decades, they moved beyond the simple declaration of a separate women’s body in the United Nations, although the preservation of such a space was integral to their achievements.
Initially created as only a sub-commission, the UN Commission on the Status of
Women had considerably more power than the League of Nations body that had preceded it, and with better prospects for pursuing their rights agenda. The League of
Nations Committee for the Study of the Status of Women only had the ability to compile a comprehensive report on women’s legal status.84 Even dependent as it was upon the
Commission of Human Rights (CHR), the new UN body had a broader mandate than its predecessor, including the duty to make recommendations and proposals based on studies of women’s status completed by the Secretary-General and the Secretariat.85
83 “’Open Letter,’” The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 105. 84 Anne Petersen, "League of Nations World-Wide Study of Women’s Status Hailed: Miss Kenyon Sees Case Furthered," New York Times (New York, NY), May 15, 1938. 85 United Nations, “Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) resolution establishing the Commission on Human Rights and the Subcommission on the Status of Women.” E/RES/5(1), 16 Feb 1946, in The United Nations and the Advancement of Women,109. 140
Created in February 1946, it would nevertheless take only a few months for women’s rights advocates to become impatient with its subordinate position.86
The debates over the creation of a separate women’s space delineated early divisions between women representatives and their visions for women’s rights. In general, women from the US argued that a separate, “international Commission on
Women” would be marginalized in the UN and would be less effective than the human rights commission. If women self-segregated in the UN, Gildersleeve had argued in San
Francisco, “it might well happen that men would keep them out of other commissions or groups,” and in either case it would be contrary to their work against “discrimination because of sex.” Women from Europe, Latin America, and Australia, most prominently
Minerva Bernardino and Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, claimed that a separate women’s body was essential to promoting their rights. Dorothy Kenyon agreed, reflecting a year later as a member of the now full commission, that “the habits of centuries did not change so quickly,” and the UN needed a watchdog on women’s rights.87
86 “Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) resolution establishing the Commission on Human Rights and the Subcommission on the Status of Women,” The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 109. 87 Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda, 141-42. Virginia Gildersleeve quoted in Jain, Women, Development, and the UN, 17. Dorothy Kenyon, “Victories on the International Front,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 251, no. 1 (May 1947), 19. 141
Figure 8 The Sub-Commission on the Status of Women, from left: Hansa Mehta (India); Way Sung New (China); Fryderyka Kalinowski (Poland); Angela Jurdak (Lebanon); Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic); Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux (France); and Bodil Begtrup (Denmark).88
The enthusiasm for women’s rights of the sub-commission’s first participants far exceeded that of its parent commission. These women elected Bodil Begtrup of Denmark as chair, Minerva Bernardino as vice-chair, and Angela Jurdak of Lebanon as rapporteur.89 By the conclusion of their first session, the sub-commission’s members had established their central goals, principles, and programs, initiated the creation of a woman-led Secretariat office to assist with fact-finding, proposed a global survey to be
88 UN Photo, Sub-Commission on the Status of Women, EcoSoc Council, May 8, 1946, United Nations News & Media, New York, NY, http://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/224/0224294.html. 89 Galey, “Women Find a Place,” in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, 13. 142
completed by the Secretary-General on women’s legal status, brainstormed how to promote women’s education, and called for a UN Women’s Conference.90 Though the
Commission on Human Rights received the report graciously, the version that they transmitted to ECOSOC was severely edited. Most egregious in the eyes of the sub- commission members, CHR had weakened the proposed institution-wide, UN- sponsored Women’s Conference into a general call for small-scale meetings on specific issues that impacted women.91 Fearing that future recommendations would meet a similar fate, the sub-commission took action, and in her capacity as chair Begtrup spoke before the Economic and Social Council.92 Representatives to the sub-commission, for whom Begtrup said “development towards full equality” is work for “essential human rights,” understood why the body existed under the Commission on Human Rights.
However, she declared that the work completed on behalf of “half the population of the world” should not depend upon the good graces of another body and requested that the sub-commission be commuted into a full commission.93
90 United Nations, Report of the Commission on Human Rights to the Second Session of the Economic and Social Council (New York, NY: United Nations, 1946), E/38/Rev.1, 17-18. 91 Ibid, 13. 92 Galey, “Women Find a Place,” 14. 93 UN, “Statement made by the Chair of the Subcommission on the Status of Women to ECOSOC recommending that the status of the Subcommission be raised to full Commissions (extract),” E/RES/2/11, The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 112. 143
Figure 9 Isabel de Urdaneta (Venezuela, left) and Dorothy Kenyon (USA, right), prepare for a session of the Women’s Commission.94
Begtrup’s presentation before ECOSOC was successful, and just over four months after the Council had established the sub-commission, it abolished the body and replaced it with the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Under its new mandate, CSW had obligations to prepare reports and recommendations to ECOSOC
“on urgent problems requiring attention in the fields of women’s rights.”95 Fact-finding reports remained a source of frustration to some. Dorothy Kenyon, the first US delegate
94 UN Photo, United Nations Commission on Status of Women Opens Its Second Session, Jan 5, 1948, United Nations News & Media, New York, NY, http://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/324/0324080.html. 95 United Nations,“ECOSOC Resolution Establishing the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW)” E/RES/2/11, The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 112. 144
to CSW, publicly defended the manner of obtaining these reports—primarily through submitting questionnaires to governments to complete. Although women’s organizations often supplemented this information, Kenyon privately commented that
“we will never get all the answers or perhaps even half of the proper answers from the governments themselves.” She even called one of the first reports of this kind “perfectly ridiculous and self-defeating!”96 Nevertheless, the collection of these materials provided the data from which CSW members could work.
The discursive terms of engagement on women’s human rights within the
Commission emerged from representatives’ domestic experiences, but also from extended conversations within women’s international organizations. Many, including
Mexico’s Amalia Ledón, the US’s Dorothy Kenyon, and Syria’s Alice Cosma had participated in their respective countries’ campaigns for women’s suffrage.97 Others, such as India’s Hansa Mehta, fought for their country’s independence from the platforms of their organizations.98 These women’s experiences and vast networks accompanied them as delegates. Women’s professional relationships and intimate
96 Dorothy Kenyon to Katherine Bompas, Feb 4, 1947, Dorothy Kenyon Papers, Series IV, General Correspondence, Feb 1947, SSC. 97 Syrian women, in fact, were first allowed to vote in 1949. Cosma wrote to Kenyon to thank her for a speech in which she gave a “sincere message to the Arab women at large” and offered congratulations on the occasion. Her words were translated and sent on to several Arabic language newspapers in the US and Middle East. Alice Kandalft Cosma to Dorothy Kenyon, Oct 3, 1949, Dorothy Kenyon Papers, Box 57, Folder 15, SSC. 98 Priya Ravichandran, “Hansa Mehta (1897-1995),” Women Architects of the Indian Republic, 26 Feb 2016, https://15fortherepublic.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/hansa-mehta-1897-1995/. 145
friendships crisscrossed the globe, born from shared membership in one organization or perhaps sparked between members of different organizations as they worked on the same political project.
Women representatives to the UN belonged to an international cohort, developing their own discursive terms through repeated conversations, intimate friendships, and gossip and politics unique to those networks. The Women’s Bureau coalition in the US represented one piece of this enormous global jigsaw puzzle, which counted among its members many leading women and organizations like the YWCA, the International Council of Women (ICW), the International Alliance of Women (IAW),
WILPF, International Federation of Business and Professional Women (IFBPW), the
International Federation of University Women, and others. Such groups held consultative status in the Economic and Social Council, enabling them to make statements within CSW, and members of the Commission frequently represented these organizations before or after their stint as delegate. The first session alone, in 1947, demonstrated the wide range of backgrounds: Sharifah Hamid Ali of India had helped to organize the All-India Women’s Conference in the 1920s;99 Dorothy Kenyon of the US belonged to multiple organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union
99 The AIWC was easily the most prominent national Indian women’s organization. Every woman Indian delegate to the UN during this period was tied to IAWC in some capacity, if not herself a leading member of the organization, including Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Hansa Mehta, Lakshmi Menon, 146
(ACLU), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and International
Alliance of Women; Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux of France belonged to the IFBPW and served as president of the ICW in 1957; and Alice Kandalft Cosma of Syria had helped to organize Syria’s Arab Women’s National League.100 Minerva Bernardino, ever a busy woman, had initially earned her prominent position through her work with the Inter-
American Commission of Women (IACW). Its networks, programs, and pre-existing legislative successes buttressed the work of CSW. The IACW made an annual report on its agenda and activities to the UN Women’s Commission, and their representative at
CSW would make a similar report back to the Inter-American Commission. At the UN, women’s NGOs and the IACW regularly weighed in on issues that concerned them, and the information that national organizations gathered on women’s status at home frequently formed important parts of member states’ reports to the Secretary General on these issues.
The overwhelming majority of those who belonged to this cohort and who therefore fabricated early UN conventions on women’s human rights were elite women.
Much of the difficult work of coalition-building relied upon women’s informal
100 Jain, Women, Politics, and the UN, 16. Women Go Global. “Biographical Note,” Dorothy Kenyon Papers, 1850-1998, Sophia Smith Collection, accessed 30 May 2017, http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss35_bioghist.html. Lefaucheux even composed a history of the ICW: Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, Women in a Changing World, the Dynamic Story of the International Council of Women since 1888 (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1996). 147
gatherings, and these often reflected the elite backgrounds or education of the women.
Tea parties, luncheons, and dinner parties provided opportunities for NGO members to discuss important topics in relaxed settings, and on more than one occasion CSW members did the same. Bodil Begtrup and Dorothy Kenyon, for example, met for lunch in November 1946 to discuss the work of CSW.101 Olive Goldman planned a tea party bringing together a large group of NGO women in association with the final stages of
General Assembly debate on the Convention on the Political Rights of Women.102 These activities echoed the informal meetings of the women’s clubs that had helped to form the backbone of women’s organizing. Elite backgrounds proved important time and again: financial flexibility allowed women to travel to international conferences and granted the resources to obtain an education, and the relationships born of elite society and family relationships granted a different degree of social and political legitimacy.103
101 Bodil Begtrup to Dorothy Kenyon, 26 Nov 1946, Dorothy Kenyon Papers, UNCSW, General Correspondence July-December, SSC. 102 Rachel Nason to Olive Goldman, Dec 1 1952, Women's Bureau, Department of Labor, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1953, box 65, folder 6-1-5-6, NARA II. 103 Many women were trained lawyers and judges, doctors, academics, or high-level government employees. Wives and female relatives of prime ministers and presidents frequently became representatives to the UN. 148
Figure 10 Minerva Bernardino demonstrates her domesticity as well as her cosmopolitanism by hosting a party for her fellow CSW members: Bernardino, top right, is assisted by her niece. Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux (left), Olive Remington Goldman (middle), and Hannah Sen (India, right) discuss the dishes served.104
Even Minerva Bernardino, who had been orphaned at 15 and forced to make her way in the world at a young age, performed an elite, cosmopolitan feminism
104 In addition to showing Bernardino’s promise as a socialite, the article demonstrates that, despite still being single, Bernardino could be very domestic. The conclusion of the article provides a recipe for the Pastelitas (meat-filled pastries) pictured on the bottom right. In this capacity, it also becomes an opportunity for the author to talk about transnational connections through food. Clementine Paddleford, “Dominican Dishes go to U.N. Party,” New York Herald Tribune, 17 May 1951, 18, PQHN: New York Tribune/Herald Tribune. 149
appropriate to the organizations she served. She belonged to one of the first generations of young women in the Dominican Republic who received a secondary school education, and she entered government service just after the US occupation ended.
Bernardino became involved with the Inter-American Commission of Women after her appointment as alternate to the Dominican delegation at the Montevideo Congress in
1933. Disappointed in Trujillo’s rejection of a plebiscite that demonstrated popular support for women’s suffrage, and eager to assist Doris Stevens in the US, Bernardino moved to the IACW’s headquarters in Washington, DC two years later, and never returned. Supporting herself with part-time jobs, Bernardino was one of the most important figures holding the IACW offices together. She served as president of the
Inter-American Commission of Women even as she made a plea for recognition of women’s rights at the Chapultepec Conference and as she represented the Dominican
Republic at the San Francisco Conference. Frequently unable to afford the mobility that wealth permitted, she kept herself in the center of many of her organizational networks by living in Washington, DC, and she relied upon the patronage of other women when necessary. Stevens, as a good friend, sponsored Bernardino’s move to the United
States.105 Bernardino’s performance of cosmopolitan feminism rested at least partially
105 By the time she was appointed as Minister Plenipotentiary of the Dominican Republic to the United Nations, Bernardino had received recognition as both a diplomat and among advocates for women’s rights. Ellen DuBois and Lauren Derby, “The Strange Case of Minerva Bernardino: Pan American and United Nations Women’s Rights Activist,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 (2009): 43-50. 150
upon her appearance; among friends and acquaintances, she was known, in addition to her diplomatic leadership and excellence, for her fabulous and dramatic hats. Her elegant (if also flamboyant) dress marked her participation in an international politics of respectability that granted her legitimacy within women’s organizations and in the male-dominated spaces of formal diplomacy. Though her appointment as a diplomat raised her above the status of a white-collar working woman, Bernardino’s resources remained more limited than those of women for whom volunteer work could be their full focus.
In addition to class, women’s cosmopolitanism in the 1950s frequently fell under the leadership of Western white women. Even when tinged with the language, dress, and cultural heritage of many non-Western societies, many international women’s organizations maintained forms of coalition-building that had originated in Euro-
American elite social relationships. The Pan-Pacific Southeast Asian Women’s
Association (PPSEAWA) typified some of the tensions that emerged within international women’s organizations as a result. Operating as a largely upper-class women’s organization, its leaders frequently struggled to reconcile white members’ desire for an approach to women’s issues as universal with the insistence of anticolonial women upon the importance of nationalism.106 Although the latter category of women increasingly
106 Fiona Paisley has reflected helpfully upon the role of race, Orientalism, and imperialism in women’s organizing by analyzing the PPSEAWA. Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural 151
challenged the Western gloss of the organization, to many internationalist women in the
US, their Asian colleagues continued to be primarily legible through programs that displayed exotic cultures for the benefit of white members.107 Leaders intended “Modes and Mores of the Orient,” an event hosted by the US branch annually from 1957-59, as “a sincere token of friendship from Asians to Americans” and a way to “strengthen the bonds of peace” through cultural exchange and understanding.108 Attendees witnessed regional dances, fashion shows of traditional dress, and re-enactments of wedding ceremonies and festival rituals.109 Staging multiculturalism as a series of performances, it allowed the US audience to encounter the predominantly Asian performers as part of an evening at the theater, rather than as part of a conversation.
Among women in the UN, Euro-American delegates were forced to develop working relationships with their counterparts in Asia and, eventually, Africa, but these working relationships did not easily translate into perfect cultural tolerance and understanding. Asian women rarely served in CSW before 1961, and African women did not serve at all, limiting the field of interaction and maintaining Asian women’s status, among US delegates, at least, as oddities. At a party hosted by the Kenyon family in 1947
Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 5, 37-38. 107 Ibid, 162-63. For a broader sense of the ways in which American perceptions of peoples and cultures of Asia and the Pacific, see: Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism. 108 Helen Fowler, “Welcome,” Modes and Mores of the Orient II, New York, NY, 21 Apr 1958, Event Programs and Invitations, 1958, Papers of the PPSEAWA, SSC. 109 Ibid, Program. 152
to honor representatives to the upcoming Women’s Commission session, Dorothy
Kenyon wrote with some amusement to a friend of her interactions with Shereen
Ahmed, who arrived with her husband in “full Indian regalia—she looking something like a fortune telling gypsy on full dress parade.”110 Nor did the pair have much opportunity to develop a relationship, as Ahmed’s service ended after the 1948 session.
Lorena Hahn, however, had a better opportunity to become friends with Ahmed during her travels in Asia. As part of their duties as US representative to CSW, each delegate made a trip to part of the “developing world” to go on speaking tour, to witness and report back on women’s status, and to advocate development and social uplift. Hahn’s trip took her primarily through Asia and Africa, and in Pakistan the PPSEAWA facilitated introductions to the All-Pakistan Women’s Association, and where her friendship with Shereen Ahmed began.111 While close relationships—whether for work or simply friendship—were possible, Euro-American women’s perceptions of themselves as positioned to educate and uplift non-Western women skewed the foundations on which they could build relationships.
As delegates moved forward to define the agenda of their new Commission, they brought together their knowledge of and hopes for their home countries with their
110 Dorothy Kenyon to Lestra (?), 16 Feb 1947, Party for DK and other members of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, 1947, Dorothy Kenyon Papers, 3, SSC. 111 By 1957, they seem to have been interacting and corresponding regularly. Lorena Hahn to Shereen Ahmed, 13 Dec 1957, Correspondence, M-R, 1957-58, Papers of PPSEAWA-USA, SSC. 153
experience in the work of national and international NGOs. In the face of their different backgrounds, they all faced the same question: to protect women around the world and allow women to begin advocating for themselves, which rights did CSW need to assure first?
3.4 Asserting Independent Citizenship: CSW on Political and Nationality Rights
Delegates in the late 1940s and early 1950s answered this question with political rights. Women, they believed, need the right to vote to change their status in their home countries. However, members of the Commission on the Status of Women did not base their pursuit of rights solely on assumptions about artificial divisions between public and private in women’s lives. They acknowledged and valorized women as wives and mothers, but they also sought to transform women’s status in the eyes of their states.
Representatives to CSW combated assumptions that women’s domestic responsibilities and their civic involvement were at odds. They insisted both upon women’s importance in the roles of wife and mother and in women’s right to independent citizenship—that is, citizenship that did not rely upon marriage or motherhood. Political rights and nationality became chief platforms on which delegates to the Commission made this stand. Delegates from Latin American states, most notably Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, and Venezuela, led the charge in securing international treaties on political
154
rights and the nationality of married women.112 Although frequently supported by other members, the full extent to which women’s civic involvement would impact family became a point of contention for representatives of some countries.
The political rights of women took a prominent position on CSW’s agenda in the early sessions because many representatives saw the right to participate in national politics as a gateway to other rights. Arguments arose, however, about how this access would impact family life and whether voting was as important to the nation as producing and raising future citizens. The political rights of women incorporated the right to vote and to run for and hold public office, but discussions on the topic in CSW also highlighted the importance of civic education in allowing the full practice of these rights. In 1946, the Sub-commission on the Status of Women had recommended that the
UN “stimulate” global opinion in favor of women’s suffrage; 30 of 51 member states had granted women the right to vote by the time they signed the Charter the previous year.113 Mexico’s Amalia Ledón, one of the four women who signed the UN Charter, declared the need for something more concrete than recommendations, and proposed a
Convention on women’s political rights in 1948.114 The Commission’s report that year
112 Although “equal pay for equal work” and women’s education were important, as well, these were primarily handled by the ILO and UNESCO, and I have prioritized the agenda items that fell more immediately into CSW’s purview. 113 United Nations, “Statement Made by the Chair of the Sub-commission on the Status of Women to ECOSOC,” E/PV.4, The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 111. 114 United Nations, Report of the Commission on Human Rights to the Second Session of the Economic and Social Council, 1948, 17. 155
recommended that the Secretary-General “examine the possibility of proposing a…convention to assist countries which have not granted women equal political rights.”
Delegates hoped to base such a treaty on the Inter-American Convention on the
Granting of Political Rights to Women, signed the previous year by 14 American states in Bogota.115 Given that women in Mexico had begun working once more to secure their right to vote, Ledón likely hoped that a UN convention would have a direct impact on
Mexico.
For some delegates, however, women’s right to vote raised questions about women’s responsibilities to home and hearth. In 1950, Mary Sutherland of the UK argued that women should only pursue involvement in local governance, which would allow women to merge political activities with their responsibilities as mothers.116 As representatives argued about the final form of a draft convention on women’s political rights, US representative Olive Remington Goldman argued that, contrary to fears that giving women the vote would take them out of the home, civic responsibilities that were
115 United Nations, Report of the Commission on the Status of Women (Third Session), E/1316, 1949, para. 18(1). This document was straightforward, with only two operative paragraphs declaring that, “the right to vote and to be elected to national office shall not be denied or abridged by reason of sex.” Organization of American States, “Inter-American Convention on the Granting of Political Rights to Women,” 2 May 1948, OAS Treaty Series, No. 3, http://www.oas.org/juridico/english/treaties/a-44.html. The Secretary-General’s report, presented the following year: UN, Report of the Secretary-General to the CSW on the possibility of proposing a convention on the political rights of women E/CN.6/143, 28 Apr 1950, in The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 141-145. 116 DoS, Daily Unclassified Summary No. 88, 8 May 1950, General Records of the Department of State, 1950-54, Central Decimal File, 310.5/5-850, 8. 156
shared with their husbands would add to domestic vitality. This would not be possible, she argued, if women were ignorant of politics and civil duties.117 Beyond that,
Goldman argued that protecting women’s voting rights would support the UN, because
“any country where the people—all the people—are allowed to vote freely, with a choice of candidates pledged to take action on significant issues, will be a peaceful country and will want to cooperate with the UN.”118 A big claim, and perhaps wishful thinking, but it shows that for some delegates at least, women’s access to the vote could have repercussions that reverberated into international relationships.
The text on political rights that CSW recommended to ECOSOC in 1951 declared women’s right to vote, to run for all publicly elected offices, and while in office “to exercise all public functions established by national law on equal terms with men.”119
The General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Political Rights of Women,
117 DoS, Daily Unclassified Summary 222, May 2 1951, General Records of the Department of State, 1950-54, CDF, 310.5/5-251, 8. As a state representative for Illinois herself, elected in 1946 and 1948, Goldman avidly supported women’s political rights. Lawrence Kestenbaum, “Goldman to Gomulka,” PoliticalGraveyard.com, http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/goldman-gomulka.html, accessed 30 May 2017. 118 She quickly brought any undertones of Cold War politics to the fore, expressing admiration for a Secretariat draft pamphlet designed for organizations working on women’s political education and suggesting that the Soviet government read a copy for suggestions on better incorporating women into their government. Daily Unclassified Summary 222, May 2 1951, General Records of the Department of State, 1950-54, CDF, 310.5/5-251, 8. 119 UN, Report of the Commission on the Status of Women (Fifth Session), E/1997, 1951, 13. UN, Report of CSW (Sixth Session), E/2208, 1952, 4-5. 157
having almost entirely maintained the wording of CSW’s draft.120 Through the voting rights convention, the Commission began articulating their groundwork for women’s human rights.
The issue of married women’s nationality also provided an opportunity for women to establish their citizenship as independent from that of their husbands’, and delegates from the Americas pushed it ahead of other marriage rights issues. Dorothy
Kenyon, a powerful presence in US women’s movements, former suffragist, and US representative to CSW from 1947 to 1950, had actively participated in the movement to preserve women’s rights to their own nationality in the US during the 1920s and had supported the Pan American Union’s treaty on the subject in 1933. Kenyon’s interests lay in the large-scale recognition of women’s independent citizenship. In this capacity, suffrage and respect for women’s birth nationality, even in marriage, similarly impacted women’s relationship with their states. Both cases required state recognition of women as autonomous citizens outside of their familial relationships or duties. Working with other representatives from the Americas, including Minerva Bernardino, Amalia Ledón, and Venezuela’s Isabel de Urdaneta, they pushed married women’s nationality ahead of other family-related concerns in the early CSW agendas. Some interested in the
Commission’s mission expressed surprise at this turn of events. Alva Myrdal, shortly
120 United Nations, “Convention on the Political Rights of Women,” 31 Mar 1953, http://www.un.org.ua/images/Convention_on_the_Political_Rights_of_Women_eng1.pdf. 158
after having seen the proposed agenda for the 1950 session, wrote with confusion and even a little irritation to John Humphrey in the Secretariat, wondering why nationality had been placed before issues like divorce and marriage consent.121 The reason likely was tied to the significance CSW delegates gave to political rights: winning recognition of women’s independent citizenship would grant them greater leverage in demanding other rights from their governments.
In debate on the nationality question, delegates had to contend not only with their pursuit of women’s rights but their governments’ foreign policy goals. In 1951, despite the enthusiasm of some delegates, at this session the nationality of married women faced a “cool reaction.” US representative Olive Goldman, in spite of her personal interest in women’s nationality, was forced to abstain on resolutions on the topic and to declare the International Law Commission (ILC) the appropriate drafting body for the development of international standards on the issue. Elena Mederos de
Gonzales of Cuba took the lead instead and managed to convince her colleagues to push for a convention rather than simply a series of resolutions on the nationality of married women. Despite the apparent enthusiasm of CSW delegates, Bernardino and Lebanon’s
Angela Jurdak Khoury expressed disappointment at the large number of abstentions:
121 Alva Myrdal to John Humphrey, 31 Jan 1950, United Nations Secretariat, Archives and Record Management Services, New York City, HRD, 18 Aug 1949-17 Feb 1950. 159
Australia, the US, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom’s delegates either lacked instructions or had been required to abstain on the issue.122
The dominant question became, thereafter, whether to pursue a gendered approach to nationality rights. In 1952, the International Law Commission (ILC) took up the topic of nationality as CSW had asked them to, but not to the latter’s satisfaction. The
ILC could only discuss nationality in the genderless terms of “stateless persons,” and for many Women’s Commission members, this approach would not sufficiently address the problems specific to women.123 New Zealand joined the US in advocating for a gender- neutral, ILC-drafted convention during CSW’s 1953 session, but many of the Latin
American delegates continued to support Cuba’s resolutions on behalf of a women- focused treaty. As chair that year, Bernardino proposed a compromise that placed the responsibility and privilege of drafting the convention on the shoulders of CSW, while also keeping the language gender-neutral, protecting the nationality of spouses in marriage. The adjusted resolution passed by a vote of twelve to three, with two abstaining.124 This outcome likely explains the common practice, in the years to come, of referring to the document as the “Nationality Convention,” which minimized the gender-specific goals of the document in favor of its relationship to citizenship.
122 Jurdak had added her husband’s surname to her own after her 1949 marriage. DoS, “Daily Unclassified Summary No. 223,” General Records of the Department of State, 310.5/5-351, 5. UN, Report of CSW (Fifth Session), 19. 123 Report of CSW (Sixth Session), 3-5. 124 Report of CSW (Seventh Session), 4. 160
The Nationality Convention, adopted January 29, 1957, referenced UDHR article
15, which proclaimed that “everyone has the right to a nationality” and that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” Perhaps CSW delegates saw the Convention as an opportunity to overwrite these conceptually gender-neutral words with their own recognition that gender mattered to nationality. The document explicitly declared that “neither the celebration nor the dissolution of marriage…nor the change of nationality by the husband during marriage, shall automatically affect the nationality of the wife.” In addition, the
Nationality Convention provided for wives who could obtain their husband’s nationality if they wished through privileged naturalization procedures.125
Both women’s right to vote and independent nationality framed women’s position in relation to their states. As they moved on to discuss the status of women in family law in the years to come, CSW delegates reframed this relationship in terms of making states responsible for the marital status of their female citizens.
3.5 The Status of Women in Private Law: Envisioning Family
CSW members’ approaches to women’s rights in private law grew out of predominantly Judeo-Christian women taking on the plight of colonial women—women in the so-called Trust and Non-Self-Governing Territories. In 1951, Alba I. Zizzania,
125 United Nations, “Convention on the Nationality of Married Women,” 20 Feb 1957, http://www.un.org.ua/images/Convention_on_the_Nationality_of_Married_Women_eng1.pdf. 161
representing the International Union of Catholic Women’s Leagues, “discussed the marital status of women in dependent territories and requested the Commission to make specific recommendations for adoption of legal provisions protecting the institution of monogamous marriage and the rights of women in valid marriages.”126 Though their sessions led only to recommendations until the late-1950s, CSW delegates and the NGO delegates who sat in on their sessions began to formulate ideas about “valid” marriages, frequently in opposition to the practices of colonial territories and postcolonial states.
Lorena Hahn, who would help to oversee much of the creation of the Marriage
Convention, joined the Commission as US delegate for the 1953 session. Her appointment represented the attitudes of the new Eisenhower administration toward
CSW. Under Truman, delegates Kenyon and Goldman had considerable experience in law, politics, and women’s rights. Hahn, on the other hand, hailed from Ravenna,
Nebraska, and her involvement in state programs had been in the more classically
“feminine” realms of welfare and women’s affairs. As an active member of the American
Legion Auxiliary—elected president of the Nebraska branch in 1929 and national president in 1936—and former Vice-Chair of the Republican Party’s Post-War Policy
Committee, Hahn espoused a more maternalist feminist politics than her predecessors.127
126 DoS, Daily Unclassified Summary 228, 10 May 1951, General Records of the Department of State, 1950-54, CDF, 310.5/5-1051, 12. 127 During WWII Hahn also served as chair of Nebraska’s State Defense Commission, and in 1937 she chaired the Forum on National Defense. At the time of her appointment to CSW, she served as a member of the Study and Program Committee of the Women’s Forum for National Security. 162
Hahn’s work and leadership in fields so distant from those of most CSW members granted her diplomatic experience, but left her behind in fields of knowledge that other delegates, and many members of NGOs, conversed about regularly. Addressing a room full of NGO representatives after the Commission’s meetings concluded for the year,
Hahn fell short when members of the National Women’s Party and the National
Federation of Business and Professional Women pressed her on issues specific to family rights and family law. Unable to answer these questions herself, Alice Morrison of the
Women’s Bureau and Rachel Nason of the State Department took command of answering, but they realized she would need considerable coaching to be ready for the following session.128 Likely still uncomfortable debating these issues in 1954, Hahn held close to the State Department’s instructions to insist that “further study was required” on the issue of married women’s property rights before CSW could reasonably make any recommendations.129
The common theme was support for armed forces and US national defense. “Lorena B. Hahn (Mrs. Oscar W.) 8625 Broadmoor Drive, Omaha, Nebraska,” Office of the Director, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, 1953, Box 64, 6-1-0-8, Women’s Bureau, Department of Labor, NARA II. 128 Morrison also notes that Hahn lacked a clear understanding of the difference between “Equal Rights” and “Equal Pay”! Alice Morrison to Frieda Miller, 29 Apr 1953, “Mrs. Hahn’s report to the NGOs,” Women's Bureau, Department of Labor, General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1953, box 66, 6-1-5-6-3^3, Women’s Bureau, Department of Labor, NARA II. 129 DoS, USUN Information Digest No. 191, 2 Apr 1954, 310.5/4-254, 2. 163
Figure 11 Lorena Hahn, circa 1955130
During their meetings in 1953, Commission members clarified what kind of equality they sought in terms of women’s marriage rights. The different but compatible roles of men and women emerged as a critical point as representatives wondered whether they could reconcile “equality of rights and duties of spouses with the principle of unity of the family.” The delegates settled the matter with a “different but equal” approach, concluding that, “since, in family matters, equality denotes reciprocal rather than identical rights and duties, the principle of equality did not preclude family unity.”131 On the surface, defending specific gender roles for men and women within the family may appear as a conservative perspective. However, claims about the unique problems of women had allowed representatives to create the women’s rights body in
130 Lorena B. Hahn, “Old and New Civilizations: Africa and Asia,” Women Lawyers Journal 41 (1955): 15-26, HeinOnline. 131 United Nations, CSW: Report of the Seventh Session (1953): 6. 164
the first place, and proved an important part of their arguments for a women-specific nationality convention.132 Without the ability to argue that the problems the Commission discussed were specific to women, conventions on several topics—such as the nationality of married women—would have been stripped away from CSW and likely tabled indefinitely. “Different but equal” claims to equality therefore framed family life as a space structured by gender, and therefore potentially maneuvered women’s requests into a stronger position outside CSW.
Despite continued US trepidation, in 1954, several delegates launched into more detailed discussions of private law and family models, particularly as they turned their eyes to colonial territories. They recognized that “women’s status in their relationships as wives and mothers was of prime significance to most women of the world,” and sought to protect women in those roles. CSW members studied reports from the
Secretary-General on the status of women in private law and agreed with Hahn and her
UK counterpart about the need for new reports on family law and property rights. As they requested more, Lefaucheux and Bernardino included condemnation, in no uncertain terms, of laws that treated women as “incompetent persons incapable of handling property or of performing a variety of legal acts and relegated to a subordinate
132 Karen Garner has discussed some of the ways in which women in the UN had to articulate their concerns in neutral language that would improve reactions to their requests from other bodies. Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda, 158-59. 165
position with respect to family rights.”133 Although their roles in family might be different, these delegates were unwilling to let women’s rights remain so.
In this vein, several representatives submitted recommendations to ECOSOC on different types of marriage rights. Cuba’s Uldarica Mañas, France’s Marie- Helène
Lefaucheux, Venezuela’s Isabel de Urdaneta, and Yugoslavia’s Mitra Mitrovic produced a recommendation to ensure equal property rights in marriage; France and Haiti co- sponsored a request that governments ensure the rights of married women to work independently and keep their own earnings; France also joined Lebanon in recommending assurances of equal parental rights over children; and Sweden and
France proposed the preservation of married women’s rights to an independent domicile. 134 Poland also attempted to introduce a resolution to recommend that states
“take measures to ensure effective protection of motherhood and childhood,” but both this resolution and a Haitian proposal on family allowances were deferred.135
The last recommendation, proposed by the Haitian and Iranian delegates, made suggestions to improve the status of women in Non-Self-Governing Territories.136 CSW members believed that in these territories, “certain practices, ancient laws and customs relating to marriage and the family” impeded “the attainment by women of their basic
133 United Nations, CSW: Report of the Eighth Session (1954): 12. 134 DoS, USUN Information Digest No. 192, 1 Apr 1954, General Records of the Department of State, 1950-54, CDF, 310.5/4-154, 3. 135 DoS, USUN Information Digest No. 193, 6 Apr 1954, 310.5/4-654, 2. 136 DoS, USUN Information Digest No. 192, 5 Apr 1954, 3. 166
rights” as laid out in the UN Charter and UDHR.137 In this discussion, women of the
Commission expressed their concerns about cultural differences, frequently informed by religious practices. Delegates pointed out that ECOSOC was in the process of considering several items with which they were concerned in association with slavery.
Whether as the “administering authorities of dependent territories” or as newly- sovereign states, “several members mentioned the particular problem of governments…where personal status was determined by religious law.”
Representatives almost certainly meant the Personal Status Laws of Muslim courts, and, recognizing that these laws did not always coincide with civil codes, established a new generalized language. Lefaucheux proposed, for the purposes of colonial territories, the inclusion of “ancient” before the word “laws,” thereby incorporating non-civil legal systems that were most at fault on the subject of women’s family rights. It also expresses the continuation of beliefs in “traditional” non-Western and non-Christian cultures as eternal and unchanging, rather than themselves in a state of flux at midcentury.138
The resolution contained important elements of the future Marriage Convention.
It emphasized the “human dignity of women” and reflected a belief that the elimination of ancient laws and customs would benefit “the family as an institution.” The resolution
137 United Nations, CSW: Report of the Eighth Session (1954): 13. 138 A number of classic texts have talked about this phenomenon in the context of 19th century imperialism. Notably, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. McClintock’s concept of “anachronistic space” is particularly relevant, with particular locations being “outside time.” 167
specified that the General Assembly, Trusteeship Council, and administering authorities should ensure: “complete freedom in the choice of a spouse;” the abolition of the bride- price and child marriage; the preservation of widows’ rights to child custody and the freedom to remarry; the registration of marriages with a civil authority; the trial of
“personal rights” cases before a “duly appointed magistrate;” and to “ensure also that family allowances”—where provided—“be administered in such a way as to benefit directly the wife and children.” To no small degree, this is a remarkable document.
Some of these rights, such as family allowances, were ones that representatives hoped to gain for themselves.139
Although she had done little but watch, listen, and follow instructions during her first two years as a CSW delegate, in 1955 Lorena Hahn brought more confidence to the
Commission—and the State Department. Feeling more capable of speaking on women’s issues after two years’ experience and after an extended journey throughout Africa and
Asia, Hahn strove to shift US policy on family. She addressed Secretary of State Dulles just before the body began discussion of private law, observing that “US failure to participate fully in this field jeopardizes the confidence women throughout the world have grown to feel toward the US” because of missionary and relief work. On these grounds, Hahn asked Dulles to grant permission to vote in favor of a “satisfactory”
139 UN, CSW: Report of the Eighth Session (1954): 14. 168
recommendation on parental rights and duties, which she expected other delegates to propose.140 But by then, Eisenhower had made the Bricker deal, and the delegation could not approve any resolutions that might “legally commit the US to adopt specific legislation.”141
CSW members at the 1955 session framed equality in private law as an important precursor to other rights, including equal employment and political rights, even as they dedicated themselves to completing work on the Nationality Convention.142 While considering the proposal that Hahn had predicted on parental rights and child custody, sponsored by France, Lebanon, and Yugoslavia, Commission delegates outlined troubling trends that led to single motherhood. In order to avoid laws under which women were stripped of child custody upon divorce, widowhood, or remarriage, in
“some less developed regions in Africa,” one of the sponsors claimed, “many women declined to enter into regular marriages in order to safeguard their right to custody of
140 Henry Cabot Lodge to John Foster Dulles, 16 Mar 1955, “Commission on the Status of Women,” General Records of the Department of State, 1955-59, Central Decimal File, Box 1310, 340.18/3-1655, NARA II. 141 Mary Lord to Herbert C. Hoover, 16 Mar 1955, “Commission on the Status of Women,” General Records of the Department of State, 1955-59, Central Decimal File, Box 1310, 340.18/3- 1655, NARA II. 142 UN, CSW: Report of the Ninth Session (1955): 7. Hahn expressed that the “absence of greater activity in the family and property law field this year is not due to any lack of interest,” but rather to delegates’ “determination to devote their major attention this year to the adoption of the Nationality Convention.” Hahn, “General Report by Mrs. Lorena Hahn on the 9th Session of the Status of Women Commission,” “Principle Substantive Matters,” (Report, 13 Apr 1955), General Records of the Department of State, 1955-59, Central Decimal File, Box 1310, 340.18/4-1355, NARA II, 3. 169
their children.”143 Though in their report the subject received no special attention, CSW members were concerned that existing laws had led to the breakdown of formal marriages because of women’s desires to preserve their parental rights.144 Despite
Hahn’s attempts to secure US support for the resolution, she was forced to vote against it.145 Once CSW began to formulate the Marriage Convention, however, she would work, once again, to shift her voting instructions.
