The Women Who Drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

At the end of World War II, the world was reeling after the atrocities that had occurred throughout the war. Representatives from 50 different countries met in what they called the United Nations Conference. Here they drafted up the UN Charter. A charter is a document that outlines the rights, aims and principals of an organisation. This charter was officially ratified by a majority of the countries involved and 4 months later the United Nations organization began. Their goal was to allow countries to gather together, discuss common problems, and find shared solutions that benefit all of humanity. One of their first missions was to create a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The aims of this document were to lay out the rights that should be enjoyed by all people of the world, no matter who they are and where they live. There are 30 articles that make up the declaration and they include things such as: no one should be subjected to torture, everyone has the right to freedom of movement, the right to a nationality and property and free speech and an education to name a few of the rights included.

This document was drafted over about three years and was proclaimed in 1948 and has hence been translated into 500 languages. Now, just to be clear, just because this document was published and shared does not mean that all of the sudden everyone in the world abided by these new moral rules. Far from it. Australia has quite the record of breaching these human rights. Prior to the 1967 referendum when each of the individual sates made the laws for First Nations people- for context this was almost 20 years after Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written- many of these rights were breached. For example, many Aboriginal people did not have freedom of movement, nor the right to marry whomever they chose, nor where they permitted to own property and they were often denied the right to participate in cultural aspects of their community.

But these violations have also occurred recently in Australia. Take for example Article 9 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. Australia has a more recent history of forcing asylum seekers into detention centres for often indeterminate lengths of time with no hope of being released.

My point is, that this is an incredible document that outlines how humanity should treat each other, but it is by no means a law that is enforced. However, it does give us a baseline as to how we should be treating other people.

In December 2023, this document will turn 75 years old, and today I would like to draw your attention to five of the women from around the world who were delegates at those meetings more than 75 years ago and helped to draft the document that has been the gold standard for human rights for nearly 8 decades.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. In fact, I was going to do an entire episode about her, but in my research, I found so many other great women involved that I just had to address their contributions as well.

Eleanor was born in 1884, which means when the Declarations of Human Rights was published, she was in her mid-sixties. I love that, because so often society assumes that older women should be at home tending to their grandchildren, but Eleanor was out there making the world a better place. Prior to this she had been married to her 5^th cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Not as creepy as is sounds. Although she did not have to change her surname when she was married, they were quite distant cousins and according to the Heritage DNA website that emails me with notices about my distant relatives, a 5^th cousin is likely to only about 0.05% similarity in DNA. Franklin or FDR was the president of the United States for 12 years until his death in 1945. She was quite remarkable because as the longest serving first lady she travelled the country, gave press conferences and lectures and openly shared her opinion on social justice issues.

A year after her husband died, she was appointed as the first Chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights and she played an instrumental role in drafting that incredibly important document that we now know as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1968, after her death, she was posthumously awarded the United Nations Human Rights Prize.

But it is important to note that she did not write this document alone. There were delegates from countries all over the world and it took 3 years for them to agree on these now universal standards. So today I am going to introduce you to some of the other women who were a part of this delegation and what contributions that they made to document.

It would be remiss of me if I did not mention the Australian feminist Jessie Street who was appointed the Vice-President of the Commission on the Status of Women. Throughout her life she fought for equality for women, equal pay, the right for women to retain their jobs after marriage and the right for women to stand for parliament. So, it is only fitting that she was selected as one of the Australian delegates—the only female one mind—ensuring that women’s rights were not overlooked in the declaration drafting process.

When Jessie Street read the first draft, she was disappointed that the language was exclusively male, with phrases such as “all men are brothers”, and all of the pronouns included were “he and him”, implying that these rights only applied to men. Jessie Street, along with the other female delegates, ensured that the word “sex” was included in Article 2. It now reads “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” She also advocated for the use of the more inclusive term “everyone” which appears 30 times in the document. But unfortunately, the declaration still includes the he/him pronouns.

One of Jessie Street’s allies in ensuring the declaration used a more gender inclusive language was one of the two female the Indian delegates Hansa Mehta. She insisted on rephrasing Article 1 from “All men are born free and equal” to “All human beings are born free and equal”.  Hansa was born in 1897, which to put this in to context was in the midst of the British rule and so when she was in her 30s, she was a part of Gandhi’s satyagraha movement and led non-violent boycotts of British clothing and liquor shops. This was not the last time she was arrested for her activism.

She also married a man from a lower caste, causing her to be rejected by her family. I imagine she was also supportive of Article 16 that entitles equal rights to marry.

One woman who was a champion for the inclusion of rights around marriage was Begum Shaista Ikramullah of Pakistan. In some strict Muslim and Hindi cultures, they have a practice called purdah. This is basically the segregation of women, covering them by way of clothing and not allowing them to be in certain public places. Begum rejected the concept of purdah and was one of the first Muslim woman in India to do so. She was also the first Muslim woman to gain a PhD from the University of London. After the partition of India, she moved to Pakistan and fought to improve women’s participation in politics. She attended 81 of the draft meetings for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and one of her passions was to include Article 16 in an effort to combat instances of forced marriage and child marriage.

The next woman, Evdokia Uralova, is super interesting, not because we know so much about her, but because she is quite the enigma. If you Google her name, there is so little information about her life. Even websites that I translated from German and Spanish, basically only had the same basic 2-3 sentences in reference to her. That she was from the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and she was the Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights in 1947. A rapporteur is someone who is appointed to report on the meeting’s proceedings. The websites mention that she is responsible for the inclusion of the phrase “Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work” in Article 23. One of the only other references to her life outside of this contribution to the declaration is the fact that she was a history teacher and senior executive in the ministry for education. Perhaps if I was able to read in Belarusian, I might find more information on her life. There is a diary entry of Eleanor Roosevelt from 14 February 1946 that says, “Among the other women I’ve met here, one of the most interesting to me is Madame Evdokia Uralova, delegate from White Russia. I have a real feeling of friendliness as a result of our few opportunities to talk together.” And that is it. She says nothing about why she was the most interesting.

There were other incredible female delegates who were involved in the drafting process of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in the interests of time, I will stop at those five. But a big thank you to all of the fore mothers who paved the way for future generations of women.