Law and Gender Commons^™

Lifting Our Veil Of Ignorance: Culture, Constitutionalism, And Women's Human Rights In Post-September 11 America, Catherine Powell

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While we live in an Age of Rights, culture continues to be a major challenge to the human rights project. During the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the 1940s and during the Cold War era, the periodic disputes that erupted over civil and political rights in contrast to economic, social and cultural rights could be read either explicitly or implicitly as a cultural debate.

Gender has figured prominently in this perceived culture clash, for example, with the Bush administration's use of Afghan women as cultural icons in need of liberation--a claim that helped justify the …