The United Nations Charter of 1945 and Women’s Rights

Note: This essay builds on earlier work published by Rebecca Adami in Chapters 1–3 of her book Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Routledge, 2019).

The United Nations was created in 1945 at the San Francisco Conference with the adoption of the UN Charter, which set a mandate to strive for peace and human rights. The San Francisco Conference began in late April 1945. With World War II still ongoing, the United Kingdom had wanted to postpone the conference, but US president Franklin D. Roosevelt was convinced that an international organization for peace would gain greater support from the public before the end of the war.[1] The adoption of the UN Charter ensued as the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, called on the delegates approving the Charter to stand up from their benches instead of only raising their hands, as was customary.[2] When the representatives to the United Nations solemnly rose from their seats, the hundreds of pressmen and the audience in the stands followed their example and waited in tense silence as the general secretary of the Conference, Alger Hiss, counted. The War Memorial Opera House had been adorned with fifty national flags for the occasion and the auditorium held more than three thousand people.[3] At the signing of the Charter and in reports from the San Francisco Conference when it ended in June 1945, the influence by women delegates passed practically unmentioned. “In the true meaning of the word, we are a union of brothers who work on a common cause,” announced Halifax, the president of the plenary session that approved the Charter.[4]

In the American delegation to the San Francisco Conference, there was one female delegate, Virginia Gildersleeve, dean of Barnard College, an all-women’s college in New York City. In her role as dean, Gildersleeve encouraged both students and employees at Barnard to engage in the political movement for peace and justice. This was something not approved by the Barnard College Board of Trustees, who found it inappropriate for young women students to demonstrate politically in the streets.[5]

At the San Francisco Conference, where the equality of women was for the first time mentioned in an international document through the UN Charter, there were only eight female delegates, and only four to sign the Charter. A total of 3,500 people gathered at the San Francisco Conference in 1945, including advisors and secretaries. Less than one percent were women.

An early generation of women who were allowed to gain a university degree had become politically engaged in independence movements, peace movements, suffrage movements, and workers’ unions, and the few women who attended the San Francisco Conference received letters and support from international women’s organizations.[6]

Four women signed the UN Charter: Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic; Wu Yi-fang of China; Bertha Lutz of Brazil; and Virginia Gildersleeve of the United States. Minerva Bernardino was chair of the Inter-American Commission of Women. Wu Yi-fang was the principal of one of the most renowned female colleges in China. Bertha Lutz was a Brazilian delegate to the Pan-American Feminist Movement. Virginia Gildersleeve was the only woman politician in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign.

Women’s rights organizations sent representatives to the conference to lobby for women’s rights, and they created a parallel process to that of the main conference whereby a visionary agenda was set: 1) to ensure that non-discrimination should apply regardless of sex, ethnicity, class, or religion; 2) to establish explicitly in the preamble the equality of men and women; 3) to state in the Charter that positions in the United Nations should be open to both men and women; and 4) to create a full commission under the Economic and Social Council on women’s international human rights.

Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic felt that “the greatest opponents to the inclusion of women in the Charter were those from the two countries where women are most advanced, the United States and Great Britain, a ‘paradox’ attributable to ‘domestic’ battles over the Equal Rights Amendment proposed to the United States Constitution.”[7]

The Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution had been proposed to insert a prohibition of discrimination based on sex. The Constitution already forbade discrimination due to race, color, religion, or national origin. The strong opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment was postulated on the need for protection of women workers. The argument was that equal rights would mean less protection for women in industry. Forty-three national organizations in the US openly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, including the American Association of University Women that Virginia Gildersleeve had taken part in founding.

Virginia Gildersleeve’s aim during the San Francisco Conference was to strengthen the four freedoms that Franklin D. Roosevelt had outlined in his famous State of the Union speech of January 6, 1941. In this speech before Congress, Roosevelt had proposed four fundamental freedoms for people all over the world: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In other words, political and civil rights alongside economic rights and international peace. Virginia Gildersleeve saw the UN Charter as a promising safeguard for these freedoms internationally.[8]

The women representatives from Australia (Jessie Street), Brazil (Bertha Lutz), and Uruguay (Isabel P. de Vidal) defended a proposal to the UN Charter, namely a resolution that women would have equal eligibility to participate in the organization.[9] The opponents of an explicit mention of women in Article 8—Cuba, the United Kingdom, and the United States—argued that such an inclusion was unnecessary since non-discrimination was already mentioned in Article 1 of the Charter, and that it might be seen as “undue interference in domestic affairs” of member states to call for equal representation.[10] Member states should, according to this view, have the right to deny half of their populations this possibility.

