One of the human rights heroes I was most committed to including in Righting Wrongs: 20 human rights heroes around the world was Hansa Mehta.
Before starting my research, I knew she had something to do with women’s rights. I knew she was part of the negotiations that led to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But I didn’t know she was such a badass.
Mehta is especially inspiring now, as women’s rights go under renewed attack in the United States. The seemingly imminent reversal of Roe v. Wade, which protects women’s right to healthcare and abortion, is just one example of where women’s rights are under siege. Afghanistan, with the return of the Taliban; Ukraine, where women are prime targets for forced displacement and war crimes like rape; and the persistent and pervasive inequality throughout the world are just some other examples.
On to Mehta’s story.
Mehta was born to a scholarly family in the state of Gujarat, on India’s west coast. Her parents taught her that she was equal to boys (similar to another hero’s upbringing, Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi).
A hereditary prince of the region, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, also believed in women’s rights. He hired an American to set up a library. As a girl, Mehta took charge of circulating books in her neighborhood. She loved sharing her favorites: Alexander Dumas’ the Three Musketeers and anything by Last of the Mohicans author James Fenimore Cooper.
Mehta was petite and always immaculately dressed in a sari. Her eyes were large and dark, with a seriousness that shines through in photographs. Baroda College officials grudgingly allowed her and a few other women to attend (now called the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda).
In her memoirs, Mehta recounted that there were only six women in her class of dozens of men.
“Women are admitted there on sufferance…we were shown to a poky little room--six by ten would be a generous estimate--called (the) Lady Students waiting room. There was no peace or privacy in this shelter, as the partition was such that we could see innumerable feet marching up and down the passage all the time.”
Despite the obstacles, Mehta excelled. She continued her studies in England, where she met other Indians committed to the country’s independence. One was poet Sarojini Naidu, elected to lead the pro-independence Indian National Congress political party in 1925, a “rare honour for a woman,” Mehta noted. For Mehta, this friendship “brought me out of my shell.”
Naidu introduced Mehta to Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence movement. He believed in what he called Satyagraha, which can be understood as non-violent resistance, a strategy that later inspired rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
Mehta returned to India and married. But even her progressive father objected to her fiancée since he was from a lower caste. In a show of support for Mehta, the region’s maharaja, a kind of prince, said he would attend her wedding, smoothing family tension. Later, when she drafted the Indian Women’s Charter of Rights and Duties (1946), she added this language: “there shall be no restriction to marriage on the ground of caste or community.”
By then, Mehta had channeled her love of literature into writing her own children’s books. She also translated stories into her native Gujarati, including Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
As part of a country-wide strategy to oppose British rule, Gandhi focused on opposing Britain’s salt tax. Since 1882, the British had barred Indians from distilling or selling their own salt. Instead, they had to buy this staple back from the British and pay a heavy tax. This was especially hard on the poor.
On March 12, 1930, Gandhi left his ashram, or religious retreat, to walk over 200 miles to the Arabian Sea in an act of non-violent civil resistance, embodying satyagraha. He and thousands of supporters planned a symbolic act: to crystallize salt from seawater, breaking British law. Soon, more than 60,000 people joined the Salt March. At one stop, he asked women to mount a parallel campaign to picket foreign-owned stores. By then, Mehta had two children and worried about being arrested. Nevertheless, she organized over a thousand women to picket stores in Bombay, now called Mumbai.
Mehta’s mentor, Sarojini Naidu, also protested, leading thousands to a British-run salt works where they were beaten by the police and arrested. Along with thousands of others, Gandhi, Naidu, and Mehta were arrested, but their strategy worked. The Salt March galvanized the independence movement.
Now well-known, Mehta was offered a seat reserved for a woman on the Bombay Legislative Council in 1937. She refused, opposed to any special status for women. Instead, she ran for the seat and won. As a legislator, she advocated for better education as well as for the rights of the harijin, also called Dalit or “Untouchables,” at the time India’s lowest caste.