The 1956 session set the gears in motion that would enable the Marriage
Convention through the request for a report on polygamy, the bride-price, child marriage, and women’s parental rights. Representatives continued to draw boundaries between presumably secular, modern states and those dominated by cultural practices.
They expressed frustration with the experiences of women in countries where “the wife’s position as an equal partner with her husband had come to be generally recognized,” but legal discriminations—in terms of working or property rights— remained. Legal provisions, however, were more manageable to make
143 UN, CSW: Report of the Ninth Session, 8. 144 Curiously, however, the Polish proposal on the protection of motherhood and childhood seems to have received no consideration whatsoever. A telegram to the Department of State from Lorena Hahn simply conveyed that the proposal was rejected, with no explanation. Perhaps representatives like Hahn feared giving any representative from the Soviet bloc a foot in the door on private law and maneuvered to have it tabled. Perhaps all delegates simply felt that its language was too generalized and the Polish representative, Zofia Dembinska, allowed its meaning to be folded into one of the other recommendations. DoS, USUN Information Digest No. 196, 31 Mar 1955, 310.5/3-3155, 4. 145 Hahn, “General Report,” ““Principle Substantive Matters,” 3. 170
recommendations about changing. More problematic were societies in which “family laws were part of an integrated social and cultural pattern,” and there was greater resistance to change “than where the social pattern in fact was more advanced than the laws.” They also looked eagerly toward General Assembly Resolution 843 (IX), “Calling on Member States to eliminate customs, ancient laws and practices affecting the human dignity of women,” adopted the previous December and almost entirely utilizing their own language.146 The fact that their wording had survived consideration in the Social
Commission, ECOSOC, the Third Committee, and General Assembly may have suggested to CSW members that they had an opportunity to drive home legislation on a set of issues to which the GA would lend an ear. Indeed, during the previous session, most other members felt that, “rather than marking the end of the Commission’s interest in the matter, should be followed up and strengthened by further and more specific recommendations.”147
These conversations proved critical to establishing ideas of women’s rights in family life that informed the sessions in which delegates drafted a marriage rights treaty, though their vocabulary took a significant turn. During the Commission’s eleventh
146 United Nations General Assembly, “Resolution 843 (IX). Status of women in private law: customs, ancient laws and practices affecting the human dignity of women” (1954). The language of the resolution likely derived almost directly from a recommendation of CSW itself (albeit filtered through the Social Commission, Economic and Social Council, Third Committee, and finally General Assembly itself). 147 CSW: Report of the Tenth Session, 15. 171
session, representatives spoke explicitly of “free consent” to marriage as they outlined the backbone of what would grow into the Marriage Convention. Throughout the 1950s,
CSW’s members articulated family rights in a way that meshed with the ideas of civic motherhood and women’s independent citizenship. Idealizing monogamy and secular family laws, these conversations about women’s status in private law nevertheless relied upon faith in modern domesticity and, as would become apparent during the framing of the Marriage Convention, the power of domesticity to modernize.
3.5 Conclusion
Delegates of many different backgrounds arrived at the 1945 San Francisco
Conference with a host of hopes and desires for the future. Despite the work of many activists and reformers, the foundation of the UN did not mark the birth of a new world order, but it did provide new channels for the pursuit of human rights. For states new and old, World War II, the Cold War, and decolonization had brought major shifts that affected family life. In many cases, solidifying or reforming family law was part and parcel of attempts to stabilize depleted populations, secure weakened governments, and establish the legitimacy of new nations.
In this environment, delegates to the new Commission on the Status of Women did their best to navigate women’s rights treaties through the troubled waters of the UN.
Relying upon the precedents of existing international treaties on political rights and the nationality of married women, they simultaneously asserted women’s unique feminine
172
family roles and their value as independent citizens. Though to some degree the
Marriage Convention had long been in the making, in 1957 delegates to CSW saw their moment and articulated a vision that would become an international treaty.
173
4. “In Case You’re Interested, It’s One Wife Per Man:” The Marriage Convention and the “Universal” Family, 1957-1962
In 1956, Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold published a report on women’s status in private law that garnered attention from the US American public. “In Case
You’re Interested,” one headline joked, “It’s One Wife Per Man.” With clear amusement, the author listed some of the marriage practices from around the world that he found absurd or unusual. India, for example, “expressly forbids a man to marry his great- grandmother.” In the Netherlands, meanwhile, no one under 30 could marry without their parents’ consent, unless they appealed to a justice of the peace. “In Pakistan, a
Moslem may have four wives and a Hindu any number. But in Tennessee,” the author commented glibly, “a man can get 21 years in prison for having only two.”148 Although the author made light of marriage practices around the world that he found bizarre, the headline brought them all together under one assumption: for the article’s readers, monogamy was the only way of life.
But this headline also summarized precisely what representatives to the
Commission on the Status of Women hoped to accomplish. Many of them sought to create a framework that would allow for shifts toward, not simply monogamy, but
148 William N. Oatis, “In Case You’re Interested, It’s One Wife Per Man,” Austin Statesman (Austin, TX) 7 June 1956. The Washington Post ran the same article a few weeks later: “Marriage Before Age 7 Illegal,” Washington Post (Washington, DC) 26 June 1956. 174
family formation that bore a strong resemblance to Judeo-Christian-influenced Western families. As a draft treaty on marriage rights moved into the General Assembly, delegates from postcolonial states challenged Western delegates’ claims to the universality of this family model, revealing disagreements about which categories of rights, civil, political, and/or cultural, the Convention should protect. The Convention on
Consent for Marriage became the center of debates about consent more broadly, especially self-determination and the consent of the governed, and explicitly tied women’s marriage rights to governance and shifts in global power.
Concerned primarily with creating global protections for women, those who represented their countries on the Women’s Commission pursued these protections in terms of “modern” families and the state mechanisms required to enable their creation.
In an attempt to legislate the creation of “stable and happy families,” delegates focused on establishing a minimum age of marriage that would give young women a better opportunity to attain the basic maturity and education they needed to properly carry out the responsibilities of wife and mother. The registration of marriages, as the chief means of enforcement, assumed the creation and utilization of bureaucratic systems.
CSW delegates hoped to create the conditions that would let women mold themselves into a particular kind of citizen. These women believed that, given the right tools—a general education and education in family life—women all over the world would naturally establish small, nuclear families through monogamous marriages.
175
Although not in perfect agreement on every point, representatives’ relative lack of geographic diversity during the document’s drafting led to a document that enshrined
Western-centered, Judeo-Christian values. On this point, members of the General
Assembly Third Committee, such as Iraq’s Bedia Afnan, would take them to task.
Inclusive approaches to rights took on a prominent position as Afnan and her allies from predominantly Muslim states argued for the validity of proxy marriage as a system. Although most representatives recognized the possibility of “legitimate” reasons for employing a legal representative for one spouse, Western delegates, such as the US representative Gladys Avery Tillett, implied that proxy marriage could only be legitimate where it was also exceptional. In the Third Committee, with a significantly more geographically diverse membership, many representatives from African and Asian states defended proxy marriage as not exceptional. Delegates of Iraq, Nigeria, and Saudi
Arabia sought to push the boundaries of the supposedly “universal” standards of the
Marriage Convention beyond those of Western-style family. While recognizing the validity of women’s right to marriage consent, they also demanded recognition of a parallel right: the right to maintain one’s traditions, be they religious or cultural. Seeking to defend women’s rights in marriage while forcing them to abandon their traditions, these delegates argued, infringed upon their religious and cultural rights.
The Marriage Convention helped solidify the discursive transition initiated by representatives of postcolonial states as they stripped away language that legitimized
176
formal imperialism. Through marriage rights, delegates of imperial states sought to preserve the concept of the “civilizing mission” and its implications. The Convention served as one platform through which Western delegates reframed the civilized/savage dichotomy as modern/backward, and produced a moral geography using family and women’s rights to distinguish the so-called developed and undeveloped states in another dimension.149 At the same time, as postcolonial delegates sought to produce the
UN as a site of self-determination, the Marriage Convention enabled new debates through which they destabilized international legal precedent that had made the continuation of empire a non-issue. Between 1957 and 1962, representatives to CSW and the General Assembly Third Committee used the Marriage Convention to frame arguments about legitimate family forms, the value or danger of traditional cultural practices, and the meaning of “universal” in the context of human rights.
4.1 Making “Modern” Families: Women’s Rights and the Dangers of Culture
Delegates to the Commission on the Status of Women between 1957 and 1961 framed women’s marriage rights in terms of women’s ability to make stronger families
149 I borrow this concept from Michael Shapiro, but also from Melani McAlister, who defines “moral geographies” as “cultural and political practices that work together to mark not only states but also regions, cultural groupings, and ethnic or racial territories.” I find McAlister’s definition especially helpful because of how she uses it in the context of her work on encounters between the US and Islam in the Middle East. Shapiro, “Moral Geographies and the Ethics of Post-Sovereignty,” Public Culture, 6, no. 3 (1994): 479-502. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 4. 177
and nations. They operated on logic that tied marriage rights unequivocally to states.
Stable families, they argued, were built upon marriages to which both partners had consented; the older a woman was when she married, the more education she had obtained, allowing her to improve her country through informed voting and the education of her children as future citizens; societies of under-developed countries needed to modernize (through education) in order to reach this state, in which marriage is not influenced by culture; and states needed to maintain women’s marriage rights by registering marriages. In this chain of logic, consent-based monogamy emerged as the highest form of marriage and the natural outcome of social development. Although not incorporated into the Marriage Convention, women delegates also assumed that properly educated and fully-modernized women would have the ability to, and would elect to, have families with few children in nuclear, rather than extended family arrangements.
Delegates had pursued multiple avenues of women’s marriage and family rights in previous sessions, but they turned specifically to the so-called under-developed countries and Trust and Non-Self-Governing Territories in 1957. This geographic shift also dramatically transformed discussions of women’s status in private law, in ways that informed delegates’ approach to consent and became the basis of the Marriage
Convention.
178
Lorena Hahn returned to the Commission on the Status of Women in a weak position on women’s marriage rights for the US. In February 1957, the General Assembly passed the Nationality Convention, on which the United States had abstained and which the Department of State forbid the delegation from signing.150 Particularly in CSW, this retreat in its women’s rights policy meant that Hahn would have to work to recover a position of leadership for the US. Unfortunately, on the subject of women’s status in private law, Hahn’s instructions did not help her regain ground. The State Department emphasized deflection and instructed Hahn not to endorse any recommendation beyond encouraging further studies.
Hahn’s superiors and advisors expected family law to be a significant agenda item in 1957 for several reasons.151 With the General Assembly’s adoption of the
Nationality Convention, the way was clear for the Commission to tackle additional marriage rights. Conversations elsewhere in the UN convinced CSW representatives that the time was right for a more extensive conversation on the subject. Secretary-General
Hammarskjold published a report on family law around the world and on private law in the Non-Self-Governing Territories in 1956. Both reports demonstrated that concerning practices like polygamy and the bride price were alive and well around the world, and
150 DoS Memorandum, “Commission on the Status of Women, Eleventh (1957) Session, Position Paper, Nationality of Married Women,” 1 Mar 1957, General Correspondence of the Women’s Bureau, 1946-1953, 1957, box 58, “International Programs 5, United Nations.” 151 Ibid. 179
provided facts to back up their claims to the rest of the UN. The Trusteeship Council had already been at work on the problems of child marriage, the bride price, and polygamy in dependent territories. However, in light of both of the Secretary-General’s reports, establishing standards on marriage and family rights took on new urgency.152 Three
African states, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Sudan, achieved independence in 1956, and
Ghana became independent on March 6, 1957, mere weeks before the Women’s
Commission met. Delegates came to the discussion having read the recent reports showing that child marriage, the bride price, and polygamy were far from eliminated, and yet these states had just attained independence. These new countries needed to be held responsible for the rights of their women citizens. Although CSW delegates were preoccupied in 1956 with finalizing their draft of the Nationality Convention, they fully turned their attention to the results of Hammarskjold’s report during the 1957 session. In these first discussions, through free consent and marriage registration, delegates began to imagine how to use state power to protect vulnerable female citizens as a reaction to decolonization.
152 Giusi Russo, “Contested Practices, Human Rights, and Colonial Bodies in Pain: The UN’s Gender Politics in Africa, 1940s–1960s,” Gender & History 30, no. 1 (Mar 2018): 196-213. Karen Knop, Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 346. “Trusteeship Council,” International Organization 9, no. 3 (Aug 1955): 396-414. Secretary-General, “Information Concerning the Status of Women in Trust Territories,” 13 Jan 1954, Economic and Social Council, Commission on the Status of Women, E/CN.6/235. 180
When looking for examples of language appropriate to tackle marriage rights, representatives looked to a General Assembly resolution on family, passed in December
1954. Intended to protect the “human dignity of women,” the document criticized
“ancient laws and practices relating to marriage and the family which are inconsistent” with the principles upheld in the UDHR. The General Assembly derived this language from a recommendation the CSW made to ECOSOC early in the year, and likely indicated to Commission representatives that this framework would prove fruitful in the
UN at large. The resolution’s geographic frame included all states, but particularly highlighted the Trust and Non-Self-Governing territories—an early indication of where representatives saw the most obstacles to women’s freedom in marriage.153
Even more profound an indicator, however, was the adoption of the
Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and
Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery a few months before the Commission met.
The document included within the latter category a variety of practices affecting women specifically. Article 1 explicitly compares any marriage practices that treat women as property, through the exchange of women for money or material items, to slavery.
Although it served as a supplement to the International Labor Organization’s 1930
153 United Nations General Assembly resolution 843 (IX), Status of women in private law: customs, ancient laws and practices affecting the human dignity of women, A/RES/843(IX) (17 Dec 1954), available from http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/9/ares9.htm. 181
convention on forced labor, women delegates seized upon the document’s predominant terms as a means of legitimizing their efforts. Criticizing the bride price and advocating installation of an adequate minimum age of marriage and state registration of marriages, the convention suggested to Women’s Commission members that the time was ripe for those hoping to defend women’s marriage consent.154
Geographically, the eighteen-member Commission was weighted heavily toward
Christian states between 1957 and 1961. In 1957, Lorena Hahn served alongside delegates from France, Belgium, Poland, Australia, the UK, Sweden, and the
Byelorussian SSR. Israel consistently voted with the US, and the delegates from Latin
American states—Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic— did the same in many of the debates on family rights. Taiwan, Pakistan, and Indonesia were the only Asian states with representatives, and Africa did not yet have any.
Disagreements primarily emerged along Cold War lines, rather than other political divisions. Poland’s Zofia Dembinska led the Soviet states in most matters during this period, and although she adhered to instructions from her superiors, delegates from the
US also frequently found her reasonable to work with.
154 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, Geneva, Switzerland, 7 Sept 1956, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/SupplementaryConventionAbolitionOfSlav ery.aspx. 182
However, conversations in 1957 foreshadowed the significance of religious difference, especially between Muslim and Christian delegates, that would arise later in the Third Committee. The categories of Western and Judeo-Christian frequently overlapped, but they did not map perfectly onto each other. Euro-American and Latin
American women shared many assumptions about family forms. However, in imperial states, Christianity did not simply form the primary social and cultural pattern but was frequently employed as part of imperial projects.155 Perspectives of representatives toward Islam, though not always stated, became clear during the 1957 discussions of family rights.
During the session, CSW representatives highlighted the status of women living in “less developed countries and territories”—places they saw as dominated by culture and the accompanying evils of polygamy, child marriage, and the bride price. But several members, including Hahn, claimed that there were risks to trying to change deeply-rooted “traditions and basic concepts of marriage and the family” without due caution and understanding. Pakistan’s Shereen Ahmed, a prominent leader in the All-
155 E.g. Patricia Hill, The World their Household. Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World. Philip E. Dow, “Romance in a Marriage of Convenience: The Missionary Factor in Early Cold War U.S.-Ethiopian Relations, 1941-1960,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 5 (Nov 2011): 859-895. Tony Ballantine, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Owen White and J.P. Daughton, eds., In God's Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 183
Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA), explained that Islamic law had originally
“represented an improvement in the status of women” as its limitation of four wives per husband exceeded no limitations whatsoever.156 Despite Ahmed’s arguments in support of Islam, representatives quickly decided that culture served as the greatest obstacle to women’s right to marriage consent. Echoing the 1954 resolution, they demonized
“customs, ancient laws and practices” such as polygamy, which they located in “less developed countries and territories.”157 Some representatives expressed their concerns outside the Commission, as well. Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic, for example, addressed a conference in Washington, DC co-sponsored by the Women’s
Bureau and the American Association of the United Nations. Commenting on women’s status in private law, Bernardino turned to the “less developed countries and territories” and asked her listeners to imagine themselves as “one of the four wives which a man is entitled to have according to the law of certain countries.” She declared her belief that an end would come to the “ancient custom” of veiling.158 Though she did not explicitly name Islam, nor exclude religions such as Hinduism, by referencing Pakistan’s four-wife
156 Although the documents do not explicitly state that Ahmed was the speaker, I can claim with confidence that she was. This position so closely reflects the arguments of the APWA, of which she was an active and prominent member. She was also Pakistan’s representative that year. 157 United Nations, Commission on the Status of Women: Report of the Eleventh Session, 18 Mar-5 Apr 1957, E/CN.6/313 (New York: UN, 1957), 22. 158 Report of The Conference on the Status of Women Around the World, Washington, DC, 30 Mar 1959. 184
standard, Bernardino implicitly questioned the possibility of women’s ability to consent—and to exercise agency more generally—in predominantly Muslim countries.
Throughout the 1957 session, delegates to CSW began to solidify the vocabulary of marriage rights that would guide their later conversations, through claims about free consent. They identified marriage consent as “a basic prerequisite for raising the status of women in areas where such practices as polygamy and the bride price existed,” and as a prerequisite that had been met in the “more highly developed countries.”159 Echoing the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, representatives added that the bride price “degraded the wife to the position of chattel or slave,” and argued that it refused the recognition of women’s “human dignity.” They determined that the registration of marriages was essential to enforcing the restriction of unacceptable marriage practices, and representatives asserted that it should be compulsory to register with state governments. Buttressing their language with references to the treaty would give the Commission better traction as it made requests of the Economic and Social
Council. They also pointed to ECOSOC’s inclusion of private law on its agenda.160 The
159 This parallels claims CSW members made about the vote as an essential, precursor right. It is difficult to fully evaluate the difference between the claims made a decade earlier, not least because CSW’s membership changed a great deal. It is possible, however, to read these similarities as general reflections on the First and Second versus Third Worlds in terms of women’s rights—having moved past “culture” already, women in the so-called developed world could start from a different position in regard to rights. UN, CSW: Report of the Eleventh Session, 22-23. 160 Ibid, 22. 185
resolution that CSW adopted also incorporated the Secretary General’s work, in addition to these other references, explicitly tying the bride price and child marriage to slavery.
Hahn and a few other delegates succeeded in holding off concrete action, and instead the Commission requested further study of consent to marriage. Despite deflecting other actions at that moment, the next report of the Secretary General would provide important information, impetus, and legitimacy for future work.161
Delegates to the Commission discussed creating “transitional measures tending to curtail polygamy and speed up the natural evolution towards monogamy.”162 In such statements, representatives reveal their assumptions about the “natural” development of human society. Placing the Third World into the category of places adhering to
“ancient” practices, in opposition to the enforced monogamy of the “developed” countries, delegates established the boundaries of modernity in regard to marriage consent. During this session, three months after the adoption of the Nationality
Convention, women delegates pressed the advantage of their victory by asking
ECOSOC to allow the Commission—through the Secretary General—to study marriage consent and minimum marriage age.163
161 Ibid, 23-24. 162 Ibid, 22. 163 UN, CSW: Report of the Eleventh Session, 23-24. 186
As these women sought to define and preserve modern family forms, modernizing state mechanisms represented an important part of their project. In defense of women’s rights, delegates argued that compulsory marriage registration “furnished the only adequate safeguard against child marriages as well as concubinage,” but registration had further uses. It would ensure the legitimacy of children and the protection of inheritance rights. But one representative remarked that evidence of marriage registration was typically required for “participation in the social security benefits of modern States.”164 This argument demonstrates a belief that the growth of state bureaucracies in support of marriages could enhance state capacity for other aspects of modern governance.
Shereen Ahmed of Pakistan, Tanino Setsu of Japan, and Elizabeth Wang Chang of China (Taiwan) returned to the Commission for the 1958 session fresh out of their own conversations at the Asian-African Conference of Women.165 Convened by women’s
NGOs from Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, the conference provided a platform for debates about women’s issues without the interference of Western representatives. The organizers presented its agenda to the US
164 UN, CSW: Report of the Fourteenth Session, 3. 165 Although I have not been able to determine for certain that these representatives themselves attended, it is highly likely that at least two did: Ahmed, as a leading member of one of the sponsoring organizations, almost certainly would have had an active role, and Tanino’s leadership in the PPSEAWA, which sent observers, makes her presence likely as well. If nothing else, these delegates would have been interested in and heard/read a report on the conference. 187
and other countries as “restricted to non-controversial basic problems affecting women and children in Asia and Africa such as health, education, women, suffrage, slavery, labor and co-operation among Afro-Asian women.”166 Conveners initially proposed the women’s conference at Bandung in 1955 and sought to continue “in the spirit of the resolutions” produced by the Bandung Conference. It reflects their desire for a space in which African and Asian women could debate women’s issues on their own terms.167
However, the Women’s Conference created its own power distinctions: while women from independent nation-states could attend as observers or delegates, those from still-colonized territories could only attend as observers, and organizers refused to provide financial assistance for women leaders hoping to attend the conference.
Attendance therefore largely reflected elite perspectives in social welfare and uplift for those less fortunate. While the meeting provided space for conversations on their terms, the agenda, participation structure, and statements to countries like the US echo the
UN’s standards and perhaps reflect an attempt to legitimize the conference in the eyes of
166 From the perspective of US diplomats and policymakers, the biggest concern was that it would become an opportunity for communists. They found that in general the conference did, indeed, largely hold to their intended purpose, even though communists and pro-communists were expected to participate. Memorandum, “Committee of Political Advisers: Asian-African Conference of Women at Colombo, 15th-24th February 1958,” 17 Feb 1958, NATO Archives Online, AC/119-WP(58)9, http://archives.nato.int/asian-african-conference-of-women-at-colombo-15th- 24th-february-1958, accessed 13 Aug 2017. 167 Elizabeth Armstrong, Gender and Neoliberalism: The All-India Democratic Women’s Organization and Globalization Politics (New York: Routledge, 2014), 199. Memorandum, “Committee of Political Advisers: Asian-African Conference of Women at Colombo, 15th-24th February 1958,” 17 Feb 1958. 188
First and Second World women and policymakers.168 It also demonstrates the delicate balance that representatives of Third World states had to find between cosmopolitan internationalism and loyalty to their own states. While claiming modernity for themselves, in the UN they also sought to explain the social conditions of their home countries. Ahmed, Setsuo, and Chang attended CSW in 1958 fresh out of these conversations but also alive to their roles as bridge-builders between practices legible to other delegates as “modern” and those dismissed as “traditional.”
Beginning in 1958, delegates to CSW identified a minimum age of marriage as the most significant change that states needed to make. Several representatives “thought that legislation was necessary in order to…prevent young girls from being married before they reached physical and mental maturity.” This issue—legislating a sufficiently high marriage age—was the first recommended topic for an international treaty, before others added that consent to and registration of marriages needed to be part of any treaty on the topic. The former was the true reason for specifying a minimum age of marriage, and the latter constituted the chief means of enforcement.169 Up until they passed their final convention draft onto ECOSOC, delegates expressed concern for
“maturity” as a prerequisite for informed consent. Adding spiritual maturity to the list in
1960, they sought to create “the basis for a stable and happy marriage” by preparing
168 Armstrong, Gender and Neoliberalism, 199-200. 169 UN, CSW: Report of the Twelfth Session, E/CN.6/336, 7. 189
young women, as much as possible, for their responsibilities as wives and future mothers.170 Toward the end of CSW’s session, Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux of France,
Uldarica Mañas of Cuba, and Zofia Dembinska of Poland banded together to propose that the Secretary General prepare a draft convention. Initially only including a minimum age of marriage, amendments added consent and marriage registration. Six representatives requested further study instead.171 The two sides ultimately compromised, producing a resolution that requested both. On the floor of ECOSOC, however, delegations favored a recommendation rather than a convention, and the resolution died.172
Determined to produce an internationally-binding document, representatives at the 1959 session adjusted their approach, pursuing what they saw as generalized standards. The resolution they submitted asked for a recommendation, instead of a convention, although Commission members shortly agreed that there should be one of each, which could operate side-by-side. Based on past observations, they were aware that recommendations “did not as a rule lead to action by Governments.” On the other hand, a convention containing a specific minimum age of marriage, if it was as high as delegates desired (15 years of age), could possibly prevent passage of the document on
170 UN, CSW: Report of the Fourteenth Session, E/3360, 3. 171 Taiwan, the Dominican Republic, Japan, the UK, the US, and Venezuela. CSW reports do not include why these states did so, but for the US the Department of State made it clear that the US delegation could not commit to any binding documents. 172 United Nations, The Advancement of Women, 21. UN, CSW: Report of the Twelfth Session, 8. 190
those grounds alone. A number of countries, the United States included (Alabama,
South Carolina, Texas, and Utah), had marriage ages younger than that. Therefore, CSW delegates gave the important operative elements to the convention and the specific age of marriage to the recommendation.173 The final recommendation simply asked
ECOSOC to reconsider the previous year’s decision and agree to produce a draft convention “concerning a minimum age of marriage, the requirement of the free consent of both parties to the marriage, and the compulsory registration of marriage.”174
As they finally drafted the convention in 1960, delegates to CSW dealt more fully with minimum age of marriage as the field in which universal agreement might not be possible. Members saw the “influence of cultural, ethnological and social patterns in various countries” within the “diversity in existing legislation” on marriage age around the world. Although they noted that there seemed to be a global trend toward increasing the minimum age of marriage, delegates generally united in their concerns about the varied marriage ages imposed by different cultures. 175 As a result, the proposed draft convention nevertheless contained the specific minimum age of fifteen.
For the draft Convention, CSW member also identified specific qualification for
“full and free consent.” The actual practice of presenting consent reveals a great deal
173 UN, CSW: Report of the Thirteenth Session, E/CN.6/350, 1960, 6-7. 174 Ibid, 21. 175 UN, CSW: Report of the Fourteenth Session, 8-9. 191
about the perspectives of Commission delegates: consent must be expressed by both prospective spouses “in person, orally, publicly and in the presence of the authority competent to solemnize the marriage.” This version of the clause would not survive discussion in other UN bodies, as it specifically eliminated the possibility of proxy marriages.176 CSW passed their draft on to ECOSOC, received feedback, and turned to finalizing the document during the 1961 session.177
The 1961 session brought a new US delegate for the first time in eight years:
Gladys Avery Tillett of North Carolina represented the new Kennedy Administration’s approach to the US-UN relationship. Tillett’s longtime commitment to women’s rights as well as her public avowal of civil rights made her an appealing choice for the
Commission. An experienced leader in the AAUN and Democratic Party, Tillett made headlines at the 1960 Democratic National Convention with her explicit endorsement of the proposed inclusion of civil rights in the party’s platform. Her enthusiasm about the
176 Ibid, 21. Lorena Hahn’s report to her superiors provides no additional details on the matter, even though Hahn’s report dedicated over five pages to details about debate on the draft convention. There certainly is no reason why proxy marriage would have been of particular interest to those in the USUN or DoS, but it does suggest that there were no holdups on the issue. The only person on the Commission at the time who might have questioned these terms was Pakistan’s new delegate and a distinguished colleague of Shereen Ahmed, Tazeen Faridi. However, she explained to Lorena Hahn early in the session that she had been instructed to “stay close to the United States representative,” and Hahn’s report that “she made a creditable record for her government” suggests that Faridi gave her no trouble during the session. Lorena Hahn, “Report on the 14th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women Held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 28-April 14, 1960,” 15 April 1960, 10, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, 1960-1963 Central Decimal File, 341.8/4-2060, NARA II. 177 UN, CSW: Report of the Fourteenth Session, 10. 192
1960 platform carried into Kennedy’s campaign, and she joined election efforts throughout the South. As a devoted Presbyterian, she dedicated time to speak for
Kennedy as a Catholic. She delivered a speech, “Religious Freedom and the Ballot Box,” on her speaking tours, and it was even published as a small pamphlet.178 Tillett arrived at the United Nations, therefore, with real credentials, a strong personal agenda, and experience and connections in political circles.
Tillett was both the diplomat that the Kennedy administration needed and the respectable white woman that conservatives could accept. An intelligent woman, she used her “Women’s Club looks and dress” and her warm southern charm to disguise sharp diplomatic acumen.179 With the change of administration, Eisenhower’s Bricker
Amendment deal no longer held. There was no longer a restriction on US participation in drafting treaties in the General Assembly, and, more profoundly, Kennedy had no restrictions on sending UN treaties to the Senate for approval. Whether President
Kennedy had any intention of acting more decisively in the UN or not, Tillett definitely
178 Gladys Avery Tillett, “Religious Freedom and the Ballot Box,” Religious Literature: Tillett, Mrs. Charles W., Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Presidential Campaign Files, 1960, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, accessed September 20, 2013, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKCAMP1960-1022-030.aspx. Jeane Kenworthy, “Tillett bio page 4,” Charlotte's Woman of the Year, North Carolina Federation of Business and Professional Women's Club, Inc., WBT/WBTV Records, MS 324, Box 2 Folder 11, J. Murrey Atkins Library, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, accessed September 20, 2013, http://charlottewoman.omeka.net/items/show/169. 179 Sara Thomas, untitled introduction to correspondence, January 2001, Correspondence, 1948- 1960, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 193
did. For the first time in many years, members of the US Mission to the UN speculated,
“the US may go back to pushing international conventions.” However, advisors suggested that Tillett should “move quietly this session and listen,” commenting that next year “she can begin to throw her weight around.” “Nobody,” a memo said, “will expect her to be a ball of fire at the first session, especially when the Administration is new.”180
She would direct her fire, as it turned out, primarily at her own delegation. The
State Department instructions stated that, as a federal system, the US could not make federal legislation about issues that rested within the jurisdiction of states. As a result,
Tillett could not vote in favor of either the convention or recommendation on consent for marriage. Unsatisfied, she leapt into action with a flurry of meetings and correspondence with State Department officials, advisors, legal counselors, the Women’s
Bureau, Department of Labor, and members of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee.181 Forced to abstain on the Marriage Convention, Tillett was nevertheless able to change the vote on the Recommendation. Given that the USSR voted for the
180 Anonymous memorandum, “Status of Women Commission,” Feb 17, 1961, Folder 841, “UN Correspondence, Feb 1961,” Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 181 Officials in much of the federal government, it seems, were displeased by the US vote against both convention and recommendation the year before. Departments of Labor, Justice, Interior, Health, Education and Welfare, and several offices within the Department of State had advised against the opposing votes. Esther Peterson to Arthur Goldberg, Mar 7, 1961, “US Position on proposed UN Recommendation establishing a Minimum Age of Marriage,” General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, 1961, Box 158, folder “International Programs 5.” 194
Convention, Tillett leveraged Cold War relationships in her favor, claiming that the abstention made the US appear “to be less concerned where human rights are involved than the USSR and others of the Soviet bloc.”182 The affirmative vote on the
Recommendation, she reported shortly after the conclusion of CSW’s session, “greatly reassured the members present from developing countries.” Tillett said the
Recommendation vote “went far to offset” the US vote on the Convention, and “placed us immediately in a position of leadership.”183 Though by no means the only person interested in or working toward this outcome, Tillett coordinated their collective actions.
She also sought, and won, the right to represent the US in the Third Committee of the
General Assembly as it debated the draft Convention.
A few months before the Commission began work in 1961, African women put the desire for maturity at marriage in harsh perspective and claimed marriage rights as a basic prerequisite for access to other rights. Women met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the regional Seminar on the Participation of Women in Public Life, where representatives from African states clarified the relationship of marriage, motherhood,
182 Gladys Avery Tillett to Hubert H. Humphrey, 9 June 1961, Folder 846, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 183 Cleveland, apparently, had a particularly profound impact on her ability to vote for the Recommendation. If Tillett’s letter is to be believed, he pushed through the change on the recommendation one morning in early March. Tillett to Harlan Cleveland, Mar 31, 1961, Folder 843, UN Correspondence, March 1961, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 195
education, and citizenship on an international diplomatic stage.184 Intended to focus on
“public” life, among African women the topic could not be fully explored without breaking down the boundaries of public and private. The head of the UN Secretariat
Women’s Section commented that, despite being a seminar on women’s participation in public life, “participants gave principle attention to discussion of family law.”185
Delegates from thirty-one African states and territories, and observers from the UK, US,
Belgium, France, and the USSR, debated “the implications of civic rights and increased participation of women of Africa in public life.”186 The seventeen sessions addressed women’s access to formal education that would best allow them to participate in voting and running for public office.187 These conversations led quickly into concerns about child marriages, which dramatically restricted girls’ access to education, or instances in which “a prospective bridegroom had the right to select the curriculum for his future bride.”188
184 Previously, African delegations to the UN had not seen fit to join CSW, nor had they appointed observers for the Commission. This seminar therefore may have represented an important opportunity for prominent African women to act on a UN-sanctioned stage. 185 Alice A. Morrison to Esther Peterson, 24 Feb 1961, General Correspondence of the Women’s Bureau, 1948-1963, 1961, Box 158, folder “International Programs 5.” 186 United Nations, 1960 Seminar on the Participation of Women in Public Life, 12-23 Dec 1960, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, ST/TAO/HR/9 (NY: United Nations, 1961), 1-2. 187 Edward W. Holmes to Department of State, 5 Jan 1961, General Correspondence of the Women’s Bureau, 1948-1963, 1961, Box 158, folder “International Programs 5.” 188 Ibid, 7-11. 196
But participants set aside space to discuss family law itself and declared that the family was the “keystone of society.” They spoke in detail about the tragedies of child marriage and child betrothal, the bride price practice as the sale of young women, and polygamy. Representatives of states with a large Muslim population frequently distinguished between Muslim and “animist” polygamy; in the former case, they said, the husband was responsible for supporting his wives and children, while women were responsible for supporting their children in the latter. Some also claimed that polygamy had begun to influence monogamous marriages, for example, “in many cases Christian husbands made it a practice to keep several concubines.”189 Among the Seminar’s conclusions, attendees declared the need for legislation that would establish a minimum age of marriage, marriage consent, and marriage registration.190
The Seminar’s conclusions influenced CSW during the 1961 session, as representatives finalized their draft of the Marriage Convention. Although no African delegates would sit on the Commission until 1962, representatives brought the
Seminar’s work into their conversations. A higher age of marriage, delegates agreed, would allow girls to remain in school for longer, and would also restrain the birth rate by decreasing young women’s reproductive years. In addition to taking up African women’s emphasis on the relationship of education to child betrothals, CSW
189 Ibid, 19-20. 190 1960 Seminar, 22. 197
representatives identified African women’s appeal for legislation on marriage consent.
Delegates likely perceived it as a plea from many of the very women that they intended to help with the Convention, and they drew momentum from this request just before tackling the draft convention and recommendation.191 The Preamble of the draft
Convention urged all states, including those in control of “Non-Self Governing and
Trust Territories,” to abolish “customs, ancient laws and practices” by guaranteeing
“complete freedom” to choose a spouse, eliminating child marriages and betrothals, and establishing registration methods and sufficient penalties for violations.192
The draft Marriage Convention as passed in March 1961 bore CSW members’ declarations on women’s marriage rights in three concise clauses. No marriage could
“be legally entered into without the full and free consent of both parties,” and this consent had to be expressed in person before a “competent authority.” State parties to the Convention must “take legislative action to specify a minimum age of marriage,” under which no marriage could legally be contracted without special dispensation by the competent authority. And finally, all marriages must be registered “in an appropriate official register by the competent authority.” The accompanying
191 UN, CSW: Report of the Fifteenth Session (Geneva: United Nations, 1961), E/CN.6/383, 8. 192 Ibid, 31. 198
recommendation added Commission members’ preference for 15 as a minimum age of marriage.193
Once the Women’s Commission handed the draft convention to the Economic and Social Council, where it was passed with little resistance or fanfare, the document left one political environment and shifted into a vastly different one. Whereas CSW continued to have limited representation from non-aligned states and recently- independent countries, the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee (Third
Committee) of the General Assembly had a much broader membership. Most notably, the draft convention and recommendation would have to contend with the forceful resistance of predominantly Muslim countries. In addition, with the passage of the
Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960, anti-imperial delegations had more fuel for their arguments. As the first human rights treaty since the Declaration, the Marriage Convention became a battleground for arguments about the continuation of empire and what, in the case of colonial territories, qualified as a defense of human rights.