The United States and Cuba were the only delegations voting against mentioning equal rights for women to hold positions in the United Nations, with an abstention from the United Kingdom, and the resolution was voted through. Bertha Lutz, heading the Latin American feminists at the San Francisco Conference, succeeded in having women mentioned in Article 8 of the UN Charter, declaring that women should be eligible without restrictions to hold positions in the United Nations.

The Latin American feminist delegates—Bertha Lutz, Minerva Bernardino, and Isabel P. de Vidal—proposed the establishment of a separate Commission on the Status of Women. The Brazilian delegation, led by Bertha Lutz, proposed this commission to study conditions and prepare reports on the political, civil, and economic status of women, with special reference to limitations placed upon them on account of their sex. Jessie Street of Australia was the only Western woman delegate who supported this initiative. She expounded in her memoirs on the dispute in the Committee: “The argument that most human rights had been enjoyed exclusively by men and denied to women and that a single body would not address this was exhaustively debated, with the United Kingdom and the United States firmly opposed.”[11] Reflecting back on her stance at the conference, Virginia Gildersleeve wrote in her memoirs: “Perhaps in the backward countries, where women have no vote and few rights of any kind, spectacular feminism may still be necessary. My English friend Caroline Spurgeon, with whom I lived so long, used to tell me that I did not appreciate the need of militant feminism because I had not been trampled upon enough. If I had lived my life in England in the old days, she told me, I would have been very different.”[12]

Had she lived in the United States 100 years earlier, she would have found that the need for “militant feminism” was still pressing. In 1848, sixty-eight American women had signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which listed the ways in which men held women’s rights back in the United States. It was a long list of the negative effects of men’s power and tyranny over women. The Declaration of Sentiments had also been signed by thirty-two men who supported the women’s movement, among them a man who had fled slavery, Frederick Douglass. The Declaration of Sentiments expresses in a straightforward way what patriarchy means to women’s rights: “[Man] has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy [woman’s] confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.”[13]

When the United Nations was tasked with drafting a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in its founding years (1946–1948), an all-women Commission on the Status of Women with representatives from newly independent countries like India and Pakistan helped to guarantee that the equality of men and women as mentioned in the UN Charter was repeated in the preamble of the UDHR. The Commission ensured that the UDHR included a statement (in article 16) that women had equal rights to men in marriage and to divorce and a prohibition (in article 2) of discrimination based on sex. When the UDHR was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the time finally seemed ripe for women’s international human rights to at least be codified in positive terms, as based on the dignity of all human beings.

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Rebecca Adami is associate professor in the Department of Education at Stockholm University, Sweden. She is a research associate at SOAS University of London, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, and the recipient of the 2022 Bertha Lutz Prize for public writing and research on women in diplomacy. Adami is the author of Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Routledge, 2019) and the co-author, with Dan Plesch, of Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights (Routledge, 2022).

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[1] Thorsten Jonsson, correspondent, [Mediation Meeting in Washington before the San Francisco Conference], Dagens Nyheter, New York, April 3, 1945.

[2] [150 Names Recognize the San Francisco Charter], Stockholms-Tidningen, June 27, 1945.

[3] [The New World Organization], Morgontidningen Socialdemokraten, June 26, 1945.

[4] [World Peace], Dagens Nyheter, June 27, 1945.

[5] Rosalind Rosenberg, “Virginia Gildersleeve: Opening the Gates,” Columbia Magazine: The Magazine of Columbia University, “Living Legacies” Series, Summer 2001.

[6] Jessie Street, Truth or Repose (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1966), p. 180.

[7] Minerva Bernardino, quoted in Ellen Carol DuBois and Katie Oliviero, “Circling the Globe: International Feminism Reconsidered, 1920 to 1975,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32, no. 1 (January 2009): 1–66, p. 48.

[8] Virginia Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 344.

[9] Jessie Street, Truth or Repose (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1966), pp. 280–283.

[10] United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO), vol. 7: 31, 64.

[11] Jessie Street, Truth or Repose (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1966), p. 181.

[12] Virginia Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 353.

[13] Declaration of Sentiments, 1848, Seneca Falls Convention.