In public, the Indian independence movement supported women’s rights. Privately, Mehta fought gender discrimination. She found humor in some daily battles. Without hesitation, legislative colleagues and staff addressed her as “Sir” or “Mr. Chairman.” Once, a cleaning woman whispered a blessing to her. “I could see that she was feeling very proud of her sex!” Mehta later wrote.
That support was crucial given the huge problems she faced. At the time, the life span of the average Indian person was 27. Many new mothers died due to lack of access to health care. Only one in four women voted. Some families forced girls to marry as young as ten years of age or go into purdah, a kind of isolation that kept them from school.
For Mehta, along with rights like voting and equality before the law, Indian women needed economic rights. “In this man-made world the worth of a person is reckoned on his or her economic status,” she wrote, advocating for health and childcare support, family planning, and rights to property. “It is in the economic sphere that women will have to fight hard to establish their position.”
As an aside, these economic rights are threatened by lack of access to abortion. Middle-class and rich Americans will always be able to get abortions. Poor women are the ones who will be forced to have children against their wishes or will suffer from unsafe abortions.
In 1946, Mehta was elected president of the All India Women’s Conference, dedicated to promoting women and children’s rights. With others, she drafted a Woman’s Charter of Rights and Duties, stating that women were equal to men.
A year later, India won independence from Britain. As the clock ticked down the last seconds of British rule in August 1947, Mehta stood beside the leaders of the new legislature. Mehta presented the national flag to the legislature’s new president on behalf of the women of India. “We have donned the saffron colour, we have fought, suffered and sacrificed in the cause of our country’s freedom,” she said (you can hear her in this audio).
Mehta and other women help draft India’s new constitution, including its provisions defending women’s rights.
It was that same year, 1947, that India sent Mehta to the Commission on Human Rights. Mehta and Eleanor Roosevelt were the only women present who represented governments. Mehta soon discovered that Roosevelt didn’t agree with removing gendered language from the Declaration. Roosevelt preferred words like “men” and “mankind.”
To Roosevelt, Mehta explained that “the wording of ‘all men’ or ‘should act…like brothers’” was dangerous. These phrases “might be interpreted to exclude women, and were out of date.”
Instead, she proposed “human beings” or “persons.” This was especially important for Article 1, which established the idea of equality among all people.
Mehta convinced the commission to accept the phrase “human beings.” To some, the dispute seemed like a minor thing, a matter of a few letters. But Mehta knew better. At home, she’d faced more than disagreements over wording. She’d been threatened, arrested, and beaten. She knew letters could mean the difference between “special status” and equality.
Mehta also argued that they should be planning to make the Declaration a treaty, not just a statement of hopes. A treaty is a legal commitment that can be enforced, she argued. Roosevelt disagreed, aware that even getting the countries to agree to a statement was a huge task. There were also world politics at play. Two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, wanted to block any enforcement that could lead to an international power beyond their control.
Mehta lost that argument but would be pleased to know that many of the Declaration’s principles are now a matter of international law.
Mehta continued her advocacy for human rights after being selected as the Vice Chair of the UN Human Rights Commission from 1950 to 1952. Later in life, Mehta became vice-chancellor at the university where her father had taught, the first woman to hold such a high academic post in India. Under her guidance, Baroda enrolled many more women. She also championed many improvements, including decent housing so that no student, including the women, would have to live cramped in a “poky little room.”
All rights advocates working for women walk in Hansa Mehta’s footsteps. As many continue to fight for women’s rights, let us remember that visionaries like Hansa Mehta walk with us.
Book news
On a different subject entirely! The re-release of The Bond Trilogy is in progress! Both The Bond and The Hive Queen have new, fabulous covers thanks to the brilliant Molly Phipps at We got you covered book design. There’s also new content and new interior design as well as Travis Hasenour’s marvelous map.
The final and as yet unpublished book in the trilogy, The Mother’s Wheel, will have a cover reveal on May 10—please put all three books on your to-read lists). Pre-orders are so important so if you can, stick these in your shopping basket.
Thank you for reading!