4.2 “Universal” Rights?: Women’s Rights and Religious Rights at Odds
“I thought I knew all about religious issues,” Tillett wrote in 1961, “after spear[- heading] the religious issue for President Kennedy in the South, but I found I had much
193 UN, CSW: Report of the Fifteenth Session, 31-32. 199
to learn about religious customs and the Arabs where women are concerned.”194 She related her troubles to a friend after her experiences trying to pass the Marriage
Convention through the General Assembly’s Third Committee. Alternatively calling those obstructing smooth passage “Arab” and “Moslem,” Tillett reflected Western tendencies to conflate the two identities, connecting their distrust of Muslim marriage practices to a racial Other.195 As the Committee struggled to agree upon the form of the
Marriage Convention, Muslim representatives proved among the most adamant about making changes, arguing for more inclusive articulations of human rights that included religious and cultural rights.
Delegates from predominantly Muslim states defended the practice of proxy marriage, where a legal representative could stand in for one or both parties. For
Western delegates in these debates, Islam took on connotations of savagery familiar to discourses of the civilizing mission, but divorced from explicit imperialism.196 Although beliefs about Muslim men’s “barbarism” were by no means new, decolonization
194 Gladys Avery Tillett to Mary W. Dewson, Nov 22, 1961, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, UN Correspondence, November 1961, SHC. 195 Among white Americans, this had already been fully entrenched during the first half of the twentieth century. See: Khaled A. Beydoun, “Between Muslim and White: The Legal Construction of Arab American Identity,” Annual Survey of American Law 69, no. 1 (2013): 29-76. 196 They demonstrated an earlier version of Saba Mahmood has written on Western, liberal feminism’s complicity in Islamophobia and neoimperialism: Mahmood, Politics of Piety. Mahmood, “Religion, Feminism, and Empire: The New Ambassadors of Islamophobia,” Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 77- 103. 200
required new terminology.197 Modern families necessitated consent in the eyes of
Western delegates, and by questioning what consent could look like, Muslim delegates placed themselves in opposition to this modern concept of family.198
However, disagreements about the conditions in which consent might be recognized brought the concept of modern families and the modernizing narrative of human rights into contact with Islamic family practices. With the opening of Committee meetings in early October, Tillett faced a new set of challenges as debates about universal application of rights sparked heated debate about the end of empire and inclusive interpretations of human rights. Representatives largely agreed upon the substantive elements of the draft Convention—free and full consent for marriage,
197 Much of the literature on aggressive Muslim masculinity comes from colonial India. E.g., Kate Imy, “Queering the Martial Races: Masculinity, Sex and Circumcision in the Twentieth-Century British Indian Army,” Gender & History 27, no. 2 (Aug 2015): 388. Mrinalini Sinha, “Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India,” Gender & History 11, no. 3 (Nov 1999): 445-60. US adoption of British imperial assumptions: Andrew J. Rotter, “Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 11947-1964,” The Journal of American History 81, no. 2 (Sept 1994): 518-542. 198 I argue that Hinduism, although not relieved of guilt in the eyes of Euro-American delegates, largely avoided the same fate because 1) India’s delegates did not engage the question of consent in the same way, and 2) early in India’s life as a sovereign nation, its leaders made efforts to project an image of India as a “secular” state. As a result, even if Hinduism might make allowances for child marriage, for example, a secular state would, theoretically, prevent human rights abuses. Ian Copland, “What’s in a Name? India’s Tryst with Secularism,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 48, no. 2 (Apr 2010): 123-147. Daniel Gorman, “Britain, India, and the United Nations: Colonialism and the Development of International Governance, 1945-1960,” Journal of Global History 9, no. 3 (Nov 2014): 471-490, DOI: 10.1017/S1.7 40022814000217. In the context of family life, the portrayal of multicultural secularism was a critical dimension of defining family: Narendra Subramanian, Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 201
minimum age of marriage, and registration of marriages. Many also spoke against the
“age-old customs and traditional ways of life” that so frequently resulted in marriage without consent.199 For several delegations, development offered solutions to the problem. Zofia Dembinska of Poland, who also transitioned from CSW to the Third
Committee, argued for language in the document that was “in keeping with modern life.”200 Although Western representatives most frequently spoke of modernity, geographic boundaries did not limit agreement about the need to “liberate women from their servitude” by assuring marriage consent and limiting practices that treated women and girls as chattel.201
Proxy marriages quickly became a focal point of the marriage rights debate. Few delegates completely opposed the practice. Even if not enthusiastic about such ceremonies, many representatives recognized that they had a purpose, for those in military service, those who were emigrating, or those who worked outside their home countries.202 Although some delegates feared the impact of including proxy marriages in
199 United Nations, General Assembly Third Committee, Official Records of the Sixteenth Session: 1067th Meeting, 9 Oct 1961, A/C.3/SR.1067, 37. 200 Ibid, 38. 201 Mr. Koumbou of Congo, Brazzaville commented on the need to liberate women: UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Record: 1067th Meeting, 38. Jeanne Martin of Guinea mentioned “chattel”: UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Sixteenth Session: 1063rd Meeting, 4 Oct 1961, A/C.3/SR.1063, 18. 202 The French and Dutch representatives both made reference to these uses for proxy marriage. See respectively: UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Record: 1067th Meeting, 40. Official Record: 1063rd Meeting, 16. 202
the Convention, they did not outright reject them. Favoring a document that spoke in sweeping generalities, Ferreira Aldunate of Uruguay framed the practice as “an institution of an exceptional nature designed to meet exceptional circumstances and should not be sanctioned as a general rule.”203 Delegates sought to guarantee the “full and free consent” of intending spouses, and those from predominantly Muslim states had to make special claims to the preservation of consent in the course of these debates.
Bedia Afnan, Iraq’s representative to the Third Committee since 1950, served as a powerful leader among those who argued for more inclusive concepts of universal rights. Afnan had a reputation as a defender of Islam and inclusiveness in human rights and a critic of colonialism. As the General Assembly had formulated the Covenants on
Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Afnan had ensured the explicit inclusion of women’s rights in both documents.204 In 1950, she spoke powerfully against the inclusion of a clause dictating application of the Covenants to colonial territories. Afnan particularly criticized the French representative, who had taken a relativist approach to human rights to defend the clause, explaining that within
203 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Record: 1067th Meeting, 38. 204 Susan Waltz, “Universal Human Rights: The Contribution of Muslim States,” Human Rights Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2004): 823-24. Alice Paul recalled working with her on doing just this, especially as Afnan was responsible for bringing in states such as Saudi Arabia. She recalled Afnan saying “I don’t believe anybody in this committee could have gotten Saudi Arabia to sponsor this treaty if I hadn’t gone, because he knows that I’m of his world and they welcome me.” Amelia R. Fry, interview with Alice Paul, Conversations with Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment, Suffragists Oral History Project, 1976, University of California Libraries, Calisphere, http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt6f59n89c&query=&brand=calisphere. 203
France’s empire were different “human beings who had convictions and beliefs that must be treated with respect.” Afnan took issue with his claim that attempting to apply the same high standards to all territories would disrespect “peoples still in the lowest stage of development.”205 In response, Afnan “wondered how the degree of evolution of a people could prevent it from enjoying” rights that the Frenchman himself “had admitted to be inherent in human nature.” She went on to argue that culture and tradition “were no obstacle whatever to the universal application of the provisions of the covenant.” She compared the status of women in “countries where the tradition of Islam was allied with political freedom,” such as Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, with those of women in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya, which were still under French rule.206 Afnan turned the Western narrative of women’s rights in Europe and the US on its head and simultaneously asserted self-determination as a human right.
205 UN, GAOR, Fifth Session: 3rd Committee 294th Meeting, 26 Oct 1950, A/C.3/SR.294, 152. 206 UN, GAOR, Fifth Session: 3rd Committee 296th Meeting, 27 Oct 1950, A/C.3/SR.296, 163. 204
Figure 12 Bedia Afnan (Iraq, right) converses with Souad Tabbara (Lebanon, left) in the General Assembly Third Committee, 1966.207
She and other delegates of predominantly Muslim states defended Islamic legal codes and Muslim-based civil law as founded upon the recognition of consent. Mr.
Darai of Iran opened discussion of proxy marriages with an attempt to expand the
Marriage Convention’s inclusiveness. He argued that the practice, “far from being disadvantageous to women, facilitated marriage,” and even recognized consent in a more concrete way than simple oral consent because of the written and authenticated process of registration involving proxies.208 Afnan agreed, declaring that Muslim law
“required the full and free consent of both parties to a marriage,” and proxy marriages under Muslim law therefore adhered to the standards listed in the Marriage Convention.
207 UN Photo, Third Committee Hears Statements on the Report of the High Commissioner for Refugees, Dec 6, 1966, UN News & Media, New York, NY, http://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/177/0177520.html. 208 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records: 1065th Session, 5 Oct 1961, A/C.3/SR.1065, 25. 205
Afnan announced that she supported a version of the Convention that allowed member states to interpret it “in the light of their national traditions.”209 Ahmad Sjaichu of
Indonesia agreed that the draft lacked scope, noting that “the Commission on the Status of Women seemed to have overlooked the differences in the marriage customs and traditions of different parts of the world.”210 As these representatives sought to safeguard elements of Muslim law, they echoed Western-based rights narratives with practices native to Islam.
But in the 1961 conversations about inclusiveness, Muslim delegates were not the only ones to speak up. Nigerian minister Jaja Wachuku’s stood out for his outspoken defense of polygamy. The Pan-Africanist and future Prime Minister earned acclaim for his diplomatic “ability and common sense” from Time and his “double-barreled attack” on South African racism from Jet.211 The Trinity College, London-educated lawyer defended national traditions through an assault on the supposedly “universal” family model that the Convention espoused. He argued that the involvement of the families and communities of African marriages meant that “marriage was more stable and did not end—as was too often the case in the West—in divorce.” Polygamy, in his
209 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Sixteenth Session: 1068th Meeting, 10 Oct 1961, A/C.3/SR.1068, 43. 210 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Sixteenth Session: 1064th Meeting, 4 Oct 1961, A/C.3/SR.1064, 21. 211 “United Nations: Pride of Africa,” Time 78, no. 16 (20 Oct 1961): 32. “Wachuku Attacks Big Powers, South Africa,” Jet, 21.1 (26 Oct 1961): 9. 206
estimation, “strengthened the cohesion of society, permitted a man whose wife was sterile to beget an heir and eliminated the problem of illegitimate children.” Jeanne
Martin Cissé of Guinea delivered a scathing rebuttal in defense of “a decent and happy existence” for women, especially African women. “Polygamy doubtless had its advantages,” she remarked, “but while it was easy for a rich man who could afford ten wives to sing the praises of that system, such was not the case for the wife who was compelled to share her home with a number of others.”212 No doubt drawn by the sensational topic and unusually sharp rhetoric, the press spread the news about the
Wachuku-Martin Cissé bout: “Women’s Wrath Raised: Polygamy Champion Meets
Match at UN,” “Nigerian Loses Polygamy Debate,” “Africans Argue at UN: He Calls
Polygamy Good, She Calls Polygamy Bad.”213
Wachuku’s critiques reached farther than the Marriage Convention, however, questioning why a topic with such cultural variability had taken precedence over broader conversations on human rights, the development of education in Africa, and
ECOSOC’s report. He announced that the Convention, “which failed to take into account the physical, economic, cultural and traditional factors in each country” had not
212 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Sixteenth Session: 1063rd Meeting, 4 Oct 1961, 18- 19. 213 “Women’s Wrath Raised: Polygamy Champion Meets Match at UN,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada), 5 Oct 1961, PQHN: The Globe and Mail. “Nigerian Loses Polygamy Debate,” Afro-American (Baltimore, MD), 14 Oct 1961, PQHN: The Baltimore Afro-American. “Africans Argue at UN: He Calls Polygamy Good, She Calls Polygamy Bad,” New York Herald Tribune (New York: NY), 5 Oct 1961, PQHN: New York Tribune / Herald Tribune. 207
been based on a universal or theoretical ideal, but rather was grounded “solely on the
Western conception of marriage.”214 No response to Wachuku’s question about why marriage consent had superseded other discussions was forthcoming. Among women like Martin Cissé and the original drafters of the Convention, an answer might have addressed marriage rights as a means of enhancing women’s ability to participate in nation-building as citizens and the mothers of future citizens. Although the debate about proxy marriage continued, none stepped forward to make as bold a statement as the
Nigerian representative had.
Tillett and her advisors primarily remembered the session as dominated by
Muslim attempts to “sabotage” the Convention. Tillett’s chief advisor, Rachel Nason of the State Department, wrote that “the Moslem countries” sought to preserve intermediaries in marriage, and she distrusted their claims to preserve free consent.215
During debate, Tillett tried to prevent inclusion of a sub-article on proxy marriage by arguing the Convention in its unaltered form was entirely generalized. Instead of explicitly incorporating individual marriage systems, she claimed, “the important thing was to define minimum standards which would safeguard the human dignity of future
214 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Sixteenth Session: 1063rd Meeting, 4 Oct 1961, 18. 215 Rachel Nason to Walter Kotschnig, Oct 19, 1961, UN Correspondence, October 1961, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 208
partners in marriage.” States that recognized marriage by proxy, she claimed, would not have to remove that institution to meet the standard of free consent.216
Figure 13 Rachel Conrad Nason, advisor to the US Delegation, 1954217
Those who preferred to keep proxy marriage exceptional triumphed. Article 1 allowed this practice where “circumstances are exceptional,” a qualification that left several delegates, especially those from predominantly Muslim states, dissatisfied.
Though representatives compromised on the issue, the vote did not demonstrate a
216 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Sixteenth Session: 1066th Meeting, 6 Oct 1961, 33. 217 “U.N. Sparks Women’s Rights: Don’t Blame the Men!” 17 Jan 1954, The Washington Post, S7, PQHN: The Washington Post. 209
consensus: it passed with 56 votes in favor, none against, and 24 abstaining.218 Without taking the diplomatic risk of standing in the way of passage of a women’s rights treaty, dissenting delegates still voiced their dissatisfaction by refusing to vote. Though General
Assembly records do not list these states, Tillett identifies “all the Moslems,” Burma,
Cambodia, Nepal, and several members of the “doubtful group”—likely meaning those countries who saw other logistical difficulties with the Convention, including Chad and the UK. Nor were those delegates willing to let the matter lie: one of Tillett’s aides wrote that Afnan and “others of the Arab nations” sought a ruling in plenary that the Marriage
Convention “is an ‘important question’ requiring a two-thirds majority,” which would invalidate the passage of Article 1.219 This never happened, however, and the Third
Committee moved on to completing the draft Marriage Convention in 1962. Muslim delegates returned better prepared to defend their religious practices during this session, practices shared by millions of the women that the Marriage Convention was intended to protect. As the debate shifted to the treaty’s implementation, Afnan’s cohort of delegates nevertheless fought for ways to preserve cultural rights.
Afnan’s work at the end of the previous session had secured her position as one of the leaders on the side of inclusivity in human rights. Striving to re-open debate on
218 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Sixteenth Session: 1069th Meeting, 10 Oct 1961, 51. 219 Rachel Nason to Walter Kotschnig, Oct 19, 1961, UN Correspondence, October 1961, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 210
Article 1, she and the representatives of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic rallied around their dissatisfaction with the “exceptional” nature of proxy marriages as included in the Convention. Jamil Baroody of Saudi Arabia claimed that in multiple countries and cultures, proxy marriage was a “frequent and normal occurrence” that “in no way detracted from the freedom of consent.” Bedia Afnan added that “to call a system governing some 5 or 6 hundred million people an exceptional circumstance was derogatory and inaccurate.” Baroody, aware that “difficulty arose from the doubt in the minds of some representatives” that Muslim proxy marriages could respect the bride’s consent, flipped the script: he argued that coercing women who chose this “traditional” approach to marriage to conform to other marriage law codes “would constitute interference in personal and private affairs.”220 Although these delegates did not succeed at formally reopening debate of the first substantive article, and therefore failed to achieve the change they hoped for, Baroody’s argument set the tone for much of the session. He suggested that failing to recognize traditional practices—as long as they adhered to basic standards, of course—could also constitute a restriction of people’s rights and an invasion of their privacy. Muslim delegates arrived in early October ready to fight, determined not to let the final text of the Marriage Convention suit the social and political goals of Western representatives.
220 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Seventeenth Session: 1140th Meeting, 3 Oct 1962, 23-24. 211
Representatives had one more opportunity to defend human rights inclusivity during discussions of state reservations. Reservations were common in United Nations treaties, and states submitted their reservations when they deposited documents confirming their ratification of a treaty. For Muslim representatives, reservations presented a final chance to eliminate the “exceptional” nature of proxy marriages, through individual state declarations. The French delegate, Lefaucheux, sought to protect the text that she had helped to create by preventing reservations to the
Convention, which she argued would make it meaningless.221 Ashraf Ghorbal of the
United Arab Republic responded that, where reservations did not “contradict the essence and principles of the Convention itself,” the International Court of Justice had advised preserving the practice. Bedia Afnan rose to join him, declaring that a clause restricting reservations had no place in a convention “based on the legislations of a very limited number of countries.”222 Agnes Wachuku, sister of the Nigerian foreign minister who had caused such a stir on polygamy, also came to the defense of reservations, which would allow states to adapt a convention that “conformed to the standards of a
European society” and to their domestic contexts. Those who favored reservations did not secure a complete victory. Delegates in the Third Committee decided that they
221 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Seventeenth Session: 1145th Meeting, 9 Oct 1962, 47-48. 222 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Seventeenth Session: 1146th Meeting, 9 Oct 1962, 49-50. 212
would leave out an article on reservations altogether. By removing an explicit statement on the issue, delegates implicitly permitted reservations without potentially jeopardizing the content of the Convention by permitting reservations that were too extensive.223 Although denied explicit recognition within the text itself, delegates of states whose cultural contexts included marriage practices unlike that of Euro-American society could, at the very least, reserve the right to those practices.
4.3 More than One Kind of Consent: Marriage and Self- Determination
During the latter part of the 1962 session, discussions about the Marriage
Convention’s implementation brought anti-colonialism to the Committee floor. The insistence of Sir Douglas Glover of the UK upon applying the Convention to colonial territories (instead of granting independence to those territories) initiated a heated debate about what human rights were, what their “universal application” meant, and their relationship to empire. Postcolonial states used this fresh opportunity to take
Western ideas of universality to task as debate began on the so-called “colonial clause.”
223 A proposal by the Mauritanian delegate to delete the reservations clause passed with 32 votes in favor, 25 against, and 28 states abstaining. There are not, however, consistent geographic divisions regarding these votes. States had many different interpretations of what deletion of the clause would mean, and not all states offered explanations, which makes it difficult to parse the divisions in detail. UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Seventeenth Session: 1147th Meeting, 10 Oct 1962, 53-54. 213
In past conventions, this clause had allowed imperial states to automatically apply the terms of a treaty to their colonial territories without having to consult the wishes of their imperial subjects. The Declaration on the Granting of Independence had made it impossible to pass a colonial clause with ease, however; it put into words changes already taking place that worked to sweep away the idea of empire as a morally desirable system of governance.224 The Declaration did not mark the end of the discussion, but provided a strong position from which Third World states could argue that recognition of universal human rights required recognition of the right of self- determination.225
The Third Committee had long served as a platform within which small states, especially those from the Third World, could defend their interests and pressure states with more influence. As John Humphrey, director of the UN Human Rights Division, explained, the perception that the Committee “is not ostensibly dealing with the great issues that divide the communist and non-communist world” facilitated the dominance
224 Christian Reus-Smit, Individual Rights and the Making of the International System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 151. 225 However, the human rights and democratic connections to self-determination would fade. By 1963, the Declaration “was being interpreted as a narrow measure against European colonialism only, with no application beyond the attainment of national independence.” Dictatorships and the Soviet Union’s activities in Eastern Europe were given a pass, evident particularly in the Declaration on Friendly Relations. Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 56-7. 214
of these countries.226 In exchange, the US and Soviet Union sought assistance from Third
World countries in other committees on issues directly relevant to the Cold War. But as
Tillett and her advisors explained to the State Department, granting the wishes of Third
World states mattered. If the Department wished for the US to remain a “leader” in the
UN, it would have to participate more in the projects that Third World delegates spearheaded. In addition, the passage of the Declaration on the Granting of
Independence the previous year shook up the legal precedents upon which the language of earlier conventions had been based. As all representatives realized, the decolonization of the United Nations was not completed with the document’s passage, but many delegates, from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, used it as fuel to make new claims that adjusted the definition of human rights in the UN.
18 new states gained independence just before the adoption of the Declaration in
December 1960, boosting the number of postcolonial member states in the UN. Nikita
Khruschev proposed the Declaration during a speech to the General Assembly in
September, and it blitzed through the earliest drafting stages. Even though the Soviet delegation had requested it, however, the draft that the ultimately formed the basis of the Declaration emerged late in November 1960, proposed by the Cambodian
226 John Humphrey, A. J. Hobbins, Louisa Piatti, On the Edge of Greatness: The Diaries of John Humphrey, First Director of the United Nations Division of Human Rights, vol. 3 (Montreal: McGill University Libraries, 1994), 8. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 7. 215
representative on behalf of 26 Asian and African countries. Unlike the Soviet-proposed draft, the Afro-Asian document explicitly tied human rights to self-determination and referenced declarations produced at the Bandung Conference.227 Accruing 43 sponsoring states, the Declaration passed nearly unanimously, with only nine abstentions and 89 affirmative votes.228 The powerful language of the Declaration indicted imperialism as an impediment to social, economic, and cultural development and to the UN’s ideal of universal peace, and demanded an end to segregation and discrimination associated with imperialism. In addition, the General Assembly announced its “respect for the principles of equal rights and self-determination of all peoples” and the collective belief of its members in the “inalienable right to complete freedom, the exercise of their sovereignty and the integrity of their national territory.”229 The document explicitly named sovereignty a right, and many delegates would rely upon this claim to support their arguments in debate of the Marriage Convention.
227 Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 50-51. 228 Edward McWhinney, “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples: Procedural History,” Audiovisual Library of International Law, United Nations, 2008, http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/dicc/dicc.html. Although the US was one of those countries that abstained, many members of the delegation were dissatisfied with the US position. Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 55-6. It joined Portugal, Spain, Belgium, South Africa, the UK, and France. 229 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, New York, 14 Dec 1960, General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV), available from United Nations and Decolonization, http://www.un.org/en/decolonization/declaration.shtml. 216
The United Kingdom’s Douglas Glover defended the colonial clause during this session by arguing that that it would “facilitate the universal application of the
Convention” and would “contribute to the growth of self-government” and therefore independence (although he never explained how). Not including such a clause, on the other hand, would “have the effect of virtually precluding [the UK’s] acceptance of the
Convention.” Because their territories, he claimed, already had a great deal of self- governance, the British government could not sign the Convention until every individual colony had granted its consent. Implicit in his statement was the belief that the inhabitants of the British colonial territories could not be trusted to accept the provisions of the treaty as quickly as the metropolitan government could, if they ever accepted the treaty at all. In the meantime, all inhabitants of the empire would be deprived of the protection of the Marriage Convention, Glover claimed. Though no delegates stated full agreement with Glover, those from Australia, Argentina, and
Ethiopia explained that they accepted the reality that colonies still existed for which there needed to be some provision. The Venezuelan delegate added that they would only accept such a clause if it contained provision for consultation with dependent territories.230
230 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Seventeenth Session: 1143rd Meeting, 5 Oct 1962, 40-41. 217
Backlash was swift and decisive, however, especially from postcolonial states who disagreed with Glover’s claim that the rights of subject peoples could be preserved by an empire. As Indonesia’s Imrad Idris and Tanganyika’s Bassilla Renju argued, the best defense of the rights of the people living in British colonial territories would be to grant them independence, so that they could sign the Convention themselves. Many delegates supported them by arguing that the Third Committee should “do nothing that countenanced the perpetuation of the colonial system.” Representatives of Tunisia, Mali,
Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Republic, Ghana, Hungary, and the Ukrainian SSR took the floor to counter Glover’s arguments and make their own in opposition tp the adoption of a colonial clause.231 Glover, attempting to explain that his government sought to hasten the end of colonialism, repeated that many territories
“were virtually self-governing,” and as a result “his Government had no power to direct them in matters of domestic legislation.” Emmanuel Dadzie, Ghana’s delegate, announced that with this claim Glover had confirmed for him that a colonial clause had no use. Furthermore, Dadzie “could not support any move that would lead to a perpetuation of the evil institutions of colonialism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism.”232
Chile’s representative summarized the views of many as he declared that the colonial clause “was no more than a relic of the past” and the whole Chilean delegation “was
231 Ibid, 41-42. 232 Ibid, 42. 218
convinced that the principle of self-determination…was the source of all freedoms and rights of the individual.”233 To infringe upon self-determination, as the UK continued to do, was therefore to infringe upon those freedoms and rights.
When the issue finally reached a vote, anti-imperial arguments soundly defeated the colonial clause: The Committee rejected inclusion of a colonial clause by a vote of 57 to 23, with seven countries abstaining. Those states that voted for a colonial clause were almost universally European and North American. Australia and New Zealand joined them, but so did Ethiopia, the Federation of Malaya, Japan, Liberia, Thailand, and
Turkey. Delegates of these states, feeling pressure to explain themselves, repeated earlier arguments about ensuring that women in territories that remained dependent had access to the protections of the Marriage Convention.234
Although the final document did not fully satisfy all parties, agreement upon a single form that excluded colonialism and recognized human rights more broadly represented no small achievement. At last, after two full sessions of debate, the Third
Committee passed the Marriage Convention onto its final test, the General Assembly floor, by a vote of 80 to none, with only eight countries abstaining.235 Acceptance by the
General Assembly was all but guaranteed—and likely for this reason, the delegation of
233 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Seventeenth Session: 1144th Meeting, 5 Oct 1962, 44-45. 234 Ibid, 45. 235 UN, GA 3rd Committee, Official Records of the Seventeenth Session: 1148th Meeting, 10 Oct 1962, 57. 219
the United Kingdom submitted a fresh resolution on the General Assembly floor that would have added a colonial application clause to the Convention. Representatives of
Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Iraq, Nigeria, the United Arab Republic, and Ghana expressed frustration that the colonial clause had returned to haunt them, and collectively worked to close debate with a vote: 75 votes to 27, with only six abstentions, an even more resounding victory for anticolonial delegates.236
4.4 Conclusion
After years of careful crafting and debate, first in the Commission on the Status of Women and then in the Third Committee, the General Assembly adopted the
Marriage Convention on November 7, 1962.237 Its form as finally adopted largely reflected the work performed in CSW between 1959 and 1961. Referencing article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the document asserted that consent to marriage was a human right. The substantive articles remained largely unchanged, except for an additional paragraph allowing for proxy marriage in exceptional cases.238
Both women’s rights advocates and postcolonial delegates had much to celebrate with the adoption of the Marriage Convention. While it joined the small body of
236 UN, GAOR, Seventeenth Session: 1167th Plenary Meeting, 7 Nov 1962, New York, NY, A/PV.1167, 707-711. 237 92 in favor, none opposing, 7 abstaining. Ibid, 711. 238 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages, New York, 7 Nov 1962, United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/MinimumAgeForMarriage.aspx. 220
documents that identified women’s human rights, the Convention also represented how much had changed in the United Nations in a short time. The Single Convention on
Narcotic Drugs, adopted in 1961, had included a colonial clause, and yet delegates from postcolonial states had succeeded in preventing the addition of such a clause to the
Marriage Convention.
As a document that defined families, however, the Convention continued to present the Western nuclear family as “universal” despite the best efforts of Muslim delegates. The distinctions of “modern” and “backward” remained, at once markers of family forms and of the ability of states to govern families. Despite including both religious and civil authorities as competent to recognize a marriage, marriage registration inherently identified secular states as the only appropriate guarantors of women’s marriage rights. This recognition of state power proved critical to US senators’ interest in the Marriage Convention, and reinforced the relationship between marriage, family forms, and governance.
221
5. “A very heavy responsibility for us”: Cold War Women’s Rights and the Marriage Convention in the US, 1961-64
In 1962, an episode of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Prospects of Mankind” television series aired dedicated specifically to the question “What Status for Women?” Roosevelt sat down with several experts, including Agda Rossel, Sweden’s permanent representative to the United Nations and the former chair of the UN Commission on the
Status of Women, to discuss the work of the new women’s rights body in the US: The
President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). Turning the conversation away from the Commission, however, Roosevelt asked Rossel about “development in other countries in the world and particularly new countries.”
“I think first of all,” Rossell said, “that the new countries are looking towards your country and countries like mine and they want to have guidance.”
Laughing, Roosevelt exclaimed, “That’s a very heavy responsibility for us!”
“Yes, it is,” Rossel agreed. “It’s not just a domestic problem, it’s also an international responsibility.”1 The diplomat represented exactly the kind of working mother that PCSW members, especially former Women’s Bureau Director Esther
Peterson, and others sought to produce in the US. Rossel had attended evening classes
1 “What Status for Women,” directed by Gene Nichols, fl. 1960; interview by Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1962, in Prospects of Mankind with Eleanor Roosevelt (Boston, MA: WGBH Boston, 1962), 59 mins. 222
while working as a hairdresser to earn an advanced degree in social work. A labor union member and later founder, she had worked in Sweden to improve women’s pay and access to jobs and training before her appointment to the UN. In this capacity, she represented a classic US American vision of the self-made man, with adjustments for the successful performance of womanhood: as a working mother, she provided for her children while fulfilling her own intellectual and career goals.2 In her interview with
Roosevelt, Rossel summarized the perspectives of many Western members of women’s organizations, but she also outlined the argument critical to discussions of the Marriage
Convention in the US and the incorporation of women’s rights goals into the policies of the Kennedy administration: women’s rights policies had the power to shape women’s status within the US and globally.
Cold War politics in the US created an impetus to fulfill civil rights and women’s rights in different and intertwining ways. On the status of women—especially white women—representatives of the US could frame the country as a leader in human rights.
In foreign policy and diplomacy, women’s rights could potentially distract from, or at least counterbalance, infringements upon the rights of people of color. The equation of
“women” in women’s rights with white women allowed for a comparatively low-risk, high-reward set of commitments on the part of the Kennedy administration. Both
2 Linder, “Equality for Women,” 15. 223
women’s and civil rights impacted US foreign policy, and were, in turn, changed by perceptions of the US abroad.3 But the whitewashing of women’s rights through the cursory recognition of black women allowed those who supported ratification of the
Marriage Convention to claim US leadership on women’s rights and push for ratification by arguing that US citizens had a responsibility to lift up women elsewhere.
In the midst of the “liberal hour” of the Kennedy administration, the federal government engaged with rights in unprecedented ways, including a new framing of human rights and their significance to the US.4 While Kennedy himself rarely spoke of women’s rights as human rights, his appeals to human dignity, the work of the UN, and his inclusion of women’s rights treaties under the heading of human rights treaties demonstrate his assumption that women’s rights fit under this umbrella. The President’s
Commission on the Status of Women was an important engagement of national policy with women’s human rights, but the ways in which questions of race and gender operated within and through PCSW highlight the ways that these categories informed conversations about the Marriage Convention as a women’s human rights document.
3 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. 4 G. Calvin MacKenzie and Robert Weisbrot speak of “the liberal hour” as a decade, but there is no doubt that Kennedy’s administration stood apart from the policies of the Johnson administration, regardless of the collective similarity of these policies. MacKenzie and Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s(New York: Penguin Books, 2008). 224
For countries mired in “culture” and “ancient practices,” US policymakers and activists placed marriage rights in a symbolically significant place in bringing women’s liberation to the domestic spaces that they imagined non-Western women occupied.
These narratives framed the US as uniquely positioned to instruct non-white people about the attainment of freedom because of its long history as a progressive democracy that pursued complete equality for its citizens. The universalizing abstractions of the
American liberation narrative relied upon colorblindness to create a universal subject.
However, the state-sponsored women’s rights project illustrated by the PCSW and the efforts to ratify the Marriage Convention reveal their reliance upon white women as the default recipients of women’s rights and the educators of brown and black women abroad.5 These narratives framed the US as the only entity that could introduce the concept of freedom to women in the “developing” states, even as women activists built long-lasting friendships with women from around the world who had formulated agendas for women’s rights in their own national contexts. Women’s friendships produced affective networks that enhanced the appearance in their own minds of US influence abroad as internationalist and integrationist, as opposed to imperial. The Marriage Convention would enhance US relationships with Third World
5 Similar to white women’s activism for voting and citizenship rights in the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. Newman, White Women’s Rights. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country, 19- 20. 225
states by lifting women up. But it also privileged Western ways of being, relating, and governing.
According to activists and policymakers, women and girls in the US lived in a free society; women in developing states suffered under the ancient customs and traditional practices that restricted their free will. US white women activists believed that in “developing” states, the evils of cultural practices primarily restricted the lives of girls and women. When the same activists in the US spoke about what women and girls at home needed in relation to marriage, they emphasized the need for family (and occasionally sex) education, morality, and responsibility. Young women in the US needed education to prevent marrying too early and to limit teen pregnancy, but popular debate generally granted them agency over their marital decisions, and therefore responsibility if those marriages failed. The difference rested in US women’s assumptions about who had agency, and why.
Regardless of the Cold War arguments leveraged by many in support of the
Marriage Convention, the greatest obstacle to ratification arose from those who believed the UN had no right to interfere in national affairs. References to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights that had helped to secure the treaty’s passage in the UN worked against it in the US context of heightened tensions surrounding the civil rights movement and the federal government’s intervention. As Gladys Avery Tillett worked
226
with two prominent senators to secure US ratification, combating states’ rights arguments would require more than taking a Cold War stance.
5.1 The PCSW: Women’s Changing Roles in an International Frame
President Kennedy folded Cold War policy goals into the creation of the
President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), incorporating women’s rights and women’s labor into US foreign relations. Through Executive Order 10980, he established the PCSW in December 1961, at the same time as the General Assembly completed deliberation of the Marriage Convention’s substantive articles. Kennedy expressed hopes of addressing women’s human rights as well as the good of the nation, condemning “prejudices and outmoded customs [that] act as barriers to the full realization of women’s basic rights,” while claiming the improvement of women’s family life and security as an important step to “advance the general welfare.” Women’s right to work, the “utilization of skills of all persons,” would enhance the economy and national defense. Referencing postwar attempts to force women back into purely domestic pursuits after World War II, Kennedy tasked the Commission with making
“recommendations for overcoming discrimination in government and private employment” such that women could continue their roles as wives and mothers while
227
contributing to the world around them.6 He harnessed the self-fulfillment narratives of women’s rights activists to a desire for skilled workers—doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and scientists—who could push the US ahead of the Soviet Union in science and education. Kennedy’s PCSW reflected changes in women’s status and roles, but also decades of work by labor feminists.7 The Commission’s purpose and agenda revolved around labor rights, and its members consistently tied women’s labor rights to women’s status more generally, demonstrating the extent to which changes in women’s paid work had transformed women’s lives.
A report issued to Commission members shortly before the body met for the first time profiled the type of woman who could be most elevated by the PCSW’s work while filling the needs of the country. The author, Caroline Ware, historian and consultant for
UNESCO and the Pan-American Union, argued that the majority of women “completed high school, worked for a few years, married, quit work to raise their children, and then were still full of vigor once their children grew up.”8 They represented an untapped well
6 Executive Order 10980 of December 14, 1961, Establishing the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Subseries II.C Work - President's Commission on the Status of Women, News Releases, 1961-1963, Pauli Murray Papers, 1910-1985, Schlesinger Library, Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 7 Here I follow Cobble’s use of the term, as it had by the 1960s entered common parlance among activists for women’s labor rights in particular. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 160-61. 8 The report does not make clear what data pool Ware drew upon to reach her conclusions. President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Women Today: Trends and Issues, by Caroline Ware (Washington, DC: July 1962), Reports of US Presidential Commissions and other Advisory Bodies, HeinOnline, http://heinonline.org/HOL/PL?key=AMFXl, 33. 228
of educated, respectable workers who could aptly fill the Kennedy administration’s needs for white-collar workers. However, to black women like Pauli Murray who read
Ware’s work and its echoes within the report of PCSW, it seemed clear that the “average
American woman” in these conversations was white. Black women’s critiques of the
PCSW’s limited inclusion of issues specific to them raise larger points about the connections of class to gender and race as the PCSW outlined a US policy approach to women’s human rights. The colorblind language of Ware’s report, the Kennedy administration’s assumptions, and the PCSW’s marching orders constructed an image of
“the average American woman” that erased the experiences of the average African
American woman and other women of color. The Kennedy administration thus approached human rights in a way that compartmentalized women’s rights and civil rights as largely distinct.
