ABSTRACT
The United Nations Charter was the first legal document to recognize human rights as a cornerstone of the international order and expressly affirm the principle of equality. This essay takes a fresh look at the debates of the late 1920s and the 1930s to explain the sudden rise of human rights language at the end of World War II. It specifically engages with long-ignored interrelations between human rights advocacy and other campaigns of the 1930s that pushed for international guarantees, such as feminist demands for the recognition of legal equality. By insisting that “sex” be explicitly mentioned as a previously unacceptable category of distinction in the various draft declarations for the “rights of man” circulating at the time, feminists were successful in associating equal rights for men and women with universal human rights. The essay concludes that their insistence on legal equality in the 1930s was essential to the conception of human rights in 1945.
