Gendering dissent: human rights, gender history and the road to 1989

Paradoxically, “1989” has been simultaneously interpreted as a victory for human rights and a setback for the rights of women. Some authors see a causal relationship between the two. The dominance of a seemingly universalist human rights language in 1989, they argue, made it difficult for women to articulate and defend their rights as a particular group. This essay explores this paradox by focusing on dissidents, a group of people who played a central role both in the revolutions of 1989 and the global rise of human rights. In the dissident movement, women were active at all levels, yet they overwhelmingly played an auxiliary role. Yet this had little to do with the language of human rights as such but rather resulted from how it was used both domestically and internationally. Moreover, the position of women in the dissident movements also mirrored their position in state socialist societies at large. There was, in fact, something of an unspoken consensus between the rulers and the dissidents on the position of women in the Soviet bloc.