Social science and history came together on Friday as historian Giusi Russo gave students a look at the gendered struggle for human rights within the United Nations.

Russo, an assistant professor of global studies at SUNY Onondaga and a Binghamton University alumnus, discussed “Tensions of Equality: Women and Human Rights Laws” as part of a speaker series sponsored by the anthropology department. The talk focused on the U.N. and the Human Rights Declaration.

In order to appeal to her audience, Russo said she decided to break her presentation up into three separate case studies: a linguistic look at the term “man” as a synonym for humanity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the cultural implications of compulsory marriage and the contradiction between equal rights and a woman’s role in the family.

“I was trained as a feminist historian, so I was always intrigued that these women who claimed to be not feminist, they claimed that they were just representing their own country, is actually something feminist,” she said. “And I think there’s still a tension with defining ourselves as feminists and then promoting equality.”

Due to her background in history, Russo said she wanted to focus on the progression of gender equality in the U.N. She talked about how the lack of female representation and participation in the U.N. affected polygamy and genital mutilation.

“The relationship between women and the U.N. only happened later,” she said. “In the beginning it was just this one case. This case also spoke about rituals that harmed women’s bodies. But it was a cultural issue and they couldn’t intervene. Only in 1975, other cultures accepted that this damaged human bodies. But before, the commissioners were seen as being crazy feminists.”

During the talk, Russo addressed the contradiction between human rights laws and cultural practices. In the second case study, she discussed a chieftain of the British Cameroons during the 1950s who had 110 wives.

The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), a body of the U.N. dedicated to gender equality, worked to end forced polygamous marriages in the country, but found little success. Women were prevented from holding positions of power since legal equality did not always mean an end to cultural discrimination.

This same issue was raised again when the U.N. tried to define gender equality. Some commissioners found traditional roles in familial relationships to be against the idea of equality, while others thought gender equality was hurting the traditional family setting.

This disagreement led to difficulty in finding common ground within the U.N. and stunted debate on the topic. However, it sparked a conversation about gender and equality that has continued into the present day about how to define equality.

“Gender equality became a difficult concept to define and to inscribe in this new declaration against discrimination,” Russo said. “Family was a sense of tension in the realm of gender inequality because some commissioners advocated for women’s tradition-based roles in familial relationships while claiming to promote equality.”

Jennifer Dunn, a first-year graduate student studying sociocultural anthropology, said she enjoyed the new angle a historian brought to previous research conducted on the topic.

“She has a different perspective than what we would necessarily say as anthropologists so it was interesting to see another field,” Dunn said. “We’re supposed to be interdisciplinary and we’re supposed to be interested in other fields, because knowing other perspectives informs our perspectives.”