Browsing by Subject "20th Century"

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    Gendering the Conservative Party’s Rise From The Ashes, 1945-51
    (2022-04-20) Thurston, Hannah
    The Conservative Party’s shock defeat to Clement Attlee’s Labour Party at the 1945 British General Election cast the party into a period of profound crisis. For the first time in its history, the Labour Party succeeded in securing an outright majority in the House of Commons. Their victory was carried by the collective sentiment of the People’s War which was forged under the hardship of the Home Front, and spurred by Labour’s promise of a brighter future. However, despite this early postwar momentum, just 6 years later, the Conservative Party and Winston Churchill had been restored to government, thus appearing to halt Attlee’s Socialist experiment. How the Conservative Party completed this remarkable electoral recovery is the subject of this thesis. During the party’s postmortem after defeat in 1945, it discovered that while a majority of women had supported the Labour Party, women were far more likely to vote Conservative than men. Thus, it appeared that women held the key to the revival of their electoral fortunes and given the party’s long history of women’s mobilization, it was women to whom they turned. What emerged was a distinct Conservative feminism that on one hand, recognized the changes to women’s roles in the aftermath of war and on the other, spoke to their longing for the security and stability of a quiet family life. This new conservatism mobilized women in their political and professional capacities, whilst at the same time continued to embrace the ideological comforts of tradition and family life. The emergence of a 12-point gender gap favoring the Conservative Party at the 1951 General Election is testament to the success of this campaign.
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    The Promise of Marriage Consent: Family Politics, the United Nations, and Women’s Rights in the US, 1947-1967
    (2019) Malitoris, Jessica

    In this dissertation, I use women’s marriage rights as framed in the 1962 United Nations Marriage Convention to demonstrate the contradictions contained within human rights that allow them to be coopted into the preservation of systems of power, from imperialism to Jim Crow. The treaty’s creators in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) designed it to defend women’s marriage consent. Delegates pursued a higher age of marriage and more government registration of marriage, and they specifically pushed for the abolition of child marriage, polygamy, and bride price systems. The Marriage Convention’s standards of family resonated with many delegates and policymakers, including segregationist Senators in the United States who otherwise distrusted outside intervention into domestic affairs because they found within the treaty’s human rights project an opportunity to shore up state anti-miscegenation laws.

    Conflicts about what human rights were and how best to defend them took shape through the debates about the Marriage Convention, both in the United Nations and in the United States as proponents pressured the Senate to ratify it. Beginning after World War II and ending with the 1967 Senate hearing that ended the Marriage Convention’s future in the United States, I examine events that catalyzed transformations in human rights, including the end of World War II, the founding of the United Nations, the Cold War, and decolonization. I focus especially on the United States, where these international changes dovetailed with those caused by civil and women’s rights movements domestically to make for a complex reception of human rights treaties. I use official United Nations documents, State Department and Women’s Bureau records, newspapers, representatives’ personal papers, and the records of women’s organizations to illustrate the ways that delegates and lawmakers mobilized rights claims as they debated the Marriage Convention.

    I argue that the appropriation of human rights by systems of power should not be taken as a corruption of the human rights project but as part of the process of shaping human rights concepts. All parties interested in the Marriage Convention pursued the relationship between marriage and state power to serve their own ends, whether those ends were protecting women, strengthening national governance, or preserving Jim Crow segregation laws. I conclude that supporters of the Marriage Convention were primarily successful in advancing their cause where it coincided with the normal racist and sexist operation of US power at home and abroad. The Marriage Convention speaks to broader changes in the history of human rights, but the treaty’s specific relationship to issues of gender and race through marriage make for a story of rights unique to it.