‘DIE MENSCHENRECHTE HABEN KEIN GESCHLECHT’: HEDWIG DOHM'S FEMINIST CONCEPTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract

This article discusses Hedwig Dohm's (1831–1919) conceptualisation of women's rights as human rights. The focus is on Dohm's essays and the strategies she employs in dismantling the arguments of women's rights opponents. By casting women's rights as human rights, she links her claims back to earlier human rights declarations and demands that their implied universality be actualised regarding women. The article examines parody and satire as important tools in two of Dohm's works – ‘Was die Pastoren von den Frauen denken’ (1872) and Der Frauen Natur und Recht (1876) – in which Dohm exposes contradictions and logical flaws in antifeminist positions. In particular, she rejects the patriarchal notion that women are biologically determined to serve in certain professions and fulfil specific roles in society. When addressing religion, Dohm, who was Jewish by birth and identified as areligious, typically refers to Christianity, which appears in her writing primarily as a tool of oppression. Notably, Dohm shows how domination and oppression operate in multilayered ways, and this awareness of intersectionality allows her to situate the discussion of women's rights in a larger rights framework in which gender is interlinked with other factors that exacerbate oppression. The article concludes with the suggestion that the concept of ‘jurisgenerativity’, i.e. the generative effect of rights narratives on the normative universe, can capture the process by which words shape the normative foundations from which legal legitimacy emanates.