Since the mid-1800s, movements such as woman’s suffrage, women’s rights, and feminism have gone through multiple waves of transformation and effectiveness. From infighting within their ranks to define their platform and create a consensus to formidable political actions, women are still challenged with being seen, understood, accepted, respected, and honored for who they are and their integral contributions to society and civilization.
Ratanjit S. Sondhe, a Sikh author, lecturer, and leadership coach, says, “The true measure of any civilization is not found in its technology, arsenal, or patents, but the educational level of its women and how respected its women are.” It would appear that America isn’t as civilized as it believes itself to be.
The women’s movement of today is vastly different from the campaign for the right to vote initiated in the 19th century. Back then, the movement was mostly run by white people with Blacks relegated to sitting on the sidelines or completely ignored. Today, the push for inclusiveness in the women’s movement has embraced women of color and gender-diverse people. Issues range from abortion to pay inequality, gender-based health care inaccessibility, rigid social expectations, and gender-based violence.
Importantly, a defining aspect of the women’s movement now is intersectionality, which is defined as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”
The term, first used by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, applies to one’s social and political identities and how they are combined to create different kinds of discrimination and privilege, e.g., through gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance. All of these are ways in which to oppress, marginalize, and control women.
As we try to make sense of events in the US over the last fifteen years, it seems the religiopolitical trend is to backslide to the days of women having fewer rights, abdicating to the wishes of men, and suppressing of their lived personal experience. In short, it’s a return to a patriarchal world.
As Paris Hatcher, founder of the activist group Black Feminist Future, says, “[it’s] a world where white men are in control, where the history that’s told is upholding the history and the legacies of white men, and also where white men are able to control who is elected and who is not.”
Conversely, on the opposite end of the spectrum of experience, we see women exercising their freedom and rights as exhibited on social media sites where sex, “social influencing” and outrageous behavior garner attention, fame, and money. Women are saying and doing whatever they want with no regard for integrity, honesty, respect, dignity, people’s feelings, and the consequences of their words and actions. The backlash is conservatism, cancel culture, book banning, and retaliatory efforts to “stop the madness … stop the degradation … stop the evil,” and rein women in.
In tandem with this is the expansion of pronoun usage, as well as how gender fluidity and the LGBTQ+ community figure in the women’s movement. To date, there are 82 types of gender identities, though a Rasmussen Reports survey states that 75 percent of US adults believe there are only two genders. What the Report doesn’t state is what that belief is based upon the ability to procreate, various sacred scriptures, or science and psychology.
Consequently, there is no real clarity as to just how the women’s movement is impacting American society. A Pew Research Center survey found that 64 percent of those surveyed say feminism is empowering with 42 percent saying it’s inclusive. Yet, 45 percent say it’s polarizing, and 30 percent say it’s outdated. Clearly, the country is divided in its assessment.
That brings us to what men think about the women’s movement and feminism. It’s pretty much what one would expect. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center reported that only 49 percent of men say the US hasn’t gone far enough in giving women equal rights and 28 percent of men say that gains by women have come at the expense of men.
It was also reported that “while 78 percent of Americans are at least somewhat in favor of this move, just 44 percent believe that it would actually make a difference in advancing women’s rights.”
Since 1923, when the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced, the women’s movement has fought hard to have “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” become the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
But achieving ERA ratification has been blocked by intense opposition from conservative religious and political leaders and organizations. Most notable in this fight was Phyllis Schlafly who argued that greater sex equality would lead to societal moral decline if we swapped gender roles from what women traditionally hold. Essentially, women would be doing the same work as men and being paid the same wages. That doesn’t sit well with a lot of men — and women.
Some of the other arguments against the ERA include:
· It wouldn’t protect people who don’t identify as male or female.
· The amendment could take away some of the benefits women currently enjoy.
· It would create fewer obstacles to prematurely ending the potential for human life.
Notorious RGB, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former US Supreme Court Justice, said, “I don’t say women’s rights — I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.” She also said, “We should not be held back from pursuing our full talents, from contributing what we could contribute to the society, because we fit into a certain mold — because we belong to a group that historically has been the object of discrimination.”
That pretty much encapsulates the argument for and against the women’s movement: removing laws that discriminate against one specific gender. Concerning one particular hot-button issue, it would also help enshrine transgender, non-binary, and other gender-identification rights into the Constitution. To many, that’s an impossibility. To others, it’s a necessity.
But today, the struggle for equal rights is still an uphill battle for women when addressing reproductive rights being denied, the widening pay gap, the inability to attain appropriate health care support, and ensuring something as necessary as paid maternity leave — something that the majority of countries in the United Nations provide but not the US.
At its core, the women’s movement is about empowerment, the ability to live and work in a world of equality and support, to pursue and achieve one’s dreams without fear of being ignored, suppressed, or discriminated against. Feminism empowers not just women but everyone as the stresses of our relationship dynamics are dissolved and brought into balance.
Women must continue to ensure their voices are heard, that women now and future generations of women know and feel in the very core of their being that they matter, that they are integral to the whole, and that their value and worth. ●
