Humanity

A guiding universalist principle might be that if an idea about man is valid, or if an international law is fair, then it applies to all of humanity. In the postcolonial era, those opposing false universalism—which intentionally misleads the oppressed—have targeted especially European ideas about man that were meant to apply only to elite European males and white feminists' ideas about women that exploit or ignore women of color. Global feminist critiques, as by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, deconstructed the Eurocentric generalizations about "Third World women" and "First World women." Historical and legal scholarship by necessity covers a spectrum from universalist to particularist, exposing in their wake examples of false universalism. Lynn Hunt's The French Revolution and Human Rights (1996) applies universalism in exploration of origins of human rights in the natural rights document "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen" (1789) and applies particularism in exposing the policy debates among French Revolution deputies about citizenship rights of the poor and the propertied, the Jews, free blacks and slaves, and women.

In updating the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (United Nations, 1948) by the "Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action" (United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995), women planned to realize generic human rights by considering the particularities of women's situations: socioeconomic conditions such as regional poverty and obstacles to women's paid employment; political situations such as men leaving women out of decision making; and bodily factors such as control over health, especially one's own fertility. Emerging is an idea of humanity that recognizes difference.