Women\'s Rights in Her Personal

Women's Rights

In her personal "Letters" Abigail Adams begged her husband John Adams to remember the contribution women had made to the founding of the new Republic when constructing the laws of the land. However, President Adams, although he placed a great deal of credence in his wife's opinion on a personal level, did not listen to his wife in this instance. He believed women's influence was best channeled through their male relations, and women were not suited to direct participation in political affairs. It was many years before equality for women was acknowledged within the legal framework of the nation.

Today, no one would seriously consider taking away any woman's right to vote and to be an articulate participant in the American political process. A woman has made a legitimate effort at securing the White House herself, and a woman is running for the office of Vice President of America. The institutional concerns and the 19th century advocate of women's rights, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, are no longer a preoccupation of the nation. Stanton desired that women be able to vote, to inherit property, and not to disappear as a legal person upon marriage. These technical questions of equal rights under the law no longer seem to impact women's lives, but that hardly means that women have no more legal wars to fight.

Women still bear the burden of caring for children and the elderly. This means that a lack of affordable childcare and eldercare hampers their ability to earn money in the workforce. Women may not be able to be formally discriminated against in the workplace, but they often face informal legal types of discrimination, which may be as indefinite as simply 'not fitting in' to a particular corporate culture. Even on the public stage, commentators on the left and right seem to have trouble talking about women as political leaders. What is seen as strong in a man is seen as irritating and aggressive when encapsulated in the persona of a woman like Hillary Clinton. Women are afraid to show emotion and humor, the qualities that contribute to electability, but seem to make a female candidate appear less serious. An attractive woman who has children like Sarah Palin may provoke sexual innuendos when her policies are criticized.

These types of attitudes can be discouraging for young women contemplating entering the political discourse. The idea of how a woman can 'hold' power is still in debate. Mary Wollstonecraft noted in "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" that if women seem to conform to the stereotypes they are subjected to, it is because of their lack of education and the fact that society awards female appearance and flirtatiousness more than it does power and strength. A postmodern view might add that women lack role models to effectively fill the role of commander-in-chief, other than imitating men, which makes them seem like inferior male copies, or being conventionally feminine, which is seen as antithetical to the qualities needed to exercise power.

Not all women want to be professionals or politicians, of course, a possible criticism of Virginia Woolf's essay on "Professions for Women." Empowerment means more than voting or working for money. It means valuing what has been traditionally constructed as feminine, including female bodies and traditionally female roles like bearing children, and not limiting female aspirations into the public sphere. But viewing the history of these various authors illustrates that a lack of dignity has been given to female political participation, female words, the feminine role in society, in a way that extends far beyond institutional limitations, like political disenfranchisement. Women winning the right to vote, far too long after the founding of America, was of course an important 'first step' in ensuring that women become full participants in the American experiment. But understanding the subtle cultural discrimination, as manifest in John Adams' treatment of his wife, and the subsidiary complaints of Stanton, Wollstonecraft, and Woolf also demonstrate that simply passing a law is not enough to change the rights of women. Women have been treated as children, and also viewed as incapable of truly realizing their dreams because of their capacity to be mothers. This has remained unchanged in the cultural discourse and memory in a way that affects all of our perceptions, male and female, and unless we remember this, we may be too easily seduced by the achievements, however remarkable, of a few talented women who have been able to chip away at the 'glass ceiling.'

Part II

It is amazing to read Christina Hoff Sommers' essay from her book the War Against Boys and compare it with the words of past feminist advocates. Only a very short while ago, in historical time, it was assumed that women were the 'inferior sex.' Now boys are seen as fragile. We live in a competitive, ego-driven and capitalistic society that supposedly women could not participate in, because of their inherently delicate bodies and temperaments. However, as soon as women began to make some political and social gains, and when these gains not only proved the naysayers wrong, but seemed to exceed even feminists' dreams, women such as Sommers began to demand a retreat. Sommers falls prey to an evil kind of 'us vs. them' thinking. She sees men and women as polar opposites, and being in an environment of women in school or in society damages boys. For example, the fact that most teachers are women (a phenomenon that is itself a product of patriarchy, as many talented women became teachers because few other options were open to them, and they needed the extra time to raise their children as society mandated) is viewed as threatening to young boys. When girls succeed, and teachers demand boys pay attention, turn in their homework, and do not excuse acting out as 'boys being boys,' Sommers believe boys are being discriminated against. The fact, in essence, that girls are not failing as antifeminists predicted years ago, must mean that things are slanted in favor of girls now, not that the antifeminists were wrong