Gender and human rights

‘Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum’. With these words, the French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges (1748– 93) threw down the gauntlet for women's rights in the eighteenth century, an era of revolutionary transformation. Her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791) was a witty and sharp rewriting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which had been issued two years earlier, in 1789, by the newly established French National Assembly. De Gouges’ Declaration demonstrated that struggles for freedom and justice demand the active participation of women, that their voices are heard and their rights addressed. Tragically, her intervention into the politics of revolutionary France ended on the scaffold: she was guillotined in 1793. In the years to come women's rights activists campaigned as trade unionists, abolitionists and suffragettes, and fought for a commitment to the principles and for the effective implementation of equal rights. This struggle is by no means over and its goals have not been fully achieved. Both globally and locally, women continue to be subjected to violations of their rights and dignity, ranging from physical violence to economic and social deprivation, and restrictions on their engagements as equal citizens (Schippers, 2016). If Olympe de Gouges embodied the struggle for women's rights in the late eighteenth century, a young Pakistani woman, Malala Yousafzai, has come to embody this struggle in the early twenty-first century. Shot and wounded by the Taliban in 2012 as a punishment for her campaign in support of the right of girls to be educated, Malala symbolises the dangers and the necessity to continue the struggle for women's and girls’ human rights.