REVIEW of WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS: Seeking Gender Justice in a Globalizing Age
Published in
Sex Education 11.4 (2011): 501-2
This book sets out to reflect on advocacy around women's human rights throughout
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whilst maintaining a
critical stance, overall the book is refreshingly upbeat. It is also well
written, at the same time scholarly and readable.
Reilly wrote this book as a postdoctoral fellow. It built on her doctoral
research in the field of politics, experience as a women's human rights activist
since Vienna (1993) and Beijing (1995), and role in coordinating the ‘16 Days of
Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign’ in its early years. She acknowledges
the influence on her work of Charlotte Bunch, with whom she worked at the Center
for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, and her commitment to
global feminism that lies at the heart of the book:
"My purpose here is to make visible, thematize, and highlight the transformative
potential of TFA [transnational feminist advocacy] in a context of globalisation,
a potential that is rooted in critical, bottom-up understandings of human rights
as universal and indivisible" (p. 1).
The author carefully charts the development of transnational feminist advocacy
since the 1970s, examining how the movement for women's human rights has engaged
with the gendered impacts of an array of global issues. Each chapter takes a
current global issue, and begins by examining the gendered dynamics, drawing
out, for example, the detrimental impacts on women's lives of neo-liberal
globalisation, health pandemics and conflict. Reilly then goes on to examine how
women's rights advocacy has addressed these issues, tracing both achievements
and continuing obstacles. There is a good balance of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’
advocacy, with some emphasis on how grassroots activism has increasingly
influenced UN activity. For example, she discusses the influence of feminist
activists from the global south as well as the north in revitalising CEDAW (UN
Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women)
through the adoption of the optional protocol in 1997.
Reilly reflects with some pride on the achievements of women's rights campaigns,
particularly in relation to violence, war and conflict. She looks at the success
of the campaigns to recognise violence against women as a violation of human
rights, and to incorporate sexual violence as a crime against humanity and as a
war crime in the statutes of the International Criminal Court. The adoption of
Security Council Resolution 1325, which emphasises the protection of women in
conflict situations and their role in peace-building and post-conflict
reconstruction, marks another major achievement of the Global Campaign for
Women's Human Rights. Whilst these are undeniably significant achievements,
Reilly makes the important point that some of these areas may be more palatable
to policy-makers, with for example a focus on violence seen as violation of the
individual, rather than as a manifestation of unequal power relations. She is
less optimistic about the progress in relation to sexual and reproductive
health, documenting the backlash since the 1990s, since when there has been
considerable resistance to addressing reproductive rights and harmful
traditional practices. Reilly argues persuasively that a broader set of human
rights demands is required, moving away from well established civil rights to an
expanded notion that incorporates socio-economic rights.
Another interesting chapter addresses the pernicious impacts of recent rises in
religious fundamentalisms on the lives of women, as well as lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgendered people. Reilly examines, for example, how
fundamentalist projects across all religions and regions threaten the women's
human rights advocacy of the 1990s, which they criticise as western, as threats
to national sovereignty, individualistic and/or anti-family. Emancipatory
cosmopolitan feminism is seen as key to contesting fundamentalist forces, with
local feminist struggles alongside global women's movements working to halt
these advances.
While in general the advocacy perspective is well theorised and reasoned, I
would like to have seen a little more critical engagement with recent theorising
in the gender and development field. Reilly touches, for example, on
post-structuralism and the work of Spivak, Mohanty and others, but could
possibly have looked more deeply at the theoretical tensions between the
burgeoning academic work especially in the global north, and feminist advocacy
in the south. I was also surprised not to see more discussion of Capabilities
Theory, which again is touched on only briefly despite its seeming compatibility
with Reilly's own line of analysis (see, for example, E. Unterhalter, E.,
Gender, schooling and global social justice [2007]). I would also like to have
seen greater engagement with the education field, with perhaps a fuller
discussion of the disconnects between movements for women's rights and those
advocating rights for children.
Overall, however, this is a lucid, informative and persuasive book. The
structure and organisation works very well, and there is a very useful summary
of key points at the end of each chapter. This book will be of particular
interest to students and academics in the fields of women's studies and
development studies. Reilly's insider position within the Global Women's
Movement clearly gives her a very clear grasp of the debates and challenges of
feminist advocacy, and goes some way to addressing the subtitle of the book:
‘seeking gender justice in a globalising age’. -- Jenny Parkes (Institute of Education, University of London)
© 2011, Jenny Parkes
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