Are Women Human? 239defending such goods as freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and ha-
beas corpus, rights are designed to make citizens as free from government
interference as is compatible with public order and the equal freedom of
other citizens. Again, feminist critics do not say that these freedoms are
irrelevant to women, nor that they would be better off without them (Smart
2005, 138 –141). They claim instead that emphasizing these rights neglects
the issue of liberty, equality, and security in the domestic sphere, which
is where many of the abuses and much of the oppression that happens to
women on the basis of gender occurs. To quote MacKinnon again, “abstract
equality has never included those rights that women as women most need
and never have had” (MacKinnon 1989, 229). In Nancy Hirschmann’s as-
sessment, “rights have been inadequate in tackling sexist barriers, because
the framework in which they exist often cannot even see harm to women as
harm, such as pornography, rape, or even sexual harassment” (Hirschmann
1999, 39). As Susan Okin reminds us, women’s rights are more likely to be
infringed upon by those close to them — fathers, brothers, husbands — than
by the state (Okin 2005, 85 – 87; see also Okin 1998a, 35 –36; Okin and
Ackerly 1999, 141–142).
The “women’s rights as human rights” movement has, however, forced
feminist critics of rights discourse to reconsider some of their concerns
about its masculine orientation. This began as a grassroots phenomenon,
arising when women around the world talked about their problems and re-
alized that traditional conceptions of human rights were insuffi cient (Okin
and Ackerley 1999, 143, 147, 155; Okin 2005, 87). It became clear that hu-
man rights “must be reconceptualized in crucial ways if they are to address
the multiple and serious ways in which the rights of women are violated
because they are women” (Okin 2005, 83; see also 1998b). Martha Nuss-
baum lists some of “the inequalities that women suffer inside the family:
inequalities in resources and opportunities, educational deprivations, the
failure of work to be recognized as work, insults to bodily integrity” and
complains that “traditional rights talk has neglected these issues” (Nuss-
baum 2006, 290). In order to detect and prevent all forms of abuse, rights
must be available not just against the state but also to protect individuals
from one another, including family members.
Rather than abandon human rights discourse altogether, feminist theo-
rists came to portray the rights that women need — rights against violence
in the private sphere, for example — as integral parts of the human rights
package. The women’s rights as human rights movement reconfigured hu-
man rights away from their original masculine model to make them more