Lynn Hunt: Inventing Human Rights
Hello class, I am Paola Maldonado, and this is m first semester at CWE. I am currently majoring in Early Childhood Education, and as an aspiring teacher I think it is really important to have a lot of knowledge about Human Rights, so we can be able to talk about it to whoever have doubts or fears because they do not know their rights and therefore are unable to defend or speak up for themselves. In reading the history of Human Rights women were portrayed lessen than men. In fact, women were to act according to the convenience of the state and government. Women weren’t free, whereas men were in charge of everything. However time has passed and society has become racionalized. Overall through women’s fights and movements we have advanced and accomplished goals that back then were unreachable for women. I still do not understand why before and even nowadays women are not treated equally as men. Why do we still hear that so called “weak gender” for women and the glass ceiling in the twenty-first century. I took this course because I want to find these answers, get educated and be able to transmit my knowledge to help others.
The history of Human Rights helps us have an idea of how society back then came to realize that we are all human beings and therefore The Declaration of Human Rights applies to all living people. However it took decades for people to respect this Declaration due to the morality and discriminating ideas of the precursors. First at all, the articles of Declaration of Human Rights went through a lot of changes because of the terminology; “men,” “man,” “every man,” “all men,” “all citizen,” “society.” I wonder if any of these terms included women as well. Not surprisingly these rights were only applicable for men; women, children, and propertyless people were excluded because they were not capable of moral autonomy. In the eighteen century when Human Rights became self evident, thanks to philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire and others, who had contributed for the morality of the society to take a big step forward when realizing that torture was just unacceptable, people began to feel a sense of empathy when recognizing individuals as human beings like any other. Eventually, abolition of corporal punishment was written as a article in the human rights. Nowadays, the doctrine of self true, knowing what is right or wrong is clear for most of the people. However, for some people this might not be truly clear since even though few cases of police brutality have happened lately, for me still it is considered corporal punishment. It was widely known the deaths of some American citizens at the hands of police abusing of their physical strengths and as a result killing innocent people, instead of going by the laws. Violence does not seem to go away definitely even though there is laws protecting people. Personally, I think society or some people true self and becoming reasonable.
