This article shows how women moved on an international level to work for equal rights for women in a long-time perspective with a focus on the interwar time and while doing so, started to define the terms of “equal rights”
and later “human rights” for themselves as well as in international law. In fact, “equal rights” did not mean the same to women as the debates related to the League of Nations and later the UN and the strategies show. Thus, the international women’s movement followed different approaches to gain equal rights and split apart in the attempt. When in 1945 the Preamble of the Charter of the UN finally stated “equal rights of men and women”, women realized that the goal they reached was only the first step to start anew to exactly define what equality rights meant for women.
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