Cynthia Enloe: Discrimination Against Women

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Unit 1 essay option three

Ultimately, society tends to figure itself out, albeit sometimes solutions to certain issues take a longer route to achieve resolution. Even in the United States, the land of the free, and the hub of “equality,” women are discriminated against due to a history of discrimination that women are inferior to men. Sarah Grimké a nineteenth century feminist states:
“there is [a] way in which the general opinion, that women are inferior to men, is manifested, that bears with tremendous effect on the laboring class, and indeed on almost all who are obliged to earn a subsistence, whether it be by mental or physical exertion- I allude to the disproportionate value set on the time and labor of men and of women” (p. 49)
In other words men make significantly more for services than men. This discrimination is cross cultural, as in it spans throughout history and it is even still prevalent. Women have fought valiantly against the discrimination throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century by

Such injustices will never be overcome unless our society chooses to be “curious feminists” (Enloe p. 1). This is a term coined by Cynthia Enloe in her excerpt The Curious Feminist. Such curiosity is very prevalent in today’s society. Arguments regarding equal salary and political representation are of constant debate and in many citizen’s consciousness. As bleak as history has been with regard to women’s rights, the future is surely optimistic. History acts as a lesson from which the present to learn from and avoid. Thus, history has shown us that just by creating laws and schools to protect women’s basic rights of equality, in order to ensure such rights are observed, women need to have an active voice in decisions. Active voices combined with curiosity will give women the best chance of achieving true