ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the alliances and conflicts between different feminist and socialist fractions within the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the international organizations with representatives at its third session in Beirut, Lebanon in 1949. In the meetings of the CSW, the early Cold War tensions both hindered and foregrounded not only the rights of working women in the West but the comparatively rights-less status of women workers in colonial territories. Among the human rights advanced by international welfare feminism in 1949 included the important notion of equal pay for women. The CSW heralded increased dissent between different position-holders on women’s right to equal pay in a time when millions of women had been laid off following the Second World War but these tensions should not be reduced to East-West ideological battles alone. This chapter situates the year that followed the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) relative to international welfare feminist history.
