Gender inequality is a global system

At Radcliffe recently, Catharine A. MacKinnon could just as well have called her lecture “Are Women Human?” That’s the provocative title of her latest book, a collection of essays published last year by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

In case you wondered, the answer to that question is no — perhaps to be expected in a book that includes an essay titled “Rape as Nationbuilding.”

In legal terms, women are not human, according to MacKinnon, who discovered that fact while parsing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 1948 United Nations document defines what a human is, and what people are universally entitled to — but fails to explicitly recognize women, and their “full human status in social reality,” said MacKinnon.

Being human first requires being “real to power,” she said, and women are not. While most states explicitly guarantee women sexual equality, the reality — filtered through cultural norms — is often quite different. Women have status, but not a real place in statehood.

Why? “The state is of and by men and usually for them,” said MacKinnon. “Gender inequality is a global system.”

Who Is Catharine A. MacKinnon ?

• In the 1970s, MacKinnon, who has both a law degree and a doctorate in political science from Yale, successfully used federal Title VII law to argue that sexual harassment is sex discrimination, an interpretation that made her famous, and turned employment law on its ear.
• In the 1980s, MacKinnon — who represented “Deep Throat” star Linda Lovelace (Linda Susan Boreman) — used civil rights law as an argument against pornography, inspiring strict new obscenity laws in Canada and a U.S. debate still alive today. (MacKinnon’s unyielding stand that pornography is a form of sex discrimination earned her the enmity of many censorship critics as well as a coterie of self-described “sex-positive feminists.”)
• In the 1990s, she started legal work on behalf of international clients, including Bosnian and Croatian women who had been systematically raped during wartime by Serb forces. The resulting U.S. court case in 2000 won a $745 million settlement for the women, and was the first to recognize rape as an act of genocide.

LINK: Harvard University Gazette