Abstract
In the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq, feminist scholars have been quick to assess the increasing references and seeming importance of women’s rights in US foreign policy. A substantial body of scholarship has emerged which has critiqued this linkage between women’s rights and US foreign policy.1 Emily Rosenberg has surveyed the efforts of the Bush administration and the US media to publicise the position of Afghanistan women in advance of the US invasion.2 Jan Jindy Pettman has similarly argued that the use of women’s rights in US justification of invasion in Afghanistan drew on a ‘familiar romance, an international triangle, our men setting out to rescue their women from their men’.3 More broadly, the association of the promotion of women’s rights with a neo-conservative agenda of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq is part of a recent association of women’s rights with aggressive US military intervention. Journalist Virginia Heffernan adroitly identifies the position of ‘Feminist Hawks’, who make a specific link between the rights of women, particularly in Muslim countries, and a US project of regime change, advocating, ‘the use of force to liberate Muslim Women from persecution and the burka’.4 Phyllis Chesler, proud to be described as the ‘godmother’ of the Feminist Hawk ideology, has succinctly described her position, ‘As a feminist, I have long dreamed of rescuing women who are trapped in domestic and sexual slavery against their will with no chance of escape.’5
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See for example; I.M. Young, ‘Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security Regime’, Hypatia, 18 (2003), 223–31;
C. Hirschkind and S. Mahmood, ‘Feminism, the Taliban and the Policies of Counter-Insurgency’, Anthropolpgical Quarterly, 75 (2002), 339–54; Sonali Kolhatkar, ‘Afghan Women: Enduring American Freedom’, Foreign Policy in Focus, http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0211afwomen_body.html, date accessed 19 September 2009; Sonali Kolhatkar, ‘Saving Afghan Women’, http://www.rawa.org/znet.htm, date accessed, 20 September 2009;
Helen Laville ‘American Women and Women’s Rights in American Foreign Policy’, in Andrew Johnstone and Helen Laville, eds., The US Public and American Foreign Policy (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 87–104.
Emily Rosenberg, ‘Rescuing Women and Children’, The Journal of American History, 89 (2002), 456–65.
Jan Jindy Pettman, ‘Feminist International Relations after 9/11’, Brown Journal of World Affairs (2004), X, 85–96, 89.
Phyllis Chester, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It (San Francisco: Jossev Bass, 2003), 198.
Alletta Brenner, ‘Speaking of “Respect for Women”: Gender and Politics in U.S. Foreign Policy Discourse’, Journal of Women’s International Studies, 10 (2009), 18–32.
Emily Rosenberg, ‘Rescuing Women and Children’, The Journal of American History, 89 (2002), 456–65.
Carol Miller, ‘Geneva: The Key to Equality: The Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations’, Women’s History Review, 3 (1994), 219–45.
Nina Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1999), 103.
See Helen Laville, ‘A New Era in International Women’s Rights? American Women’s Associations and the Establishment of the UN Commission on the Status of Women’, Journal of Women’s History, 20 (2008), 34–56.
See, Helen Laville, ‘Protecting Difference or Promoting Equality? US Government Approaches to Women’s Rights and the UN Commission on the Status of Women 1945–1950’, Comparative American Studies, 5 (2007), 266–91.
For a more detailed discussion see Andrew Moravcsik, ‘The Paradox of U.S. Human Rights Policy’, and Paul W. Kahn, ‘American Exceptionalism, Popular Sovereignty and the Rule of Law’, in Michael Ignatieff, ed., American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton, Princeton: University Press, 2005).
See Louise Henkin, ‘US Ratification of Human Rights Conventions: The Ghost of Senator Bricker’, The American Journal of International Law, 89 (1995), 341–50.
See Jutta M. Joachim, Agenda Setting, The UN and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007), 153.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights’, Excerpts, 5th September 1995, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 24 (1996), 98–101.
See Doris Buss and Didi Herman, Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Emily Rosenberg, ‘Rescuing Women and Children’, The Journal of American History, 89 (2002), 20.
Alletta Brenner, ‘Speaking of “Respect for Women”: Gender and Politics in U.S. Foreign Policy Discourse’, Journal of Women’s International Studies, 10 (2009) 18–32, 30.
Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist (California: University of California Press, 2004), 147.
Jan Jindy Pettman, ‘Feminist International Relations after 9/11’, Brown Journal of World Affairs (2004), X, 85–96, 89.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 Helen Laville
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Laville, H. (2011). American Foreign Policy and Women’s Rights. In: Sewell, B., Lucas, S. (eds) Challenging US Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349209_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349209_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32101-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-34920-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)