Women's Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights

This article explores both the importance and difficulty of connecting women's rights to human rights and outlines the four basic approaches that have been used in the effort to make this connection. In practice these approaches often overlap, and while each raises questions about the others, the author sees them as complementary. These approaches can be applied to many issues, but she illustrates them primarily in terms of how they address violence against women in order to show the implications of their differences on a concrete issue. The four approaches are: women's rights as political and civil rights, women's rights as socioeconomic rights, women's rights and the law, and feminist transformation of human rights. The author concludes that all of these approaches contain aspects of what is necessary to achieve women's rights.