Gender Equality and the Economic Empowerment of Women

This paper examines the notion of rights discourse and its international application in recent feminist theory. Feminists seem to take at least two contradictory views of rights. On the one hand, some feminists criticize the notion of rights as a highly individualistic, abstract Western idea. They argue that rights are a culture-bound construct that does not do justice to more relational understandings of self, or to communal cultures. Yet other feminists argue that rights is an important tool for securing women‟s protection from violence, and promoting women‟s equality. I argue that both of these views inadvertently neglect economic issues, and so long as this is the case, current discussions of rights by Western feminists have only limited benefit for poor women in developing countries. I suggest that feminists concerned with global women‟s issues and rights prioritize economic and social rights, rather than political and legal rights. I illustrate the connection between women‟s economic empowerment and the resulting overall improvement of quality of life by looking at the impact of Indian women‟s employment in two co-operatives, Marketplace India and SEWA (the Self-Employed Women‟s Association).