462 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )New Directions in Liberalism— Feminist Critiques
In the area of liberalism, there were some innovations too. Th e principal one
was an attempt to articulate a feminist approach to international law. Th ere
was certainly no gainsaying that the fi eld of international law has been an
overwhelmingly masculine preserve throughout history. Prior to the twen-
tieth century, the lone important female contributor to the subject was
Christine de Pisan in the fourteenth and fi ft eenth centuries. Apart from
her writing on the laws of war, she was a strong advocate of the advance-
ment of women.
Indications of gender- based analyses had appeared prior to the late twen-
tieth century, though not from the pens of women. Bluntschli had posited
that states and governments are intrinsically masculine— in contrast to
churches, which are equally intrinsically feminine. More recently, the
Dutch lawyer Cornelius van Vollenhoven, in the immediate aft ermath of
the Great War, foresaw that, in the future, women would assume increas-
ingly prominent roles in what he called the coming “second age” of interna-
tional law. Th e older, more traditional, male- craft ed law of the previous era
would then come to be “hated and detested by [the] warmer and more deli-
cately sensitive heart” of the new international woman.
Whether the feminists of the post- 1945 era were best described as “deli-
cately sensitive” might be a matter of some doubt. Th e two most prominent
champions of feminism have been Hillary Charlesworth, of Australian Na-
tional University, and Christine Chinkin, of the London School of Econom-
ics. To a large extent, feminist contributions to international law have been
squarely in the liberal tradition, with its stress on the removal of arbitrary
discriminatory barriers against disfavored groups. Th is aspect of feminism
fi tted comfortably into the broader human- rights movement. An important
early step in this pro cess was the draft ing of the Convention on the Po liti cal
Rights of Women in 1953. It was only in 1979, though, that an international
convention was concluded for the comprehensive eradication of discrimina-
tion against women in all walks of life. In 1999, the convention was supple-
mented by an optional protocol that established two enforcement proce-
dures. One was a provision for inquiries into grave and systematic violations
of the convention. Th e other was a system of individual applications, compa-
rable to that which exists for the Covenant on Civil and Po liti cal Rights.