Up to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century...

Up to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, what was said about human rights and what practical steps were taken were connected with the rights of the people with respect to governments, or else with the rights of the worker and the proletariat with respect to the employer class and the overlords.

But in the twentieth century, the question of the rights of women as opposed to the rights of men arose, and, for the first time, in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, which was drawn up after the second World-war in 1948 by the United Nations Organization, the equality of women and men was explicitly declared. In all the social movements of the west, from the seventeenth up to the present century all ideas centered around two things: liberty and equality.

Keeping in view the fact that the movement for women’s rights in the west followed the same sequence as the other movements, and although the history of women’s rights in Europe was full of extraordinary hardships as far as their liberty and equality was concerned, still in this case also, nothing other than, ‘liberty and equality’ was discussed.

The pioneers of this movement considered the liberty of women and the equality of their rights with those of men to be the completion and fulfillment of the movement for human rights that had been the central idea since the seventeenth century. They claimed that without securing the liberty of women and establishing equal rights for them and men, any reference to human rights and freedom was meaningless.

Moreover, they believed that all difficulties within the family arose from the absence of freedom for women and the inequality of the rights of women and men, and that with the securing of this objective all difficulties in the family would be solved in one swoop.

In this new departure, that which we call “the fundamental question is the system of family rights”, that is the question of whether this system is naturally an independent system with its own logic and standards separate from the logic and standards social institutions or not, was entrusted to oblivion. That which engaged people’s minds was the extension of the principles of the liberty and equality of women with respect to men.

In other words, in the matter of the rights if women, also, the only topic for discussion was the “natural, inalienable, irrevocable rights of man”, and nothing more.