Legal Rights of Women in Russia, 1100-1750

Slavic Review ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
George G. Weickhardt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Legal Rules

This study will trace the evolution of rights of women to acquire and own land in Russia during the period 1100-1750. While detailed studies of particular periods are valuable, only with a chronological comparison can one appreciate the overall direction in which women's legal rights were developing and, specifically, whether they were contracting or expanding. Taking the long view in legal history is particularly important because changes in legal rules and legal status are often gradual, even glacial, and such change may be perceptible only over centuries. An overview is also important for the placement of past and future studies of particular periods in context. While it would be more conventional to conclude at the end of the Muscovite period rather than in the early empire, there were developments in women's rights in the Muscovite period which reached logical conclusions only in the mid-eighteenth century, such as the consolidation of a widow's rights to her husband's property.

The Fragmentation of Gender in Post-Invasion Iraq

2017 ◽  
pp. 426-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahra Ali
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Iraqi Women ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter explores the evolution of gender and women’s rights struggles in Iraq since the establishment of the Personal Status Code in 1959 and shed light on the ethnosectarian fragmentation of women’s legal rights in post-invasion Iraq. The chapter argues that in order to explore women’s rights and conditions of lives in Iraq it is essential to explore the evolution of women’s rights and gender issues historically and through a complex lens of analysis rather than applying a predefined argument involving an undifferentiated “Islam” or age-old gender-based violence. It seeks to show that gender issues have been entangled with issues of nationhood, religion, and with the nature of the political regime since the very foundation of the Iraqi Republic in 1958. First, the chapter examines the debates and mobilizations around women’s legal rights in Iraq. Secondly, it highlights the development of political, economic, and military violence since the 1980s and its impact on gender norms and relations. Finally, it analyzes the specific context of ethnosectarian fragmentation in which Iraqi women have lived and mobilized since 2003.

The Legal Status of Women in Early America: A Reappraisal

1983 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marylynn Salmon
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary America ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Status Of Women

In 1930 Richard B. Morris published Studies in the History of American Law: With Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The monograph included a chapter on the legal status of colonial women that became extremely influential within a short time of its appearance. Morris's influence continues half a century later. Several books published in 1980 cite him as one of their primary authorities on women's rights: Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America; Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The ‘Weaker Sex’ in Seventeenth-Century New England; and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Other influential books and articles also rely heavily on Morris, including A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony by John Demos, ‘The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution,’ by Joan Hoff Wilson, and ‘The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, 1800–1840,’ by Gerda Lerner. In fact, almost every published sentence on women's rights in early American law is followed by a footnote citing chapter three of Studies in the History of American Law. In The Bonds of Womanhood (1977), Nancy F. Cott declared that Morris's chapter ‘has become the standard essay on colonial women under the common law.’

Women's Legal Rights

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Bond
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
African Women ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
The Status ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Health Rights ◽  
Status Of Women

In the colonial and postcolonial period, African women have advocated for legal reforms that would improve the status of women across the continent. During the colonial period, European common and civil law systems greatly influenced African indigenous legal systems and further entrenched patriarchal aspects of the law. In the years since independence, women’s rights advocates have fought, with varying degrees of success, for women’s equality within the constitution, the family, the political arena, property rights, rights to inheritance, rights to be free from gender-based violence, rights to control their reproductive lives and health, rights to education, and many other aspects of life. Legal developments at the international, national, and local levels reflect the efforts of countless African women’s rights activists to improve the status of women within the region.

What Are Women’s Rights Good For? Contesting and Negotiating Gender Cultures in Southern Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Van Allen
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
Policy Shift ◽  
Good For ◽  
And Gender

Abstract:Currently, feminist activists are engaged in problematizing and reframing “rights” claims in southern Africa. This article discusses three cases of such activism, all of which show the limitations but also the potential of using rights claims to transform gender cultures and gain economic and gender justice. These cases involve the successful challenge to the gender discriminatory 1982 Botswana Citizenship Act; the policy shift of Women and Law in Southern Africa from a focus on legal rights advocacy to a synthesis of rights and kinship-based claims; and initiatives by South African gender activists to confront the contradiction between the country’s constitutional guarantees of women’s rights and high levels of gender violence.

From Nobility and Excellence to Generosity and Rights: Sophia's Defenses of Women (1739–40)

Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Broad
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Querelle Des Femmes ◽  
Men I ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Superiority

Abstract This article examines two early modern feminist works, Woman Not Inferior to Man (1739) and Woman's Superior Excellence Over Man (1740), written by “Sophia, A Person of Quality.” Scholars once dismissed these texts as plagiarisms or semi-translations of François Poulain de la Barre's De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673). More recently, however, Guyonne Leduc has drawn attention to the original aspects of these treatises by highlighting Sophia's significant variations on Poulain's vocabulary (Leduc 2010; 2012; 2015). In this article, I take Leduc's analysis a step further by demonstrating that Sophia's variations amount to unique and distinctive arguments for the restoration of women's rights, based on both the natural equality and the moral superiority of women compared to men. I argue that Sophia goes beyond Poulain's Cartesian insights to mount a critique of male tyranny characterized as a lack of generosity toward women. My contention is that Sophia's texts represent a culmination in a line of reasoning that extends from the querelle des femmes of the Renaissance to Poulain's Cartesian feminism of the seventeenth century, through to arguments for women's rights in the eighteenth century. Her works thus warrant greater recognition as significant turning points in the history of feminist thought.

CLASS, GENDER, AND LIBERALISM IN PARLIAMENT, 1868–1882: THE CASE OF THE MARRIED WOMEN'S PROPERTY ACTS

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
BEN GRIFFIN
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Radical Reform ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Married Women's Property Acts ◽  
And Gender

The class and gender identities created by male politicians are vital to a proper understanding of how and why parliament increased women's legal rights in the nineteenth century. An examination of the parliamentary debates on the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 reveals that it is misleading to divide men into supporters and opponents of women's rights, because even some of those who supported the most radical reform did so in the belief that the gender hierarchy should be left intact. At the same time, politicians were reluctant to accept that their own homes should be affected by changes to women's rights, both because they feared that these changes would reduce their domestic authority and create discord in their homes, and because they did not think that the critique of male behaviour which justified the reforms should apply to them or their class. Their ability to confine both charges of abuse and the effects of the acts to the poor was essential to the successful passage of the Married Women's Property Acts. Rather than see this as the defeat of a liberal individualist vision, it was in fact the victory of an alternative strand of Victorian liberalism.

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