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Women's rights are entitlements and freedoms claimed for women and girls of all ages in many societies.
In some places these rights are institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behaviour, whereas in others they may be ignored or suppressed. They differ from broader notions of human rights through claims of an inherent historical and traditional bias against the exercise of rights by women and girls in favour of men and boys.
Issues commonly associated with notions of women's rights include, though are not limited to, the right: to bodily integrity and autonomy; to vote (suffrage); to hold public office; to work; to fair wages or equal pay; to own property; to education; to serve in the military or be conscripted; to enter into legal contracts; and to have marital, parental and religious rights.
During the 19th century women in the United States and Britain began to challenge laws that denied them the right to their property once they married. Under the common law doctrine of coverture husbands gained control of their wives' real estate and wages.
In the subsequent decades women's rights again became an important issue in the English speaking world. By the 1960s the movement was called "feminism" or "women's liberation." Reformers wanted the same pay as men, equal rights in law, and the freedom to plan their families or not have children at all. Their efforts were met with mixed results.
The various achievements in the century today has given us the attainment of following rights.
Causes and successes of the feminist movement in the western world include:
Women's Sufferage
Reproductive rights, which includes birth control and abortion rights
Equal Pay for Equal Work Laws
Educational Rights
Diminishment of mandatory gender roles
Sexual assault and harassment laws
Many feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony, also latched on to the Black Sufferage movement in the past, seeing it as similar in their ideals. Today, some feminists, particularly liberal feminists, also fight for the LGBT cause of equal rights and marriage. But it's not just about obtaining these rights, my friends. It's about keeping them, too.
Right now, in our so-called "enlightened" world of equality, women are still the most common victim of honor killing followed by homosexual men. Most often, honor killings occur in predominately Muslim cultures, though there is no support for this in Islam at all. But in India, more than five thousand brides are killed annually because their dowries are considered insufficient. In Iraq, "honor killings are conducted by armed insurgent groups on politically active women and those who did not follow a strict dress code, and women who are perceived as human rights defenders." (from the link above).
If that doesn't make you, as a woman (or friend of women) angry, then let me tell you this. 99% of women in Guinea of reproductive age (15-49) and 97% of Egyptian women in the same age bracket have gone through Female Genital Mutilation. In the entire world, between 100 and 140million women have been circumcized and every year, two million girls are at risk. The World Health Organization classifies FGM as "all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural, religious or other non-therapeutic reasons." In most instances, this includes partial or complete removal of the clitoris. Other than initial shock and pain, FGM can also cause bleeding, infection, infertility and death. It has also been linked to complications during childbirth, which can harm the mother and her child.
If that isn't personal enough, let me leave you with one last statistic, this time closer to home. In the United States, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, one in six women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. 17.7 million American women have been victims of attempted or completed rape. And if that doesn't make you angry, only six percent of rapists will serve one day in jail.
According to a United Nations report, one in three women-- 33% of our sisters-- around the world "has been beaten, coerced into sex or abused in some way, most often by someone she knows." Ladies (and friends of ladies), if you thought that the feminist struggle was just about bra-burning and refusing to shave, if you thought that the feminist movement was more or less over and done with, if you thought that feminism was all about man hating and protesting maleness, what do you think now? When a depressingly large amount of our sistersstill suffer in the world? When Saudi Arabian women are denied the right to drive, or to leave their homes without a male escort? When a woman can be stoned to death simply for making eye contact with a man?
So I want to ask those of you who answered the question at the begining of this article as "no."
Do you still not consider yourself a feminist?
"It is very easy to hate a Nazi, a guardian in a Gulag. But the real danger is not them. It is the decent people who compromise with evil."-- Jacobo Timerman.
