The women that made history and the women that are making history create who we are.
By: Charlotte 8.3
“Let it be that human’s rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human’s rights,”—American Rhetoric: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
For centuries, women have been objectified, told what to wear, and how to act. This has been a pre-existing problem since the beginning of humankind. So, what is feminism? Feminism, by definition, is the equality of both male and female but it so much more than that: it’s when women fight for what is right.
The earliest signs of feminism date back to 400BC, when Agnodice defied the norms of practicing gynaecology, or in Mexico of 1691when Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz defended female education. Some other examples are in 1792, when England Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” stating that women are not naturally inferior to men. In 1848, when women activists publicly petition for women’s rights and the social, economic, and political rights and the declaration of the Sentiments are signed at the Seneca Falls Convention in the United States. Another famous example is when Elizabeth Cady Stanton led the first women’s movement in July of 1848. Stanton led around 300 people and echoed the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” In 1893, women from New Zealand got the right to vote. March 19, 1911, Copenhagen proposed that one day each year, we set aside to another women’s rights movement and build support for the universal suffragette International Women’s Day, which was marked for the first time in Australia, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland. In the 1900s, writer Raichō Hiratsuka challenged women’s roles. From June 19 to July 2 of 1975, the UN’s first world conference was on women in Mexico City. The UN’s fourth world conference was on women in Beijing. This shows all nationalities of women have grouped together to fight the patriarchal society.
Some more recent fights for women’s rights include the women’s march in January 2017 in Washington, DC, which was the largest international denomination to fight for women’s rights. They marched the sizes ranging from a couple dozen to a hundred thousand people held in city around the word including Accra, Bangkok, Paris, Nairobi, Belgrade and even the Antarctic.
The women who made feminism possible were The Suffragettes; the first major feminist group. Angela Davis was a voice for women of colour, and she played a key role of the Black Power movement. Bell Hooks was an American author and an advocate for women’s rights and racial equality. Coretta Scott King was known for her work in the civil rights movement, but she is notably the first woman to deliver the class day address at Harvard.
Now some modern-day feminists are Hillary Clinton, running for president twice and fighting for gender equality and healthcare reform. Yoko Ono might be widely known as John Lennon’s wife, but she has been an activist for peace and human rights since 1960s. Alice Walker, an American novelist, is most famous for her book “The Colour Purple.” Walker was also an activist who was mentioned by Beyoncé, a famous singer and the highest-paid black musician.
All of these women who fighting for what’s right and making the world a better a more equal place deserve more recognition and deserve their place in history.
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