ABSTRACT
This is not to deny that rights-based social movements have exerted a powerful influence on the course of US history. The labor movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Native American resurgence in the 1970s all did much to highlight the experience of marginalized social and economic groups in American life. Their accomplishments were matched, and in most respects exceeded, by the US women’s movement that began its modern ascendancy in the early 1960s, and has today succeeded in eliminating most of the discriminatory impediments to women’s public and private freedoms. The idea that human rights abuses are often crucially related to “gender” – which can be defined as “cover[ing] masculine and feminine roles and bodies alike, in all their aspects, including the (biological and cultural) structures,
dynamics, roles and scripts associated with each gender group”1 – is now virtually a truism in both the USA and international communities.
