From Self-Determination via Protection to Equality via Non-Discrimination: Defining Women’s Rights at the League of Nations and the United Nations

Abstract

In the late 1920s, Vera Brittain wrote two pamphlets on behalf of the English Six Point Group in which she made the case that ‘the status of women’ was an ‘international question’. Since the establishment of the League of Nations as ‘the triumph of the international idea’, she said, ‘women have come to regard the League as the one fitting instrument through which justice can be done to women, completely and for all time’.1 How justice would be best achieved for women was, however, a matter of continuing debate.