Assignment 01
My name is Maria D’Amelio and this will be my second to last semester at CWE. I am grateful for the variety of classes and the dedication of the professors and students, here but I am also very much looking forward to graduating. I was delighted to learn about this class as I have been an activist around various issues – including women’s rights – for over a decade and am always interested to read and learn more about political and theoretical debates so that I can be as informed as possible. Currently, I’m involved in a group to defend women’s reproductive rights, which is something that has been steadily eroded ever since the right to safe, legal abortion was won in 1973. Women’s issues have always been a centerpiece for me in terms of my involvement and my study. I believe very strongly that we need to learn the lessons of the past and build a grassroots movement that takes into account and fights around the issues that affect all races, gender expression, religions, and economic statuses. I actually still have a lot of hope that this is possible. I’m hoping that this class will help me to learn more about issues that are deeply important to me.
The language in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 – one of the precursors to the Universal Declaration for Human Rights of 1948 that Lynn Hunt discusses in Inventing Human Rights (2007) – is so familiar to so many by now, that it is almost taken for granted. But, the questions raised by Hunt, in particular whether or not something that is supposedly “self-evident” needs to be explained, force a critical examination as to what the actual drafters of the document meant. The irony of a well-known slaveowner penning lines about the equality of all human beings may still be lost on some, but is an act that is nonetheless difficult to defend. It seems rather obvious today, that Jefferson’s vision of “man” was a supremely narrow one. Certainly, as Hunt points out, the word “man” as a term was a stand-in for “people,” though, even this is cause for pause. Jefferson did not intend for women to be part of the category of “all men,” nor did he intend for men of a darker hue to join in the celebration of the equality of “all men.” He spoke to a specific demographic: his own. Those who owned property (slaves were the most profitable form of property in Jefferson’s day), those who were male, and, of course, white. This version of equality or notion of human rights does not jibe with the standard – or the perceived standard – that exists today. What’s interesting, however, is how, even today, human beings are quickly demoted from that category under a variety of circumstances. Hunt points to a few in her essay, including immigrants, but it’s worth talking about prisoners, as well.
