New Oxymoron: A Feminist Analysis

Looking in from the outside, the journey of Women’s rights was a lengthy one, and it has come a significant way from what it began as. It was a long road to freedom that started with just a few women protesting together for change in the mid 1800’s to the large movement it is today. What started only as an effort to put women on equal footing with men in the voting realm blossomed into a full on fight against gender norms and independence through protesting, speeches, and gatherings. Gender norms or ‘roles’ are (as defined by Webster’s dictionary) “a set of societal norms dictating what types of behaviors are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on their actual or perceived sex” and they are one thing that modern feminist have set their sights on to change for the better. Traditional gender roles have continued to exist for hundreds of years through perpetrators such as religion, government and society, and its effects have been felt by every woman, whether they realize it or not.

The old feminism is crumbling because it simply does not answer the needs and questions of the 21st-century women. “Women are the equals of men. Men and women are not separate political classes” (Socialist Alternative, 2). Anyone who shares the desire to reduce inequality and promote opportunity must embrace feminism. “If the future is men and women dwelling as images of each other in a world unchanged, it is a nightmare” (Greer, 2). All of us benefit from the same political circumstances… like freedom of speech, conscience, private property, and the right of self-defense. Any particular man is no more my enemy, no more a threat to me, than any particular woman is. We are all individuals to be evaluated

Feminism as an ideology should be understood and appreciated as a pioneering movement that has pushed the boundaries of what should and should not be discussed in the political arena. All Feminist traditions are united in their fight towards the equality of the sexes but differ on what they believe needs to change within society. Some areas focus more on legal matters, namely: Liberal feminists, whereas other areas of feminism place a larger focus on social inequalities. This essay will discuss whether feminism is defined by 'the personal is the political ' or not.

Feminism is described as the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men. The suffrage movement began in the mid-1800s, and has continued to impact our lives ever since. Women wanted the right to vote, but they also wanted what came after the right to vote. Women expected the right to vote transform their social standing with men.

In this paper I will be going over issue 17, “Has the Women’s Movement of the 1970’s Failed to Liberate American Women?”. Sara M. Evans and F. Carolyn Graglia each voice their opinions about the issue. They talk about the history of the women’s movement throughout time and the effects it had in our country.

Feminist theory is associated with the analysis and explanation of women’s subordinate social situation. It seeks to

Feminist theory is important to each and every one of us today. Women are attacked and being underestimated whenever they want to break that cultural condition in ways of seeing. Patriarchy is a male-dominant society that makes women have limitations and generally unequal to men. Looking at the feminist perspective, we can see how women are oppressed and projected inferior, and in the story of “Learning to Fall”, there are two types of females that patriarchy describes as the “good girl” and the “bad girl”.

In modern day society, every person has designated roles, otherwise known as social roles. Social roles are expected behaviors of what is accepted and excepted from an individual. Social roles reflect on how we present ourselves to our individual identity and to other people in a society. The accepted and excepted behaviors of men and women in society are different and these are known as gender roles. Throughout the course of history, there exists an inequality amongst male and female rights. To exemplify, it was only until 1920, less than 100 years ago, when females were granted the right to vote in the United States. Around the same time in history, women started to assert themselves by drinking, smoking socializing and casually approaching

The invisible privilege, power and oppression of hegemonic masculinity or masculinities across societies continue to maintain gender inequalities (Kimmel, 2010). Cornell and Messerschmidt (2005) first identified hegemonic masculinity to describe how specific traits, such as white, middle-class and heterosexual, are the valued norms and identities in Western society. Hegemonic masculinity is a form of hegemony that allows men, including subordinate men as a group, to gain more power, control and resources than women (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Masculinised privilege is invisibly ubiquitous in that women and subordinate men construct identities and gender

Since the beginning of time, the existence of women and men has been undeniably considered as one of the integral factors that forms our society as it is today. Despite their parallel existence and contribution to the growth of the society, it was considered that women were not treated equal to men both in domestic and working circumstances, leading to a wave of movements demanding equal rights for women, known as feminism. Despite its success in claiming benefits for mistreated women in the past, recent feminism actions and point of views have gone above their original purpose, and created negative impacts and false mindset as its consequences,

The feminist movement has made many ground breaking accomplishments over the years however has it truly gone to the root of the problem. Pollitt states that, “The feminist movement ……… has hardly turned America into a playground free of sex roles.” Claiming in her article about how the feminist movement will be unsuccessful till people are able to fully practice gender equally from infancy. If people started to take what Pollute said to practice the overall beneficial effects would cause, there to be less gender inequality. There would be less discrimination because as it is now man still get paid more and are favored more over women in high level positions. One good example would be since the establishment of the President of the United States

“This has meant that generally the analysis of men and masculinities has been subordinate to the overarching themes of female oppression and female liberation” (Horrocks, 9).So looking for masculine gender may seem odd at first because it seems that masculinity has an obvious meaning and men are the ones who are in power. Todd W. Reeser in his Masculinities in Theory states, “Masculinity seems like an obvious thing, something we can and do take for granted. We know what it is when we see it: it is commonsensical, produced by testosterone or by nature” (1).It has been decades that women and feminists are the ones who talked about gender damaged and inequalities all over the centuries as a weaker gender and look for gender equality.“Gender equality means that males and females have equal opportunities to realize their full human potential and can contribute to and benefit from economic, social, cultural and political development”(Jasmani,61). But recently having masculine gender can be harmful as well for men because both genders are active in society, politics, etc and men are not the only ruler; it is not really a promotion to have a masculine identity anymore. As a matter of fact, gender

In this article, we will be discussing how feminism is still needed as there is a lack of gender equality. Till this day there are still women that are not given the opportunity to be educated like men, females’ salaries are less than males’ salaries and women are treated as if their job is to serve men. Women and men should have equal rights because no one is more superior to the other gender. Sexism is still a struggle in our society that has to be tackled as it makes us as women feel unworthy and not capable of things that we can actually do. We are all human beings therefore we all have the same abilities as well as we all have goals we want to achieve but it is a struggle for women more than it is for men.

The first wave of feminism has been a revolutionary social movement in terms of that it could lead to an overcoming of the previous social order (Newman, 2012 p. 487) through its social agents and create, through this, a new social ordering of time and space. Moreover, through reaching their previously described aims, the first wave of feminism has been able to literally “overthrow the entire system itself, (…) in order to replace it with another one.” (Skocpol, 1979, as cited in Newman 2012, p. 487). Thereby, one can even state that a new ordering of time and space by which routines and routinised behaviour has been challenged as well as changed took place. The interactions influenced the way how societies work today. (Allan, 2013, p. 323).

Feminist issues have always been controversial throughout history and gender topics remain debatable matters in the context of the democratic society of the 21st century. Social, political and economic inequality between men and women are still important issues for the contemporary world. Women’s rights concerning motherhood or abortion, domestic violence within the family, the right to equal pay or sexual discrimination and harassment are all issues that are frequently debated in the society of our century.