Cold War conflicts meant that representatives of the United States had work to do repairing the country’s reputation abroad on rights, and as a prominent women’s and human rights body, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women could counter some of the negative images of the US. Despite his campaign promises, Kennedy’s approach to civil rights early in his term left much to be desired. Elected in “the Year of
Africa,” during which 17 African states gained independence, Kennedy and his administration had to mediate disputes between racists in the US and the flurry of new
African ambassadors entering the country. Refused service by restaurants and other
229
establishments that “didn’t serve blacks” while on their way to present the president with their credentials resulted in encounters deeply embarrassing to the ambassadors and to the administration.9 Reluctant to engage more thoroughly with the problem than foreign relations required, the new Office of the Special Protocol Service handled the public relations aspects of the conflicts, as well as sitting down with business owners to convince them that their actions had an impact on US standing abroad.10 The Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and other encounters brought new immediacy to the Cold War even as accelerating decolonization made foreign perceptions of the US “race problem” more important. Roy Wilkins and Arnold
Aaronson of the NAACP brought the issue home to Kennedy in a letter in terms that would arise in PCSW discussions. Citing the US need for labor, they claimed that
“without progress on civil rights, we shall be unable to achieve the full utilization of our manpower resources so indispensable to accelerated economic growth,” and emphasized that US foreign policy interests could not be separated from domestic civil
9 Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 152-53. 10 Paul A. Kramer, “Shades of Sovereignty: Racialized Power, the United States and the World,” Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 3rd Ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 245. 230
rights.11 Kennedy’s lack of action on issues such as discrimination in federal housing programs in his first year perhaps made the women’s rights field more appealing.12
US diplomats could more easily claim leadership on women’s rights issues than on civil rights so frequently blocked by Southern Democrats. Even during Eisenhower’s administration, the US delegation could claim leadership in the UN in several fields of women’s rights, particularly labor. In 1956, Lorena Hahn had co-sponsored a resolution on cottage industries and handicrafts with Pakistan’s Anwar Ahmed to prevent abuses of women’s labor.13 The US maintained interest in handicrafts for the purposes of assisting “economically underdeveloped countries” by raising the standard of living for rural populations.14 In 1957, Hahn could proudly report in the UN that US women could be found in all 446 occupations identified by the 1950 census, although numbers varied depending on the profession. She also expressed US support for collective bargaining and reported on new equal pay legislation endorsed by the AFL-CIO.15 Hahn had particularly piqued the interest of other CSW members in 1959 as she explained US
11 Arnold Aaronson and Roy Wilkins, Confidential Memorandum, 6 Feb 1961, Papers of Theodore C. Sorensen, Subject Files, 1961-64, Box 30, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA. 12 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 155-56. 13 Lorena Hahn, “Report on the 10th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, March 12-29, 1956,” 340.18/3-2956 CS/HHH, General Records of the Department of State, 1955-59, Central Decimal File, Box 1310, NARA II, 2. 14 Hahn, “Report on the 11th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women,” Apr 5, 1957, 340.18/4-557, General Records of the Department of State, 1955-59, Central Decimal File, Box 1310, NARA II, 3. 15 Ibid, 2. 231
retirement provisions which made retirement voluntary and set 65 as the age at which both men and women could receive full benefits.16 Under the new administration, Tillett reclaimed some measure of the leadership the US delegation had lost on women’s status in private law through her commitments to the resolution that accompanied the
Marriage Convention. The new administration gave her and other US representatives to the United Nations a sense of optimism for the US international human rights agenda.
The US had not participated in the creation of a UN human rights treaty since the 1951
Genocide Convention, and through the US delegation’s active work on and signing of the Marriage Convention, Kennedy rejected the terms of Eisenhower’s Bricker agreement. Signing the Convention seemed to demonstrate that changes really were coming, and women’s rights would serve as the vehicle. The PCSW had some roots in foreign policy and served as another means of asserting the US’s international leadership in the field.17
However, it also brought together domestic considerations about the value of women’s human rights and how best—and most conveniently—to address them. The work of the Commission emphasized the equal value of women’s labor in the work force
16 Hahn, “Commission on the Status of Women: Report of the US Representative on the Thirteenth (1959) Session,” General Correspondence of the Women's Bureau, 1948-1963, 1959, Box 108, folder "International Programs 5-1,” NARA II, 3. 17 Cobble, “Labor Feminists and President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of US Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 151-53. 232
and at home, a combination that made PCSW’s project no less important but more palatable in the mainstream.18 For Kennedy, the Commission undoubtedly allowed him to safely engage with women’s rights politics while keeping clear of the controversy surrounding the Equal Rights Amendment. Support for the ERA had sufficiently advanced that the Democratic Party considered putting it on the platform for the 1960 election. At the Democratic National Convention, however, organizations including the
AFL-CIO, the NCNW, the ACLU, and several religious and professional women’s organizations repudiated proposals to add it to the platform.19 Nevertheless, Kennedy recognized that women voters significantly contributed to his victory and he could not dodge the women’s rights question. His election gave women activists hope that the federal government would be more open to change. Esther Peterson, director of the
Women’s Bureau and Assistant Secretary of Labor (the highest-ranked woman in the cabinet), was among the women activists who saw the new administration as a chance to incorporate women’s human rights into federal policy.20 A longtime labor feminist and among those who opposed the ERA, Peterson had pushed for Kennedy to create a
Commission on the Status of Women, and to no small degree she set the focus of its agenda.
18 Cobble, The Other Women ‘s Movement, 161. 19 Jo Freeman, A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 209. 20 Cobble, “Labor Feminists and President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women,” 156. 233
Caroline Ware’s report brought together the domestic value of women’s human rights and the possible resonance of PCSW abroad. Although she rarely mentioned human rights as such, Ware spoke to different categories of women’s rights—legal, political, and civil—and framed them all under the umbrella of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.21 Ware praised womenpower initiatives and saw women with grown children as a massive potential source of labor. She compared the rate of change in the US, which had long been “characterized by individualism, advancing technology, mass education, flexibility of status and social mobility” to countries with
“ancient, once-static societies…where women’s lives have long been defined in terms of the extended family, primitive technology, limited education and rigidity of status.”
Despite acknowledging that change had “finally” arrived in these societies, Ware placed the US in a particularly important position in relation to the Third World.22 Ware’s hopes for US women revolved around “modern” rights recognition and US leadership by demonstrating these values to recently-independent states.
Aware of the eyes of the world upon the US, Ware commented that, in a country as supposedly advanced as the US, “foreign observers” could not comprehend the lack of provisions such as maternity leave “so general in other countries.”23 She outlined a
21 PCSW, Women Today, by Caroline Ware, 24. 22 Ibid, 1. 23 Ibid, 31. 234
narrative of US history that highlighted progress toward recognition of human rights, a narrative which paralleled US foreign policy attempts to woo newly independent states by praising US virtues in opposition to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Ware framed US human rights interests in the context of “the rights of once-dependent colonial peoples” and democracy’s unique potential for eliminating inequality and reinforcing rights.24 Family served as an integral part of this process in Ware’s terms, as family transitioned from a “hierarchal” form to a “partnership or cooperative group whose members share authority and responsibility.”25 Finally, Ware distinguished women’s labor as it operated in the democratic environment of the US from socialist approaches to labor. Although “we may conceive of needs narrowly in terms of material goods, and occupations in terms of our traditional orientation toward ‘work,’” in the new environment of the 1960s, women could “envision a full life for individuals, families, and communities in which energies may fruitfully be dedicated to providing the conditions for civilized living, the enrichment of human society and the creative use of leisure.”26 US women could be workers without being socialist because of the US fixture on fulfillment of the individual, leisure time, and the centrality of family life.
24 Ibid, 23-4. 25 Ibid, 25. 26 Ibid, 44. 235
Under Esther Peterson’s influence, the Commission pursued women’s labor rights. For the roster, Peterson selected other labor feminists including Mary Callahan
(executive board member of the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine
Workers and the AFL-CIO), Marguerite Rawalt (lawyer and member of the National
Federation of Business and Professional Women), and William F. Schnitzler (Secretary-
Treasurer, AFL-CIO). Also selected for the Commission, Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, and Representatives Jessica M. Weis and
Edith Green tied PCSW’s conversations directly into government policy. Eleanor
Roosevelt served as chair and figurehead. Peterson also brought together the best minds from a broad variety of women’s organizations. Margarety Mealey (National Council of
Catholic Women), Viola Hymes (National Council of Jewish Women), and Dr. Cynthia
Wedel (co-chair of the National Council of Churches’ Committee on Co-operation of
Men and Women in Church and Society) brought the interests of religious women’s groups into debate. In addition to their contributions on “home and community” and women’s civil and political rights, Dorothy Height (NCNW president), Dr. Rosa Gragg
(NACW president), and Pauli Murray, lately returned from Ghana, brought black women’s perspectives and goals to PCSW even as they spoke about housing rights and, in Murray’s case, argued in support of the ERA.27 Although all of these groups had
27 “Statement by the President on the Establishment of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women,” Office of the White House Press Secretary, Dec 14, 1961, Pauli Murray Papers, 1910- 236
individual agendas, they all belonged to the Women’s Bureau coalition and collaborated on projects. Peterson had collected a cohort of representatives who were already well- acquainted with each other, their interests, and their strategies, and she knew that she could trust their work.
Figure 14 President Kennedy meets with members of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in the Oval Office. From left: William F. Schnitzler (Secretary- Treasurer, AFL-CIO), Eleanor Roosevelt (Chair, PCSW), John W. Macy, Jr. (Chair, Civil Service Commission), Representative Edith Green (D-OR), President Kennedy, Richard A. Lester (Vice-Chair, PCSW), Esther Peterson (Assistant Secretary of Labor).28
1985, Subseries II.C Work - President's Commission on the Status of Women, News Releases, 1961-1963, 3-4. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 161. 28 Abbie Rowe, President John F. Kennedy Meets with President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Feb 12, 1962, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA, 237
Eleanor Roosevelt’s TV program, Prospects of Mankind, expanded PCSW outside the domestic context into a foreign policy statement. For the final show in the series, which aired in June 1962, President Kennedy joined Roosevelt to discuss “What Status for Women?”, highlighting the significance of the Women’s Commission and the importance of women’s labor. Roosevelt followed up her interview with the president with a small round-table discussion featuring Secretary of Labor Goldberg, President
Thomas Mendenhall of Smith College, Soviet-born sociologist Mirra Komarovsky, and
Agda Rossel. As Sweden’s Permanent Representative to the UN, and former chair of the
UN Women’s Commission, Rossel “has been in the forefront of the UN’s investigation into the status of women around the world.”29 She worked, as well, with the YWCA and the World Council of Churches’ Department on the Cooperation of Men and Women in
Church and Society (which also sanctioned and participated in PCSW), and she composed a report on “Freedom of Work With Special Reference to Working Women with Family Responsibilities.”30 Her interests therefore dovetailed perfectly with
https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHP/1962/Month%2002/Day%2012/JFKWHP-1962-02- 12-A. 29 Memorandum, 1962, “For Your Information,” Information Office, Pauli Murray Papers, 1910- 1985, Subseries II.C Work - President's Commission on the Status of Women, News Releases, 1961-1963. 30 “Freedom of Work with Special Reference to Working Women with Family Responsibilities” by World's Young Women's Christian Association; in Report of the Consultation on the Christian Approach to Women's Questions: Freedom of Marriage, Freedom of Work, Held at the John Knox House, Geneva, Switzerland, March 27-30, 1958 (Geneva, Geneva Canton: World Council of Churches, 1958), 19-20. 238
PCSW’s primary interests. Although Roosevelt largely asked Rossel to speak about the changes taking place in women’s status in Sweden, the visitor provided an important opportunity to discuss possible provisions for working women in the US. The US and
Sweden had similar proportions of men and women in the work force, but their countries also shared a sense of leadership in women’s rights.
Komarovsky, a professor at Barnard College and Columbia, was a longtime resident of the US but still spoke with a distinctive Russian accent. Her brilliance in the sociology of gender and her work on women and family—her book Blue Collar Marriage was based on interviews with working class women conducted in 1958 and 1959— provided excellent reasons for her participation. It is hard to deny, however, that
Komarovsky’s presence allowed the program to expand its internationalist appearance.
Komarovsky commented on the wide variance in gendered labor in many countries as a critique of those who sought to limit the fields of women’s work in the US. In addition to
Rossel’s comments on Western states’ responsibility to serve as an example, therefore,
“What Status for Women?” incorporated arguments and policies from other states into the argument for women’s labor rights. Many of their meetings took place in late 1962, and they probably paid attention to the progress of the General Assembly’s debates on the Marriage Convention. Although members of the President’s Commission on the
Status of Women came to their work from a US context, they also remained aware of the broader significance their work could potentially have for women’s human rights.
239
Through the Commission’s focus on labor rights, its members addressed what many still considered to be women’s primary “career”—homemaking. Their conversations on this topic demonstrate how they viewed marriage and family as the
Marriage Convention was in its final stages in the United Nations. PCSW dealt with the delicate balance between home and career on which women’s lives so often pivoted.
Esther Peterson had long promoted recognition of homemaking as labor, and she and others continued to press for homemaking as a legitimate path for women.31
Commission members identified a trend that had been developing since the end of
World War II: US citizens were marrying younger, and more citizens were marrying very young. The document stated that nearly 250 thousand boys and young men between 14 and 19 who were married, and three times as many girls and young women in this age group who “have begun homemaking.”32 In truth, what members identified was a change in marriage rates among urban white teens. Rates of teenage marriage among rural populations and people of color remained steady, it was simply that the problem had become more visible because of the surge in marriage among white, middle-class teens, especially white girls.33 As they tried to understand the problem of
31 Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 154. 32 President’s Commission on the Status of Women, American Women: Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, PR 35.8:W 84/AM 3 (Washington, DC: 1963), iii, HeinOnline women and the law, reports of US presidential commissions and other advisory bodies, http://heinonline.org/HOL/PL?key=FCTOy. 33 Nicholas L. Syrett, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 229. 240
teenage marriage, Commission members highlighted psychological stressors. In adolescence, girls had to choose between conflicting images of womanhood to pursue, whether to pursue homemaking, paid work, or both, and, if seeking a job, which career path appealed to them. For adolescent girls, PCSW members feared that the stress of these decisions could lead, among other things, to sexual promiscuity.34
As a result, family planning and education comprised a cornerstone of the plan
Kennedy and women leaders made for improving women’s lives. The woman PCSW imagined as average finished high school, went to college and/or worked for a few years, left the workforce to raise their children, and re-entered it in their 30s and 40s.
With fewer children, women had more time after the children had grown to seek fulfillment in work outside their homes. Through family planning, Commission members sought to create a strong family life that would enable children to “develop their full potential to become mature adults and responsible citizens.” Courses on
Family Life and Responsibility represented an essential step in the process. Some schools offered such courses, but they rarely brought it together with family planning and discussions of birth control.35 As a result, PCSW members advocated education—
34 Office of the Assistant Secretary for Legislation, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, “’The Adolescent Girl’: Prepared for the Committee on Home and Community, President’s Commission on the Status of Women” (Washington, DC: Apr 1963), Pauli Murray Papers, US President's Commission on the Status of Women, Publicity, Committee on Home and Community, Box 4, folder 24. 35 Committee on Education, “A Statement on Family Planning,” President’s Commission on the Status of Women (Washington, DC: Feb 6, 1963), Pauli Murray Papers, US President's 241
both in general and specifically related to family life—as “the highest priority item on the American agenda.”36 Adolescent girls in particular needed to learn responsible parenting, which included internalizing an ideal image of small, middle-class family life and the tools to make decisions that would allow them to imitate this ideal.
The question of working wives and mothers paralleled these conversations of homemaking, and in this context PCSW members had to contemplate the problem of women-headed households. Members, given their backgrounds, unsurprisingly saw women’s work outside their own homes as important, and made claims to women’s paid work as an extension of domestic responsibilities. They recognized women breadwinners as real heads of families and not as pathological. Although they did not represent an ideal situation, women breadwinners and heads of households were a reality. The Committee on Home and Community identified 8 million women working full-time with children under the age of 18, one third of whose children were under the age of six.37 On the subject of single black mothers, however, the Commission could not avoid addressing the question of “matriarchy” during a special consultation, organized by Dorothy Height, on the “Problems of Negro Women” in April 1963. Through it, black
Commission on the Status of Women, Publicity, Committee on Home and Community, Box 6, folder 39, 1. 36 PCSW, American Women, 7. 37 The President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Committee on Home and Community, “Report of the Home and Community” (Washington, DC: July 1963), Pauli Murray Papers, US President's Commission on the Status of Women, Publicity, Committee on Home and Community, Box 4, folder 26, 12. 242
women on the Commission brought the consequences of racism into PCSW’s discussions and they incorporated issues specific to black women throughout the
Commission’s final report. They simultaneously claimed that their problems were women’s problems and that, as Height argued, the “problems of the Negro woman cannot be dismissed by saying ‘Well, all women have those problems.’”38 Tackling discrimination in housing, education, employment, and interpersonal relationships, the assembled consultants also spoke on the impact discrimination had on “Negro Family
Patterns,” especially addressing accusations of “matriarchy.”
The input of African American experts demonstrated how different the average black woman’s experiences were from the “typical” woman outlined in other PCSW discussions. For black women, even if they had a male partner, the women usually had better luck finding work, and therefore became the primary breadwinners through economic necessity.39 Dr. Jeanne L. Noble, vice-chair of the NCNW and one of the first
African American women to achieve tenure at NYU, delivered a talk demonstrating that black women frequently pursued education based on vocational opportunity.40 “The
38 President’s Commission on the Status of Women, “Problems of Negro Women: Apr 15, 1963,” in Report on Four Consultations (Washington, DC: Oct 1963), HeinOnline, US Presidential Library, heinonline.org/HOL/PL?key=BETVg, 35. Participants hailed from the Urban League, Howard University, Fisk University, the Women’s Bureau, UNESCO, and the AFL-CIO’s Civil Rights Department. Caroline Ware and Esther Peterson also attended. Ibid, 37-38. 39 Ibid, 30. 40 “Jeanne L. Noble, 76, Pioneer in Education,” New York Times, Nov 2, 2002, nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/02/nyregion/jeanne-l-noble-76-pioneer-in-education.html, accessed Jan 24, 2018. 243
progress of the Negro woman—her personal advancement and that of the whole family—is inextricably bound to the improvement of opportunities for the Negro male,” she explained. Women frequently chose not to pursue better jobs or education because it would make their romantic partners feel inferior. Statistics showed that more black women had attended college or attained college degrees than black men, and black women frequently married men who had less education than they.41 Consultants argued that this situation interfered with the development of children. Mothers who were forced to work full-time could not care properly for their children, which was a major cause of juvenile delinquency. Therefore, PCSW concluded from the session, “Forging stronger family relationships is of particular concern to the Negro woman if the pressures now on her are to be eased.”42
Although PCSW’s final report, American Women, explicitly addressed issues important to black women, black women themselves felt it had not gone far enough. The
Commission’s report included explicit statements on racism as its members decried
“discrimination based on color” as “morally wrong and a source of national weakness.”
Members particularly pointed to black women, on whom “such discrimination currently places an oppressive duel burden” of supporting their families financially and raising
41 “Problems of Negro Women,” 30. 42 Ibid, 31. 244
children.43 Black women faced “too large a share of the family responsibility” because of racial discrimination in employment. 44
Height initially praised the Commission’s approach and brought some of its work to the attention of NCNW members at the national conference. The body dealt “in a fresh way with the whole concept of equality; it was thinking less of women as a cause and more of the extent to which women, as part of the whole society, are free to participate as persons and take their place as they themselves choose in the home, in the community, and in the wider society.”45 At NCNW’s 1963 conference, the release of
American Women gave the organization’s members a great deal to discuss and PCSW chair Margaret Hickey presented a keynote based on it.46 But presentations from Noble and Murray indicate that black women still had a great deal to discuss, and frustrations to address.
Noble critiqued American Women and PCSW for not giving black women enough space. “A paragraph here and a statement there,” she said, “does not adequately present
43 American Women, 4. 44 The report also mentioned Latina and native women, but only briefly: speaking about the discrimination black women experience, the report explained that “Hundreds of thousands of other women face somewhat similar situations: American Indians, for instance; and Spanish- Americans, many of whom live in urban centers but are new to urban life and burdened by language problems.” American Women, 4. 45 “Problems of Negro Women,” 29. 46 The annual convention happened just after the report’s release, and its theme, “The Negro Woman in the Emancipation Century” dovetailed with PCSW’s attention to the status of women. Dorothy Height to Convention Planning Committee, Oct 9, 1963, NCNW, NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, folder 166, Correspondence, 1963. 245
a picture of the Negro woman, not in the year 1963.” In addition, she was deeply critical of the “matriarchy conspiracy theorists” (although she named no names) in PCSW and the civil rights movement who claimed that women-headed households caused juvenile delinquency, black boys’ drop-out rates, black men’s unemployment rates, and drug addiction.47 Noble went on to critique the “predominant” social pattern established in
PCSW meetings, “The newly evolving pattern of white girls retiring from work until the last child reaches nursery school and re-entering around age 30+ doesn’t fit the sociological cloth of American Negro women.” Black women, even those who attended college, worked outside their homes for most of their lives.48 Although Noble also took to task men who suggested “that Negro girls rest awhile and let Negro males assert their newly-won freedom,” she primarily questioned PCSW’s assumptions of how an average family—and average woman—operated.49
Pauli Murray addressed the latter point more thoroughly as she spoke on Jim and Jane Crow, but she similarly played up the distinction between the experiences of black and white women. She declared that the March on Washington had been “bitterly humiliating for Negro women” as men granted them “little more than token recognition
47 Dr. Jeanne L. Noble, “The Negro Woman College Graduate,” NCNW Annual Convention, Nov 14, 1963, Washington, DC, 1-2, NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, folder 167, Minutes, 1963. 48 Ibid, 3. 49 Ibid, 7. 246
in the historic March.”50 But she also drew upon the most recent census to demonstrate that the reality of black women’s lives was not reflected in American Women: “a Negro woman…has a harder time finding a mate, remains single more often, bears more children, is in the labor market longer, has less education, earns less, is widowed earlier and carries a heavier economic burden as a family head than her white sister.”51 The combined critique, that black women’s experiences had still not been adequately represented in PCSW and that the civil rights movement sought to enforce gender-based power differences, made for a complex review of black women’s relationship with rights discourses in the early 1960s.
Women’s family rights held a prominent place on the women’s rights agenda that PCSW members proposed, but the body’s report focused on the experiences of white women. In their report American Women Commission members claimed that “few
20th-century changes have been more striking than those in the composition of American households,” but they still emphasized the pattern of life for middle-class white women.52 Esther Peterson spoke optimistically at a flurry of women’s conventions during and after PCSW’s discussions. At the YWCA’s 1964 convention, she declared that
50 Pauli Murray, “The Negro Woman and the Quest for Equality,” NCNW Annual Convention, Nov 14, 1963, Statler Hilton Hotel, Washington, DC, 5 NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, folder 175, Speeches, 1964. 51 Ibid, 11. Brittney C. Cooper has also made a powerful argument about Pauli Murray’s critiques of respectability politics and gender. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2017), 87-113. 52 PCSW, American Women, 18. 247
“it is a great time to be a woman,” and said she felt “windows opening, doors opening” for women.53 The changes in family life for women that PCSWS identified revolved around women’s right—even duty—to work, but the Commission members also framed working outside the home as a matter of personal fulfillment.
Cold War tensions, and Kennedy’s early inaction on civil rights issues made women’s rights an important field in which the US needed to excel in a way that would be visible to foreign audiences, and the President’s Commission on the Status of Women aptly filled this role. Kennedy’s executive order and Caroline Ware’s report both spoke in terms often used in the United Nations. Women’s human rights, anticolonialism, and principles such as equal pay and the plight of older women workers had been on the agenda of the UNCSW for years. As Tillett moved forward with her attempts to secure ratification for the Marriage Convention, she did so with an awareness of these conversations about women’s rights in the US and their use for the country in foreign affairs.
5.2 Deals with the Devil: Women’s Rights and Segregationist Politics
Maneuvering the Marriage Convention into a beneficial position with the Senate required Gladys Avery Tillett to engage the most difficult voting bloc, Southern
53 “Proceedings: Twenty-Third National Convention, Apr 20-25, 1964,” YWCA (Cleveland, OH: 1964), 222, YWCA-USA, Record Group 4. National Conventions and Conferences, Series III. Conventions, box 282, folder 3-8, “23rd Convention Typed Proceedings,” SSC. 248
Democrats, on their territory. Through the issue of marriage, the Marriage Convention’s central problem in the US context became the ways in which it would potentially alter states’ ability to exert racialized power. In the UN Commission on the Status of Women, citing the UDHR had served to appeal to a standard of international human rights, but the document’s declarations of racial equality, in the US context, threatened state- sponsored white supremacy. Tillett would convince the State Department to allow the
United States delegation to sign the Convention. Although a signature was far more than the State Department had allowed on any human rights treaties for over a decade, it did not create a legal obligation but served as a preliminary endorsement. Ratification would be the next step but ratifying the Marriage Convention would make some of the most dangerous clauses of the Universal Declaration legally binding. Tillett therefore drew instead upon the strategy that had been successful at convincing policymakers in the State Department that she should vote in the affirmative on the marriage recommendation: she framed women’s rights as a strategic battle for Cold War supremacy. Even before the General Assembly adopted the Marriage Convention in
November 1962, Tillett leapt into action, mobilizing Senators, legal advisors, and members of the administration as she began to work toward ratification of the
Convention.
As she wrote letters to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
(FRC), she emphasized that abstaining on the Convention had placed the US in the
249
uncomfortable position of appearing “to be less concerned where human rights are involved than the USSR and others of the Soviet bloc,” who had voted in favor of it.54
However, the US vote for the Recommendation on marriage consent—the secondary, non-binding document that specified 15 as a minimum age of marriage—“went far to offset” abstention on the Convention. More importantly, it contributed to containment abroad as it “greatly reassured the members present from developing countries,” and repositioned the US as a leader on women’s rights issues.55
Early in the process of acquiring allies, Tillett worked toward the approval of
Southern Democrats as a bloc by bringing two on board. She contacted a childhood friend, Samuel Ervin (D-NC), and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee who favored US participation in the UN, John Sparkman (D-AL). Despite the group’s shared membership in the Democratic Party, the trio held fundamentally different ideas about rights—the two conservative men championed states’ rights and the rights of the individual, but took issue with many expressions of women’s rights and outright denounced civil rights. They both, for example, signed the “Southern Manifesto” stating their disagreement with the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling.56
54 Tillett sent identical copies of this letter to every member of the Committee. See for example: Gladys Avery Tillett to Hubert H. Humphrey, 9 June 1961, Folder 846, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 55 Tillett to Harlan Cleveland, 31 Mar 1961, Folder 843, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 56 Anthony Badger, “The South Confronts the Court: The Southern Manifesto of 1956,” Journal of Policy History 20, no. 1 (2008): 126-142. 250
Sparkman also collaborated on Alabama’s Civil War centennial celebration romanticizing the Confederacy.57 The differences between Tillett’s pursuit of progressivism and the Senators’ strident conservatism raise the question: how did these three find common ground in the Marriage Convention?
Tillett, Ervin and Sparkman all considered themselves liberals, committed to the
“dignity of men and women.”58 But where, for Tillett, this translated as a “belief in the basic concept of trust on which marriages, religions, and governments must be built in order to endure,” Ervin’s and Sparkman’s legal backgrounds grounded their liberalism in a conservative interpretation of the US Constitution—and a more rigid commitment to white supremacy.59 Titling his autobiography Preserving the Constitution, Ervin committed himself wholesale to the preservation of states’ rights and, with them, Jim
Crow legislation. The Supreme Court, in his estimation, committed a grave outrage with the Brown v. Board ruling by attempting to foist national restrictions upon something within state jurisdiction. Ervin’s complaints against the civil rights laws primarily found
57 Robert J. Cook, “Red Termites and Rebel Yells: The Civil War Centennial in Strife-Torn Alabama, 1961-1965,” The Alabama Review 64, no. 2 (Apr 2011): 148. 58 Paul R. Clancy, Just A Country Lawyer: A Biography of Senator Sam Ervin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1974), vii. Glenn Feldman, “Southern Disillusionment with the Democratic Party: Cultural Conformity and ‘the Great Melding’ of Racial and Economic Conservatism in Alabama during World War II,” Journal of American Studies 43, no. 2 (Aug 2009): 199-230. 59 Jeane Kenworthy, “Tillett bio page 6,” Charlotte's Woman of the Year, North Carolina Federation of Business and Professional Women's Club, Inc., WBT/WBTV Records, MS 324, Box 2 Folder 11, J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC-Charlotte, accessed September 20, 2013, http://charlottewoman.omeka.net/items/show/172. Clancy, Just A Country Lawyer, 5. 251
root in their violation of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and “the fundamental principle that the federal government has no powers whatever except those expressly or impliedly delegated to it by the Constitution.”60 Sparkman was also an established
Democrat. He had been Adlai Stevenson’s Vice-Presidential nominee in the 1952 election, and was a respected Southern Democratic Senator, serving since his election in
1946.61 Ervin and Sparkman belonged to the school of southern white liberalism that recognized that there was a “race issue” in the South, but that such an issue could not be solved with government intervention. Both senators frequently claimed that the government should not force civil rights onto the country from above but allow change to happen naturally from below: “folkways” would have more success than
“stateways.”62
At the same time, neither Senator took a purely isolationist approach to foreign policy. Both men saw the importance of the UN as a peace-keeping organization, despite disagreeing with some of its decisions. Ervin regularly defended the UN to constituents
60 Samuel Ervin, Preserving the Constitution, 151. 61 “John Sparkman, 85, Ex-Senator, Dies,” New York Times, Nov 17, 1985, nytimes.com, www.nytimes.com/1985/11/17/John-Sparkman-85-ex-senator-dies.html, accessed Jan 30, 2018. 62 David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, “Another "Great Migration": From Region to Race in Southern Liberalism, 1938-1945,” Southern Cultures, 3, no. 4 (1997): 37-62, Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.1997.0065. Steven P. Miller, “Whither Southern Liberalism in the Post- Civil Rights Era? The Southern Regional Council and its Peers, 1965-1972,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 90, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 547-568, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40584976. Linda C. McClain, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ‘Legislating Morality’: On Conscience, Prejudice, and Whether ‘Stateways’ Can Change ‘Folkways,’” Boston University Law Review, 95, no. 3 (May 2015): 891-927, ProQuest, document ID 1691409816. 252
who wrote to him. Although critical of some of the UN’s actions, “I nevertheless believe that this organization fulfills a useful function in that it constitutes a forum in which world issues can be discussed.”63 Some constituents gave Ervin opportunities to agree with them and explain that he would “continue to support” its “efforts to achieve peace throughout the world.”64 Sparkman largely agreed with Ervin, supporting its peacekeeping mission and its ability to serve as a platform of international debate. He participated directly in the work of the UN in 1950 as a US representative to the General
Assembly, and he spoke in favor of the organization at a meeting on international law.65
For Southern Democratic senators in general, civil rights activists presented a dire threat as they seemed to pursue interracial sex and reproduction. In the logic of white supremacy, “social equality” would inevitably lead to interracial marriage, sex, and reproduction as people of different races had daily opportunities to mingle and associate.66 Ervin was among those who saw social equality as the “demand that all governmental powers be diverted from their proper functions to force the involuntary
63 Samuel J. Ervin, Jr. To Mr. And Mrs. Albert Boyle, Jr., Jan 30, 1962, Senate Records, Legislative 1961, Samuel J. Ervin Papers, SHC. SJE to Mrs. M. R. Banner, Aug 16, 1961. SJE to Mrs. E. W. Hartsoak, Aug 22, 1961. SJE to Mrs. W.P. Dorsey, Apr 4, 1961. Samuel J. Ervin Papers, SHC. 64 SJE to Mrs. J. U. Gibbs, Apr 10, 1961. SJE to Mrs. Melba Y. Simmons, Apr 10, 1961. 65 Sparkman, “The United Nations and the Future,” in Proceedings of the American Society of International Law at Its Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, Apr 28-30, 1955, 136-145, HeinOnline, http://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/asilp49&i=164 (accessed Jan 30, 2018). 66 McClain, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ‘Legislating Morality.’” 253
mixing of races.”67 Shaken on the one hand by what he saw as government attempts to force unnatural interracial interactions, Ervin also thought that the Equal Rights
Amendment was a threat that would “destroy the social fabric of America.”68 He believed in fundamental differences between men and women, in their bodies and their social roles, and feared that the ERA would upend natural gender differences and roles.
Men’s and women’s complementary parenting roles and responsibilities were “vital to the development and advancement of the human race.69 If passed, he claimed he ERA would bring about “unisex bathrooms, male and female prisoners sharing jail cells,” and
“the end of statutory rape protection for young girls.”70 White supremacy built its power upon discourses of gender as well as race, in which the proper functioning of gender roles and family life was equivalent to the smooth function of racial hierarchy; when one element broke down, the other was sure to follow.71 With threats to the natural race and gender order looming, as Kennedy endorsed the ERA during his campaign and
Congress passed voting rights protections in 1960 over Southern Democratic opposition, the Marriage Convention’s focus on heterosexual monogamy likely seemed to Ervin and
67 Karl E. Campbell, Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007), 135. 68 Ibid, 136, 180. 69 Ervin, Preserving the Constitution, 249. 70 Campbell, Senator Sam Ervin, 180. 71 Kari Frederickson, “’As a Man, I am Interested in States’ Rights’: Gender, Race, and the Family in the Dixiecrat Party, 1948-1950,” in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, edited by Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 260-274. 254
Sparkman like a far better reason to exert federal power, as long as it was properly constrained.
The Convention’s preamble, however, raised questions about its possible interference in US racial policies at the federal and state levels. Citing article 16 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the document declared that all men and women had the right to marry and found a family “without any limitation due to race, nationality, or religion.”72 Tillett already tread on unsteady ground as she pushed for ratification of a United Nations treaty. Ervin and Sparkman, however, read this clause as a direct challenge to state anti-miscegenation laws, and they primarily worked with
Tillett to block its effects.
Tillett conceded the need to address Southern Democrats’ unwillingness to compromise Jim Crow and their need, as a result, to preserve the integrity of independent state laws. In July 1961, Tillett wrote to Sparkman in hopes of taking a stronger stance on the Convention “without impairing the right of the individual states.”73 She believed that the solution lay in an amendment to an ECOSOC document proposed by Australia and India, which were also federal states. Although never used,
Tillett suggested that the draft held potential for US use. The US delegation, she
72 United Nations, Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age of Marriage, and Registration of Marriages, 7 Nov 1962, Preamble. See also: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 Dec. 1948, Article 16.1. 73 Gladys Avery Tillett to John J. Sparkman, July 26, 1961, Folder 847, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 255
suggested, could frame their reservation to the Convention with the wording of the
Australia-India amendment: “This Covenant shall not operate so as to bring within the jurisdiction of the Federal State making such declaration any of the matters referred to in this Covenant, which, independently of the Covenant, would not be within the jurisdiction of the Federal authority.”74 Utilizing this clause as a reservation, Tillett proposed, might help forestall concerns by critics within the US that the federal government was making a power grab in the area of family law.
When Tillett received confirmation in August that she would be permitted to vote on the draft Marriage Convention in the General Assembly that fall, she sought broader support for the treaty in the Senate. Tillett encouraged allies such as Senator
Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) not to speak of ratification yet, afraid that it might doom their efforts before the group could secure wider support.75 At the same time, however, they had already begun drafting a set of “understandings” that the US delegation could declare in General Assembly discussion and append to its ratification of the Marriage
Convention. Ervin, with his reputation as a former judge and champion of states’ rights, drafted the clauses:
74 Ibid. It is unclear from which covenant this is excerpted. Tillett vaguely describes it as being “under discussion in [ECOSOC] a few years ago.” 75 Gladys Avery Tillett to Hubert H. Humphrey, 5 August 1961, Folder 848, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 256
“In recommending the ratification of this Convention, the Senate understands that each State of the U.S. has laws regulating Marriage to meet the standards set out in the Convention.” “The Senate construes this Convention to be a recognition and not an impairment of the Constitutional Rights of State to regulate marriages according to their respective borders.”76
These “understandings” formed the basis of the trio’s response to anxieties about the preservation of states’ rights, but for Ervin and Sparkman, they held additional power. The women who drafted the Convention created the article on marriage registration to enforce a means of only legitimating marriages that recognized women’s consent and preventing marriages that did not. Although the final version of the treaty did not specify “competent authorities” as secular, Ervin and Sparkman interpreted the clause as a declaration of state power to legitimate or deny individual marriages on its terms. The Marriage Convention, therefore, could serve to shore up rather than challenge state anti-miscegenation laws if the US ratified it.
The General Assembly’s approval in November 1962 of the preamble and substantive articles, including the declaration about a right to marry “without any limitation due to race,” brought new urgency to the task to reframe the Convention’s possible impact on Jim Crow laws. As Tillett and the Senators sought fresh recommendations from legal advisors, Martin van Heuven from the State Department’s
UN Affairs section made clear that, among senators, “exception will be taken to the
76 Tillett to Brooks Hays, 5 August 1961, Folder 848, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 257
Convention on the ground that the implication of this clause is that it would affect the situation in various States which still have miscegenation statues.” His recommendations for assuring the FRC reflect the senators’ distrust of the UN, and the rhetorical acrobatics the Convention proponents would have to perform as a result. As
Ervin and Sparkman sought allies in the FRC, he advised, they should emphasize that the preamble was not legally binding, the UDHR from which the clause had been derived contained a number of limiting clauses, and that Ervin’s “understandings” would make it “absolutely clear” that nothing in the Convention would impact states’ rights.77 The advisor remained concerned, however, about the nature of the Marriage
Convention as a nationally-binding treaty. Upon becoming a party to the treaty, the states would lose “any constitutional rights in the matter,” potentially rendering the
“understanding” meaningless.
