scholarly journals The Sharia-Based Understanding of Religious Freedom and Women's Rights in Conflict with the Secular Constitutional State

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 366
Author(s):  
Christine Schirrmacher
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Opinion Leaders ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Neutral State ◽  
Constitutional State ◽  
Religious Convictions

ABSTRACT: The areas of conflict relating to the freedom of religion and women’s rights do not affect the majority of Muslims who practice their religion in Germany and, in the process, they do not clash with the constitutional state. This is also not a matter having to do with those theologians who take their justification for comprehensive religious freedom and equal rights for women from the Koran and, respectively, other normative sources of Islam. Rather, it has to do with those influential scholars who interpret the norms and commands of Islam in such a way that conflicts arise with the laws of a secular constitutional state. These scholars defend the view that the laws of the Sharia are prior to the norms of the secular constitutional state and are obligatory for all Muslims. At the present moment, the question of freedom of religion could be virtually understood as a topic which, in largely secularized Europe and for the religiously neutral state, possesses little relevance. To what extent do inner-Islamic standpoints interest the constitutional state on the question of religious freedom? For the constitutional state, it does not concern itself with the question of evaluating a religion and its doctrinal content. This also applies with respect to Islam. There, however, where actions are justified by religious convictions, or where they follow from them or are declared to be mandatory by influential religious opinion leaders, and where these actions infringe upon established law or limit the basic rights of individuals, the state and its representatives have to concern themselves with these convictions, independent of whether these convictions are of a religious, political, or of a religious and political nature. KEYWORDS: Germany, Islam, freedom of religion, women’s rights, the constitutional state, conflicts

Cry of Murder on Broadway

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Law ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Desperate Attempt

This book shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the Astor House Hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him. Ballard survived the attack, and the trial that followed created a sensation. Newspapers in New York and beyond followed the case eagerly, and crowds filled the courtroom every day. The prominent author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child championed Norman and later included her story in her fiction and her writing on women's rights. Norman also attracted the support of politicians, journalists, and legal and moral reformers who saw her story as a vehicle to change the law as it related to “seduction” and to advocate for the rights of workers. This book describes how New Yorkers followed the trial for entertainment. Throughout all this, Norman gained sympathys, in particular the jury, which acquitted her in less than ten minutes. The book weaves together Norman's story to show how, in one violent moment, she expressed all the anger that the women of the emerging movement for women's rights would soon express in words.

From Women’s Rights to Religious Freedom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Kranson
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Reproductive Rights ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Legal Abortion ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Reproductive Autonomy

This essay traces the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism’s engagement in the issue of reproductive rights during the 1970s and early 1980s. Members of the Women’s League first championed legal abortion in 1970, defending their position through expressly feminist arguments supporting women’s reproductive autonomy. While they never backed down from their endorsement of legal abortion, the political shifts of the late 1970s and early 1980s compelled them to develop a new language through which to discuss the issue. Reframing access to abortion as a matter of religious freedom offered Women’s League members a way to articulate their support for the procedure without publicly endorsing the principle of women’s reproductive autonomy, an idea that had become increasingly controversial over the course of the 1970s. As much of the American public began to view a particularly right-wing, Christian opposition to abortion as a universal religious principle, the leaders of the Women’s League struggled to show that their backing of legal abortion did not conflict with their religious commitments. Framing access to abortion as a religious right enabled them to present their stance on abortion as a component of their spiritual worldview rather than as a capitulation to secular, feminist ideals.

Gender Roles, Women’s Rights, and the Polarization of American Politics in the Late 20th Century

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie J. Spruill
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Wide Range

The late 20th century saw gender roles transformed as the so-called Second Wave of American feminism that began in the 1960s gained support. By the early 1970s public opinion increasingly favored the movement and politicians in both major political parties supported it. In 1972 Congress overwhelmingly approved the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and sent it to the states. Many quickly ratified, prompting women committed to traditional gender roles to organize. However, by 1975 ERA opponents led by veteran Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly, founder of Stop ERA, had slowed the ratification process, although federal support for feminism continued. Congresswoman Bella Abzug (D-NY), inspired by the United Nations’ International Women’s Year (IWY) program, introduced a bill approved by Congress that mandated state and national IWY conferences at which women would produce recommendations to guide the federal government on policy regarding women. Federal funding of these conferences (held in 1977), and the fact that feminists were appointed to organize them, led to an escalation in tensions between feminist and conservative women, and the conferences proved to be profoundly polarizing events. Feminists elected most of the delegates to the culminating IWY event, the National Women’s Conference held in Houston, Texas, and the “National Plan of Action” adopted there endorsed a wide range of feminist goals including the ERA, abortion rights, and gay rights. But the IWY conferences presented conservatives with a golden opportunity to mobilize, and anti-ERA, pro-life, and anti-gay groups banded together as never before. By the end of 1977, these groups, supported by conservative Catholics, Mormons, and evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, had come together to form a “Pro-Family Movement” that became a powerful force in American politics. By 1980 they had persuaded the Republican Party to drop its support for women’s rights. Afterward, as Democrats continued to support feminist goals and the GOP presented itself as the defender of “family values,” national politics became more deeply polarized and bitterly partisan.

Mobilizing Women’s Rights as Human Rights

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-197
Author(s):  
Katherine M. Marino
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines how, during the Second World War, Latin American feminists continued to push broad meanings of international women’s rights and human rights in spite of little support from their U.S. counterparts. The women from the U.S. Women’s and Children’s Bureaus who replaced Doris Stevens in the Inter-American Commission of Women avoided promoting women’s “equal rights” because of the fraught Equal Rights Amendment debate in the U.S. Latin American feminists effectively pushed these U.S. counterparts on a number of issues, including toward advocacy for maternity legislation, which Latin American feminists asserted as a human right. The Atlantic Charter and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which underscored social and economic rights, inspired Latin American feminists’ broad calls for human rights. Their framings included women’s rights, and greater economic security and multilateral relations in the Americas. These demands came together at the 1945 Chapultepec conference where a number of Latin American feminists in the Inter-American Commission of Women also paved the way for Latin American countries to appoint women to their delegations going to the conference that would create the United Nations.

The Nineteenth Amendment Today

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-154
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Women's Equality

Chapter 8 concludes that the Nineteenth Amendment can be revitalized today, to more fully ensure women’s equality. It reviews new legal scholarship that suggests direct applications of the Nineteenth Amendment to today’s voting rights challenges. And it describes how some scholars suggest that the Nineteenth should be read together with the Fourteenth Amendment, as a normative matter, to provide a more capacious understanding of the Fourteenth, as applied to women’s rights, beyond voting. Given persistent gender inequality, and the uncertain status of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the chapter concludes that it is worth revisiting the jurisprudential potential of the Nineteenth Amendment, at its centennial.

Apostles of Equality: James Brown Scott and the Feminist Cause

2019 ◽  
pp. 245-311
Author(s):  
Paolo Amorosa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Short History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pan American ◽  
Alice Paul ◽  
Nationality Law

Chapter 6 tracks the story of an unlikely alliance between Scott and leading feminist activists Doris Stevens and Alice Paul. The first section provides a short history of the women’s rights movement in the United States and details how Paul and Stevens rose to become key figures in the battle for women’s suffrage. Section 2 tracks the early interest by feminist activists in international politics. As Paul and Stevens moved toward internationalism, Scott moved closer to the positions of women’s rights activists by becoming a supporter of the equality of sexes under nationality law. Section 3 follows the collaboration between Scott and the feminist leaders. Beginning in 1928, the collaboration would peak in 1933 with the approval at the Montevideo Pan-American Conference of two equal rights treaties.

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