Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies

Women's Rights, Human Rights, and Duties: From Domination to Partnership

Lester R. Kurtz

George Mason University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/ijps.v4i1.152

Keywords: women's rights, human rights, violence, nonviolence, partnership, domination, patriarchy, structural violence, cultural violence

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Abstract

The idea of women's rights as human rights can facilitate our identifying the causes, consequences, and potential remedies for the current quagmire in which we find themselves, but it needs some reformulation. To the traditional understandings of human rights, I add four conceptual tools: (1) Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of the counterparts of rights and duties, (2) Eisler’s concept of partnership (as opposed to dominator) societies, (3) Johan Galtung’s expansion of our conception of violence to include its structural and cultural forms, and, finally, (4) the literature on nonviolence as a path to mobilization and transformation that resists existing social structures and builds new ones.