Wednesday, January 22, 2020

How have women’s actions remade the world for women, and how not, from 1790 to present? To what extent have the things that Olympe de Gouges called for in the 1790s “Declaration of Rights of Women” been realized, and to what extent are they things women are still struggling to attain two centuries later?

De Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman was enormously influential. We can see its influences on early English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, on the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and Maria Edgeworth, and on early American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments. Since the publication of these works, women have partially achieved changes in access to work, education, voting, political representation, laws regarding rape and abuse, and family structure. However, women continue to be less protected or respected than men in a majority of nations in the world.
De Gouges's Declaration was part of a worldwide pattern of women asserting their equality. Many tribal nations, such as the Iroquois Confederacy, had strong traditions of women governing, and the Iroquois were used as a model by western feminists like Stanton. Women were central to the abolitionist movements in England, France, the United States, and Latin America. Many abolitionists were feminists, and vice versa. Women were part of revolutionary movements in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. It was women, the Lowell Mill Girls, who led the Ten Hour Movement and were central to labor struggles.
To date, almost sixty nations have had a female president or prime minister. Over seventy have a quarter or more of their congresses or parliaments made up of women. (The United States is not among them.) In the United States, where it was once standard and legal for women to earn half of what men did, white women typically earn about eighty percent of what white men do. Practices that were once completely legal, including sexual harassment, firing people for getting pregnant or married, marital rape, and child marriage, are now outlawed and condemned.
Women continue to have higher rates of poverty than men, especially among the newly divorced or widowed. In dozens of nations, women are barred from most education and physically isolated, often kept out of the public sphere by force or threats. While rape is outlawed everywhere, powerful stigmas make prosecution difficult. There remain striking examples of backlash against women's rights, such as chauvinism in the 2016 US presidential election and the ensuing election of Donald Trump, a man accused by two dozen women of harassment or assault.

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