Gender Issues and Human Rights" by Dianne Otto (Ed), UK, Edward Elgar, 2013. ISBN 978-1-84980-830-9

[Extract] Dianne Otto’s magnificent three-volume edited collection is
the fourth in the Elgar Research Collection’s Human Rights
Law series, edited by Sarah Joseph. Otto has brought together
a diverse range of previously published works that together
provide a comprehensive chronicle of the genesis and
development of scholarship about women and gender within
an international human rights framework.
Book One introduces the reader to the histories of struggle,
the question of women’s needs or rights, and structural
critiques of international human rights law. These three parts
provide the context within which women’s issues have become
regarded as human rights. It is not obvious to all that women
belong within a human rights framework, nor that women’s
rights need exist independently of human rights. Fraser’s
opening chapter thus provides a ‘counter-history’ to a generally
perceived denial of women’s rights. She traces the gestation
of women’s rights to the early 15th century and explores
women’s education and independence, anti-slaver and later
family planning and women’s health as important precursors to
the contemporary rights movement.