Cassin used women’s status to justify withholding rights from Muslim colonies

Evidence

Cassin was committed to the view that the rights of man were a Judeo-Christian inheritance, and he saw the status of women as both ‘a marker of a society’s capacity to value and enact human rights and, concurrently, a basis for denying the universal application of human rights in culturally differentiated communities’. Transforming the rights of the family, which might take several months in metropolitan France, he argued, would take a long time in the overseas territories, and might ‘endanger public order, since the peoples would not be ready for such changes’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the reader’s immodesty/moral-panic article: women’s dress and status as class/civilizational markers policing who merits rights. — connects to: Human rights founding figure René Cassin also authorized colonial repression in Algeria — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 868; Colonial feminism used saving Muslim women to justify imperialism; Victorian feminism was weaponized to justify colonial rule over Muslim societies — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 35 (+12 more)
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone working on feminist critiques of liberal internationalism, where women’s status is weaponized to defer rights.

Broader Connections

• Human rights founding figure René Cassin also authorized colonial repression in Algeria #expands (0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 868
• Colonial feminism used saving Muslim women to justify imperialism #expands (0.90)
• Victorian feminism was weaponized to justify colonial rule over Muslim societies #expands (0.90) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 35
• Neoconservative discourse exploits women’s rights to mark Islam as foreign. #expands (0.90)
• Islamophobic discourse uses Muslim women as pawns to serve imperial and domestic agendas #expands (0.85)
• Feminist positioning becomes a justification for imperial invasion of Muslim lands. #expands (0.85) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 62
• Outrage at Muslim women’s suffering gets weaponized to justify racist war policies #expands (0.85)
• Women’s rights rhetoric is selectively deployed to justify imperial interventions #expands (0.85)
• Colonial powers co-opted feminism to justify empire while opposing it at home #expands (0.85)
• The oppressed-Muslim-woman narrative was fabricated to justify colonial invasion. #expands (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 164
• Feminist defense of Muslim women silenced those very women #expands (0.80)
• Genuine concern for Muslim women was repurposed to justify war and racism #expands (0.80) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 817
• Some American feminism serves imperial goals toward Muslim women. #expands (0.80)
• Colonial nonintervention in women’s customs mirrored the metropole’s denial of women’s rights #exemplifies (0.75)
• Colonial pressure on women’s status trapped Algerians in a double bind on reform #complicates (0.75) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 242