Even more dramatically, ratification of the Convention could create a precedent for other human rights treaties to which the US might consider becoming a party. The prospect excited Tillett, who hoped for precisely this outcome, but the matter was considerably more complicated for the administration. As the advisor explained, the
United States could acknowledge that UN conventions on human rights would not restrict states’ rights, in which case “our adherence to human rights treaties may become
77 Memorandum by Marten H.A. van Heuven, Nov 1962, Folder 857, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC, 2. 258
no more than a sham;” or its representatives could insist upon federal adherence to these treaties, including state adherence, in which case “it will be highly doubtful if the advice and consent of the Senate can be obtained.”78
Nevertheless, Sparkman and Ervin pressed forward, convinced that they could maintain Jim Crow without necessarily compromising Cold War foreign policy goals.
The trio met again in November 1962, even as delegates to the General Assembly neared completion of the Convention. Noting that the family, “including marriage practice, is a particularly sensitive field,” the group had to navigate the continuing problem of domestic dissatisfaction with US involvement in the UN. They shared concerns about
“’distortions’ which might affect popular opinion,” and feared that opponents of the UN would see the Marriage Convention as an opportunity to declare that “The UN is taking over family life!”79 Although Tillett, Ervin, and Sparkman displayed anxiety about domestic dissatisfaction with the UN, these fears also reflected the difficult position that the Kennedy administration was in, which risked becoming even weaker if it presented the ratification of the Marriage Convention in the wrong way. The group called upon
Article 29 of the UDHR to counteract Article 16 in the preamble. Speaking about the exercise of individual rights and freedoms, they seized upon a paragraph which
78 Ibid, 3-4. See also a pre-conversation memo written in November, which addresses some of these issues: Rachel Nason, Memorandum to Mr. Cleveland and Mr. Rossow, 15 Nov 1962, Folder 857 in the Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 79 Rachel Nason, Memorandum of Conversation, 16 Nov 1962, Folder 857 in the Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC, 1. 259
acknowledged the need for “limitations, inter alia, for ‘the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.’”80 In its original context, this article limited a person’s exercise of freedom to that which would not interfere with the general good of the society in which they participated. Although Ervin and
Sparkman spearheaded the preservation of “morality, public order, and general welfare,” Tillett cannot be absolved. Whether or not she shared their opinions, Tillett allowed her allies to pursue these avenues in hopes of ratifying the Convention. Though she favored civil rights, Tillett was willing to make a deal that might have reinforced legal aspects of anti-miscegenation law.
Tillett, Ervin, and Sparkman proved that pursuing women’s rights did not mean abandoning white supremacy. Ervin, in particular, was willing to support it, confident that the respect other Southern Democrats had for his legal opinions and defense of states’ rights would help them navigate the rough waters of ratification. Tillett, as a participant in networks of religious women throughout the US and, to a lesser degree, the world, claimed that “the missionary interest in the churches would find satisfaction in the convention as a protection against child marriage,” and that this sentiment was especially strong in the South. To acknowledge the ongoing conversations about teen
80 Nason, Memorandum, 16 Nov 1962, 2. Quoting United Nations, UDHR, Article 29.2. Those who resisted interracial marriage in the US used appeals to “conscience, morality, religious teaching, and the Bible” to support their opposition. McClain, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ‘Legislating Morality.’” 260
marriage and the marriage ages below fifteen in several southern states would have been to jeopardize the image of the United States abroad and, consequently, ratification.
As a group, they agreed that the Convention came at an important moment, as “new conditions, particularly in the developing nations in Africa” created a new imperative to
“encourage improvement in human right standards through treaty action,” and hoped that the Senate would agree to ratify for this reason.81 The Marriage Convention signified an important moral topic for the group, but it also risked humiliating the US within the politics of the Cold War and intervened in domestic conversations about interracial marriage.
Their hard work bore fruit when the United States signed the Convention on
Consent for Marriage on December 10, 1962. Their discussions laid the foundations for further arguments in favor of ratification, most importantly the treaty’s impact on the relationship between state and federal power. These arguments bore out less in mainstream discussion of the Convention, however, than internationalist narratives.
5.3 Internationalism is Not Enough: Reception of the Marriage Convention.
Where women policymakers and activists believed the President’s Commission on the Status of Women could present an informal example of women’s rights to women around the world, the Marriage Convention could legally bind the US into a position of
81 Nason, Memorandum, 16 Nov 1962, 1-2. 261
leadership on women’s human rights. However, winning ratification for the Marriage
Convention or other human rights treaties required increasing acceptance—or at least mitigating rejection—of the United Nations. A perception that the Marriage Convention was intended for women in other countries meant that US internationalism was a critical part of the Convention’s success in the United States. It also became a major obstacle as
Tillett moved forward with efforts to secure ratification alongside advisors and her allies in the Senate. After the document’s adoption by the UN, most in the US who supported it turned their attention to other tasks.
The treaty first had to contend with the more profound human rights news that overshadowed its passage. Eleanor Roosevelt passed away November 7, 1962 mere hours after the General Assembly adopted the Marriage Convention. In the days and weeks to come, newspapers featured dozens of articles lauding her as the “First Lady of the World.” They detailed her numerous achievements, especially her leadership in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the events of her funeral, and the outpouring of messages from foreign dignitaries and leaders.82 One last time, Eleanor
82 “Eleanor Roosevelt Dies—World’s First Lady,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov 8, 1962, PQHN: New York Tribune/Herald Tribune, 1. “As UN Delegate She Inspired Draft of Human Rights Covenant,” New York Times, Nov 8, 1962, PQHN: The New York Times with Index, 35. “A Very Great Lady, President Says,” The Atlanta Constitution, Nov 8, 1962, PQHN: The Atlanta Constitution, 1. “Flags at Half-Staff for Mrs. FDR: Adlai Leads U.N. Tribute Today to Her Memory,” Boston Globe, Nov 9, 1962, PQHN: Boston Globe, 1. “Messages of Mourning Sent by World Leaders: Khrushchev Dispatches Cable Expressing His Sorrow and That of Russian People,” Los Angeles Times, Nov 9, 1962, PQHN: Los Angeles Times, 22. Christine Sadler Coe, “Mrs. Roosevelt Called ‘First Lady of World’: Inaugural Surprise,” The Washington Post, Times 262
Roosevelt created fellowship between the United States and countries around the world as the General Assembly celebrated her life as it had only one other person, Secretary-
General Dag Hammarskjold. Adlai Stevenson led the way with a eulogy on the floor of the Assembly, followed by representatives from the Soviet Union, Sweden, Israel, Japan,
Haiti, Ethiopia, and Tunisia. “The United States, the United Nations—the world—has lost one of its greatest citizens,” Stevenson said. “I do not think it amiss to suggest that the United Nations is, in no small way, a memorial to her and her aspirations…she breathed life into this organization.”83 A major symbol of internationalism and of the
United States’ relationship with the United Nations human rights agenda was gone.
In an irony that might have frustrated Roosevelt, her death largely overshadowed the Marriage Convention’s impact in the US. The news cycle immediately after the document’s passage could have provided a crucial boost, raising interest and awareness of the document around the country. Prior to its passage, the
Convention had garnered limited interest in the US outside of women’s rights circles except for the polygamy debate in the General Assembly. The Marriage Convention, one
Herald, Nov 8, 1962, PQHN: The Washington Post, A28. “Mrs. Roosevelt a Symbol of Hope to All Mankind,” The Atlanta Constitution, Nov 8, 1962, PQHN: The Atlanta Constitution, 10. Emmanuel Perlutter, “10,000 Attend Memorial Service for Mrs. Roosevelt,” Nov 18, 1962, PQHN: The New York Times with Index, 71. “6000 Hear Eulogy of Mrs. Roosevelt in New York Cathedral,” Washington Post, Times Herald, Nov 18, 1962, PQHN: The Washington Post, A16. 83 Kathleen Teltsch, “U.N. Holds Memorial Rite for Mrs. Roosevelt: Stevenson Leads in Eulogies—Zorin Adds His Praise,” Special to the New York Times, Nov 10, 1962, PQHN: The New York Times with Index, 10. 263
writer for the New York Sun argued in 1960, “would cause great upheaval in much of
Asia and Africa.”84 The Washington Post also made brief mention of the treaty-in-process early in 1961.85
In the weeks after the Marriage Convention’s passage, it did win some attention in mainstream news, although not all was in its favor. Some authors treated the
Marriage Convention with outright derision. The Chicago Daily Tribune ran a piece that simultaneously criticized the UN and cracked jokes about men’s suffering at the hands of their wives. Amidst far bigger issues—“sticky situations in Cuba, Berlin, and along the Sino-Indian border”— the author claimed with visible sarcasm that the UN had
“displayed its customary facility for singling out the really important problem.” They did not consider women’s marriage rights significant, and in fact argued that “a fair number of husbands of our acquaintance would probably be disposed to argue that their wives need no protections beyond those now available and that the institution of marriage is already amply weighted in favor of the girl.” Husbands, they said, “are well aware that, in a woman’s world, it is the immutable privilege of husbands to keep their mouths shut if they are on the losing end of the argument.”86 Despite their distaste for
84 “The UN on Marriage,” The Sun, Mar 1, 1960, PQHN: The Baltimore Sun, 20. 85 “Marriage Age Minimum is Set at Fifteen,” The Washington Post, Times Herald, Mar 31, 1961, PQHN: The Washington Post, B5. 86 The facetious tone might also call the underlying opinions into question. Based on other perspectives I have seen in newspapers and correspondence; however, I feel confident in my interpretation of the opinions as at least somewhat genuine. “First Things First,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov 21, 1962, PQHN: Chicago Tribune, 16, 182896027. 264
the UN’s support of women’s marriage rights, they also shared their opinions of the UN with others, and even women activists in favor of US ratification would have agreed with the root assumption of the article: the Marriage Convention was for other countries, not the US.
The Convention did garner interest among those who sought the expansion of women’s rights, however. One Connecticut reporter seemed hopeful that “the treaty recently put into force by the United Nations will not sweep away old conventions, but it will bring a breath of fresh air into secluded rooms in underdeveloped countries.” The reference to purdah tied the Marriage Convention to cultures throughout Africa and
Asia. “As women learn of the freedom that others enjoy,” they continued, women would realize that “it is within their reach if they demand it,” and through activism “they will gradually evolve toward a condition of equality with men in political and economic activities.” Clearly founded on assumptions that women in such states had no women’s movements or access to any political or economic rights, the author went on to criticize specifically “Muslim and Arab” states where women “still do not have any liberty of action.”87 Others in the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor expressed similar hopes that the Marriage Convention would benefit “underdeveloped” states.88 Mary
87 “A U.N. Treaty Seeks to Protect Women,” The Hartford Courant, Dec 17, 1962, PQHN: Hartford Courant, 14. 88 Arnold H. Lubasch, “UN Safeguards on marriage Set: Assembly Votes Convention to Protect Human Rights in Questions, 92 to 0: Women Chief Gainers: Free Consent is Stressed—Ratifying 265
Hornaday of the Christian Science Monitor said that the document “would have little direct effect in the U.S.,” but felt hopeful about its ability to “lead nations away from child marriages and marriages lacking free consent,” and felt it would assist women “in areas of the world where social and cultural processes are undergoing rapid changes.”89
Among women’s organizations, the Marriage Convention earned more attention and praise—but not much. In the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the YWCA,
International Alliance of Women, and International Council of Women had been in good company as they gave statements in favor of the Marriage Convention.90 Back in the US, although the national branches of these organizations favored ratification of the
Marriage Convention, there is little evidence to suggest that they joined Tillett in any campaigns for ratification. Family education remained a central means of addressing domestic problems of young marriages for many activists. Ebony magazine joined women’s organizations in expressing anxiety about the flood of younger marriages. Carl
Nations Urged to Fix a Minimum Age,” Special to the New York Times, Nov 8, 1962, PQHN: The New York Times with Index, 41. 89 Mary Hornaday, “Mrs. Tillett Takes Skill to UN,” The Christian Science Monitor, Apr 6, 1962, PQHN: The Christian Science Monitor, 14. 90 World YWCA, “Statement Submitted by the World YWCA to the 14th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women,” Feb 1960, Geneva, Switzerland, folder SO 244 (5-3_ PT-C, United Nations Archives and Records Management Service (ARMS). International Association of Women, “Communication from the International Alliance of Women, non-governmental organization with consultative status B,” Feb 1961, NGO/110 SO 242/2 15th Session, UNARMS. International Council of Women, “Statement Submitted by the International Council of Women, a non-governmental organization having consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (Category B),” E/CN.6/NGO-105 SO 242/2 15th Session, UNARMS. 266
T. Rowan, longtime journalist and recent appointee as Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for Public Affairs, put it in the context of politics, arguing that “it is essential that our youngsters be convinced that marriage for the ‘new Negro’ cannot be merely a yielding to raw emotions; it must also be an intellectual decision, made with the realization that the Negro family, too, is a major link in our new chain of freedom.” For black women, education provided one solution to the problem of hasty marriages, as educated black women had the best chance of the marriage surviving, and if it failed they were in a better position to successfully gain legal protection.91 The NCNW also had its own agenda on women’s family rights, but largely removed from marriage age and consent. Despite interest in the international conversations taking place on women’s rights and Council members’ ability to participate as observers in the UN Women’s
Commission, these women remained focused on domestic issues that impacted the family: civil rights, housing, poverty, education, and youth, rather than marriage age or consent.92 As their discussions surrounding working women and “matriarchy” demonstrated, black women’s lives looked different from what UNCSW imagined.
The PCSW report American Women recognized the Marriage Convention as the first UN treaty the United States had signed since the Genocide Convention.
91 Carl T. Rowan, “The Tragedy of Teen-Age Marriage,” Ebony 16.10 (Aug 1961), 68, MasterFILE Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed June 10, 2018). Rowan, Breaking Barriers: A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 173. 92 “Convention Handbook,” NCNW, Sheraton Park Hotel, Washington, DC, 29th Annual Convention, “The Challenge of Poverty, 1964, NABWH_001, [details]. 267
Unfortunately, the Commission noted, “the US policy of abstention has not infrequently been misunderstood as indifference,” and in future at the UN, diplomats “should assert leadership…in securing equality of rights for women as part of the effort to define and assure human rights.” They also advocated US support of international women’s rights agreements in the future and argued that the US “should demonstrate its sincere concern for women’s equal rights by becoming a party to appropriate conventions.”93 In general, however, women’s rights activists in the US focused on other issues.
Despite the minimal responses in the months following the Marriage
Convention’s adoption, Tillett saw the Marriage Convention as a gateway to Senate discussion of human rights in general. She argued that the Marriage Convention
“focused attention on the whole area of human rights conventions” and made the State
Department reconsider its opposition to human rights treaties as a whole in favor of evaluating the merits of each convention individually.94 In order for the US to ratify a human rights convention, the document needed to allow US diplomats to make claims about US attention to human rights while containing no articles to which the US did not already adhere.95 After her discussions with Sparkman, Ervin, and advisors from the state department, she nevertheless recognized that ratifying the Marriage Convention
93 American Women, 45-46. 94 GAT to Rachel Nason, 28 Jan, 1963, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, box 19, folder 859, “U.N. Correspondence, Jan-Feb 1963,” SHC. 95 Marten H.A. van Heuven to Mr. Schwebel, Jan 22, 1963, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, box 19, folder 859, “U.N. Correspondence, Jan-Feb 1963,” SHC. 268
would be too steep an uphill battle against states’ rights proponents and those who distrusted the UN.
In consultation with Richard Gardener, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for
International Relations, Tillett agreed that the best path to getting the Marriage
Convention ratified was to take a step back from it, for the time being. Despite its appeal to those like Ervin, who saw the document’s potential to preserve gender roles and racial hierarchy, states’ rights critiques of the document made the Marriage Convention too risky to push initially. Instead, the conventions on the Political Rights of Women,
Forced Labor, and the Supplemental Convention on the Abolition of Slavery all became a “labor package,” while the Marriage Convention was filed into a “women’s package” of conventions. Tillett hoped that President Kennedy would forward the first package to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1963, and provided that the Senate ratified, he could then forward the second package in 1964. The treaties in the labor package all concerned national legislation, and in no way tread onto the unsteady ground of state jurisdiction. The creation of a women-specific package did not sit right with Tillett, although she acknowledged that this plan stood the best chance of success. She hesitated because the women’s package had been postponed. “It seemed to me discrimination,” she confided to Rachel Nason, one of her closest advisors, “to have an ‘all package’ relating to any of the areas of discrimination, race, creed, color, economic status, or sex, and have it in a corner of postponement.” Her fears echoed those of Bodil Begtrup and
269
other women in the UN who had insisted upon upgrading the women’s subcommission to a full commission: that higher bodies would perpetually be almost ready to address women’s issues, discussions which were not opposed but “postponed.”96
With the decision made, however, Tillett jumped once more into action with a strategy that had already worked for her: extensive letter-writing. Typical once more of
Tillett’s political savvy and familiarity with Washington’s political circles, she sent out flurries of letters in March and April to Senators on both sides of the aisle.97 She built the letters to Senators around a consistent form, but most of them contained references to their previous interactions or name-dropping that matched each Senator’s political interests. For Senators more sympathetic to US involvement in the UN, Tillett mentioned casually that former Senator Frank Graham “said he especially felt sure you would be interested and helpful in regard to Human Rights Conventions.”98 To her friend Hubert
Humphrey, Tillett confided more about her team’s strategizing on the “labor package” as opposed to the Marriage Convention.99 To senators anxious about how international
96 GAT to Rachel Nason, 28 Jan, 1963, SHC. 97 There appear to have been two distinct waves, one in late March and another in late April. I believe the first wave allowed Tillett and her allies to get their feet under them—Tillett expected that these Senators would agree to support the human rights conventions or could be readily convinced. The second wave seems to have consisted of more conservative and isolationist Senators who would take more convincing. 98 GAT to George McGovern, Mar 30, 1963, Correspondence, March 1963, folder 860, series 2, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. See letters as well to: Estes Kefauver, George P. Aiken, Fred W. Morrison, and Maurine B. Hauberger. 99 GAT to Hubert Humphrey, Mar 30, 1963, Correspondence, March 1963, folder 860, series 2, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 270
treaties could encroach upon state jurisdiction, Tillett placed Ervin in a prominent position, explaining that he had already expressed willingness to support the conventions in the Senate.100
At the same time, Tillett still had to convince Kennedy to send the conventions on to the Senate FRC for ratification. Through two of his assistants, she passed materials and recommendations on the treaties to the president.101 Secretary of State Rusk suggested to Tillett that Attorney General Robert Kennedy sign the papers first, likely in order to add the strength of a legal stamp of approval.102 With all of the information collected and recommendations heard, Henry Wilson, one of Kennedy’s aides, suggested that Tillett defer her planned trip to Washington to continue campaigning for ratification “to allow the dust to settle,” and he promised that “I’ll listen for you.”103
Kennedy would take no action on the labor package until July.
In the intervening months, Tillett took steps to prevent the human rights conventions from fading from Kennedy’s mind. On the same day that Wilson asked her to postpone further work on the conventions, the Los Angeles Times ran an article in
100 GLADYS AVERY TILLETT to Spessard Holland, Apr 25, 1963, U.N. Correspondence, Apr- May 1963, folder 861, series 2, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. See letters also to George A. Smathers, Olin Johnson, and Russell Long. 101 Gladys Avery Tillett to Henry Wilson, Mar 26, 1963, March 1963, folder 860, series 2, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 102 GAT to Larry O’Brien, Mar 26, 1963, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 103 Henry H. Wilson, Jr. to GAT, Mar 28, 1963, March 1963, folder 860, series 2, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 271
which Tillett once more raised the importance of supporting human rights in a Cold
War context. “As long as we refuse to ratify a single convention,” she declared, “we look hypocritical to our friends,” and, even worse, gave more opportunities for communist states to say, “I told you so.” Tillett also used the interview to try to maintain interest in the women’s rights conventions, in hopes that 1964 might bring their ratification, as well. She used what was quickly becoming a common refrain among women activists, that those conventions “stand as minimum standards to the new nations of Asia and
Africa.”104
Addressing members of women’s organizations at the United States Mission to the United Nations in March 1963, Tillett urged US ratification of the conventions under discussion by the Senate on political rights, forced labor, and slavery. She tasked the other women in the room with ensuring that women’s marriage status in the US matched the standards of the Convention. Specifically, she hoped that women might reform laws in South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Alabama, which still had an age of marriage below that recommended by the United Nations. Despite her desire for assuring women’s rights, she also brought Cold War politics to the fore, warning that it
104 Louis B. Fleming, “She Battles in the UN for Rights of Women,” Los Angeles Times, Mar 28, 1963, March 1963, folder 860, series 2, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 272
would embarrass the United States in the UN when the Soviet Union inevitably brought it up in discussion.105
Tillett also dedicated time to audiences that she knew would be the hardest to sell on ratification, and her status as a well-to-do Southern white woman gave her a safe platform from which to speak in conservative circles. In April, she began addressing the
Daughters of the American Revolution as a major conservative women’s organization in hopes of convincing them that the UN was “the alternative to nuclear war.” She criticized a DAR pamphlet, “UN: A Trojan Horse.” Tillett protested that, “we ought to give thanks that it is on our own shores where we can make its members our friends and where we can give voice to our hopes, beliefs, and aspirations.”106
Tillett had a fresh opportunity to address Kennedy directly in conjunction with the passage of the Equal Pay Act. After years of work by labor feminists, the Equal Pay bill passed through Congress at the end of May, and the president signed it into law on
June 10.107 Tillett congratulated Kennedy on “the achievement of this basic advance toward the economic rights of women” even as she used the new law to draw attention to the human rights conventions. Pointing specifically to the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery and the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, Tillett
105 Gladys Avery Tillett, Meeting at the US Mission to the UN, 11 Mar 1963, notes, Folder 5, YWCA Papers, SSC. 106 Hornaday, “Mrs. Tillett Takes Skill to UN,” 14. 107 Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 166-63. Though not as strong a law as labor feminists had initially hoped, it nevertheless was a huge step. 273
argued once more that ratification “would be convincing evidence to the world of the sincerity of our effort to achieve human rights at home, because nations, especially new nations, measure our sincerity in terms of the commitments we are willing to share with them.”108
Her work and that of many advisors paid off when Kennedy forwarded the labor package to the Senate in late July 1963, even as new problems arose. “This is encouraging, even exciting to one who has worked as long and hard as I to bring this about,” she wrote to Harlan Cleveland. However, as civil rights demonstrations and tensions surrounding the movement reached a fever pitch, the human rights conventions had to take a back seat.109 In May, Birmingham, AL Police Commissioner
Eugene Connor used fire hoses to deter thousands of African American children and teenagers from demonstrating. The news echoed around the US and the world, and the
USSR promptly stepped up propaganda specifically on racial tensions in Birmingham.110
Later that month, Governor George Wallace attempted to physically block the registration of two black students at the University of Alabama. In June, Kennedy delivered a speech on civil rights on national television, followed by an appeal before a
108 GAT to JFK, June 5, 1963, U.N. Correspondence, June-July 1963, Series 2, folder 862, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 109 GAT to Harlan Cleveland, July 31, 1963, U.N. Correspondence, June-July 1963, Series 2, folder 862, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 110 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 169-70. 274
joint session of Congress for civil rights legislation.111 Amid these tensions and
Kennedy’s civil rights plea, Tillett was “keenly aware of the political wisdom” of deferring a Senate hearing on the human rights conventions. “The overwhelming importance of civil rights legislation at this time,” she wrote, “makes this evident without comment from me.”112 Given Ervin’s pro-segregation agenda, she could not very well hitch this women’s rights treaty to the civil rights bandwagon.
Women’s rights activists did not cease advocating for ratification of the human rights conventions. By 1964, the push to ratify the labor package of human rights conventions was in full swing. United Church Women sought ratification of the treaties on “forced labor, slavery, and the marriage of women without consent.”113 The
International Council of Women, through its US branch, expressed its hopes that the US would ratify the protections against slavery and forced marriage.114 The AAUW similarly expressed support for the human rights conventions Kennedy sent to the
Senate.115 The YWCA also leapt on board; although US law already met the
111 Ibid, 178-180. 112 GAT to Cleveland, July 31, 1963, Gladys Avery Tillett papers, SHC. 113 “UCW Board Urges Civil Rights Action,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 23, 1964 PQHN: Philadelphia Tribune, 21, 532606383. 114 “Women War on Cigarettes and Slavery,” The Washington Post, Times Herald, June 29, 1963, PQHN: The Washington Post, D10, 142036921. 115 “Reports of National Officers, Administrative Staff, Committee Chairmen, Area Representatives, and Staff Associates of the American Association of University Women,” Biennial Convention, June 21-24, 1965, Portland, OR, AAUW (Washington, DC: 1965), 64, AAUW Papers, box 1, “Biennial National Convention - Reports, 1955-71,” SSC. 275
Convention’s standards, members agreed that this did not mean the US could “stand aloof from documents which project our own heritage on an international scale.”
Increasingly, members commented, “the day-to-day unfolding of events makes it ever clearer that our own welfare is interrelated with the rights and freedoms assured by the peoples of other nations.”116
The immediacy of racial tensions in the US had overwhelmed the ability of a women’s rights agenda to distract from issues of civil rights on an international stage.
Black women, like those of the NCNW, still engaged with some women’s rights issues, especially labor rights, but their priorities rested with civil rights as the best means of securing their goals.117 The administration needed to address civil rights, and Tillett agreed. The first package of human rights conventions was postponed, initially only for a few months, but it would in fact not see the floor of the Foreign Relations Committee chamber until 1967.
116 “Proceedings: Twenty-Third National Convention, Apr 20-25, 1964,” YWCA, 795. 117 Their resolutions at the end of the 1963 national convention, for example, strongly favored voting rights, mobilizing for the pending civil rights bill, and opposition to apartheid, although it also included the need to “uphold and support the highest ideals and concepts of womanhood” in an internationalist frame, especially engaging with women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. NCNW, “Resolutions,” NABWH_001, NCNW, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, Folder 167, “Minutes 1963,” NABWH. 276
5.4 Conclusion
The President’s Commission on the Status of Women presented its report to
Kennedy on what would have been Eleanor Roosevelt’s 79th birthday, Oct 11, 1963. The letter of transmittal that opened the report framed American Women as another form of tribute to her. Roosevelt’s “devotion to fuller realization of the abilities of women in all walks of life and in all countries raised the status of women everywhere in the world,”
Esther Peterson wrote on the Commission’s behalf.118 The Commission’s work, however, provided a model for the pursuit of women’s human rights on a smaller scale, inspiring state commissions across the US. By 1965, thirty-six states had created their own commissions, from Alabama and Iowa to Colorado and Washington.119
Kennedy’s assassination on November 22nd created change of a different kind.
Acknowledging that civil rights as an issue could no longer be safely sidestepped,
President Johnson committed to continuing his predecessor’s agenda. Within the first
118 “Letter of Transmittal,” in American Women, i. 119 Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 175. See for example: Agenda and Minutes of the Meeting of the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women, May 12, 1964, by the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women (Montgomery, AL: Alabama. Governor's Commission on the Status of Women, 1964); “Summary of Conference Proceedings,” by the Iowa Governor's Commission on the Status of Women, in Statewide Meeting of the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women, by the Iowa Governor's Commission on the Status of Women (Des Moines, IA: Iowa Governor's Commission on the Status of Women, 1964), 1-28; Summary Report of the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women in Colorado, 1965, by the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women in Colorado (Denver, CO: Colorado Commission on the Status of Women, 1965); Report of the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women, December 1963, by the Washington Governor's Commission on the Status of Women (Olympia, WA: State of Washington, Governor's Commission on the Status of Women, 1963). 277
few weeks of Kennedy’s death, Johnson began work toward the passage of what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.120 Representative Howard Smith (D-VA) tacked an amendment onto the bill that he expected to kill it: elimination of discrimination based on sex. Instead, with its passage into law, it also incorporated women’s rights protections.121 The “liberal hour” inaugurated by Kennedy did not die with him, but during Johnson’s administration it took on a different form.122
What defeated the Marriage Convention in 1963, paradoxically, was precisely the claim that it only applied outside the US. This argument removed its immediacy as the desperate need for civil rights legislation postponed even the more readily-passed conventions. Even among women’s rights activists, the truth of the statement bore out as they turned their attention largely elsewhere. Racism and the stronger pull of Cold War civil rights defeated this set of women’s rights. In the context of Johnson’s War on
Poverty and the escalating Vietnam War, the ideas that had led to the development of the Marriage Convention—a woman’s right to choose her spouse at the right time and with the right education—took on new life. And, critically, they left behind the
Convention’s rhetoric.
120 Mackenzie and Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour, 159-61. 121 Ibid, 162-65. See also: Susan M. Hartmann, “Women’s Issues,” in A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, edited by Mitchell B. Lerner (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 149-62. 122 Mackenzie and Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour. 278
The arguments that women internationalists of Eleanor Roosevelt’s era expected to work didn’t. Segregationists lost their opportunity to preserve the white family ideal through the Convention as the transformations of 1964 carried the US into a new era.
However, in the years to come, the UDHR article protecting the right to marry “without regard to race” would become the Marriage Convention’s most important contribution as the Senate finally took up the question of the human rights conventions and the
Supreme Court took up the question of interracial marriage.
279
6. Internationalism and Moral Power: Bringing the Human Rights Treaties to the Senate, 1965-1967
During the Foreign Relations Committee hearings that determined the fate of
Kennedy’s human rights package, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) and Ambassador
Arthur Goldberg presented opposing documents that spoke to the transformations in the US approach to international relations over the two decades since the end of World
War II. Hickenlooper sought to understand why President Kennedy had decided to reverse former Secretary of State Dulles’s opposition to the ratification of the Convention on the Political Rights of Women.123 He presented Dulles’s words on the record, “to be sure,” Hickenlooper said, “that there is no suggestion left that he was against women.”
The 1953 statement claimed that, “we [the US] do not believe that this goal [global recognition of women’s political rights] can be achieved by treaty coercion or that it constitutes a proper field for exercise of the treatymaking power,” nor did Dulles see
“any clear or necessary relation between the interest and welfare of the United States and the eligibility of women to political office in other nations.”124
123 US Congress, Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Human Rights Conventions, 90th Congress, 1st sess., 23 Feb and 8 Mar 1967, 38. 124 Ibid, 39. Quoting: Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on SJ Res 1 & 43 Before a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 1953, 825-829. Dulles’s declaration came from the same meeting as the statements that constituted the Bricker agreements, the promise that the US would not ratify or participate in the drafting of any UN human rights treaties. William Korey, NGO’s and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Curious Grapevine (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 212. 280
In response, Goldberg presented the 1963 letter from President Kennedy transmitting the package of human rights treaties to the Senate. Kennedy wrote that “the fact that our Constitution already assures us of these rights does not entitle us to stand aloof from documents which project our own heritage on an international scale.”
Despite believing that the US fulfilled all the requirements of the treaties contained within the human rights package, Kennedy claimed that US welfare was intimately tied to the “rights and freedoms assured the peoples of other nations.”125
The distance between these statements demonstrates the re-evaluation of the US position within global systems of power that took place from 1953 to 1963. By the time of the hearing in 1967, many policymakers believed that the US could, and should, intervene in other states and pursue humanitarian concerns as part of the country’s international engagements. The US, they believed, was in a unique position to serve as a moral example to other states. However, for all the changes the two statements represented, there had been less of a departure from Dulles’s statements than Goldberg would have liked to admit. Goldberg pointed to bipartisan support of human rights- focused legislation as indications of the transformations taking place in the US between
125 John F. Kennedy: "Letter to the President of the Senate in Regard to Three International Human Rights Conventions.," July 22, 1963, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9352, accessed 10 June 2018. 281
1953 and 1963 as one critical difference.126 Nevertheless, Dulles’s argument that treaties were “not appropriate” to preserve human rights had not died. Hickenlooper voiced the same sentiment during the 1967 hearing, even as Goldberg echoed the need that
Kennedy had vocalized to pursue international leadership four years after his death.
Federal action on human rights treaties remained limited to how human rights could enhance US state power. During the years leading up to the Senate consideration of the Kennedy human rights package, Senate interest in the three treaties remained low.
With no action early in Johnson’s presidency, US dissatisfaction with the UN, and the escalation of the Vietnam War, the human rights conventions were at risk of being tabled permanently. In the end, the Senate would ratify only one of the three treaties in the Kennedy human rights packet: The Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of
Slavery (Slavery Convention).
Nevertheless, Tillett’s work on the Marriage Convention had cracked open a window for US participation in international human rights. Her actions changed State
Department policy toward human rights conventions, and although the Marriage
Convention did not move forward, the strategies that Tillett utilized for mobilizing allies did. In addition, the Slavery Convention shared some of its ideological foundations with
126 Goldberg is unclear about which he means, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act certainly fit the bill. US Congress, Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Human Rights Conventions, 90th Congress, 1st sess., 23 Feb and 8 Mar 1967, 40. 282
the Marriage Convention. It served as a corollary to the 1926 Convention to Suppress the
Slave Trade and Slavery, created under the auspices of the League of Nations. The UN treaty, adopted in 1956, targeted “Institutions and practices similar to slavery.”
Alongside serfdom, child slavery and debt bondage, the treaty condemned various forms of marriage without consent, including forms of marriage with a financial transaction: cases in which “a woman, without the right to refuse, is promised or given in marriage on payment” to her family, in which a wife is transferred from one person to another for payment, or in which a person inherits someone else’s widow. State parties to the Convention also agreed to establish a minimum age of marriage, “to encourage the use of facilities whereby the consent of both parties to a marriage may be freely expressed in the presence of a competent civil or religious authority,” and to
“encourage” marriage registrations.127 Tillett’s work on the Marriage Convention and its similarities to the Supplementary Convention both mattered to the latter treaty’s success. However, Senators found the Supplementary Convention acceptable largely because its terms specified inter- rather than intra-state problems.
Two sides emerged during the hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. Those who sought ratification of the conventions and US support for human
127 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, Geneva, 7 Sept 1956, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/SupplementaryConventionAbolitionOfSla very.aspx, accessed 14 June 2018. 283
rights more broadly came down on the side of “morality,” emphasizing the obligations the US had to protect people abroad by leading the way in human rights. In the mid-
1960s, these people came together to form organizations specifically addressing “human rights” and to bring their issues in these terms to the level of policy. However, they had to contend with segregationist opponents who focused on the legal problems of ratification, in lieu of addressing their real concerns: how ratifying human rights treaties would place the US under unprecedented global surveillance and pressure federal powers to further regulate and restrict the Jim Crow laws that were already collapsing under the weight of international scrutiny and federal intervention. The question of legality allowed segregationists like Samuel Ervin and Bourke Hickenlooper to make claims to a philosophically neutral, colorblind approach through which white supremacy could remain threaded through state systems of governance.
To frame proponents of ratification like Arthur Goldberg as anti-racists, however, would be to ignore the racist and Orientalist underpinnings of the belief that the US and only the US had the ability to rescue fledgling Third-World states from themselves.128 In their minds, American exceptionalism manifested in the unique ability of the US to “make the world safe for diversity.”129
128 The work of Christina Klein is central to my understanding of Orientalism in this moment. As Klein explains, middlebrow intellectuals reshaped East-West relations and “legitimated US expansion while denying its coercive or imperial nature.” Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 13. 129 John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University,” (speech, Washington, DC, June 10, 1963), John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. 284
Policymakers and activists who participated in the debates surrounding ratification of the human rights conventions argued about how US power should manifest internationally, and the ways that race and gender should shape this power remained a central point of contention. For opponents, departure from Jim Crow policies threatened their way of life, and they sought to maintain racist policies even as the success of decolonization and the black freedom struggle necessitated a shift in the language they used to preserve racial hierarchies. For advocates of ratification, human rights served as a central pillar of US power abroad.
6.1 Domestic Human Rights Questions: Continued Challenges to Segregation
The participants in Senate debates approached the question of ratification amidst new and ongoing elements of women’s and civil rights movements that insisted upon the redistribution of power through the recognition of rights. These pressures made the human rights treaties uncomfortably relevant to segregationist Senators. White supremacists continued to try to block avenues of federal control over state-created obstructions to African Americans’ freedoms. The enhanced visibility of Black Power after 1966 split some members of the black freedom struggle and seemed to confirm white supremacists’ fears about African American violence. Passage of the Voting Rights
Act in 1965 and the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling in 1967 heightened segregationists’ need to defend against integration and miscegenation in the face of these fresh examples of extreme federal overreach. The international reach of civil rights 285
and women’s rights and their increasingly intertwined agendas pressured segregationists in ways that jeopardized ratification of the human rights conventions.
