Women and Human Rights

The title of this volume, Women and Human Rights might be taken innocently to indicate its contents: a set of lectures given by women on the rights of women, on the failure to achieve those rights, and on the reasons and remedies for those failures. However, it might also imply that women’s rights are not simply the extension of the agreed rights of men to all members of the community. In other words, the "lived in" experience of being female results in a distinctive account of the nature of rights and the applicability of the language of rights to the status of women as equally valuable social, political, and economic agents. Women, therefore, might be expected to give a distinctive critique of the theory of rights that depends on their difference from men.