A Brief Introduction of Feminism
Slut.
You hit like a girl!
Real
women have curves.
You can’t do that! You’re
girl.
Women belong in the
kitchen.
Real men don’t show
their emotions.
Boys can’t play with
dolls, they’re for girls
Men can’t get raped.
They always want sex.
She was asking for
it. Did you see what she was wearing?
God did not put a
male in a female’s body. God does not make mistakes.
Someone
has probably said at least one of these things, or something similar, to you at
some point in your life. This is sexism, whether the person who said it meant
it like that or not. Sexism is something that affects everyone: men and women,
boys and girls.
I’ve
heard many of these throughout my life, whether directed at me or someone else.
Hell I’m guilty of saying some myself. I never really understood why it was so bad
to say dolls are for boys or call a girl a slut or a whore if she slept with
half the school. One day I came across the word “feminism.” I Googled it and it
opened my mind to a shit ton of new information.
So here
is a super brief overview of the history of women’s rights movements:
Abbigail
Adams is often one of the people mentioned when talking about the roots of the
feminist movement. She is often quoted warning her husband, John Adams, to make
sure women have the right to vote.
Women
didn’t actually get the right to vote until 1893, 24 years after the suffrage
movement began. And even then it was only in Colorado. The 19th
amendment, the amendment that gave women the right to vote, wasn’t ratified
until 1919, 26 years later. It took 50 years of hard work and protest for women
to gain national recognition as voters. (timeline)
After women gain the right to vote, women begin to make
appearances in politics. Hattie W. Caraway of Arkansas was the first women to
be elected to the U.S. Senate in 1932.
In 1933, Frances Perkins becomes the
first women to serve as a cabinet officer.
In 1981, Sandra Day O’Conner became
the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro was
the first woman to be nominated to be a vice president candidate. (timeline).
It
wasn’t until 1963 that Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which supposedly
meant employers had to pay women the same as the would a man if they were doing
the same job. However, this was apparently a joke seeing as we are still
fighting against a wage gap between men and women for doing the same job. (timeline)
Okay so that is what feminism was. Feminism now is a
completely different entity. It’s based on the same ideals but it has expanded
quite a bit. It’s also not as uniform or specific. Instead of focusing on one
issue, like the right to vote, modern feminism tackles many different topics.
And like any movement the views and opinions vary greatly between each
feminist.
If you ask Google to define feminism it will tell you
“the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and
economic equality to men.” This is technically correct, but it doesn’t
encompass everything that feminism stands for. In general feminism is fighting
against anything that demeans or belittles anyone of any gender or sex in
anyway simply because of their gender or sex. So yes they do help fight against
the double standards that affect men. But not the same way supposed men’s
rights activists, or meninists fight for. (There’s probably going to be a rant
on that later.)
Some specific things
feminists fight:
- · Sexism in the media
- · Wage gap between men and women
- · The glass ceiling
- · Violence against women
- · Gender norms
- · “beauty” standards for both men and women
- · Transphobia
- · limitations reproductive rights
- · Sexism in dress codes
- · Expectations and marriage
- · The expectation that every women’s goal is to get married and have children
- · Body shaming
- · Slut shaming
- · Shaming men for being “feminine” and women for being “masculine”
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