Abstract

Subject to Debate

During the cold war the U.S. granted political refugee status to virtually any escapee from the Soviet Union and its satellites, a policy that persisted, with regard to Cuba, until recently. Yet even by the narrowest definition of political rights, millions of women around the globe are as deprived as were the inhabitants of the evil empire, unable to vote, travel freely, own property, speak their minds. By any more expansive definition of liberty, even more millions of women qualify as human rights victims. For all its faults, Communism did not permit the legal murder of women by male relatives for supposed crimes against the family honor, use rape as a weapon of terror, deny widows custody of their children or permit young girls to be sold into polygynous marriages.