ABSTRACT
This essay examines evidence of women’s individual and collective contributions to human rights activism that challenged repressive daily conditions under military dictatorship in Chile (1973–89) and confronted the authoritarian and patriarchal power mechanisms used by the regime. These women’s actions, from theoretical writings to political practice, represented a strategic shift in women’s organizing and participating in human rights debates. The essay uses the history of Chilean women’s mobilization for rights under military rule to address larger questions about the roots of human rights practices that embrace women’s rights as human rights: how can women “become human” in the discourse and practice of human rights? Under what circumstances have women’s rights initiatives, human rights movements, and feminist activism converged, claiming “women’s rights as human rights”? How have these initiatives confronted the framework of equality between the sexes that continues to measure women’s rights against those of men? And what are the persistent barriers to acknowledging the rights of all women?