Many women activists expanded their demands and made it increasingly difficult to separate the problems of racism and sexism. The women’s rights activists who participated in the Senate hearings on the human rights conventions included members of the old guard of the women’s movement, but the politics of new generations of feminists served as a backdrop. The YWCA was the highest-profile multiracial women’s group to dramatically pursue the eradication of racism. Its National
Board shifted the organization’s terms of engagement with civil rights from
“integration” to “racial justice,” founding the Office of Racial Justice under the directorship of Dorothy Height in 1965.130 The board intended the new body to combat racism within the YWCA itself, as well as educate non-members and pursue legal and institutional changes in society.131 Though not yet in full swing, lesbian and abortion rights activists had begun to shift the debates about women’s roles and the right to make decisions about their bodies. Feminists of color challenged gender- and race-based hierarchies in new ways. Black feminists like Florynce Kennedy combined their feminism with the politics of Black Power and tried to share these critiques with the
130 Mary E. Boyce and Carol Ann Franklin, “From Integration to Racial Justice: Organizational Learning in the YWCA,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 9, no. 5 (1996): 91-101. 131 Helen Laville, “‘If the Time is not Ripe, Then it is Your Job to Ripen the Time!’ The Transformation of the YWCA in the USA from Segregated Association to Interracial Organization, 1930–1965,” Women’s History Review 15, no. 3 (2006): 359-383. 286
white women with whom they worked.132 Kennedy and fellow lawyer Pauli Murray, whose concept of “Jane Crow” gained legal traction, were among prominent black women building spaces to critique racism and sexism simultaneously, from within both women’s rights and civil rights. Murray helped to establish the National Organization for Women in 1966 in response to the tens of thousands of women who filed suits under
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.133 White feminists in general never perfectly enacted intersectional feminism, but the widespread work of many feminists whittling away at the whitewashed image of the women’s rights movement also narrowed the gap between the Convention on the Political Rights of Women and the rights of women of color.
The continued international claims of black activists kept segregationists anxious about the domestic and international implications of ratifying human rights treaties.
Black Power also did not mark a complete departure from previous activism or argumentation in the black freedom struggle, but it did shift the paradigm of the
132 Sherie M. Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 101. 133 Murray and Kennedy were both part of the black minority in NOW, however, and regularly pointed to its middle-class whiteness. Self, All in the Family, 114-15. Women from within the Black Panther Party also critiqued their male compatriots’ misogyny, although they did not pursue more formal reforms within the Party until the 1970s. Antwanisha Alameen-Shavers, “The Woman Question: Gender Dynamics within the Black Panther Party,” Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men 5, no. 1 (2016): 33-62. Robyn Ceanne Spencer, “Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California,” Journal of Women's History 20, no. 1 (2008): 90-113. 287
movement. In international focus, the Black Panther Party pursued black nationalism as part of a global socialist movement and sought alliances with third world activists.134
Organizations like the NAACP, which had so long cultivated relationships with white activists, had to position themselves as opposed to Black Power, just as they had the black left and SNCC’s internationalism. Many members and leaders nevertheless agreed with at least some elements of the philosophy espoused by Huey P. Newton and Stokely
Carmichael.135 After the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965, resistance to the war brought together civil rights arguments and internationalism. In his speech “Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to break Silence,” Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) expressed disappointment in the disintegration of poverty programs in the face of “adventures like Vietnam.” King criticized the disproportionate presence of men of color among soldiers drafted to fight “to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East
Harlem.”136 African Americans protested the war with slogans like, “Fight Poverty, Not
134 Sean L. Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). 135 Simon Hall, “The NAACP, Black Power, and the African American Freedom Struggle, 1966- 1969,” The Historian 69, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 49-82. See also Carol Anderson’s work for a longer history of NAACP engagements with anticolonial struggles and the emerging Third World. Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 136 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” 4 Apr 1967, in The Radical King: Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 203-204. 288
Hanoi.”137 Black resistance to the war in Vietnam was not isolationist. On the contrary, black men and women from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC, the
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and others identified with the
Vietnamese people and sought to end US violence against both themselves and the
Vietnamese.138
States’ rights proponents continued to rally around opposition to voting rights even after the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act. CORE, SNCC, and the NAACP had come together in the South in 1964 to organize voting drives and freedom schools in a broad push that came to be known as Freedom Summer. The NAACP Legal Defense
Fund set up an office in Mississippi to represent Freedom Summer workers arrested for participating in protests or registering black voters. These drives for the right to political participation also drew out intense white supremacist violence. They bombed 37 churches and 30 homes and businesses, while local sheriffs and police officers intent
137 Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What is it Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the US Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2012), 16. 138 Blackwell, No Peace without Freedom, 180-83. Donald R. Culverson, “From Cold War to Global Interdependence: The Political Economy of African American Antiapartheid Activism, 1968- 1988,” in Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988, edited by Brenda Gayle Plummer (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003): 221-38. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Daniel S. Lucks, Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014). 289
upon maintaining the racial status quo arrested over one thousand activists.139 The
National Council of Negro Women began its Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS) program under the direction of Polly Cowan and Dorothy Height during Freedom
Summer 1964, to ease Mississippi through school desegregation (still barely begun ten years after the Brown decision) and contribute to the voting rights efforts. Middle class black women and white women allies went south, using their respectability to make racist white people more comfortable. They worked on rights education, organizing their own freedom schools and participating in literacy programs.140 These women also had a front-row seat to the intense and often violent white resistance to African
American’s right to vote. Dorothy Height recalled an incident at one predominantly white hotel, where white men with “peculiar” (questionable) badges had gathered to expel Height and her companions from the hotel. The black men who worked there stood up for them in silent protest. “As we walked out,” Height said, “what we saw was that all of the black help had lined up, and they had formed a kind of an assembly line”
139 Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, The Voting Rights War: The NAACP and the Ongoing Struggle for Justice (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 123-234. Karlyn Forner, Why the Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 150-156. 140 Debbie Z. Harwell, Wednesdays in Mississippi: Proper Ladies Working for Radical Change, Freedom Summer 1964 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). 290
to escort the women to their car. A bellman said to her, “I just want you all to know that if they bother any of our women here tonight, they will never forget it.”141
White resistance did not evaporate after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On the contrary, for many white supremacists, the law served as only one more example of the federal government overstepping its bounds. The Voting Rights Act challenged or prohibited poll taxes, literary tests, and other forms of voter restriction and intimidation.142 Samuel Ervin wrote in his autobiography that the Act “condemned the entire states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and
40 counties in North Carolina,” by suspending “the constitutional power of these states and counties.”143
In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Convention on the Political
Rights of Women therefore raised the hackles of segregationist Senators who saw their states’ ability to limit black Americans’ access to voting falling apart. Where Ervin and
Sparkman had believed the Marriage Convention could reinforce state control over marriage laws, the Political Rights Convention threatened to do the opposite to voting rights. The Slavery Convention’s approach to marriage, on the other hand, became even
141 Dorothy Height, interview by Polly Cowan, oral history interview, transcript, 28 Mar 1975, NABWH_006_S06_F14_S1, Polly Spiegel Cowan Papers, Series 6, "Dorothy Height Oral History Interview,” 1-2. 142 LaKerri R. Mack, Tonya Perry-Mitchell, Kaye Thompson-Rogers, Devona Foster-Pierre, “’Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired’: Challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Why We Must Continue to March,” Making Connections 16, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 25. 143 Samuel Ervin, Preserving the Constitution, 170. 291
more appealing than the Marriage Convention had been. Clauses in the Slavery
Convention about coercion may have given segregationists hope that it could reinforce the power of the 1910 White Slave Trade Act (Mann Act), which had been used in the
1920s and 1930s to prosecute “seduction” cases that relied upon victims’ claims of sexual coercion.144 Although the treaty lacked the Mann Act’s vague declaration of regulating
“immoral purpose” that had served white supremacists so well in targeting interracial marriages, segregationist Senators may have hoped to align the Mann Act’s restrictions on inter-state marriage with the treaty.145
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family (1965), with its depictions of the disintegration of black families, further reinforced segregationists’ beliefs that federal interventions to secure social equality could only go astray. Despite Moynihan’s desire to help state agencies address the needs of African Americans, the report positioned black families as the problem.146 All of the stereotypical assumptions that Dr. Jean Noble had identified were writ large in a national policy paper. Moynihan pointed to marital separation, women-headed families, illegitimate children, and welfare dependency as
144 Jessica R. Pilley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 131-82. 145 Supplementary Convention, Article 6.1-2. An Act to further regulate interstate and foreign commerce by prohibiting the transportation therein for immoral purposes of women and girls, and for other purposes, Public Law 61-277 U.S. Statutes at Large 36 (1910): 825-27. 146 Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 63. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: GPO, 1965). 292
signs that “The Negro Family” was “crumbling.”147 The topic was not new—the PCSW and NCNW, for example, had discussed the issues experienced by black women family heads, and their frequent designation as “matriarchs.” But black scholars and activists like Jeanne Noble, Pauli Murray, and Kenneth Clark—who created the term “tangle of pathology”—framed problems as the direct result of a racial hierarchy still in operation.
Moynihan, on the other hand, framed “pathological” black matriarchs and “collapsing” black family structures as the result of racism’s—and especially slavery’s—legacy, a relic of a racist United States past, not evidence of its racist present.148 For segregationists,
Moynihan’s interpretation fed assumptions that black Americans were the root of the problem. Repairing their faulty families would do more to solve African Americans’ problems than social transformations like desegregation.149 The Moynihan report likely contributed to Supreme Court justices’ readings of the Loving v. Virginia case. Without the protections of state-granted marital legitimacy, Mildred Loving was simply another black matriarch.150 The Loving decision was as much about upholding the heterosexual
American family as securing civil rights to marriage.
147 Moynihan, The Negro Family, i. 148 Geary, Beyond Civil Rights, 66. Moynihan, The Negro Family, 15-18. Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 149 Geary, Beyond Civil Rights, 87. 150 Habiba Ibrahim reads the Moynihan report and the Loving case together to break down the state remaking of American marriage. Ibrahim, Troubling the Family, 44-52. 293
Decided in June 1967, as the Senate considered the package of human rights treaties, the Loving case sharpened segregationists’ need to shore up state jurisdiction on marriage laws. Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter married in Washington, DC in 1958, returned home to Bowling Green, Virginia, and a short month later were arrested in their home for violating the state’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Judge Leon Bazile waived the expected year-long prison sentence and instead banished the couple from Virginia for the next twenty-five years. The case took many years to reach the Supreme Court, and the couple’s attempts to convince Bazile to reconsider his ruling earned them a response in 1965 (after a wait of 6 years) that blatantly announced the racist foundations of his decision: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.”151 As ACLU lawyers laid out the Lovings’ case for the Supreme Court, they grounded their claims in equal protection and due process. They emphasized the personal toll for couples such as the Lovings, but also highlighted the side of the matter directly relevant to state concerns about the health of heterosexual families: miscegenation laws “perpetuate and foster illicit exploitative sex relationships,” and “stand as a present day incarnation of an ancient
151 Loving v. Virginia, Transcripts of Records and File Copies of Briefs, 1966, Case no. 395, 6, US Supreme Court Library, Washington, DC. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 272-75. Habiba Ibrahim, Troubling the Family, 47-48. 294
evil.”152 The ACLU lawyers drew explicit comparisons to practices similar to slavery to highlight the need for the Supreme Court to grant multiracial couples legitimate marriages.
The Loving v. Virginia case disrupted white supremacists’ image of the all-white ideal “American Family” and threw miscegenation laws into crisis. Although not the first Supreme Court case on interracial relationships—the 1964 McLaughlin v. Florida decision on interracial cohabitation set the stage for Loving—this case shattered the groundwork of existing anti-miscegenation laws.153 Nevertheless, as with voting rights, segregationists’ views on interracial marriage were more difficult to change in a hurry.
Fact magazine polled a cross-section of its prominent readers on interracial marriage and found a spectrum of responses. A professor emeritus at Columbia thought “it would be ruinous generally to encourage intermarriage” because black people were “very much lower in abstract intelligence than the white man.” Ross Barnett, governor of
Mississippi, insisted to the interviewer, “You’re a white person, aren’t you? You know
God made you white, and you know why? He wanted you white and he intended for you to stay that way.” Barnett went on as if prescriptions against “separate but equal” had never happened: “We respect Negroes highly [in Mississippi] …We’re good to
152 Brief for Appellants, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law, vol. 64, edited by Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Arlington: University Publications of America, 1975), 24-27. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 277. 153 Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 246-48. 295
them. We give them equal facilities in our schools. But we do not believe in intermarriage.” One writer declared “I think the only kind of Negro I could stand to have in my family would be one who looked almost white.” The article included more positive responses, from writers, politicians, and even geneticists who had no problems with interracial marriage, but the vehemence of the negative responses speaks to the discrimination that would not die easily.154 Alabama did not formally take its anti- miscegenation laws off the books until 2000.155 In 1970, a fresh round of federal court cases followed a Mississippi judge’s issuance of an injunction prohibiting a single interracial marriage. The following year, the federal government intervened for soldiers stationed in Alabama and Georgia who were denied marriage licenses by local officials.156 Segregationists fought hard, socially and legally, to mitigate the outcome of the Loving case, and the Senate FRC became one battlefield.
Voting rights and marriage rights both represented forms of social and political desegregation that threatened Southern Democratic lawmakers. The ongoing pressures
154 “The Final Question: 27 well-known Americans tell how they would react if a child of theirs wanted to marry someone whose skin color was different,” Fact: 3, no. 1 (1966):2-13, Pauli Murray Papers, 1910-1985, Subseries V, Subject Files, Interracial Marriage, 1965-66. 155 The 1978 Zablocki v. Redhail decision supplemented Loving and the two cases are read together to establish marriage as a fundamental right. Kevin Noble Maillard and Rose Cuison Villazor, Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 16-20. Brian Cabell, “Alabama Considers Lifting Interracial Marriage Ban: Law Not Enforced for Decades,” 12 Mar 1999, CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/US/9903/12/interracial.marriage/, accessed 2 Dec 2018. 156 Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 289. 296
of domestic rights movements made the human rights conventions relevant in negative ways for segregationist senators. At the same time, tensions in the relationship between the US and the United Nations made participation in UN treaties even less appealing.
6.2 “Does the US Want the United Nations?”: International Cooperation in Crisis
Also at stake in the question of ratifying the human rights treaties was the increasing ambivalence of policymakers and citizens toward the United Nations. Senate ratification of the treaties would declare US recognition of international human rights and with it, international cooperation and responsibilities within the UN. Kennedy’s injunction to “project our own heritage on an international scale” in 1963 speaks to the internationalism of the 1960s, especially the sense that the US had a responsibility to transmit its values globally. Policymakers increasingly gave voice to US diplomatic power. As empire waned as a legitimate system of power—openly stated, at least—US leaders and diplomats had to be careful to frame US ambitions abroad as an outstretched hand of friendship rather than one wielding a Rooseveltian “big stick.”
Most prominently, the Johnson administration repeatedly proclaimed the need for US military intervention in Vietnam as a humanitarian issue, as preservation of the lives of
Vietnamese noncombatants.157 Johnson and Humphrey both argued in 1965 that the
157 Neda Atanasoski, “The Vietnam War and the Ethics of Failure: Heart of Darkness and the Emergence of Humanitarian Feeling at the Limits of Imperial Critique,” Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Eric Bonds, 297
United States “does not aspire to any Pax Americana,” referencing the Pax Romana to distance the administration and country from conquest and to frame the US as a world guardian.158 However, the same global shifts in power that had necessitated an embrace of “diversity” on the world stage made many policymakers uneasy and increasingly ambivalent about US participation in the UN, where the rise in the number of Third
World states thwarted straightforward fulfillment of US policy goals.
During the mid-1960s, even proponents of the UN, who in the 1950s had argued wholesale in support of the organization, began to echo conservatives’ more limited defenses of the UN. As Samuel Ervin had explained to constituents in the 1950s, despite its drawbacks, the UN was worth the investment as a space for peaceful conflict resolution. However, in the aftermath of prominent crises in the Congo and Egypt, even members of the American Association of the United Nations were forced to recognize that the UN was not perfect. In 1968, speaking on behalf of the Humphrey presidential campaign, Tillett said that Humphrey saw the need for a “more adequate United
“Hegemony and Humanitarian Norms: The US Legitimation of Toxic Violence,” Journal of World – Systems Research, 19, no. 1 (2013): 82-106. Making humanitarian and even human rights claims well before the 1975 refugee crisis. Heather Marie Stur, “’Hiding Behind the Humanitarian Label’: Refugees, Repatriates, and the Rebuilding of America’s Benevolent Image After the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 2 (April 2015): 223-44. 158 Frank Porter Graham, “Does the US Want the United Nations..?,” 1965, 3, “UN, General,” Folder 1965-3337, Box 181, Frank Porter Graham Papers, SHC. 298
Nations.”159 Even if these words are not her own, they represent changes among supporters of the UN.
Women activists still attempted to pursue responsible US internationalism.
Women Strike for Peace, founded in 1961 under the maternalist goals of defending their families from nuclear war, also pursued relationships with women in Hanoi from
1965.160 During their initial strike in 1961, they grounded political claims in their maternalism, writing letters to Jaqueline Kennedy and Nina Krushchev in which they asked the women to convince their husbands to pursue peace.161 YWCA-USA members reiterated their role in pursuing international relationships and in spreading a sense of
“world responsibility.”162 The American Association of University Women sent delegates and participated in letter-writing campaigns to convince Congress to support the Foreign Assistance Act in 1964.163 The International Planned Parenthood Federation
159 Tillett, Untitled Speech, 1968, “DNC, Miscellaneous Materials, 1966-1968,” Folder 816, Box 17, SHC, 7. 160 Wu, Radicals on the Road, 195. 161 Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 15-16. 162 YWCA, “Change: Problem and Promise: National Converence—Western Region,” 20-24 Mar 1966, Asilomar, CA, YWCA-USA, Series II. Conferences, box 267, folder 10, “Western 1960-66,” SSC. 163 AAUW, “Biennial Convention: Reports of National Officers, Administrative Staff, Committee Chairmen, Area Representatives, and Staff Associates of the American Association of University Women,” 21-24 June 1965, Portland, OR, AAUW, box 1, “Biennial National Convention - Reports, 1955-71,” 79, SSC. 299
continued to report to its US members on new provisions for family planning and conversations on the subject around the world.164
Many policymakers in the mid-1960s translated this sense of global responsibility espoused by women’s organizations into claims that the US had a moral obligation to act as global mediator, whether peacefully or “using force when necessary as in
Vietnam.” Secretary of State George Ball made a presentation before the Council of
Foreign Relations about the “Responsibilities of a Global Power,” in which he exhorted
US ability to use its power wisely. The Johnson administration clarified that the US sought not to build an empire but, as national security adviser Walt Rostow explained,
“play our part in building an orderly world community.”165 Assistant Secretary of State
Harlan Cleveland’s 1966 book, The Obligations of Power, similarly framed US responsibilities to use its power for good, “in the service of a world of diversity.”166
Cleveland claimed that the foreign policy of empire—”a foreign policy to further territorial expansion and colonial rule”—was “primitive” and inimical to US foreign policy goals.167 In an era of shifting power and the prominence of nuclear threats to global peace, as “the world’s most powerful nation,” the United States “must also be the
164 See for example: International Planned Parenthood Federation, International Planned Parenthood News, 151 (Sept 1966), PPFA, Series V: Related Organizations, N-Z, box 56, folder 3, International Planned Parenthood Federation, 1952-1962, “Miscellaneous, 1957-1964,” SSC. 165 Graham, “Does the US Want the United Nations..?,” 3. 166 Harlan Cleveland, The Obligations of Power: American Diplomacy in the Search for Peace (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), x. 167 Ibid, 2. 300
world’s most responsible nation.”168 Such claims repositioned the US in relation to empire as a modern world power that intervened for selfless reasons rather than material gain.
However, the unprecedented influence of recently independent states, especially in the General Assembly, raised questions for many policymakers about US involvement in the UN. Frank Porter Graham asked in a 1965 speech “Does the US Want the United
Nations..?” Unable to answer in the affirmative, he outlined a country deeply uncomfortable with transformations in global power. While US delegates to the UN made claims within the General Assembly about seeking to strengthen the organization, the State Department, Congress, and the president all acted against it. Agenda items in many different fields of disarmament demonstrated other states’ pursuit of the abolition of nuclear weapons and the dismantling of military bases, while the US “seeks a nuclear- armed Nato [sic],” and “a free hand in dealing with Communist revolutions around the globe.” NATO military bases in the Middle East and Southeast Asia continued to be more important to US interests than cooperation with other states, Graham claimed. He identified US global power as the source of tension, as a “giant, impatient with the overwhelming votes of the Lilliputian nations, who now determine the decisions of the world organization, decisions the US now finds unpalatable.”169 Decolonization and the
168 Ibid, 8. 169 Frank Porter Graham, “Does the US Want the United Nations..?,” 1-2. 301
accompanying power shift in the UN made US participation in the organization more difficult than ever for policymakers to defend. Graham apparently shared the fears of many within the UN, both staff members and delegates of other states, who believed that the UN does not face “a mere difference in principles” from the US, but “a new dream of power, a new blueprint for world order very different from the blueprint hammered out in San Francisco in 1945.”170 Graham clearly perceived many policymakers chaffing under the limitations of participation in the UN.
UN documents in opposition to discrimination further tested the US-UN bond.
The Non-Aligned Movement catalyzed the creation of the Convention on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) at their 1961 Belgrade summit, where delegates asserted racial discrimination as their highest human rights priority.171 Under the leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement, resistance to South African apartheid and the abuses of colonialism took center stage in the UN on draft versions of the
Convention. The final draft of CERD used “universal” language, but its politics were nevertheless grounded in perspectives of Third World representatives.172 The document condemned “colonialism and all practices of segregation,” and expressed collective alarm at “governmental policies based on racial superiority or hatred, such as policies of
170 Ibid, 5. 171 Lisa Baldez, Defying Convention, 56. 172 Rowland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 70-1. 302
apartheid, segregation, or separation.”173 Initially drafted in 1963, CERD progressed rapidly through the UN to be approved two years later by the General Assembly.
Noting the Convention on Racial Discrimination’s success early in the process, delegates from the USSR, Hungary, and Poland requested a similar document for women. In 1963, pointing to the Convention as a model, the General Assembly asked
CSW to draft a document addressing discrimination against women. As a document specifying the “elimination of discrimination,” CERD crucially paved the way for the
UN to acknowledge that women experienced discrimination, as well.174 For two decades,
CSW members had understood that securing women’s rights was not simply a matter of creating the right laws, but also of removing social barriers. The Declaration on the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (DEDAW) allowed the Commission to state the latter half of this thesis explicitly, and in a position of prominence. It enabled a wider audience for other women’s rights conversations in this vein. DEDAW, adopted in 1967, offered new possibilities of making women’s rights claims in the UN by altering the terms in which these claims could be made. DEDAW compiled all the UN’s previous work on the status of women into a single document. Although not legally binding, the
173 United Nations, General Assembly, International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 21 Dec 1965, Preamble, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx, accessed 6 May 2018. 174 Lisa Baldez, Defying Convention, 56-60. 303
Declaration established international norms on women’s rights across multiple areas of law and society.175
As CSW developed the Declaration, Tillett once more sought to resist US diplomatic conservatism, but to little avail. In 1965, Iran hosted the Commission on the
Status of Women under the authority of the Shah, presided over by his sister, Princess
Ashraf ol-Molouk Pahlavi, as chair. Among the major achievements that Tillett noted were CSW support for a new set of regional seminars on women’s civic and political education, and the Commission’s first resolution on family planning.176 On the subject of
DEDAW, however, Tillett had to act as a deterrent for the enthusiasm of many other representatives. The US delegation might have been able to support the declaration because it was not a legally binding document, were it not for references to discrimination that, “made it fall in the pattern of the Declaration against Racial
Discrimination which includes several references to obligations of States.” Tillett could not vote in favor of the Declaration if it served as more than a “statement of principles” because of its potential effect on US state laws.177
Matters came to a head because of the peacekeeping budget crisis of 1964-65, which further threw US involvement in the UN into question. At primary issue lay
175 Devaki Jain, Women, Development, and the UN, 45-47. 176 Gladys Avery Tillett to Dean Rusk, 23 Apr 1965, “U.N. Correspondence, March-April 1965,” Folder 871, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC, 1. 177 Tillett to Rusk, 23 Apr 1965, 7. 304
Article 19 of the United Nations Charter, which stated that a member-state that had not paid its financial contributions to the organization for two years would lose its vote (not its seat) in the General Assembly.178 Funding the UN had always been an issue, but expansive peacekeeping missions between 1956 and 1960 deepened the problem.
Controversy surrounding operations in Egypt and the Congo raised questions about the
UN peacekeeping mandate: Did a state have an obligation to fund these efforts if its delegates objected to the missions? The Soviet Union and France both refused to pay for the two controversial missions. By the end of the summer in 1964, of the UN’s $113 million deficit, the Soviet Union owed over $50 million and France owed nearly $18 million. Kennedy had threatened to press for adherence to Article 19, and after assuming the presidency, Johnson appeared prepared to act on the threat.179
Secretary of State Rusk supported Johnson’s position, believing that pressing for adherence to Article 19 would strengthen both the UN and US influence within it. His assistant secretary, Harlan Cleveland, also feared that US concessions would increase
178 The General Assembly, however, might decide to reinstate voting rights if the body determined that failure to pay results from “conditions beyond the control of the Member.” United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 Oct 1945, Article 19, accessed 22 May 2017, http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/index.html. 179 Lise Namikas, “A Silver-Lining: President Johnson and the U.N. Peacekeeping Budget Crisis of 1964-65,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 15, no. 3: 595, 10.1080/09592290490498820, accessed 20 May 2018. Johnson had announced shortly after assuming the presidency that there would be no distinct “Johnson policy” in foreign relations, and his early decisions frequently echoed Kennedy’s. Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 1982), 415. 305
pressure for the country to fund larger portions of the programs that its UN delegation approved. In February 1964, Cleveland announced that the US would press to rescind
USSR voting rights if the country did not pay its debts. The US had little support among
African and Asian states, however, and after the Soviet delegation approved a mission to Cyprus in the Security Council and then rescinded support, refusing to pay for the mission, the situation came to a head. Soviet debts now stood outstanding for the requisite two years, and the US delegation could insist upon application of Article 19.180
The Soviet Union threatened to leave the United Nations, which would fundamentally undermine the organization’s intended neutrality and its global reach.
By the end of 1964, the conflict had brought work in the General Assembly virtually to a standstill. A coalition of Afro-Asian states proposed a compromise—a
“voluntary rescue fund” to which states could donate, under the condition that Article
19 not be mentioned during the current session to allow the Assembly to get on with its work. The US delegation, fearing permanent acceptance that the Soviet Union would never pay for any projects, balked. In January, the situation worsened yet again as nine other states, including France, crossed the two-year debt threshold. A problem that had originally seemed an opportunity to primarily weaken the Soviet Union in the eyes of other states had become far more complicated. Despite growing disagreement among
180 Namikas, “A Silver-Lining,” 598-99. 306
his advisors, Johnson refused to back down on Article 19. At the UN 20th anniversary celebrations, Adlai Stevenson and the State Department suggested and desperately hoped that Johnson would use the opportunity of his speech to announce that the
United States had no further intentions of pursuing the Article 19 issue. Instead, Johnson vaguely appealed for UN assistance in Vietnam.181 After Stevenson, Permanent
Representative to the UN, passed away from a heart attack in July, Arthur Goldberg’s first speech as the new UN representative gave the administration the opportunity to announce that the US would not press the issue of Article 19 to prevent immobilizing the General Assembly. The problem continued on a smaller scale for several more years, as the representatives of the US and USSR continued to bicker and withhold funds.182
Johnson’s UN 20th anniversary speech almost did not happen at all, so great was his frustration with the budget situation. He did not decide to attend until the last moment. However, advisors commented that the fact that he attended and spoke for an hour with Secretary-General U Thant on world affairs “added up to the beginnings of a change of American policy.”183 U Thant, during the celebrations, made a speech taking to task “nations of the world that do not want to abide by [the UN] Charter.” “The greatest obstacle,” Thant said, “to the realization of the Charter is the inescapable fact that power
181 Ibid 602-603. 182 Ibid, 606. 183 Anonymous, Memorandum, 30 June 1965, “United Nations Report: The President and the Secretary-General at San Francisco,” 1, “UN General,” Folder 1965-3337, Box 181, Frank Porter Graham Papers, SHC. 307
politics still operates…in international relations.” He identified nationalism and
“ideological extremism” as diametrically opposed to the internationalism of the Charter, and later commented, in a Special Convocation at Berkeley, that he hoped the next generation would not be taught to believe “that the interests of their own country must always come first.”184 Although not explicitly about the US, his frustration at the stubbornness of two of the largest UN member states is palpable.
The 1965 International Cooperation Year offered the opportunity for the US to renew its relationship with the UN, an opportunity the Johnson administration nearly missed. The UN General Assembly declared 1965 International Cooperation Year on
November 21, 1963 with the intention of alleviating international tensions and educating people all over the world about the importance of cooperation. The resolution establishing ICY particularly highlighted nuclear cooperation—the Partial Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty entered into force in October, after both the US and USSR ratified it.185
Kennedy’s assassination the day after the General Assembly’s announcement disrupted
ICY’s announcement in the US, and Johnson, in the first year of his presidency, prioritized other issues. On October 2, 1964, he proclaimed 1965 as International
184 Ibid, 4. 185 United Nations, General Assembly Resolution 1907 (XVIII), International Cooperation Year, 21 Nov 1963, A/RES/1907(XVIII), http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/1907%20(XVIII), accessed 5 May 2018. "Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Ratified," Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1963, 19th ed., 248-54. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1964), cqal63-1317011, accessed 5 May 2018. 308
Cooperation Year in the United States to reaffirm the country’s “enthusiastic support” for the “movement of international cooperation,” especially recognizing the United
Nations and its associated agencies. Johnson also ordered that the agencies of the
Executive Branch “examine thoroughly what additional steps can be taken in this direction in the immediate future,” and asked citizen organizations to pursue internal education programs on international cooperation.186
Among the “additional steps” mentioned in his proclamation, Johnson intended a White House Conference to celebrate the ICY. He assigned the Secretary of State to coordinate government resources and asked the United Nations Association of the
United States of America to do the same for private resources.187 In practice, Assistant
Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland handled most of the hands-on coordination, and he tapped Tillett and Mary Dublin Keyserling to head women’s committees for the private and public sector, respectively. Cleveland also appointed Tillett as his general ICY consultant, with a special interest in her connections with NGOs and women’s organizations. Both women’s committees were tasked with producing reports, including specific recommendations on future actions that that the bodies would present to
186 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Proclamation 3620—International Cooperation Year,” 2 Oct, 1964, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=75233, accessed 5 May 2018. 187 Porter McKeever to Leslie Paffrath, 19 Apr 1965, “U.N. Correspondence, March-April 1965,” Folder 871, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 309
President Johnson.188 Tillett brought together a tremendous group of women, counting among its members presidents and professors, representatives of women’s organizations, and current and former government officials. Prominent members included Mary Rockefeller, then chair of the YWCA’s World Service Council, former
Women’s Bureau director Frieda Miller, former UNCSW representative Lorena Hahn,
Esther Hymer of United Church Women, and Judge Sarah Hughes of the US Circuit
Court of Appeals.189 The private sector women’s committee quickly set about coordinating materials to distribute on women’s status in association with ICY. They planned a packet on “The New Role of Women in a Changing World,” and prepared a questionnaire that the committee distributed to women’s organizations about their international activities.190
188 Gladys Avery Tillett to Guion Griffis Johnson, 28 May 1965, “International Cooperation Year,” Folder 497, Box 51, Guion Griffis Johnson Papers, SHC. Cleveland wrote Obligations of Power during much of the conference preparations, and the book follows the conference theme to a great extent. 189 Gladys Avery Tillett to Women’s Committee Members, 9 June 1965, “UN Correspondence May-June, 1965,” Folder 872, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. “Women’s Rights Advocate Mary Rockefeller, 86,” New York Times News Service, Chicago Tribune, 20 Apr 1997, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-04-20/news/9704200361_1_ywca-laurance-s-rockefeller- mary-french-rockefeller, accessed 6 May 2018. 190 Alice Morrison to Mary Cannon, 22 June 1965, “U.N. Correspondence, May-June 1965,” Folder 872, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Much of the NGO organizing fell under the purview of the revamped American Association for the United Nations, now the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA). It emerged from the private AAUN and the government-sponsored US Committee for the UN, which the State Department created in 1948 after the AAUN had proved too outspoken on policy issues. Leaders of the two bodies, frustrated by competition for funds and members, began to contemplate merging the organizations in 1955. The two bodies formally became the UNA-USA in 1965, representing their 310
Despite solid foundations and support, the White House Conference faced numerous planning difficulties. Ambassador Stevenson’s death and Arthur Goldberg’s assumption of Stevenson’s duties sent out a ripple of personnel changes. Just a few months before the Conference was set to take place, Harlan Cleveland became US ambassador to NATO, initiating a scramble as he dropped his Conference responsibilities to take up those of his new position.191 When he formally left in
September, his deputy, Joseph J. Sisco, replaced Cleveland as both Conference chair and
Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs.192 Tillett herself chaired in abstentia during the summer, as she traveled much of Asia in her official capacity as a UN delegate. Although she received progress reports during her travels, by the time she was able to resume direct participation in September, the deadline for the final report was nearly upon them.193 Tillett had only a few weeks at work with the women’s committee before a “government directive” shook up the Conference yet
members’ hopes for a united approach to US-UN relations. James Wurst, The UN Association- USA, 62-67. 191 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur J. Goldberg, 15 Sept 1965, “U.N. Correspondence July-Sept 1965,” Folder 873, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Esther Hymer to Gladys Avery Tillett, 6 July 1965, “U.N. Correspondence July-Sept 1965,” Folder 873, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 192 Harlan Cleveland to ICY Cabinet Committee, Memorandum, 10 Sept 1965, “U.N. Correspondence July-Sept 1965,” Folder 873, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 193 International Cooperation Year Citizen’s Committee on Women, “Minutes of Meeting,” 2 Sept 1965, “U.N. Correspondence July-Sept 1965,” Folder 873, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 311
again, and the women’s committee had to find itself a new chair.194 In the face of the needs of diplomacy, the ICY White House Conference fell down the list of priorities.
Mary Keyserling wrote to Tillett that “I hope to heaven the whole Conference is a success but I do not see how it can be, judging by the confusion and mess it is in now.
