Politics of Empowerment of Women in South Asia

Abstract

In the 1970s most Latin American countries were ruled by military dictatorships. All forms of civil disobedience were met with arrests, torture, or even death. The bodies of the victims often simply disappeared. The vanished body, deprived of identity, of physical and spiritual space, of social as well as historical memory, brings to mind the nearly universal condition of women pushed to the margins of official and recorded history, uneducated, illiterate, and powerless. The story of the disappeared represents a startling parallel to the worldwide struggle by women for visibility and for human rights and justice. So the womenƒ??s rights, must also be defined as being seen and treated as equal in the political and ideological as well as domestic and private arenas. The participation of women in the political and the social realm allows for delegitimizing discrimination against women- and achieving genuine equality ƒ?? not only under the law. It also affects individual cultures that previously denied women the possibility of an education and confined them to a world of silence. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, created in 1948 as an international body of laws, was meant to protect the integrity and dignity of human beings. Those laws, together with the 1979 Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, have been pivotal in the affirmation and implementation of womenƒ??s rights. At the same time, these instruments have been used to prove the continued existence of violations of rights in both public and private spheres.