Campaigning against women’s rights? Britain’s global colonial legacy in the early UN women’s rights agenda 1950-1962

This article assesses the impact of British colonialism in relation to UN women’s rights conventions in the 1950s and early 1960s. Building on the body of scholarship on the role of colonialism on the development of human rights frameworks at the UN, it focuses on Britain’s diplomatic engagements on women’s rights at the global level and finds that Britain’s global colonial legacy on the UN women’s rights agenda in this period was as a conservative and obstructive state actor. Britain’s lack of interest in conventions to support women’s rights, and insistence on the need for ‘Territorial Application Clauses’, outweighed any acknowledgement of the importance of establishing universal rights for women, or the importance of these rights for indigenous women within British colonies. Further still, Britain’s conservativism impacted the very contours and political weight of the conventions themselves. As well as exposing the geopolitics of British colonialism on these specific conventions, this article highlights the critical need to challenge myths surrounding British colonial benevolence and to interrogate the notion that that ‘Western’ governments such as Britain have consistently sought to export women’s rights at the UN.