Women's rights

• 1. Introduction

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  Women's rights are the rights and entitlements claimed for women and girls worldwide. In ancient Sumer, a woman could buy, own, sell, and inherit property, yet her husband could divorce her for mild infractions. Centuries later, in classical Athens, no woman ever acquired citizenship, and the law treated her as part of a household headed by a male guardian. These two snapshots sit at opposite ends of a long, uneven story. Why did a woman in Sparta come to own nearly 40% of the land while an Athenian neighbor could not sign a contract worth more than a measure of barley? Why were tens of thousands of people executed as witches, most of them women, in German-speaking lands? And why did it take until 1893 for any country to grant women the vote on a national level? The claims gathered under this single phrase reach back to Mesopotamia and forward into present-day disputes over abortion, travel, and pay. What follows traces how those claims were won, lost, and argued over.

• 2. The Ancient Ledger

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  In ancient Egypt, women enjoyed the same rights under the law as men, though entitlements depended on social class. Landed property descended in the female line, from mother to daughter, and women could administer their own estates. They could buy, sell, act as partners in contracts, serve as executors of wills, witness legal documents, bring court action, and adopt children. The Akkadian poet Enheduanna, priestess of the goddess Inanna, is the earliest known poet whose name has been recorded. Female deities like Inanna were widely worshipped even where most East Semitic gods were male. In ancient Rome, the picture was patriarchal but layered. Freeborn women were citizens with legal protections that slaves and non-citizens lacked. They could not vote, hold office, or serve in the military, yet they could own property, enter contracts, and run businesses. Some acquired sizable fortunes and are recorded in inscriptions as benefactors of major public works. Girls held equal inheritance rights with boys when a father died without a will. By 27-14 BCE the ius tritium liberorum granted legal privileges to a woman who had borne three children and freed her from male guardianship. The greatest scholar of the ancient world for her learning was Hypatia of Alexandria, who taught advanced courses to young men and advised the Roman prefect of Egypt on politics.

• 3. Philosophers Disagree

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  Aristotle thought women would bring disorder and evil, and that it was best to keep them separate from society. He pictured wives confined to a room called a gynaikeion, looking after the home with little exposure to the male world. He denied that women were slaves, arguing that "nature has distinguished between the female and the slave," yet he considered wives to be "bought." In his view the labour of women added no value, because the art of household management was not the same as the art of getting wealth. Plato acknowledged that extending civil and political rights to women would substantively alter the nature of the household and the state. The Stoic philosophers broke sharply from Aristotle, arguing for equality of the sexes and holding that sexual inequality was contrary to the laws of nature. They followed the Cynics, who said men and women should wear the same clothing and receive the same education, and who saw marriage as a moral companionship between equals rather than a biological or social necessity. Stoics of the Imperial era, such as Seneca and Musonius Rufus, held that nature gives men and women equal capacity for virtue and an equal need for philosophical education. These philosophical trends among the ruling elite are thought to have helped improve the status of women under the Empire.

• 4. Scripture And Law

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  The Bible depicts women as having the right to represent themselves in court, to make contracts, and to purchase, own, sell, and inherit property. It guarantees women the right to sex with their husbands and orders husbands to feed and clothe their wives. A polygamous man who breached these Old Testament rights gave the woman grounds for divorce. The Qur'an made the wife, not her family, the recipient of a dowry from the husband, which she could administer as her personal property, making her a legal party to the marriage contract. Its inheritance rules assigned fixed shares to designated heirs, first to the nearest female relatives and then the nearest male relatives. According to Annemarie Schimmel, compared to the pre-Islamic position of Arab women, this legislation meant "an enormous progress." Islam prohibited female infanticide and recognized women's full personhood. In western Europe, the early Christian Church set down formal protections. The council of Adge in 506, in Canon XVI, ruled that a young married man who wished to be ordained required the consent of his wife. Welsh law under The Laws of Hywel Dda held men accountable to pay child maintenance for children born out of wedlock. Swedish law shielded a wife's property and land, which could not be taken by the husband without her family's consent, though in the countryside women inherited only half the share of men.