However—it may all straighten out and be fine; I hope so. At least I have done my best to provide a good panel.”195
The final report of the ICY Citizens’ Committee on Women situated US women within global transformations in women’s status and reflected women’s hope for their role within global power shifts. The Committee acknowledged women’s importance to development and their unique ability to contribute as “the rapid tempo of economic development makes imperative a more effective use of woman power.”196 Briefly outlining the history of work on women’s status in the UN over the previous two
194 Gladys Avery Tillett to Mary Dublin Keyserling, 3 Nov 1965, “U.N. Correspondence Oct-Dec 1965,” Folder 874, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. I have been unable to determine what, exactly, the shakeup was, but she specified to Dorothy Height in a letter that it was “very important” that she be introduced at the NCNW’s annual convention only in her capacity as a UN representative, that “While I am working at the U.N. no reference can be make [sic] to ICY.” Gladys Avery Tillett to Dorothy Height, 4 Nov 1965, “U.N. Correspondence Oct-Dec 1965,” Folder 874, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. The pair would end up serving together as panelists on the Women’s Committee Panel at the White House ICY Conference alongside Esther Hymer, James Roosevelt (US representative to ECOSOC), Mary Dublin Keyserling, John Macy (US Civil Service Commission), and Frances Murphy Howard (Program Liason Officer to US Voluntary Agencies in Foreign Service). 195 Mary Dublin Keyserling (?) to Gladys Avery Tillett, 11 Nov, 1965, “U.N. Correspondence Oct- Dec 1965,” Folder 874, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 196 International Cooperation Year Citizens’ Committee on Women, “ICY Citizens’ Committee on Women,” 1 Oct 1965, “International Cooperation Year,” Folder 497, Box 51, Guion Griffis Johnson Papers, SHC, 1. 312
decades and the existing status of women around the world, their report argued that
“the unequal status of women and the lack of opportunities for their full participation in the life of their communities particularly in the less developed areas of the world hinders economic and social development and retards the process of nation building.”197
The Committee promoted goals including freely available education, the elimination of poverty, the preservation of human dignity (which included bodily security and equal rights in marriage and family), the right to participate in public life, and cooperation toward the creation of world peace.198 The Committee’s recommendations to the
President included international methods—exchanging travelers with foreign countries, hosting or participating in regional seminars, and continuing participation in intergovernmental organizations—but also domestic ones, such as the creation of women’s status commissions and the ratification of international covenants on women’s rights.199
The White House Conference brought together an estimated five thousand participants asserting the need for US action on a range of topics concerning peace, poverty, and nuclear non-proliferation, but did not quite provide the boost the Johnson
Administration had hoped for. From November 28 to December 1, participants
197 Ibid, 4-6. 198 Ibid, 6. 199 Ibid, 7-9. 313
addressed issues within thirty National Citizens’ Commission panels.200 Peace proposals, especially on nonproliferation and support for a permanent UN peacekeeping force, made headlines.201 The Conference generated more than 400 recommendations, for which Johnson had to appoint a separate committee and on which, he boasted in 1967, two-thirds had seen some action taken. Topics included the War on Hunger, the Outer
Space Treaty, the US-USSR Consular Convention, a moratorium on ballistic missiles, the
Nonproliferation Treaty, trade relations with Eastern Europe, and changes in foreign assistance policies.202
However, some delegates noted with disappointment halfway through the conference that participants had thus far avoided mention of the Vietnam War, despite the centrality of peace as a topic. Dr. Benjamin Spock and Norman Thomas, both
200 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Memorandum Concerning the Recommendations of the White House Conference on International Cooperation,” 4 Aug 1966, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=27760&st=white+house+conference+on+inter national+cooperation&st1=, accessed 19 May 2018. 201 See for example: “White House Parley Hears Peace Proposals: Sen. Clark Calls for Enforcing World Peace through World Law and Vice President Humphrey Urges Permanent U.N. Peacekeeping Force. One Panel Suggests Treaty to Make Moon an International Park and Exclude Military Maneuvers in Space,” The Gazette and Daily, 30 Nov 1965, 1, 31, http://www.newspapers.com/image/383316730, accessed 19 May 2018. John M. Hightower, “Peace—From Earth to Moon—Dominates Parley on International Cooperation,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, 29 Nov 1965, 8, http://www.newspapers.com/image/59364747, accessed 19 May 2018. 202 LBJ, “Statement by the President Reviewing Actions Taken to Carry Out Recommendations of the White House Conference on International Cooperation,” 3 Apr 1967, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=28180&st=white+house+conference+on+inter national+cooperation&st1=, accessed 19 May 2018. 314
prominent white antiwar activists, voiced the complaint, but its wide reporting suggests that a broader audience wished to ask the same question of conference participants.203
Spock had spoken only a week before alongside Coretta Scott King at a demonstration sponsored by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy that brought an estimated 35 thousand demonstrators to Washington, DC. Part of the demonstration had included a march outside the White House, and the early absence of the Vietnam War from the
Conference discussions seemed strange to observers.204 By the time Secretary Rusk stood in front of the press at the ICY Conference, he had to defend the administration’s foreign policy.205 Rusk claimed that the administration hoped to shift the war “from the battlefield to the conference table,” but also that the US could not abandon its commitments in the south.206
The ambivalence of many US Americans toward the UN did not make for a solid foundation as Gladys Avery Tillett and her allies pressured the Senate to formally consider ratification. The health of the relationship between the US and UN potentially
203 Donald H. May, “Viet Ignored at Conference: Delegates Complain at White House,” The News- Herald, Franklin, PA, 30 Nov 1965, 1, http://www.newspapers.com/image/96880498, accessed 19 May 2018. “Viet Nam War Ignored in D.C. ‘Peace’ Conference,” The Daily Messenger, Canadaigua, NY, 30 Nov 1965, 1, http://www.newspapers.com/image/22020722, accessed 19 May 2018. 204 “What’s the Trouble?” The Gazette and Daily, York, PA, 3 Dec 1965, 24, http://www.newspapers.com/image/383297813, accessed 19 May 1965. 205 “Rusk Condemns Atom War as an Instrument of Policy,” The Gazette and Daily, York, PA, 2 Dec 1965, 2, https://www.newspapers.com/image/383295249, accessed 190 May 1965. 206 Mattie Belle Davis, “The White House Conference on International Cooperation,” Women Lawyers’ Journal 52, no. 1 (1966): 12. 315
hinged upon ratification of the human rights documents, and activists rallied to try to secure it. The Vietnam War took on a role as one among many examples of how the US protected human rights abroad. In this vein, proponents of the human rights package argued to the Senate that they could produce a non-violent complement to US intervention in Vietnam.
6.3 Insider Politics: Building a Human Rights Alliance
A storm of concerns spurred by domestic conversations about women’s and civil rights and tensions with the UN may have been building overhead, but in November
1964, all seemed to be going well as Tillett worked toward Senate ratification of the human rights conventions. By this time, Tillett and her allies more consistently used the phrase “human rights” to describe their goals, under which umbrella they included “the status of women.” They drummed up networks to advocate for ratification, and Tillett had made progress earning the approval of senators on both sides of the aisle. The road to ratification did not run smoothly, however. Even reaching the Foreign Relations
Committee hearing in 1967 was an accomplishment. The Tillett-led coalition used all the arguments at their disposal to reach the hearings. They relied upon the shifts in civil rights and claims to US moral authority to press for ratification, but they also recognized the need to compromise with segregationists. To secure FRC consideration of the conventions, Tillett, Goldberg, and other needed to make it clear that the treaties concerned more than human rights: US prestige on the world stage was at stake.
316
Tillett networked furiously between 1964 and the Senate hearings in 1967.
Friends, acquaintances, and political allies helped pursue Congressional action on the human rights treaties and kept her abreast of developments. Women’s NGOs, as ever, formed a vanguard of action, contacting Congress-people and educating citizens on the content and importance of the conventions. The National Council of Jewish Women remained a consistent and dedicated organizational ally, as did United Church
Women.207 An Ohio branch of the UNA-USA and United Church Women collaborated on a letter-writing campaign to ask President Johnson to include support for the human rights conventions in his 1964 State of the Union address.208 Concern, a Methodist Church periodical, published an article demanding that the US “bring our international stance into line with our announced national aims” on rights. The US, it noted, was among only
12 countries that had not ratified a single human rights treaty.209
In pursuit of convention ratification many of these organizations joined forces to bring human rights to the national stage. The Ad Hoc Committee on Human Rights and
Genocide Treaties served as Tillett’s most useful non-governmental ally in its capacity as
207 See for example: Nettie Levy to Gladys Avery Tillett, 3 June 1963, “UN Correspondence, June- July 1963,” Folder 862, Box 17, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Betty Rosen to Gladys Avery Tillett, 3 May 1965, “UN Correspondence, May-June 1965,” Folder 872, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Robbins Strong to Gladys Avery Tillett, 3 May 1965, “UN Correspondence, May-June 1965,” Folder 872, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 208 Jessamal Brophy to Gladys Avery Tillett, 9 Dec 1964, “UN Correspondence, Nov-Dec 1964,” Folder 869, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 209 Gladys Avery Tillett to Mrs. Dale Miller, 19 May 1966, “UN Correspondence, Mar-June 1966,” Folder 877, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 317
a clearing house for NGO strategizing on the passage of the human rights conventions.
Founded in 1964, the Ad Hoc Committee brought under its umbrella 35 national organizations, which by the time of the FRC hearing had grown to 51.210 Multiple AFL-
CIO-affiliated unions (including the International Union of Electrical Workers, United
Automobile Workers of America, and the American Federation of Teachers, among others) stood alongside the ACLU, the American Jewish Committee, the United Church of Christ, the YWCA, the NAACP, the National Association of Negro Business and
Professional Women’s Clubs, and the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom.211 Arthur Goldberg agreed to serve as chair, making him a central figure in preparations for the hearing.212 As the new UN representative, he became an invaluable
210 William Korey, "The United States and the Genocide Convention: Leading Advocate and Leading Obstacle," Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 11 (1997): 271-290. Peter Ronayne, Never Again?: The United States and the Prevention of Genocide Since the Holocaust (NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 24. Identifying the organization’s history on human rights in general is difficult because it has been written about so specifically in relation to the Genocide Convention and its Jewish members and member organizations. There is also some confusion about the date of its founding. Michael Galchinsky dates the Committee’s founding to 1960; I cite 1964 following the information of the library that holds the organization’s papers. Galchinsky, Jews and Human Rights: Dancing at Three Weddings (NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 94. “Guide to the Records of Ad Hoc Committee on the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties WAG.037,” Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, NYU Libraries, http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/wag_037/dscref13.html, accessed 8 June 2018. 211 US Congress, Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Human Rights Conventions, 90th Congress, 1st sess., 23 Feb and 8 Mar 1967, 117. 212 The Ad Hoc Committee originally pursued multiple conventions. After the 1967 convention decisions, they moved on to the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, as well as treaties on statelessness and asylum. But they ultimately saw the Genocide Convention and its identification of life as a human right as the keystone human right. Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 223. Galchinsky, Jews and Human Rights. Joe Renourad, “Limits and Morality: The Emergence of Human Rights in America’s Post-Vietnam Foreign Policy, 1968-1981” 318
contact, and they shared advice and strategies about communication with senators and advisors.213
Friends and acquaintances within the Democratic Party and the administration allowed Tillett to put out feelers on policymakers’ views of the conventions. Margaret
Price, Vice Chair and director of women’s activities for the Democratic State Central
Committee of Michigan, served as one of Tillett’s political contacts. In July 1965, Price reported, the Democratic State Central Committee of Michigan unanimously passed a resolution requesting that the Senate “give high priority to ratification” of the package of human rights conventions Kennedy had submitted to Congress, as well as the Genocide
Convention.214
Richard Gardener, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Harlan Cleveland, delivered “Human Rights—Some Next Steps” in support of the human rights packet shortly after Kennedy referred it to the Senate. He also became a critical contact even after he left the administration, in his capacity as Vice Chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on the conventions. The State Department printed his speech as a pamphlet to easily disseminate arguments in favor of the human rights conventions. Gardner framed the
PhD diss., Emory University, 2008, https://www.chinhnghia.com/renouard_dissertation.pdf, accessed 15 June 2018. 213 See for example: Arthur Goldberg to Gladys Avery Tillett, 8 June 1966, “DNC Correspondence, 1966-1969,” Folder 804, Box 17, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 214 “Resolution on Ratification of the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties,” Michigan Democratic State Central Committee, 18 July 1965, “DNC Correspondence, 1962-1965,” Folder 803, Box 17, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 319
US as other policymakers did, as having a long history of seeking to preserve human rights. Although acknowledging problems, he claimed that “the real significance of
Little Rock and Birmingham and Cambridge is not that the United States is making no progress in civil rights but precisely that we are making progress.” He connected the
Declaration of Independence to the UN Charter, arguing that both documents laid the groundwork for the preservation of human rights. The practical benefits of ratification,
Gardener argued, “can play a modest but still significant part in building an international environment congenial to American interests.” More specifically, Gardener claimed that the US could influence the creation of constitutions for new states, it could uphold these standards in other states, and enhance the influence of US representatives, especially regarding the drafting of future human rights documents. He sought to appeal to the best of his fellow US Americans: “Our power in the world derives not just from our position as an arsenal of weapons or as a storehouse of commodities,” Gardner reminded them, “but as a society which seeks the universal realization of the dignity of man.”215
As part and parcel of these efforts to secure ratification, however, a question consistently arose among Tillett’s contacts: If human rights conventions were on the table for ratification, why not re-introduce the Genocide Convention, as well? Members
215 DoS, “Human Rights—Some Next Steps,” by Richard N. Gardner, Sept 1963, “UN Correspondence, Jan-Feb 1965,” Folder 870, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 320
of NGOs and the administration enthusiastically picked up the idea. Secretary of State
Dean Rusk and Assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland both publicly stated that they favored ratification of the Genocide Convention, and declared that “it is the intention of the Administration to ratify the Genocide Convention if it receives the advice and consent of the Senate, and we hope that the situation in the Senate may develop to a point where this is possible.”216 The document’s primacy in the Ad Hoc
Committee’s name also reveals the significance much of the organization’s leaders placed upon it. The other human rights treaties were important, yes, but at least partly so because it let them raise the issue of genocide once again.
The Genocide Convention, however, had catalyzed the events leading to the
Bricker compromise early in the Eisenhower administration, and it remained a political risk. Early in 1965, Tillett and Richard Gardener met with Goldberg to strategize about how to get the necessary 57 senators on board with ratification. Also present were
Goldberg’s co-officers in the Ad Hoc Committee, representing the National Council of
Churches, the Jewish Labor Committee, and the Quaker UN Program. Inclusion of the
Genocide Convention alongside the other human rights treaties divided those present.
Although they claimed to favor ratification of the Genocide Convention alongside the others, Gardner and Tillett urged the others to wait to introduce it. They felt the
216 Dean Rusk, “Statement Regarding Genocide Convention by Secretary of State,” 14 June 1963, “UN Correspondence, June-July 1963,” Folder 863, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 321
Genocide Convention had the best chance of ratification if pursued later, after the success of the treaties already before Congress. The primary issue, which could weaken the other human rights conventions if they brought in the Genocide Convention too early, was its relationship to civil rights: the ratification of the Genocide Convention would require new legislation making genocide a federal crime. The three human rights treaties had been chosen to no small degree because US law safely adhered to them without the need for any legislative changes.217 Senator Ervin agreed that the Genocide
Convention brought too many legal complications, and he thought it could not be ratified at that moment, nor would he support it himself.218 Segregationist senators in general may have also had flashbacks to the Civil Rights Congress’s and William
Patterson’s appeal to the UN We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the
Negro People (1951) as they stared down the resurrection of the Genocide Convention in popular conversation. The treaty still carried too many risks on the international stage.
Tillett made use of her position and her contacts in the government and
Democratic party to make personal requests of the President as often as she could. At a reception for UN delegates at the Johnsons’ Texas ranch, Tillett spoke to him informally about the three conventions before the Senate. In November, she followed up with a
217 Memorandum to Richard Gardner, DoS, 27 Jan 1965, “UN Correspondence, Jan-Feb 1965,” Folder 870, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 218 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, Memorandum, 19 April 1966, “UN Correspondence, Mar-June 1966,” Folder 877, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 322
letter that clearly laid out how expressing support for ratification in his State of the
Union address could benefit Johnson. These conventions, she claimed, “have the support of important and large bodies of public opinion.” Among them, Tillett listed “all major women’s National Church Organizations,” African American leaders, and labor leaders. The church organizations, she emphasized, had done work to win support for ratification from both Republican and Democratic senators. Tillett highlighted Sam
Ervin’s advocacy of the conventions and the respect his opinion garnered from conservatives. His approval, she said, “tends to put the US Constitution on the side of ratification.” Lastly, ratification would put the US in a stronger international position for its support of human rights.219
Tillett hoped that the White House International Cooperation Year Conference would generate interest to jumpstart action on the conventions in the Senate. Nor was she alone in these hopes: her co-panelist from ICY, John W. Macy of the Civil Service
Commission had heard little about the conventions prior to the White House
Conference, and he came to agree with her that ratification “is necessary as an important expression to the world of our deep concern with Human Rights.”220 In addition,
Richard Gardener’s speech and pamphlet, “Human Rights—Some Next Steps,” began to
219 Gladys Avery Tillett to Lyndon B. Johnson, 23 Nov, 1964, “UN Correspondence, Nov-Dec 1964,” Folder 869, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 220 John Macy to Gladys Avery Tillett, 16 Dec 1965, “UN Correspondence, Oct-Dec 1965,” Folder 874, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 323
circulate again after the ICY Conference. UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg found the time was right to push hard again for ratification.
Shortly after the Conference ended, Tillett and Goldberg began drafting a new plan of action.221 Early in 1966, Tillett attended a seminar at the UN Church Center along with an array of leaders of national, religious, and black women’s organizations, where they discussed peace as a central issue for the 1966 elections, particularly in response to the administration’s foreign policy. Tillett wrote to Goldberg that “Human Rights are the basis of peace in Vietnam and Rhodesia. Therefore, the president has an opportunity to dramatize his interest in peace” by pressing for ratification of the human rights conventions. Tillett proposed a “Johnson package” of conventions, which would add the
ILO convention on discrimination to the existing package, referencing Title VII of the
1964 Civil Rights Act.222
In May, Tillett and Goldberg continued their efforts to make connections, and they specially sought out Senator Fulbright after his speech criticizing the increasing US reticence toward the UN. Goldberg went straight to the President, taking advantage of his position as Permanent Representative to the UN. The Kennedy Administration’s
221 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, 13 Dec 1965, “UN Correspondence, Oct-Dec 1965,” Folder 874, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Arthur Goldberg to Gladys Avery Tillett, 27 April 1966, “UN Correspondence, Mar-June 1966,” Folder 877, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 222 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, 27 April 1966, “UN Correspondence, Mar-June 1966,” Folder 877, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 324
policies, he claimed, marked a break in adherence to the Bricker agreement. Although he and Tillett had not agreed upon the idea of a Johnson package, Goldberg leaned into the idea of crediting Johnson. Ratification of the Human Rights and Genocide Conventions,
Goldberg argued, “is the logical complement to the domestic effort in the racial field begun by President Kennedy and brought to fruition under your leadership.”223 Tillett, once again with Ervin’s aid, approached Foreign Relations Committee chair Senator
William Fulbright (D-AR) to bring him on board.224 In an early meeting, Fulbright clarified that Vietnam and NATO needed to come first in US foreign policy, but he would support ratification and helped her to meet with other members of the FRC.
Tillett and Goldberg strategized, as well, about how to earn support from states’ rights and anti-UN Senators. The FRC Chief of Staff, Carl Marcy, agreed to speak with
Tillett “in strictest confidence,” and she promptly relayed his recommendations to Arthur
Goldberg. Marcy recommended, as a first order of business, to bring on board all the
223 Arthur Goldberg to Lyndon B. Johnson, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XXXIII, Organization and Management of Foreign Policy, United Nations, eds. David C. Humphrey and James E. Miller, (Washington, DC: GPO, 2004), Document 381, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v33/d381, accessed 7 June 2018. 224 Gladys Avery Tillett to William Fulbright, 19 May 1966, “UN Correspondence, Mar-June 1966,” Folder 877, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, 19 May 1966, “UN Correspondence, Mar-June 1966,” Folder 877, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Fulbright still holds the record of longest-serving FRC chair, for fifteen years from 1959 to 1974. "Carl M. Marcy, Chief of Staff, Foreign Relations Committee, 1955-1973," Oral History Interviews, Senate Historical Office, Washington, DC, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/oral_history/Carl_M_Marcy.htm, accessed 25 May 2018. 325
senators that might be most expected to oppose ratification of the human rights treaties.
He placed Ervin on this list alongside Russell, Hickenlooper, and Dirksen. In addition, he proposed convincing Johnson to mention the conventions at one of his informal
Tuesday luncheons, which included many of the administration’s highest-ranking foreign policy advisors.225 From there, Tillett and Goldberg strategized about each of the
“difficult” senators. Ervin, of course, had already worked with Tillett, and he could help her with Richard Russell (D-GA). Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) would be more complicated, as neither Tillett nor Goldberg had close connections to him. Instead, they enlisted Richard Gardner and Helen Irwin, a close friend of the Senator’s, to assist them in ascertaining his views on the convention. Gardner also liaised with Senator Everett
Dirksen (R-IL). President Johnson presented his own set of difficulties, and Tillett proposed White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers as the ideal candidate to speak to him about it, possibly at one of the Tuesday luncheons.226
Ervin, once more, featured prominently in their plans. But his allegiances and expectations for the conventions changed before they reached the FRC when he
225 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, 24 May 1966, “UN Correspondence, Mar-June 1966,” Folder 877, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. David C. Humphrey, "Tuesday Lunch at the Johnson White House: A Preliminary Assessment," Diplomatic History 8 (Winter, 1984): 81-101. David M. Barrett, “Doing ‘Tuesday Lunch’ at Lyndon Johnson's White House: New Archival Evidence on Vietnam Decision-making,” Political Science and Politics 24, no. 4 (Dec 1991): 676 - 679. Kevin V. Mulcahy, “Rethinking Groupthink: Walt Rostow and the national security advisory process in the Johnson administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 237. 226 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, 24 May 1966. 326
determined that the treaties could not be bent to his purposes, as he had hoped. In early
1966, he had still favored ratification of all three human rights conventions and declared his willingness to speak before the FRC.227 In July, a meeting with senator Russell marked the beginning of the end of Ervin’s confidence in ratification. Russell’s discomfort with the Convention on the Political Rights of Women set Ervin on an extended legal review of the three conventions in the Kennedy package.228 Ervin made extended notes on each treaty drew up reservations for Senate use. On the Political
Rights of Women, Ervin recommended a reservation to clarify that, in the US, voting was available to all citizens “if, and only if, a person possesses the qualifications for voting and office-holding prescribed by the laws of his country.” He pointed to minimum voting age, period of residence, “mentality,” or “freedom from conviction for certain infamous offenses.”229 The ongoing court cases enforcing adherence to the Voting
Rights Act over state protests likely enhanced the urgency of limiting the treaty.
On the Convention on the Abolition of Forced Labor, Ervin commented that the drafters “talked too much in the Preamble.” The Preamble referenced five international agreements from the 1926 Slavery Convention to the Universal Declaration of Human
227 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, Memorandum, 19 April 1966, “UN Correspondence, Mar-June 1966,” Folder 877, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 228 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, 28 July 1966, “UN Correspondence, July-August 1966,” Folder 878, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 229 Sam Ervin to Gladys Avery Tillett, 3 Aug 1966, “UN Correspondence, July-August 1966,” Folder 878, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 327
Rights, only one of which (the Slavery Convention) the US had already ratified. “I doubt very seriously whether the Senate will ratify this Convention” without a reservation stating that the US does not also constitute ratification of these other treaties. On the
Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, Ervin rescinded his support, remarking that he “would be very reluctant to vote for its ratification.” Through his legal interpretation, Ervin concluded that the Supplementary Convention “obligates the States bound by its provisions to undertake to prescribe by law certain standards relating to the marriage contract.” He primarily took issue with references to the UDHR and the use of the ICJ for enforcement.230 Like the Marriage Convention, which also enforced the end of “practices similar to slavery” in marriage, Ervin approved the extent to which the
Supplementary Convention left legal space for individual states to adhere to the terms.
But neither the Slavery nor Forced Labor conventions permitted reservations, and therefore Ervin saw no way that they could collect the necessary Senate votes for ratification.
Tillett felt “keen disappointment” at Ervin’s responses to the Forced Labor and
Abolition of Slavery treaties, but she and Goldberg pressed forward with preliminary work on ratification. Ervin hoped to complete work on the reservations that he recommended for the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, and Tillett
230 Sam Ervin to Gladys Avery Tillett, 12 Aug 1966, “UN Correspondence, July-August 1966,” Folder 878, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 328
continued to support him. “I am nevertheless convinced,” she remarked to Goldberg,
“that the ratification of even one human rights convention will establish the precedent and open the way for ratification other UN conventions.”231 As a result, Tillett also sought a re-evaluation from Ervin on the possibility of ratification for the Marriage
Convention.232 There is no indication of how he responded to this request—there are no further responses on the issue in either set of personal papers. But it speaks to the hope that Tillett felt at this moment. She reported to James Sisco and Walter Kotschnig in
September that, “At no previous time has there been this combination of support for ratification of any human rights treaty.” None, Ervin included, had yet been able to get
Senator Russell on the side of ratification, but the other major roadblock senators,
Dirksen and Hickenlooper, had expressed their support, and Tillett and her allies turned to communicating with less stringent supporters of states’ rights in the FRC.233
However, Tillett also worried about the implications of ratification for establishing legal precedent. As much as she desired ratification of all three, it seemed, by 1967, that the conventions on Slavery and Forced Labor would have to be abandoned.
231 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, 28 Aug 1966, “UN Correspondence, July-August 1966,” Folder 878, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Sam Ervin to Gladys Avery Tillett, 29 Aug 1966, “UN Correspondence, July-August 1966,” Folder 878, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 232 Gladys Avery Tillett to Sam Ervin, 15 Aug 1966, “UN Correspondence, July-August 1966,” Folder 878, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 233 Gladys Avery Tillett to James Sisco, through Walter Kotschnig, 6 Sept 1966, “UN Correspondence, September 1966,” Folder 879, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 329
One of Tillett’s final communications to Goldberg in 1966 demonstrates even her uncertainty. The document is filled with questions as she sought direction on their next move. Should the conventions be separated or still considered as one package? Should they approach the president about speaking only the Convention on the Political Rights of Women during his State of the Union address? If they did not press the issue of the political rights of women, would they lose the chance to “establish the precedent of ratifying a human rights convention”?234
By the end of 1966, Tillett and Goldberg had solidified their arguments in preparation for the FRC subcommittee hearing in February and March 1967. Ervin, unnerved by the inability of the US to tailor the Slavery and Forced Labor Conventions to the US domestic political environment and their references to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, had backed down. The adaptations of the arguments in favor of ratifying the human rights conventions remained couched in legal concerns, but
Tillett and Goldberg felt that they could leverage assumptions about US moral superiority to appeal to the subcommittee. They knew that they would need to balance their claims of US international responsibilities with Senators’ desires to preserve US power and Jim Crow.
234 Gladys Avery Tillett to Arthur Goldberg, 12 Oct 1966, “UN Correspondence, Oct-Dec 1966,” Folder 880, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 330
6.4 Moral Internationalism and a Defense of Jim Crow: The FRC Hearings
“For one I am not for letting the African countries run this country through emotion or otherwise,” Senator Hickenlooper declared in the Foreign Relations
Committee not long before the subcommittee began its hearings on the human rights conventions. Referring to conversation in the General Assembly, he put into words some lawmakers’ dissatisfaction with the loss of US leadership in the UN. The African countries, “have been doing it for a little while, and I think it is time we stopped letting them be influential on [human rights].” With Ervin’s flip on the political rights and slavery treaties, Hickenlooper had also changed his mind, and he demonstrated the uphill battle that proponents of ratification would have to fight against the concerns of states’ rights proponents. Hickenlooper and John Sparkman agreed that the human rights conventions could be ratified only with modifications to protect states’ rights.235
Ratification depended upon the Senate’s preservation of states’ ability to dictate access to voting, marriage licenses, and the characteristics of forced labor.
The hearing by the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Human Rights Conventions under the FRC marked the most sustained engagement in Congress with any human rights
235 US Congress, Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Together with Joint Sessions with the Senate Armed Services Committee, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., 11 Jan 1967, 14. 331
treaties since the Genocide Convention’s introduction in 1949.236 During the two sessions of the hearing, February 23 and March 8, the Subcommittee heard from organizations of many different backgrounds, most of them under the banner of the Ad Hoc Committee on Human Rights and Genocide Treaties, and representing a broad cross section of US society from the ACLU and the American Veterans Committee to the WILPF and the
American Baptist Convention. The FRC hearing thoroughly reviewed all three conventions, considering existing legal precedents and the possibility of establishing a precedent with the Conventions.
Senators Thomas Dodd (D-CT) and Joseph S. Clark (D-PA) served alongside
Hickenlooper, balancing his opposition to ratification. Dodd established one of the central arguments around which the hearings revolved: the US could lead the way in human rights by ratifying and influence the observance of these conventions in other parts of the world, which “would contribute significantly to the sum total of human freedom.”237 Dodd echoed claims that advocates for the conventions had long made and would continue to proclaim throughout the hearings, that the US progressed “in eliminating the inequities inherited from the past,” but there were other states “where
236 The advocacy of the Ad Hoc Committee on Human Rights and Genocide Treaties would earn the Genocide Convention fresh consideration in 1970, and the US would ultimately ratify the Convention on the Political Rights of Women until 1976. 237 US Congress, Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Human Rights Conventions, 90th Congress, 1st sess., 23 Feb and 8 Mar 1967, 17. 332
the curve has been downward rather than upward.”238 It is ironic to suggest the US could “lead” on, for example, the Slavery Convention, which had 68 ratifying countries by the time of the hearing, including states from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.239
Nevertheless, Dodd hoped, along with Clark and many others present, that consideration of the human rights conventions would also resurrect the Genocide
Convention, despite the risk of addressing the state-federal relationship.240
Arthur Goldberg served as the principle witness on February 23 to open debate on the importance of the conventions in the context of internationalism and diplomacy.
Goldberg pointed to the human rights conventions as a fulfillment of centuries-long US commitment to the rights of the individual. The Ad Hoc Committee had helped
Goldberg draft his statement. Sydney Liskofsky of the American Jewish Committee emphasized the Jewish identity of many of those who had resurrected the Genocide
Convention in the Senate, but by the final draft homed in on the human rights treaties as a natural extension of US American values.241 It would be “fitting that our country, which leads all the world in its observance of human rights” ratify the conventions.
Goldberg framed US foreign policy as “intended to elevate the standards of the world community” that also conveniently served “the national self-interest of the United
238 Ibid, 18. 239 Ibid, 34-35. 240 Ibid, 18. 241 Ronayne, Never Again?, 95. 333
States.”242 Ratification of the treaties would allow the US to enforce international standards to its advantage. For example, representatives of the US could bring the
Forced Labor Convention to bear on states that produced cheaper goods through coerced labor and improve US competition in the global economy.243 Not ratifying the conventions was both difficult to explain and to justify in the UN to US allies, especially smaller countries.244 The USSR, in contrast, had ratified some conventions—with significant accessions, but ratified nonetheless—and the US “should not leave the field to them.”245
Hickenlooper focused much of his questioning upon the implications of ratification on the state-federal relationship in the context of rights. His questions about the Convention on the Political Rights of Women tied it into questions about poll taxes, voting restrictions, and the expansiveness of women’s access to public offices. Despite the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the conversation about states’ rights to limit access to voting continued. In March 1966, the Supreme Court once more upset segregationists with the Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections decision, overturning a
1937 decision and declaring poll taxes unconstitutional.246 In the hearing, Hickenlooper
242 FRC Subcommittee, Human Rights Conventions, 19. 243 Discussion of the Forced Labor Convention entailed Goldberg explaining why prison labor did not fall within the convention’s purview. Ibid, 55. 244 Ibid, 20. 245 Ibid, 21. 246 Harper et al. v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966). Overturned Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937). 334
declared that the Supreme Court had “moved in and just usurped all of the states’ rights” regarding voting and election to office.247
Esther Peterson, former director of the Women’s Bureau, kept a sharp eye on debate about women’s access to political rights. She made only a modest statement, but her presence reminded the men present of the impact of their discussions. Goldberg insisted, in response to Hickenlooper’s concerns, that the Convention on the Political
Rights of Women would only affect national laws, and that state laws limiting women’s participation in certain public offices could continue.248 “Esther,” Goldberg said, “is looking at me very carefully at this moment.” Under her gaze, he tried to reframe his comment: the convention was limited “in this respect,” because it did not provide for state as well as national laws—a distinction, he did not mention, that the US delegation had carefully included during the drafting process in the UN.249 Peterson, when given the opportunity to contribute, emphatically supported Goldberg’s statements about ratification and presented the reports of the President’s Commission on the Status of
Women and the ICY report of the women’s committee. Both contained statements on the international conventions on human rights, and the PCSW report contained signatures by cabinet members and senators.250
247 FRC Subcommittee, Human Rights Conventions, 27. 248 The conversation revolved to some degree about public positions in general; Hickenlooper worried about women being allowed into military offices. 249 Ibid, 28. 250 Ibid, 64-65, 67-79. 335
Of the three human rights conventions, the Slavery Convention inspired the least controversy, to some extent because it seems to have been taken the least seriously.
Dodd highlighted the serious problems of “involuntary marriage, the sale of women, and the transfer of widows as inherited property” among other forms of slavery.251
However, echoing the newspaper article making light of the Marriage Convention and the need to protect men’s rights in marriage, Hickenlooper asked about the terms of
“slavery” included in the Supplementary Convention. He mentioned an alimony case he knew of in which the man “claimed he was subjected to involuntary servitude in this country because the court told him either to go to work and pay the alimony…or go to jail. He didn’t go to work, but went to jail.” Goldberg, also a former lawyer, laughed as he remembered similar cases he had seen, and clarified that the Slavery Convention did not relate to alimony cases. Hickenlooper earned another round of laughter by closing that the man in the alimony case “was not my client, but I supported his position.”252
Though it is not mentioned in the record, one wonders how the women in the audience reacted.
Goldberg brought Ervin’s opinions into the debate to argue there was not much that could reasonably obstruct ratification other than the inclusion in the texts of other international treaties. Although Ervin declined to attend the hearing, Goldberg
251 Ibid, 17. 252 Ibid, 23. 336
submitted Ervin’s letters to Tillett that broke down his legal opinion on the conventions as part of the record. His biggest issues, as already described, were with the incorporation of documents such as the UDHR or ILO conventions into the texts. The
Convention on the Political Rights of Women fared best in Ervin’s estimation, as it permitted reservations. But these references, Goldberg explained, were only in
Preambles and did not feature in operative paragraphs. “They do not relate,” he insisted, “to our obligations as a treaty power.” Nevertheless, this set off an argument with Hickenlooper about fine legal details in relation to preamble paragraphs. In frustration, Goldberg declared adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as stated in any of the preambles was a “moral obligation,” not a legal one.253 Senator
Clark asked about the “Moral Effect of US Ratification.” The question, after the legal nit- picking, must have come as a relief, as one of the chief arguments in favor that supporters had refined for years precisely concerned it. “Does our inaction,” Clark asked, “give you any embarrassment at the United Nations or elsewhere?” Goldberg answered that he was “never embarrassed” when defending decisions and policies that were true to the “basic principles” of the US, even in the face of majority opposition.
However, when confronted about human rights, “where we lead the world by virtue of
253 This led to a detailed discussion, in turn, of the concept of “letters of intent.” Ibid, 46-47. 337
our own Constitution and laws, I do find it very difficult to explain why we are lacking.”254
As Hickenlooper tried to bring the conversation back to the apolitical safety of legal issues, he exposed a flaw in the facade of many states’ rights proponents’ claims that the treaties were only a problem for legal reasons. Each of the human rights conventions included clauses placing enforcement under the jurisdiction of the
International Court of Justice. Hickenlooper asked whether ratification would interfere with the Connally Amendment in regard to allowing ICJ oversight. Goldberg replied with an emphatic “No” and brought new evidence into the debate: a list of other treaties that the US had signed with the same provision, granting minor jurisdiction to ICJ over the specific issues of those treaties. They included 22 multilateral treaties, on subjects from limiting narcotic drugs and opium and the prevention of oil pollution to the foundation of UNESCO and the World Health Organization, and bilateral commercial treaties with 22 countries.255 The Senate had clearly found it acceptable to submit the US to the authority of the International Court of Justice—albeit with limitations—in these other cases. The primary problem with ICJ jurisdiction, then, seems to have been the proximity of the human rights treaties to specific situations that might prompt international intervention, such as civil rights violations.
254 Ibid, 48. 255 Ibid, 50-54. 338
The next hearing met on March 8th, and only senators Dodd and Clark attended to hear testimony by non-governmental organizations, but many non-governmental organizations had come to offer their support. So many had asked to speak, that the subcommittee limited presentations to ten minutes in hopes that the senators might have time for questions. Tillett attended this session, and although she did not address the subcommittee herself, she brought the eyes of the world’s women with her. Twenty- one members of the UN Commission on the Status of Women joined her, including the representatives of Iran, Iraq, Uganda, the Philippines, and several Latin American countries.256
Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), though not in the subcommittee, attended as
“a leader in the Senate” in seeking to ratify the conventions.257 Beginning in January
1967, Proxmire spoke in favor of the human rights treaties every day that the Senate was in session, a practice that he maintained for two decades.258 He opened the session with a statement that echoed much of Goldberg’s; both men claimed the rights protected by the conventions as long a part of US tradition in the Constitution. Proxmire pointed to both national interest and international responsibility, as well. Domestic oppression, he said, had twice grown into “unprovoked foreign oppression,” initiating two world wars.
256 The record does not specify which. Ibid, 86. 257 Ibid, 81. 258 Ronayne, Never Again?, 25. 339
Peace, therefore, was a result of protecting human rights. The US should serve as an example to new states by ratifying the conventions. New countries “inspect the ratification list of these convention” and they “do not see the greatest nation in the world on that list.”259 But Proxmire also turned to the Genocide Convention and its protection of “man’s most precious right, the right to live.” Dodd, who had appeared as a civilian at the hearings on the Genocide Convention in 1949, was sympathetic and hoped that it would be ratified next. Senators Clark and Proxmire agreed that “we simply cannot divorce the moral issue from the political issue” in foreign policy, and the
“moral” abolition of genocide must have as much weight as the politics.260
Richard Gardner followed Proxmire to make a statement on behalf of the Ad Hoc
Committee, and the 10 million people he claimed the organization represented.261
Gardner presented the report of the ICY Conference’s committee on human rights, which declared “that to fulfill its international responsibilities as a leader of the free world the United States is bound to participate more vigorously in the international effort to achieve greater protection of human rights.”262 The body recommended ratification of the four human rights conventions, including the Genocide Convention.
259 FRC Subcommittee, Human Rights Conventions, 82-83. 260 Ibid, 84-85. 261 Ibid, 86-87. 262 Ibid, 88. Quoting: National Citizen’s Commission, “Report of the Committee on Human Rights, White House Conference on International Cooperation, Nov 28-Dec 1, 1965 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1965). 340
Gardner recited many previous arguments in favor of ratification. After all, he and Goldberg served together on the Ad Hoc Committee, and Gardner’s pamphlet on human rights served as a template for many of the arguments. He argued that: promotion of human rights globally serves US national interest; ratification of the treaties will “make a practical contribution” to promoting human rights; and there “is no reason in law or policy” to prevent ratification. 263 In conclusion, Gardner reiterated that
“there is a moral dimension to our foreign policy,” and the organizations represented by the Ad Hoc Committee “believe that at a time when we are discharging at great cost a commitment to human freedom in Vietnam, we should also discharge our unfinished business in the worldwide promotion of human rights.”264 Vietnam represented the military side of US intervention on human rights internationally. Completing the task required legislative action, as well.
