ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some observations on how and to what extent women diplomats and activists, and, more broadly, ideas of gender equality, helped to shape the norms on children’s rights at the UN between 1945 and the mid-1990s. More broadly, it seeks to determine whether it is justifiable to speak of international children’s rights as a feminist project, or whether it is more accurate to see children’s rights as clashing with projects of gender equality and women’s liberation. The conclusion suggests that both of these assessments are true. On the one hand, women representatives repeatedly found ways to use the frameworks on children’s rights to advance gender-sensitive conceptions of human rights and to challenge the private-public distinction in international human rights law. At the same time, the main UN instruments on children’s rights upheld traditional understandings of the nuclear family as the fundamental social unit and the most conducive realm for promoting children’s physical and mental development.
