Feminism
Today a lot of women, and some men, will say, “I’m not a feminist, but…,” and then go on to add that they hold certain beliefs about women’s equality and traditional gender roles that actually fall into a feminist framework. Their reluctance to self-identify as feminists underscores the negative image that feminists and feminism hold but also suggests that the actual meaning of feminism may be unclear.
Feminism refers to the belief that women and men should have equal opportunities in economic, political, and social life, while sexism refers to a belief in traditional gender role stereotypes and in the inherent inequality between men and women.
In the United States, feminism as a social movement began during the abolitionist period
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In contrast, socialist feminism blames capitalism for women’s inequality and says that true gender equality can result only if fundamental changes in social institutions, and even a socialist revolution, are achieved. Radical feminism, on the other hand, says that patriarchy (male domination) lies at the root of women’s oppression and that women are oppressed even in noncapitalist societies. Patriarchy itself must be abolished, they say, if women are to become equal to men. Finally, an emerging multicultural feminism emphasizes that women of color are oppressed not only because of their gender but also because of their race and class (Andersen & Collins, 2010). They thus face a triple burden that goes beyond their gender. By focusing their attention on women of color in the United States and other nations, multicultural feminists remind us that the lives of these women differ in many ways from those of the middle-class women who historically have led U.S. feminist …show more content…
To avoid this, families stricken by poverty often opted to kill their first or second child if it was a girl, due to the fact that girls bring in less income, and the fact that the government’s fines would push families past financial ruin.
Because of this, infanticide statistics in China make for depressing reading. Chinese girls are twice as likely to die in their first year of life as their male counterparts, with the risk of death being three times higher for the second girl than the first. Some parents seek a divorce and then remarry to have another child, abandoning their previous child — 95% of the time, abandoned children in rural communities land outside of state-controlled orphanages.
5. Rape of all kinds; massive amount of rape is unreported, and in many cases, simply not taken seriously by men, women, and the authorities. It’s a pandemic in developed and developing countries alike. Reporting rape can be dangerous in countries where premarital sex and adultery lead to the death penalty — or an honor killing. Although male-on-male, female-on-female, and female-on-male rape is a prevalent problem world-wide, statistics for female-on-male rape are the highest, and the most