It’s still new. Women’s suffrage happened less than a hundred years ago, and that’s here in the United States. It’s clear that change doesn’t happen overnight, and suffrage didn’t solve everything. It was simply the most basic of decisions to let women’s opinions count. It was only the beginning.
It’s not simply dictated by laws but social standards. Passing a law doesn’t magically change our society. Societal standards take generations resolve, and some we still hold onto. Parents hold a different set of standards for their daughters. Men and women have a strict idea of how a woman is supposed to behave. If a woman steps outs of these bounds even slightly, she is harshly criticized.
Feminist. That’s an ugly word! There’s so much stigma around the subject of feminism. Images like man-hater, bra-burner, legs going unshaven, come to mind when a feminist is imagined.But, come on people. It’s 2013. Maybe it’s time to put those hateful notions to bed and realize that a feminist could be any woman. It’s about women standing up for women and deciding which way we want our gender progression to go and what we want to achieve.
What about family? How do we raise our children if we decide to have them? We want our careers, but if we decide to have children, our careers get put on hold. After the child is born, it is required that women take at least six weeks off to recover. Some women decide to take several years off to be with their child through it’s infancy. That’s not a bad thing, but how do we keep our family lives and career together? That’s a hard one!
Not everyone is on board. And I’m talking about us women. Whether they think feminism is a dirty word or just don’t care, a lot of women are not active. Some are not as active as they’d like to be. It takes a lot of openness to educate our women. It takes a lot of discussion to sort out how we are feeling. Mostly, it takes courage. We can’t completely agree on every issue as a whole, but some issues we can such as equal pay scale. Why wouldn’t we want the same pay for the same job? Unfortunately, women are still getting less.
Check out this New York Time’s article on gender gap that shows some current insight on the subject.
Contemporary Progressive Feminism 