Researchers: Latin American women got women into UN Charter

UNITED NATIONS – Eleanor Roosevelt gets the credit for championing women's rights at the United Nations but two researchers have found the real heroines responsible for getting women into the U.N. Charter are from Latin America, led by a little-known Brazilian.

Fatima Sator and Elise Luhr Dietrichson, researchers at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, said it's important to set history straight because the U.N. Charter was the first international document to inscribe the rights of men and women as part of fundamental human rights.

At a news conference Friday, they quoted from Brazilian delegate Bertha Lutz' report on her campaign to get the San Francisco conference that adopted the Charter in 1945 to refer to women.

Lutz later wrote that U.S. and U.K. delegates opposed mentioning women.