Cassin was committed to the view that the rights of man were a Judeo-Christian inheritance, and he saw the status of women as both 'a marker of a society's capacity to value and enact human rights and, concurrently, a basis for denying the universal application of human rights in culturally differentiated communities'. Transforming the rights of the family, which might take several months in metropolitan France, he argued, would take a long time in the overseas territories, and might 'endanger public order, since the peoples would not be ready for such changes'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 270