Topic 9.5 Notes – Calls for Reform and Responses After 1900

How Rights-Based Reform Challenged Social Hierarchies After 1900

Rights-based discourse means people framed inequality as something unjust and changeable. That shift mattered because after the world wars, decolonization, mass media, rising literacy, and globalization, reformers could reach bigger audiences and organize across borders.

The main hierarchies under attack were:

• Race through civil-rights and anti-apartheid struggles
• Class through movements demanding protection for workers and the poor
• Gender through feminism and suffrage campaigns
• Caste through antidiscrimination and reservation policies in India
• Religion when people demanded equal treatment and freedom of belief

Common claims kept repeating across regions:

• equality before the law
• voting rights and public office
• access to schools and professions
• freedom from discrimination
• protections for women, children, refugees, and displaced people

A key distinction shows up a lot on tests. Formal equality means the law says everyone is equal. Substantive equality means governments take extra steps to fix the results of past exclusion. India’s reservation system is the clearest example.

Major Rights-Based Movements and Ideas

The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The UDHR was adopted in 1948 after World War II and the Holocaust. Eleanor Roosevelt helped lead the UN commission that drafted it.

Eleanor Roosevelt with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

It declared universal rights such as legal equality, freedom of religion and expression, education, work, and political participation. It was especially important for women, children, refugees, and displaced persons. Its weakness was enforcement. It set a global standard, but the UN could not simply force states to obey.

Global feminism movements

Feminism challenged women’s exclusion from politics, education, professions, and family law, and pushed for protection from violence.

Suffrage examples you need to know:

• United States 1920
• Brazil 1932
• Turkey 1934
• Japan 1945
• India 1947
• Morocco 1963

Female literacy rose in much of the world, and more women entered higher education. Still, legal rights did not erase underrepresentation or unequal expectations at home and work.

Negritude movement

Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas challenged French colonial racism and the idea that Black people should assimilate into French culture. Negritude celebrated Black identity and African culture. That made culture itself a form of political resistance.

Liberation theology in Latin America

Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, and the Medellín conference connected Christianity to social justice. The phrase “preferential option for the poor” meant the church should side with the poor against exploitation, not just offer charity. This challenged class inequality and the church’s traditional closeness to elites.

How States Expanded Inclusion in Politics, Education, and Public Life

Governments responded through suffrage, antidiscrimination laws, expanded schooling, access to professions, and affirmative action.

• U.S. civil-rights movement fought Jim Crow through boycotts, sit-ins, marches, voter-registration drives, and nonviolent protest. Know Martin Luther King Jr., Brown v. Board of Education, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Also keep the laws straight. Civil Rights Act of 1964 attacked discrimination. Voting Rights Act of 1965 protected voting.
• South Africa ended apartheid, the post-1948 system of legal racial segregation and white-minority rule. Resistance included the African National Congress, international sanctions, and Nelson Mandela. F. W. de Klerk negotiated the transition, Mandela was released, and universal suffrage came in 1994. Huge inequalities remained.
• India abolished untouchability in its constitution and banned caste discrimination. It also created reservations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and later Other Backward Classes in legislatures, schools, and government jobs. That is substantive equality in action.

Environmental and Economic Justice Movements

These movements argued that globalization spread benefits unevenly and pushed environmental damage and labor abuse onto poorer communities.

• Greenpeace began in 1971 protesting U.S. nuclear testing at Amchitka. It used direct action and media attention to fight whaling, toxic waste, deforestation, climate threats, and ocean damage.
• Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement in Kenya, founded in 1977, organized tree planting and rural women’s leadership to fight deforestation, erosion, and fuel and water insecurity. It also linked environmental protection to democracy under Daniel arap Moi.
• World Fair Trade tried to reform trade, not end it. Through networks like the World Fair Trade Organization, it pushed fairer prices, safer labor conditions, less child and forced labor, and sustainable production for goods like coffee, cocoa, tea, bananas, textiles, and handicrafts.

Responses, Limits, and Big Patterns

States and institutions responded with reform, delay, repression, or partial enforcement. That is the core pattern.

The biggest continuity is simple. Rights on paper did not always become rights in practice. Prejudice, unequal wealth, violence, weak enforcement, underrepresentation, and institutional discrimination kept old hierarchies alive.