module 6

I think that suffrage and women's rights in general aren't "on the radar" for people today, especially for white middle class women, because we feel like we already have equality. White middle class girls of my generation grew up being told that we can be anything we want to be and that "girls can do anything boys can do." It is now politically incorrect to speak of men and women as unequal. However, all this talk of equality might be masking underlying issues that are still empowering men over women. I personally grew up thinking that women have already achieved freedom, and wondering what all the fuss regarding women's rights was about. I now know that there are still problems for women, and that there is a disconnect between what is being said about the equality of women and what is actually happening. One of the biggest issues with women's equality is that minorities and women who are in poverty still face huge amounts of gender inequality and adversity. In fact women in general are more vulnerable to becoming impoverished than men.

We learned in our lecture about the first wave of feminism that although African American and white women were both very involved in the women's right movement, white middle class women were willing to denounce equal rights for African Americans if it helped their own cause. During the time of the passing of the 14th and 15th amendments, there was a split in those fighting for civil rights between those who didn't want African Americans to have the right to vote if women didn't have it also, and those who were willing to let African Americans have the vote first. Although today most feminists are also concerned about the rights of all people and are well aware of the adversity faced by all classes and ethnicities of women, the general public is unaware of these issues. Despite the many African American feminists of the first and second wave, the women's rights movement has the stereotype in the eye of the public as being a white middle class issue. This is a problem for two reasons. First of all, just because some women have economic security, the opportunity for higher education and to work outside the home doesn't mean that they are equal to men in all ways. Secondly, just because many women today have these rights (mostly middle class women) doesn’t mean that all women have equal access to these things. Both of these facts are largely overlooked by women and men in our society.


Another reason why many people don't understand why all the fuss is about when it comes to women's rights is because many people don't know about the long and arduous fight that women went through to achieve suffrage in the first wave. It took 70 years of activism to achieve the right for women to vote. Until taking this class I had no idea how long women were fighting for this right, and how many people were involved in the struggle. I think that women today should know more about their history, then they might have more of an appreciation for the rights they have now and the rights they have yet to gain.


The one thing I don't have much respect for in regards to the women of the first wave is how some (though not all) of them were willing to abandon those they had been working with for the equal rights of all people at the first sign that others were going to get the right to vote and they weren't. I think they should have stuck by them and fought just as hard for other socially disadvantaged groups as they did for themselves. If they truly believed in equality, that would have been the way to go.