Deconstructing CEDAW’s Article 14: Naming and Explaining Rural Difference

Abstract:     
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is the first human rights instrument to recognize explicitly rural-urban difference. It does so by enumerating specific rights for rural women in Article 14 and also by mentioning their needs in relation to Article 10 on education. In this Essay, I examine the Convention’s Travaux Préparatoires to better understand the forces and considerations that led to the inclusion of Article 14 and its recognition of rural people and places. I also assess Article 14’s particular mandates in light of both that drafting history and CEDAW’s other provisions, and I consider the assumptions implicit in the Convention’s embrace of rural exceptionalism. In addition, I offer some thoughts on the expressive significance of the particular rights accorded to rural women, as well as of the explicit acknowledgment of this group – and, by extension, rural populations in their entirety – in this widely ratified treaty. I thus discuss what CEDAW implies about the character of rurality and rural-urban difference. Finally, I argue that CEDAW provides a framework for spatial equality, in addition to the more obvious and comprehensive one for gender equality. This Essay therefore fills a void in the legal scholarship on CEDAW, which often mentions Article 14 in inventories of the Convention’s provisions, but which has largely ignored both its meaning and significance.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 49

Keywords: rural, rural women, human rights, women's rights, gender, rural development, rural and urban, migration, CEDAW, socioeconomic rights, spatial inequality, uneven development, agriculture, cooperatives, self-help groups, developing world, developed world, CEDAW, health care

JEL Classification: K00, K33 I00

Accepted Paper Series