Representatives of many organizations made statements in favor of ratification, generally reiterating that, given national claims to human rights leadership, ratification of the human rights treaties simply made sense. Jacob Clayman, administrative director for the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, countered the “normal assumption that...the ordinary people of America don’t know or care” about the human rights treaties and whether they would be ratified. Clayman relayed a conversation from the
263 FRC Subcommittee, Human Rights Conventions, 99. 264 Ibid, 119. 341
department’s executive board meeting about the conventions, as members asked “Aren’t we against slavery? Aren’t we for the political rights of women? Aren’t we against forced labor? Aren’t we against genocide?” and in response to the answer, “of course, yes,” they continued, “Then in heaven’s name what is the reason we haven’t acted?”265
The chair of the American Veterans Committee’s International Affairs Commission declared that, “as veterans, as servicemen, we fought for human rights, and we speak as veterans in saying with think the United States Government should ratify these conventions which put down in writing the principles which we all espouse and believe in.”266
Women’s organizations made a special appearance, as might be expected. The
National Council of Women stood before the subcommittee to speak on behalf of all the conventions and brought with them an article published only a few days before in the
World Journal Tribune, “Slavery’s Chains Still Clank.” The article highlighted the necessity for more profound action on the international slave trade through the cases of girls sold into slavery, particularly in the context of prostitution or child marriage, although the author also pointed to various forms of serfdom and debt bondage that might be abolished with greater enforcement of the Slavery Convention. The Council’s message was clear—US ratification would lend weight to the Slavery Convention,
265 Ibid, 151-52. 266 Ibid, 177. 342
weight needed to improve conditions around the world.267 The WILPF made clear that it stood in a special position to comment on international appearances because it was present as the international organization, not its US branch. The representative, Judith
Nies, focused on the international dimension and “the issue of the loss of United States prestige and leadership” because of the failure to ratify. She explained that “people in many countries,” as conveyed by non-American WILPF members, “feel that implicit in espousal of human rights is the necessity of action to bring them to reality,” and the lack of action “can be synonymous with denial of rights.”268
The FRC subcommittee did not deliver a verdict at the end of the hearings, and proponents of ratification maintained their work to pressure the FRC. True to the practice he began in January, Senator Proxmire continued addressing the Senate to criticize the lack of action on the human rights conventions. He cited the National
Council of Women, whose members claimed that their affiliates in 60 countries could not make the same claims to voting rights that women in the US could. Proxmire joined them in urging ratification, “so that women, the world over, may point proudly to the
United States as they wage their own fight for political equality.” The US could change
267 Ibid, 161. Donal Trelford, “Slavery’s Chains Still Clank,” World Journal Tribune, 5 Mar 1967. The paper’s short run—only eight months—and limited interest in preservation of its archive means that I have only been able to read the copy printed in the hearing record. An expanded version was published shortly thereafter in The Washington Post: Trelford, “Two Million Are Still Slaves and Nobody Seems to Care: Fear Misunderstanding 70 Cents to $1700,” Washington Post, 19 Mar 1967, E2, PQHN: The Washington Post. 268 FRC Subcommittee, Human Rights Conventions, 179. 343
foreign laws and policies by acting as an influence upon which citizens of foreign countries might draw. “How can the young governments of Burma, Cameroon, Nigeria,
Syria, and Gambia—to name a few—be expected to change centuries old traditions without encouragement and prodding?” Proxmire asked, implying that, without US influence, the achievement of women’s political rights elsewhere was simply impossible.269 On March 21, he stood to speak on the International Day for the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination, remembering the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in
South Africa and demanding ratification of the human rights conventions to hold states like South Africa to those standards.270
The American Bar Association held the highest position in the eyes of the Senate on the ratification decision, and its involvement worried those who supported ratification of the human rights treaties. The ABA had long fought liberal and progressive reforms, including much of the New Deal.271 Beginning in 1948, the ABA took swings at the nascent UN human rights system, especially the concept of an
269 Senator Proxmire, speaking on Human Rights Convention on Political Rights of Women—No Excuse for Senate’s Failure to Ratify—XXXIX, 15 Mar 1967, 90th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 113, pt. 5: S. 6780. 270 Senator Proxmire, speaking on March 21 International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination—Sad Reminder of Senate’s Indifference to Human Rights—XLII, 21 Mar 1967, 90th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 113, pt. 6: S. 7482. See also, Senator Proxmire, speaking on March 16—Sad Anniversary for Human Rights—XL, 16 Mar 1967, 90th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 113, pt. 6:S. 6989. His addresses continued, even after the ratification of the Slavery Convention, in hopes especially of ratifying the Genocide Convention. 271 Glenn Mitoma, Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power, 145. 344
international human rights court. It also fought the new Universal Declaration of
Human Rights on the grounds of supposedly communist clauses on, among other topics, social security and protection against unemployment, and the Genocide
Convention after Truman referred it to the Senate, in 1950.272 In April 1967, supporters of the human rights conventions in the ABA defeated an effort by opponents to get the
International Law Section on-record as rejecting the human rights conventions, but continued to deliberate. Richard Gardner, perhaps out of worry or impatience, wrote to members of the FRC subcommittee to reiterate that “there is no legal impediment to ratification.”273
At the end of May, Senator Dodd came out publicly in favor of the conventions.274 Finally, in June, the conventions were passed from the subcommittee to the Foreign Relations Committee.275 The FRC dallied for several more months, deciding in August to wait to confer with the American Bar Association.276 Rachel Nason kept an ear to the ground as Tillett was traveling out of the country once more, and reported to
272 Ibid, 147-49). Rowland Brucken, A Most Uncertain Crusade, 201, 203. 273 Richard N. Gardner to Thomas J. Dodd, 1 May 1967, “UN Correspondence, April-May 1967,” Folder 883, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. Fred P. Graham, “Bar Unit Neutral on U.N. Treaties: Rejects Plan for Opposition to Human Rights Stand,” Special to the New York Times 29 April 1967, 13. 274 ”Too Long Ignored,” Washington Post, 28 May 1967, C6. 275 “Minutes,” 5 June 1967, in Executive Sessions, 624. 276 “Minutes,” 22 Aug 1967, in Executive Sessions, 856. 345
her a few days later about the decision. The FRC had not discussed in detail, but Nason worried that the Political Rights Convention was in trouble.277
At long last, at the end of August, the American Bar Association made its recommendations. Contrary to the expectations Ervin had created after his evaluation of the human rights conventions, the ABA only recommended ratification of the
Supplementary Convention on Slavery.278 The chief problem ABA members found in the conventions in general echoed conservative approaches within the State Department and US delegation to the UN on international rights questions: were treaties
“appropriate” to defend human rights? In the Slavery Convention’s favor was the simple fact that it buttressed the 1926 Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and
Slavery, which the US ratified in 1956.279 But ABA experts also identified the 1926
Convention and the Supplementary Convention as addressing the international traffic in slaves, as opposed to issues of domestic concern. The Supplementary Convention, therefore, did not “constitute a precedent for any present departure from the sound
277 Rachel Nason to Gladys Avery Tillett, 25 Aug 1967, “UN Correspondence June-Aug 1967,” Folder 884, Box 19, Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, SHC. 278 American Bar Association, “Section of International and Comparative Law Standing Committee on Peace and Law Through the United Nations,” American Bar Association Annual Meeting, August 1967, American Bar Association, Section of International Law, Human Rights, https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/intlaw/policy/humanrights/humanright sgenerally08_67.authcheckdam.pdf, accessed 7 June 2018. 279 “Slavery Convention, signed at Geneva on 25 September 1926 and amended by the Protocol,” United Nations Treaty Series, https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII- 2&chapter=18&lang=en, accessed 8 June 2018. 346
traditional limits on the use of treaties,” as John M. Raymond, former advisor to the
State Department, argued.280 Richard Gardner spearheaded claims that the US needed to ratify to set a good example, but many ABA members rejected this line of argument. 281
As Raymond wrote, “The fact is that our ratification would not bring about any change in the objectionable practices.”282 Arguments about ratification as the moral choice did not sway the American Bar Association.283
The judgment that the Slavery Convention concerned the international traffic and therefore was not limited to domestic concerns proved the most substantial in the
Senate. Senator Fulbright remarked that the Forced Labor and Political Rights
Conventions were inappropriate subjects “for international conditions,” as he explained the FRC’s October 11 decision to pass only the Slavery Convention on to the Senate at large.284 Both documents concerned the internal affairs of countries, and the topics at stake fell into the category of “domestic jurisdiction” issues. The Slavery Convention, on the other hand, with its wording about interstate traffic in persons, concerned
280 John M. Raymond, “Don’t Ratify the Human Rights Conventions,” American Bar Association Journal, 54 (Feb 1968): 143. 281 Richard N. Gardner, “A Costly Anachronism,” ABA Journal 53 (Oct 1967): 907-910. 282 Raymond, “Don’t Ratify the Human Rights Conventions,” 143. For other examples, see: Eberhard P. Deutsch, “International Covenants on Human Rights and Our Constitutional Policy,” ABA Journal 54 (Mar 1968): 238-245. Bruno V. Bitker, “Genocide Revisited,” ABA Journal 56 (Jan 1970): 71-75. 283 One newspaper article noted the problem of allowing government employees to strike if the US ratified the Forced Labor Convention. “Forced Labor Ban is Opposed,” The Baltimore Sun, 14 Sept 1967, A8. 284 “Slavery Treaty Moves Ahead,” Atlanta Constitution, 12 Oct 1967, 1. 347
transnational crimes and international relationships. The wording also resonated with the Mann Act prohibitions of interstate sex trafficking that had been used in the past to punish interracial marriages.
On November 2, the Senate voted unanimously to ratify the Slavery Convention.
Senator Proxmire, although relieved that the Senate would “at least endorse the principle of US participation in an international treaty to establish human rights,” called rejection of the Forced Labor and Political Rights Conventions a “disgrace” and “a callous repudiation of President John F. Kennedy.”285 The documents relevant to domestic human rights were rejected, and the treaty on international human rights was accepted, a statement about how far the Senate was willing to go on limiting US power in the name of human rights: nowhere at all.
6.5 Conclusion
Gladys Avery Tillett continued to look ahead toward stronger statements on women’s rights after ratification of the Slavery Convention. Despite all her hard work throughout the process, Tillett left behind little documentation that suggests real disappointment at the outcome. The distinction between the domestic issues of forced labor and voting rights and the international issue of slavery may have frustrated her,
285 Senator Proxmire, speaking on Supplementary Slavery Convention, 2 Nov 1967, 90th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 113, pt. 24: S. 15744. “Antislavery Accord Ratified by Senate,” New York Times, 3 Nov 1967, 5. 348
but the decision did result in the ratification of a human rights convention. Precedent was still precedent, even though it was weaker than she had hoped. In addition, the
Slavery Convention’s many similarities to the Marriage Convention may have made
Tillett feel that she had done what she came to do. The US had ratified a treaty that would protect the consent of women and girls. But she also likely held hopes for US participation in the new Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against
Women and turned her attention to securing support for the larger document. In
November, the General Assembly adopted DEDAW, which contained articles on many different dimensions of women’s rights, including nationality, marriage consent, equal pay, voting, and election to public office.286
Black women were largely absent from the convention ratification process.
International women’s rights documents had done very little for black women’s struggles in the United States, and the arguments about the human rights treaties in the
Senate indicated that black women could expect more of the same. NCNW signed on to the human rights conventions through their affiliation with the National Council of
Women, but NCNW members pursued avenues that would better address their needs.
Although Dorothy Height had secured significant avenues of direct participation for
286 General Assembly resolution 2263 (XXII), Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, New York, 7 Nov 1967, A/RES/22/2263, http://www.un-documents.net/a22r2263.htm, accessed 11 June 2018. The New York Times also published a copy of the document: “U.N. Declaration on Women’s Rights,” New York Times, 8 Nov 1967, 24. 349
NCNW in shaping US policy, the organization’s efforts to secure black women’s political rights deliberately moved beyond legal provisions. “No matter how interested and excited a woman is on election day,” a 1965 convention workbook explained, “she cannot vote in 46 out of 50 states if she has not registered.” WIMS continued its visits to
Mississippi after 1964, and NCNW maintained voter registration programs to instruct women and their branch organizations to operate their own registration campaigns.287 In
1967 they worked toward public housing and members pursued their longtime goals of mentoring young women, maintaining WIMS workshops, and the establishment of
Project Womanpower to encourage women in the workforce.288 Black women devoted little time or thought to the Senate hearings on the human rights treaties. Arguments in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of ratification had demonstrated to them that, time and again, policymakers, advisors, and law makers would not or could not use international human rights to enforce domestic changes that would support them. Disappointing, perhaps, but hardly unexpected.
In this sense, ratification of the Slavery Convention represented less change than many activists might have hoped. Global power had shifted significantly since the US first participated in the creation of the United Nations and helped to limit the reach of
287 NCNW, ‘Civil and Political Status,” 30th Anniversary Convention, 10-14 Nov 1965, NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, Folder 189, “Programs, 1965.” 288 NCNW, “To All National Affiliates of NCNW,” 1967, NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, Folder 197, “Correspondence, 1967.” 350
human rights within the new organization. With decolonization and changing Cold War relationships, delegates and diplomats from the United States had to shift the country’s performance toward the rest of the world, stripping away as much as possible any claims to imperialism or support for racism. However, the Senate had only voted to ratify the Slavery Convention because it had passed muster among segregationists who continued to dominate the Foreign Relations Committee. Human rights were only viable on the national stage where they did not edge too close to the ongoing “race problem” or the controversy over teenage marriages.
Proponents and opponents of the human rights conventions remained fundamentally at odds on an issue that had divided policymakers and activists in the US since the United Nation’s founding: What should US power look like on the global stage? Proponents saw human rights as a critical aspect of how the US engaged in foreign relations, and with ratification of the Supplementary Convention on the
Abolition of Slavery, many opponents recognized the need to at least pay lip service to human rights. The treaties on voting rights and forced labor remained too risky, but the
Slavery Convention was legally impeccable and boosted the relationship between states and marriage laws. For segregationists, the ratification of treaties on issues within the domestic jurisdiction of the US threatened to set a dangerous precedent and would potentially invite greater international scrutiny on domestic human rights abuses. To
351
remain a global power, the US needed to preserve the illusion, if not the reality, of human rights leadership.
But for many like Tillett and Proxmire, human rights provisions needed to be a central element of global governance. As Proxmire explained to the Senate:
“I submit that the whole purpose of the United Nations is to convince the world that human rights are not simply a matter of domestic concern. Human rights transcend national boundaries. Human rights must be truly universal if we are ever to have a truly peaceful world.”289
Tillett and her allies had not quite succeeded in making human rights a central element of US power at home and abroad, but they had reopened, at least partially, a door long closed.
289 Senator Proxmire, speaking on Supplementary Slavery Convention, 2 Nov 1967, 90th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 113, pt. 24: S. 15744-15745. 352
7. Conclusion
In the years after its adoption, in the halls of the UN, the Marriage Convention enjoyed some measure of success. The necessary ten countries—primarily from
Scandinavia and Africa—ratified the document to allow it to enter into force in
December 1964.1 It picked up another fourteen ratifications from an assortment of states, bringing the total to 24 before the International Women’s Year Conference met in 1975.2
At present, there are 55 state parties to the Convention. The United States is one of only seven states that have signed but never ratified.3
The Marriage Convention always faced an uphill battle toward Senate ratification. After all, the US government has always been and continues to be hesitant to ratify human rights treaties. Nevertheless, the Marriage Convention did open the door to greater consideration of human rights treaties in the US and among its agencies, however briefly, and I argue that no other convention could have done so. Its completion in the UN during the “liberal hour” of the early 1960s made broader policy approval of the document easier, but its content was just as significant.
1 Burkina Faso, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, Mali, New Zealand, Norway, Niger, Samoa, and Sweden. “Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages,” Chapter XVI: Status of Women, United Nations Treaty Collection, https://treaties.un.org/pages/viewdetails.aspx?src=ind&mtdsg_no=xvi-3&chapter=16&lang=en, accessed 25 Nov 2018. 2 Austria, Benin, Cuba, Fiji, Germany, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Poland, Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Argentina, Ibid. 3 Ibid. 353
On the international stage, the Marriage Convention arrived during a collective moment of defining nations: the new, fabricating state governance under nationalist movements; the old, reworking nationalism in the aftermath of World War II and the beginnings of decolonization. Throughout the debates taking place around the world, women’s roles and what “the Family” meant held a prominent place. In the UN, the
Marriage Convention granted diplomats from the US and other states opportunities to make nationalist claims in competition with each other. In the process of defining a global version of the family as the fundamental social unit, delegates chose one vision to prioritize. The Marriage Convention preserved a family form held up as “modern,” but appealed to US Americans because it maintained space for “traditional” gender roles.
The document asserted individual women’s rights to free choice in marriage while incorporating—through marriage registration—their legibility to state power and their accessibility to state approval or rejection of their marriages. Lastly, ratifying the
Convention could confer the stamp of “women’s rights” on the US while elevating a vision of women’s rights that could easily be interpreted as feminine and required no changes in US law.
But its appeal to segregationists and then their abandonment of it reflect the tight hold that white supremacy maintained on foreign policy and the image that US diplomats could present of the US. Pro-human rights policies mattered to this image but also threatened the maintenance of the US racial hierarchy. More than any other issue,
354
the success of both civil rights activists (in bringing their issues to such prominence that the federal government had no choice but to address them) and Southern Democrats (in maintaining control of the Foreign Relations Committee and the preservation of state jurisdiction over most issues) decided the fate of the Marriage Convention. The comparative prominence of the US on women’s rights issues—as defined within the
UN—gave the Marriage Convention a boost but also made it less relevant as the fat hit the fire on civil rights.
Since the United Nation’s founding, human rights considerations have held an important place in the question of whether the United States should participate in the organization, and to what extent. African Americans’ support for anticolonial movements and their attempts to bring their grievances to the world stage—most notably through William Patterson’s and the Civil Rights Congress’s We Charge
Genocide—alarmed even moderate white policymakers as it aired dirty United States laundry in a place where the Soviet Union could leverage it. Human rights are about governance as much as individual rights, and US state reluctance to participate demonstrates policymakers’ desire to conduct governance independent of interference.
White supremacy fundamentally influenced this desire as segregationists sought to preserve state jurisdiction over its citizens, and with it, the right to decide who did not qualify for citizenship and its protections.
355
More so than any of the previous UN women’s rights treaties, which addressed women’s independent citizenship and voting rights, the Marriage Convention made space for more “feminine” readings of women’s rights in the US. For the white men who continued to dominate the federal government, it allowed them to combine human rights and the gender roles of the heterosexual nuclear family safely at a time when the latter seemed to be under siege: from the population bomb, “social equality,” homosexuality, and the ERA.
On the global stage, many of the Marriage Convention’s principles lived on in the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (DEDAW), which the Commission on the Status of Women developed with a more diverse array of states.
Representatives from Africa joined after the Marriage Convention left the Commission in 1961: the first, in 1962, were from Ghana and the United Arab Republic (by this point comprised only of Egypt); in 1965 the number of African delegates increased further—
Sierra Leone and Guinea joined the previous two states. During this session, Judge
Annie Jiagge also became Ghana’s delegate. A founder of Ghana’s national YWCA chapter and a judge in Ghana’s High Court, she became a powerful figure in the
Commission during the 1960s and was instrumental in crafting the Declaration.4
4 In 1959, through the Ghanian YWCA branch, she requested and was granted funds to oversee the creation of a hostel for young women moving to Accra from rural areas. Abe and Edith Halperin, “It’s Wonderful to Be a Woman: An Interview with Annie Jiagge,” The Rotarian 112, no. 2 (Feb 1968): 36-37,59, https://books.google.com/books?id=1zMEAAAAMBAJ&dq=annie+jiagge+ywca&source=gbs_nav 356
DEDAW, adopted five years to the day after the Marriage Convention, incorporated all the fundamental elements of the marriage treaty, but in the context of the broader sweep of marriage rights that the Commission had discussed almost since its founding. Article 6 included women’s rights in marriage in considerably more detail than had the Marriage Convention, and it placed consent and marriage age alongside other rights including those to property, inheritance, child custody, and divorce. The
Declaration continued to proclaim the need to safeguard, “the unity and the harmony of the family, which remains the basic unit of any society,” while preserving women’s
“equal rights with men in the field of civil law.” Those who drafted the document placed women’s rights to property within marriage alongside freedom of movement.
However, the statements that echoed the Marriage Convention did not highlight dependent territories and postcolonial states in the same way. The Declaration announced that women should have “the same right as men to free choice of a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent.” The clause on prohibitions against child marriage and “the betrothal of young girls before puberty” did not contain the same geographical markers, nor did it utilize the language of
“ancient practices.” It did, however, maintain the Marriage Convention’s preoccupation
links_s, accessed 2 Dec 2018. Annie Jiagge, “The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in the Education of Women in African States,” Convergence 2, no. 2 (Jan 1, 1969): 73-78, ProQuest ID 1437904773. 357
with compulsory “registration of marriages in an official registry.”5 CSW retained its faith in the kind of liberal governance that required the legibility of citizens to their governments. But while DEDAW’s drafters maintained the need for legislative changes, they also explicitly stated what they had known for decades: that women’s rights were not simply a matter of creating the right laws but would also involve removing social barriers.6
The document had a significant impact for the women who sought to enact a broader definition of women’s human rights—for example, it served as the guiding principles for the eighteen-country Arab Women’s Commission (1971)—and it incorporated ideas of economic development, rather than the Marriage Convention’s emphasis on social development.7 The preamble includes the conviction that “the full and complete development of a country…require[s] the maximum participation of women as well as men in all fields.”8 The publication of Esther Boserup’s Woman’s Role in Economic Development in 1970 enhanced women delegates’ convictions about women in development and provided concrete data for them to use in the UN. Boserup revealed that gendered biases structured many development programs by assuming specific roles
5 UN General Assembly, “Resolution adopted by the General Assembly: 2263 (XXII). Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women,” 7 Nov 1967, UN Documents, A/RES/22/2263, http://www.un-documents.net/a22r2263.htm, accessed 29 Nov 2018, Article 6.1-3. 6 Jain, Women, Development, and the UN, 47. 7 Ibid, 48. 8 UNGA, “Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women,” Preamble. 358
for men and women, which were often based on Euro-American assumptions rather than pre-existing gendered divisions of labor. The very development programs intended to improve the lives of everyday people made situations worse for women.9 The women of the “developing” states, such as Judge Jiagge, performed postcolonial modernity while promoting women’s human rights that mattered to them. They walked the line between patriotism that reinvigorated the cultures that had been devalued by imperialist states and pursuing changes to the “traditional” way of life in pursuit of rights for themselves.10
In the US, women’s rights also took on new meanings with the expansion of black women’s pre-existing arguments about the layered effects of racism and sexism.
The prominence of civil rights conversations that had necessitated dropping the
Marriage Convention did not abate.11 In the aftermath of Title VII of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, protests of the Vietnam War, and others, critiques of United States imperialism and the sexist white supremacy that maintained it became more mainstream. 1968 often stands as a symbolic year of change in the United States, and it certainly featured significant events: the Tet Offensive and its
9 Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development 10 Jain, Women, Development, and the UN, 51. 11 Timothy J. Minchin and John A. Salmond, After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). Greta de Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2016). Sean Malloy, Out of Oakland. 359
aftermath, including Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for reelection; the foundation of the Third World Liberation Front in San Francisco; and the protest of the
Miss America pageant that generally represents a shift from liberal to radical feminism.12
But as I have demonstrated, these events built on changes already in progress.
Many women’s organizations pursued the radicalism of the time, in whole or in part. Generational differences made an impact on the politics of women activists and their organizations. The National Council of Negro Women sought to listen to younger voices, and several teens and college students in attendance at their 1967 youth luncheon spoke frankly about the generational differences. “Only if you want us to listen to you, you ought to be willing to listen to us in return,” declared one student from North
Carolina College (now NCCU). Students spoke on topics including what it meant to be middle-class and black, dismantling the sexual double-standard, and school dropouts—
“They aren’t dropouts,” said Ruth Atkins of New York, “They’re pushouts.”13 But there were also generational differences between the long-established and far more recently formed organizations. Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee enhanced older activists’ perception that the changes in their
12 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “The U.S. 1968: Third-Worldism, Feminisms, and Liberalism,” American Historical Review 123, no. 3 (June 2018): 710-16, https://doi- org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1093/ahr/123.3.710. Kathleen A. Laughlin and Jacqueline L. Castledine, eds., Breaking the Wave. 13 Carolyn Lewis, “’Don’t Pretend,’ Say Youths to Adults,” Washington Post, 12 Nov 1967, NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, folder 202, “Speeches, News Releases, 1967.” 360
movements emerged from young people’s approaches. The National Organization for
Women, spearheaded by leaders who included Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray, took up much of what the older Women’s Party addressed, but not without making their elders uncomfortable. NOW members sent a special invitation to longtime Women’s Party leader Alice Paul to join them, but according to a friend Paul thought they behaved “as if they just discovered the whole idea, it’s been going for 40 years but they act as if they just discovered it.” In addition, NOW harnessed new issues—most notably abortion—to their support of the ERA, making the Women’s Party hostile to the newer organization.14
But some women’s organizations, like the YWCA, pursued greater engagement with issues of racism alongside sexism. In 1969, the National Board requested funds from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to support the creation of Racial Justice Institutes to educate YWCA members and those in their communities about problems created by racism, how to work “for the empowerment of the Black community,” and how to encourage and participate in community and economic development.15 In their proposal, national board members criticized the “anti-Black, anti-youth, anti-poverty, anti-poor, anti-minority attitude” held by the “White ruling class and organized structures of power.” Dorothy Height spearheaded the drafting of the proposal, but its approval by
14 Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, 180-181. 15 National Board, YWCA of the USA, “Racial Justice Institutes,” NABWH_051, The Papers of Dorothy Irene Height, Racial Justice Institute Planning, 1961-77, p. 7. 361
the National Board represents the organization’s broader commitment to attacking racism head-on.16 “That monster called racism must be destroyed before he consumes us all,” the proposal concluded.17
The NCNW, meanwhile, pursued direct action programs including their new housing project in Mississippi, for which they laid the groundwork at their 1967 convention. Their aim was to provide good-quality, affordable housing for black families.18 The conversations during the convention that year saw explicit confrontations about the gap between upper and lower class and the need to close it and work in tandem. Height closed the convention that year with a reminder of the organization’s founding purpose:
“We dare not lose sight of the fact that the reason Mary McLeod Bethune brought us together as Women United was to make us visible on Capitol Hill, in City Hall, in the Executive Chambers of our States…. We will be true to our destiny.... We have tried to find the direction into which we ought to move. It is wherever the black American is handicapped, is frustrated, in a racist society that we must be at work.”19
The 1962 Convention on Consent for Marriage, Age of Marriage, and
Registration of Marriages, by drawing upon racist imperialist assumptions about
16 Ibid, 2-3. 17 Ibid, 10. 18 “Charting a Pathway to the Future,” Press Release, 9 Nov 1967, NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, folder 202, “Speeches, News Releases, 1967.” 19 “D.H.—closing words,” “NCNW Charts New Directions,” NABWH_001, National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, Sub-Group 1, Series 2, folder 202, “Speeches, News Releases, 1967.” 362
“civilized” and “savage,” defined modern and not-modern spaces through the marriage practices they exhibited. Race is as important a framework for interpreting this document as gender, and the categories together reveal the extent to which white supremacy almost made the Marriage Convention successful in the US, and ultimately prevented its ratification.
There is no tidy conclusion to the history of the United Nations Marriage
Convention in the United States. It did not end forever conversations about women’s marriage rights, nor did US ratification of the Slavery Convention secure the domestic changes Tillett and others had hoped for. Only a few years after the Senate hearings, US directors of a program in Vietnam turned a blind eye to the polygamous marriages of one of the program’s Vietnamese leaders because he got the results the US directors wanted.20 As of October 2018, only New Jersey and Delaware have ended all child marriages.21 But the struggle for these rights, who they were intended to protect, and who they excluded demonstrate broader elements of human rights history.
20 Gabriel N. Rosenberg, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 212. 21 “Child Marriage in the US,” Laws to End Child Marriage, Unchained at Last, http://www.unchainedatlast.org/laws-to-end-child-marriage/, accessed 28 Feb 2019. Syrett, American Child Bride, 252-266. Terrence McCoy, “’You shouldn’t be doing this’: She was 16. He was 25. Should Marrying a Child be Allowed?” The Washington Post, Oct 5, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/10/05/feature/child-marriage-in-the-u-s-is- surprisingly-prevalent-now-states-are-passing-laws-to-make-it- harder/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a42853df9b4a, accessed 28 Feb 2018. 363
Human rights should not be defined as outside the influences of white supremacy and imperialism: in the United Nations, no single unified vision of human rights existed, although one vision predominated. Human rights were frequently framed by the assumptions that produced “modern” states and their subjects. In outlining protective legal relationships between states and subjects, UN human rights documents contributed to the shifting definitions of modernity.
Determining concretely what many of the actors in this dissertation thought were
“human rights” is not always a straightforward task, complicated as it is by political environments in which that phrase had different currency depending upon the audience. For women in the United Nations, claiming their place under the “human rights” umbrella served to legitimate their women’s rights projects. In the United States, however, using the phrase had the opposite effect given segregationists’ tendency to see human rights mechanisms as the gross overreach of federal and international governing bodies. Nevertheless, the activists who most pursued rights as widely varied as voting, equal pay, and marriage consent consistently placed all these rights under the same heading. Recognizing that human rights are affected by systems of inequality does not dismiss their value, but it does require reflection on how some protections might privilege certain practices and experiences.
364
365
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Henry, Charles P. Ralph Bunche: Model Negro or American Other? New York: New York University Press, 1999.
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381
Ibrahim, Habiba. Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
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382
Knop, Karen. Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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MacKenzie, G. Calvin and Robert Weisbrot. The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
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383
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Maillard, Kevin Noble and Rose Cuison Villazor. Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Majumdar, Rochona. Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
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Marino, Katherine M. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2019.
Maul, Daniel. Human Rights, Development and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940-70. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
May, Elaine Tyler. America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. 3rd Edition. New York: Perseus Group, 2008.
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McDuffie, Erik. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
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384
McMichael, Philip. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012.
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Merry, Sally Engle and Mark Goodale, eds. The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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Mitoma, Glenn. Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010.
Mumford, Kevin. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
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Paisley, Fiona. Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009.
385
Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Patil, Vrushali. Negotiating Decolonization in the United Nations: Politics of Space, Identity, and International Community. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Pedersen, Susan. Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Peplar, Michael. Family Matters: A History of Ideas about Family since 1945. New York: Pearson Education, 2002.
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Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945- 1988. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003.
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Randolph, Sherie M. Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
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386
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Salime, Zakia. Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011.
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Scarfi, Juan Pablo and Andrew R. Tillman. Cooperation and Hegemony in US-Latin American Relations: Revisiting the Western Hemisphere Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Schott, Linda K. Reconstructing Women's Thoughts: The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom before World War II. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
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Scott-Smith, Giles and Hans Krabbendam. The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945- 1960. Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003.
Self, Robert O. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.
Shibusawa, Naoko. America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
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387
Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Sklar, Martin J. Creating the American Century: The Ideas and Legacies of America’s Twentieth-Century Foreign Policy Founders. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
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Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
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Storrs, Landon R. Y. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Subramanian, Narendra. Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.
Swerdlow, Amy. Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Syrett, Nicholas L. American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Thomas, Lynn M. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
Weisenfeld, Judith. African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
West, Cornel. The Radical King: Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.
White, E. Francis. Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
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Williams, Randal. The Divided World: Human Rights and its Violence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
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Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
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Zahra, Tara. The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Dissertations
Gradskova, Yulia. “Soviet People with Female Bodies: Performing Beauty and Maternity in Soviet Russia, 1930-1960s.” PhD diss. Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, 2007.
Renourad, Joe. “Limits and Morality: The Emergence of Human Rights in America’s Post-Vietnam Foreign Policy, 1968-1981.” PhD diss. Emory University, 2008.
Articles and Essays
Abbott, Freeland. “Pakistan’s New Marriage Law: A Reflection of Qur’anic Interpretation.” Asian Survey 1, no. 11 (Jan 1962): 26-29.
Alameen-Shavers, Antwanisha. “The Woman Question: Gender Dynamics within the Black Panther Party.” Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men 5, no. 1 (2016): 33-62.
Badger, Anthony. “The South Confronts the Court: The Southern Manifesto of 1956.” Journal of Policy History 20, no. 1 (2008): 126-142.
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Barrett, David M. “Doing ‘Tuesday Lunch’ at Lyndon Johnson's White House: New Archival Evidence on Vietnam Decision-making.” Political Science and Politics 24, no. 4 (Dec 1991): 676 - 679.
Beydoun, Khaled A. “Between Muslim and White: The Legal Construction of Arab American Identity.” Annual Survey of American Law 69, no. 1 (2013): 29-76.
Bonds, Eric. “Hegemony and Humanitarian Norms: The US Legitimation of Toxic Violence.” Journal of World – Systems Research 19, no. 1 (2013): 82-106.
Boyce, Mary E. and Carol Ann Franklin. “From Integration to Racial Justice: Organizational Learning in the YWCA.” Journal of Organizational Change Management 9, no. 5 (1996): 91-101.
Burke, Rowland. “Flat Affect? Revisiting Emotion in the Historiography of Human Rights.” Journal of Human Rights 16, no. 2 (2017): 123-141. doi:10.1080/14754835.2015.1103168.
Cabell, Brian. “Alabama Considers Lifting Interracial Marriage Ban: Law Not Enforced for Decades.” 12 Mar 1999. CNN.com. http://www.cnn.com/US/9903/12/interracial.marriage/ (accessed 2 Dec 2018).
“Child Marriage in the US.” Laws to End Child Marriage. Unchained at Last. http://www.unchainedatlast.org/laws-to-end-child-marriage/ (accessed 28 Feb 2019).
Cook, Robert J. “Red Termites and Rebel Yells: The Civil War Centennial in Strife-Torn Alabama, 1961-1965.” The Alabama Review 64, no. 2 (Apr 2011): 143-167.
Copland, Ian. “What’s in a Name? India’s Tryst with Secularism.” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 48, no. 2 (Apr 2010): 123-147.
David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, “Another "Great Migration": From Region to Race in Southern Liberalism, 1938-1945,” Southern Cultures 3, no. 4 (1997): 37-62. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.1997.0065.
Davis, Mattie Belle. “The White House Conference on International Cooperation.” Women Lawyers’ Journal 52, no. 1 (1966): 10-12. de Haan, Francisca. "The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991." Women and Social Movements, International, 1840 to the Present. 2016.
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Diwan, Paras. “The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955.” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Apr 1957): 263-272.
Dow, Philip E. “Romance in a Marriage of Convenience: The Missionary Factor in Early Cold War U.S.-Ethiopian Relations, 1941-1960.” Diplomatic History 35, no. 5 (Nov 2011): 859-895.
DuBois, Ellen and Lauren Derby. “The Strange Case of Minerva Bernardino: Pan American and United Nations Women’s Rights Activist.” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 (2009): 43-50.
Feldman, Glenn. “Southern Disillusionment with the Democratic Party: Cultural Conformity and ‘the Great Melding’ of Racial and Economic Conservatism in Alabama during World War II.” Journal of American Studies 43, no. 2 (Aug 2009): 199-230.
Gamble, Vanessa Northington and Theodore M. Brown. “Midian Othello Bousfield: Advocate for the Medical and Public Health Concerns of Black Americans.” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. 7 (July 2009): 1186.
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Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: NYU Press, 2011.
Gorman, Daniel. “Britain, India, and the United Nations: Colonialism and the Development of International Governance, 1945-1960.” Journal of Global History 9, no. 3 (Nov 2014): 471-490, DOI: 10.1017/S1.7 40022814000217.
Gutterman, Lauren Jae. “Another Enemy Within: Lesbian Wives, or the Hidden Threat to the Nuclear Family in Post-War America.” Gender and History 24, no. 2 (10 July 2012): 475-501. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2012.01692.x.
391
Hall, Simon. “The NAACP, Black Power, and the African American Freedom Struggle, 1966-1969.” The Historian 69, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 49-82.
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Humphrey, David C. "Tuesday Lunch at the Johnson White House: A Preliminary Assessment." Diplomatic History 8 (Winter, 1984): 81-101.
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Imy, Kate. “Queering the Martial Races: Masculinity, Sex and Circumcision in the Twentieth-Century British Indian Army.” Gender & History 27, no. 2 (Aug 2015): 374-396.
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Laville, Helen. “‘If the Time is not Ripe, Then it is Your Job to Ripen the Time!’ The Transformation of the YWCA in the USA from Segregated Association to Interracial Organization, 1930–1965.” Women’s History Review 15, no. 3 (2006): 359-383.
392
Levine, Philippa. “’A Multitude of Unchaste Women:’ Prostitution in the British Empire.” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (Winter 2004):159-163.
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Namikas, Lise. “A Silver-Lining: President Johnson and the U.N. Peacekeeping Budget Crisis of 1964-65.” Diplomacy and Statecraft 15, no. 3: 593-612.
393
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Biography
Jessica Malitoris graduated cum laude from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill in 2012 and earned her Master of Arts in History from Duke University in
2015. She has presented papers at the International Federation for Research in Women’s
History Conference, the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and
Sexualities, and the Working Group for Feminism and History. Her awards include the
Guion Griffis Johnson Visiting Scholar Grant from Louis Round Wilson Library, the
Gender and Race Research Award from the Duke University Department of Gender,
Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, and the Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research
Grant from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. She is a member of the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign
Relations, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the Coordinating Council for
Women in History.
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