ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with a particular group of thinkers and activists who may usefully approach human rights as human rights to come: feminist thinkers and activists. The discourse of rights, human rights in particular, has had a mixed relationship with feminism. Diverse views have been put forward as to the utility of the language and practice of rights to productively engage gender concerns. Following the first wave of feminist ideas emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demanding equality between the sexes in matters such as voting rights, property rights and marriage, action was taken to ensure feminist views informed the development of the modern international human rights framework. In considering such, the analysis below breaks feminist theorising and activism on human rights into four broad stages: formal equality, deconstruction of law. reconstruction, reconceptualisation and reinterpretation and reflection, re-evaluation, and reassessment.