• 5. Freedom In The North

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  During the Viking Age, women held a relatively free status across Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, recorded in the Icelandic Grágás and the Norwegian Frostating and Gulating laws. A paternal aunt, niece, or granddaughter, called an odalkvinna, could inherit property from a deceased man. In the absence of male relatives, an unmarried woman with no son could inherit not only property but also the position as head of the family. Such a woman, a ringkvinna, could demand and receive fines for the slaughter of a family member, unless she married and her rights passed to her husband. After the age of 20, an unmarried woman, called maer or mey, reached legal majority and could decide where she lived. Women held religious authority as priestesses, called gydja, and oracles, called sejdkvinna. They worked as poets, rune masters, merchants, and medicine women. A married woman could divorce her husband and remarry, and a free woman could cohabit with a man and bear his children without marriage, a position called frilla. No distinction was drawn between children born inside or outside marriage; both could inherit, and there were no legitimate or illegitimate children. These liberties faded after the introduction of Christianity, and from the late 13th century they are no longer mentioned.

• 6. Witches And Coverture

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  Between the 16th and 17th centuries, witch trials sent thousands across Europe to execution, of whom 75-95% were women, depending on time and place. The killings took place mostly in German-speaking lands, and by the 15th century witchcraft was firmly cast as something feminine. Manuals such as the Malleus Maleficarum and Summis Desiderantes depicted witches as diabolical conspirators who worshipped Satan. Its authors, the inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, argued that women had greater credulity, feeble minds and bodies, impulsivity, and carnal natures that made them prone to evil. The myth traced back to Roman night creatures called Strix, thought to be transformed women, an image itself believed to descend from descriptions of women leaving and returning home swiftly at night. Female hermits or beggars could be sent to trial simply for offering herbal remedies. Under English Common Law, developing from the 12th century, all property a wife held at marriage became her husband's possession. Even after courts forbade him to transfer it without her consent, he kept the right to manage it and collect its income. English women had fewer grounds for divorce than men until 1923. Husbands controlled most of their wives' personal property until the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882. The philosopher John Locke opposed marital inequality, advocating equality among the sexes in his 17th-century work.

• 7. The Language Of Rights

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  In 1791 the French playwright and activist Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, modelled on the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It follows the seventeen articles of the original point for point, described by Camille Naish as "almost a parody." Where the first document declared men born free and equal in rights, de Gouges replied that woman "is born free and remains equal to man in rights." She wrote that the revolution would only take effect when all women became aware of their deplorable condition. A year later, in 1792, the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguing that the education and upbringing of women created their limited expectations. She pressed for equal educational opportunities and demanded "justice!" and "rights to humanity" for all. In 1869 John Stuart Mill, in The Subjection of Women, described the wife as the actual bondservant of her husband. As a member of parliament, Mill proposed replacing the term "man" with "person" in the second Reform Bill of 1867. The House of Commons greeted the proposal with laughter and defeated it by 76-196 votes. His attempt still drew greater attention to women's suffrage in Britain. Earlier, in 1754, Dorothea Erxleben had become the first German woman to receive a M.D., from the University of Halle.

• 8. The Vote And The Body

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  In 1893 New Zealand became the first country to give women the right to vote on a national level. Australia followed in 1902, then a wave of Nordic countries: Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913, Denmark and Iceland in 1915. The end of the First World War brought many more, including Germany and Luxembourg in 1919 and the United States in 1920. Late adopters lagged for decades: Greece in 1952, San Marino in 1959, and Liechtenstein only in 1984. Switzerland granted women the federal vote in 1971. On the 16th of May 2005, the Parliament of Kuwait extended suffrage to women by a 35-23 vote. In China, the government ordered an end to foot-binding in 1912, a practice that had altered the bone structure so feet were only about four inches long. About 45% of Chinese women had bound feet in the 19th century, and for the upper classes the figure was almost 100%. After the October Revolution, Russia became the first country in human history to provide free abortions in state-run hospitals, with the Bolsheviks legalising the procedure in November 1920. Reproductive rights were first discussed as a subset of human rights at the United Nations 1968 International Conference on Human Rights, and endorsed by the Cairo Programme of Action adopted in 1994. In August 2019, Saudi Arabia ended its male guardianship laws, allowing women to travel by themselves.