ABSTRACT
This essay examines the economic rights of women from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, highlighting the human rights legacy of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the years leading up to the first UN International Conference on Women in 1975. The ILO – a specialized agency of the UN responsible for formulating global labor standards – approached women’s rights at work in a contradictory manner, treating women in industry like all other workers, yet also regarding them as needing special provisions to accommodate childbearing. The essay argues that ILO conventions and other instruments embedded three paradigms: the hidden gender paradigm (universal instruments with differential gender impacts), the equal treatment paradigm (nondiscrimination and equality instruments), and the special treatment paradigm (women-directed instruments for equal results), none of which adequately addressed the unequal burdens of what the ILO called “family responsibilities.” Neither women-specific protections nor legal equality alone, the essay concludes, could enhance women’s human rights without an interrogation of the gender division of labor at home as well as at work. Precisely because the ILO reflected the positions of member countries and strove for consensus, it would take decades for the vision of economic rights as human rights to account or women’s family labor.
