{"id":80469,"date":"2016-10-03T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T11:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=80469"},"modified":"2016-09-29T12:10:21","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T11:10:21","slug":"the-long-long-journey-to-female-equality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/10\/the-long-long-journey-to-female-equality\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long, Long Journey to Female Equality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"james-haught-pic-2\"<\/a>With the possibility of America\u2019s first woman president looming, it\u2019s appropriate to consider the monumental struggle for gender equality.<\/p>\n

For millennia, female inferiority was presumed, and mandated, in virtually every human culture. Through most of history, the brawn of heavier males gave them dominance, leaving women in lesser status — often mere possessions of men, confined to the home, rarely educated, with few rights.<\/p>\n

Many were forced to wear veils or shrouds when outdoors, and they couldn\u2019t go outside without a male relative escort. Fathers kept their daughters restricted, then chose husbands who became their new masters.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the husbands also had several other wives. In a few cultures, unwanted baby girls were left on trash dumps to die.<\/p>\n

In Ancient Greece, women were kept indoors, rarely seen, while men performed all public functions. Women couldn\u2019t attend schools or own property. A wife couldn\u2019t attend male social events, even when her husband staged one at home. Aristotle believed in \u201cnatural slaves\u201d and wrote that females are lesser creatures who must be cared for, as a farmer tends his livestock.<\/p>\n

Up through medieval times, daughters were secondary, and inheritances went to firstborn sons. Male rule prevailed. Anthropologists have searched for exceptions, with little success — except possibly some Iroquois tribes in Canada, where women reportedly had some rights.<\/p>\n

In the 1930s, the famed Margaret Mead thought she found a female-led group in New Guinea, but she later reversed her conclusion and wrote: \u201cAll the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed\u2026.<\/u> Men everywhere have been in charge of running the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

As The Enlightenment blossomed in the 1700s, calls for women\u2019s rights emerged. France\u2019s Talleyrand wrote that only men required serious education — \u201cMen are destined to live on the stage of the world\u201d — and women should learn just to manage \u201cthe paternal home.\u201d This infuriated England\u2019s rebellious Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), who wrote\u00a0A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,\u00a0<\/em>contending that females have potential for full public life. (Her daughter married poet Percy Shelley and wrote\u00a0Frankenstein<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Reformer John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) wrote\u00a0The Subjugation of Women\u00a0<\/em>in 1869 after his wife had written\u00a0The Enfranchisement of Women<\/em>, calling for a female right to vote. The husband protested: \u201cThere remain no legal slaves, save the mistress of every house.\u201d As a member of England\u2019s Parliament, Mill sought voting by women and became president of the National Society for Women\u2019s Suffrage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement,\u201d Mill wrote.<\/p>\n

The western world wrestled nearly a century before women finally won the right to vote.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was the bright daughter of a New York state judge. Few schools admitted girls, so her father arranged for her to attend male-only Johnstown Academy.<\/p>\n

The daughter grew outraged by laws forbidding women to own property or control their lives. She married an abolitionist lawyer and accompanied him to London for a world conference against slavery. Women weren\u2019t allowed to talk; they sat silent behind a curtain while men spoke.<\/p>\n

Back in America, she joined Quakers to organize an 1848 assembly at Seneca Falls, New York, that launched the modern women\u2019s equality movement.\u00a0\u00a0Frederick Douglass urged delegates to demand female suffrage.\u00a0\u00a0Stanton later joined Unitarians Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in a lifelong struggle for female rights.<\/p>\n

The Civil War temporarily suppressed those efforts, but they flared anew when the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, allowed black males to vote, but not females of any color.\u00a0\u00a0Demands snowballed for decades.\u00a0\u00a0Mark Twain gave a speech calling for female voting.\u00a0\u00a0Various suffrage groups took to the streets, some more militant than others.\u00a0\u00a0The National Woman\u2019s Party led by Alice Paul was toughest, picketing outside the White House, enduring male jeers, and physical assaults.<\/p>\n

President Woodrow Wilson tried to ignore the clamor.\u00a0\u00a0When a Russian delegation visited the White House, pickets held banners saying \u201cAmerica is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protesters staged Washington parades that were attacked by mobs, sending some beaten victims to hospitals.\u00a0\u00a0Women pickets on sidewalks were hauled to jail on absurd charges of \u201cobstructing traffic.\u201d When they refused to pay fines, they were locked up with criminals.\u00a0\u00a0Paul was sentenced to seven months.\u00a0\u00a0She went on a hunger strike and was force-fed.<\/p>\n

Finally, Wilson reversed position in 1918 and supported female enfranchisement.\u00a0\u00a0Congress approved the 19th Amendment, and it was ratified in 1920, letting women vote.<\/p>\n

Around the world, various other nations followed, some more slowly than others.\u00a0\u00a0In Switzerland, women didn\u2019t gain full ballot rights in all districts until 1991.\u00a0\u00a0Saudi Arabian women finally gained only partial voting in December 2015.<\/p>\n

Social struggles never really end.\u00a0\u00a0Western women still haven\u2019t gained full equality.\u00a0\u00a0Their pay remains below the average for male workers.\u00a0\u00a0In some places, American women couldn\u2019t serve on juries until the 1950s.\u00a0\u00a0Some Muslim and African cultures remain medieval, with women subjugated, with girls less-educated, with \u201chonor killings\u201d of flirtatious daughters who besmirch a family\u2019s Puritanical standards, and with genital mutilation of girls to subdue their sex drive and keep them \u201cpure\u201d for husbands.<\/p>\n

An Amnesty International report said:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the United States, a woman is raped every six minutes; a woman is battered every 15 seconds.\u00a0\u00a0In North Africa, 6,000 women are genitally mutilated each day.\u00a0\u00a0This year, more than 15,000 women will be sold into sexual slavery in China.\u00a0\u00a0Two hundred women in Bangladesh will be horribly disfigured when their spurned husbands or suitors burn them with acid.\u00a0\u00a0More than 7,000 women in India will be murdered by their families and in-laws in disputes over dowries.\u00a0\u00a0Violence against women is rooted in a global culture of discrimination which denies women equal rights with men and which legitimizes the appropriation of women\u2019s bodies for individual gratification or political ends.\u00a0\u00a0Every year, violence in the home and the community devastates the lives of millions of women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obviously, even with the possibility of a female U.S. president, the battle for full equality still isn\u2019t over.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

James Haught, syndicated by <\/em>PeaceVoice<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> is editor emeritus of West Virginia\u2019s largest newspaper, <\/em>The Charleston Gazette-Mail.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For millennia, female inferiority was presumed, and mandated, in virtually every human culture. Through most of history, the brawn of heavier males gave them dominance, leaving women in lesser status — often mere possessions of men, confined to the home, rarely educated, with few rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}