ABSTRACT
The central conflict in this chapter is between the chair of the Commission on Human Rights; Eleanor Roosevelt; and the only other woman delegate to the Commission, Indian Hansa Mehta. Mehta was a political activist in the freedom movement in India, alongside Mahatma Gandhi, and had presented a draft of a declaration on women’s rights at the All India Women’s Conference. Mehta argued that the wording ‘all men’ that Roosevelt wanted to keep would not be inclusive of women in India. The separatist strategies of Indian women like Mehta in their advocacy for gender equality—for example, to combat child marriage in their quest for women’s right to vote—laid a historical and contextual foundation for understanding the discrepancy in argumentation between Roosevelt and Mehta in the Commission on Human Rights.
