1 Women’s lives after the two world wars changed, but there is some debate as to how much it changed. Their lives changed politically, with women gaining the vote, they changed in terms of employment, as they were now permitted to join certain professions and they also changed socially as a better way of living was set out for them. It is argued that women were given greater opportunities after the wars due to their exceptional participation on the home front. However, many historians believe that this change in women’s lives was simply due to the changing times and the progression in society. The historical debate surrounding this topic is wether women’s lives really did change greatly after the two world wars, or wether their lives simply went back to the way they were before the war started.
Has society and culture hindered women’s abilities to lead, and are women still constantly judged against? There are multiple ways to answer this question. Argument against: From the beginning it has been made clear to humans that men should be the protective, strong, working ones, while women should care for the family and take care of household duties. Over thousands of years of an ever-changing world, the role has gradually shifted and shifted. When women were granted the right to vote in the early 1900’s, a women’s right streak took over, and from then on, it only got better for women.
Firstly, employment for women throughout the war had a drastic improvement; many jobs became available for women to choose from. This was due to the gaps that men left in employment, after most of them went to war in 1914. Source A2 for example, clearly supports the interpretation that the number of jobs that women participated in increased from the years 1914 to 1918. This is because, the source is in the form of a bar graph which presents to bars, one representing the amount of women working in that job in 1914 and the other bar representing the amount of women working in that job in 1918. The types of employment included are Transport, Agriculture, Industry, Commerce, Civil Service, Hotels/Inns and Domestic Service).
A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ is an early example of a feminist outlook; Wollstonecraft aims to define, establish and defend equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. In this extract, Wollstonecraft “speaks of passion”; she believes that women were not given the right choices; they were not educated to the full. This affects their choices and they don’t have the full knowledge that they should have been provided with. Jill tweedy was also a feminist writer, who had a balanced view of the relationships between men and women. She believed that women should be equal to men in relationships.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s literature is based on women’s issues. She wrote fiction mainly depicting her social ideas. In her works, she portrays women struggling to achieve personal autonomy, adapting to independence, and challenging accepted images of women. In her novel Women and Economics, Gilman argues that women need to change their identities in society in order to be equal to men and become part of the world’s evolution. In addition, her novel Herland depicts women at their true, full potential in roles equal to men.
This changed after the Civil War, giving women their right to speak up and become more like men. The role of many women had change from a homemaker to being able to provide for the family by either getting a job. In addition, they were starting to be allowed to have a voice. Not only were they allowed to go out and start getting jobs, but the right to vote was also starting to come out. Without the changing role of women, things that we have in everyday life as American’s could possibly not exist.
Their emphasis was on women’s responsibilities as mothers, “Maternalism”, Public Housekeeping, and women’s biological difference from men. Their goal was to enable women freely to be different from men without being penalized on the basis of their differences. Difference feminists included civic-minded, middle class women, immigrants, “Industrial Feminists”, women’s trade unionists, wage earners, suffrage leagues and social reformers. They sought
A Vindication of the Rights of Women Essay A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the earliest works of feminist ideals. In the text, Wollstonecraft deeply responds and criticizes many influential political theoreticians from the 18th century who did not believe that women should have the same basic rights as men. Her arguments vary from how women should contribute to society to how women should be treated in a relationship. All of her viewpoints not only played a crucial role in the feminist movement of her time, but also helped pave the way for modern feminist movements. One of the main points that Wollstonecraft touches upon in A Vindication of the Rights of Women is the issue regarding women and education.
It was in the early 1800s when women began to question various issues such as their roles in society and their rights as a woman, or their lack of rights and unjust inequality in comparison to males. Interestingly though in 1792Marry Wollstonecraft, who was a significant driving force in the women’s right movement, wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In her book she argued that women were rational beings who should be able to be educated, earn their own livings, and develop their characters “regardless of the distinction of sex” (pg 24 Alison M Parker). Then in 1820 the activist Frances Wright went on to further publicize her work. At the time Frances Wright was best known for being a early proponent of the notion that marriage was a form of cohesive bondage for women, who there thereby denied the right to inheritances, wages, and joint guardianship of their children.
In the mid-sixties and early-seventies the second wave of feminism was formed. According to Kari Meyers Skredsvig, the core argument of the second wave was for equality, not only in the home but also in the workplace (Skredsvig par. 3). This wave also dealt with deeper issues in literature like sexuality and reproductive rights. In these two periods women around the world expressed their frustration with inequality and sexual frustration.