Abstract: Women have always maintained a special relation with water.Women also have special needs regarding water and are especially vulnerable to the lack of access thereto and sanitation. This special relation of women with water has over time tended to accentuate the hardships in life which are bound to persist so long as discrimination, inequalities, and stereotyping remain entrenched. While there is no simple solution to improving the lot of women and girls and their access to water and sanitation and other social goods, the human rights framework seems to offer an analytic and normative toolkit that simultaneously reveals and permits to address the structural causes of inadequate access to water and sanitation and offer solutions that can contribute to both ensuring equal access to water and sanitation and improving the status of women and girls. A first move in this direction resulted from the recognition of a human right to water and sanitation. This occurred already in the 21st century, at the end of a long and erratic process of legal construction. It is however necessary to move forward and consolidate this legal empowerment of women as well as address the entrenched discriminations and gender inequalities that they suffer, by further exploring the potential that the whole toolkit of human rights seems to bear. This approach has started to be followed in the latest years; at a policy level with the Sustainable Development Goals agenda and legally by systematically pooling on human rights principles and procedural rights and obligations. However, in order to fundamentally change the situation locally, where women feel the impacts, it also seems necessary to maintain a dynamic interaction between different levels of governance and legal orders. Progressive legal thinking in the international context, together with international policy initiatives and institutions seem to hold inspiring indications for and promote the legal and deep social and cultural changes that states have to bring about, for the sake of full realisation of the human right to water and sanitation and, more fundamentally, the dignity of an important part of Humankind.