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Women's Rights and Their Reality: the swinging pendulum
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Feminism and women's rights - introduction
Where did feminism start?
Suffragettes
Then
The well-known, 'old-fashioned feminists' yearned for a 'new identity', a human identity that men, but not women had a claim to. This started them 'on that passionate journey, that vilified, misinterpreted journey away from home.' What then would these heroines think of the fact that decades later, at the time Betty Friedan was writing, all women had to identify with in magazines was cooking, breastfeeding and falling in love with her husband; being a ‘housewife’. Friedan relays how 'you could sometimes get away with writing about a woman who was not really a housewife, if you made her sound like a housewife, if you left out her commitment to the world outside the home, or the private vision of mind or spirit that she pursued.’ This may go some way to answering the criticism that Friedan herself ‘was eager to portray herself as yet another desperate housewife while she was in fact a working woman’. Housewives were 'the audience she wanted to help', so 'this bid for solidarity' is understandable, especially when you consider that writing about anything outside of a woman's sphere of reference (indeed, anything outside of the home) would likely have alienated them.
However, the fact still remains that women seemed to have come full circle. This passionate journey returned to that from which it fled - the home. Did Friedan's solidarity with the housewife help or hinder this problem?
So where has this journey led women today?
Is feminism relevant?
Are women's rights being upheld in the west?
Example of misogyny in the skeptics movement.
Elsewhere?
Link to Dawkins’ muslima rant
Yes, things are worse for women in Saudi Arabia and the like, but that doesn't mean that what is going on in the UK is any less intrinsically wrong.
What should we do?