Emma Watson, actress, and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, once said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly “This isn’t just, ‘girls are better than boys, boys are better than girls.’ This is just, ‘Everyone deserves a fair chance.” Every man, women, son, and daughter deserves the right for equality. The word equality is synonyms with equal opportunities. This is getting into people’s heads just as hard as it is to give a cat a bath.
Equality has been mistaken for people being exactly the same, but it isn’t. Equality is having the same chances in life. Since the 1800s, women have been fighting for equality, whether it was the right to vote, or equal pay with men. Each time the movement came to be an overpowering flood, there was opposition. People don’t like change when it is unexpected. People didn’t like the women’s movement because it forced them to look at women as more than just the dutiful housewife.
Women have been being pushed down for thousands of years ever since the Neolithic Revolution. Back then, the females were at a disadvantage because they were not as physically strong as the men. The women gravitated to arts, crafts, and making sure the home was running smoothly, while the men gravitated towards the more physically taxing aspects in society. The scales between men and women were now tipped unevenly. This made women begin their journey into being less than they actually are.
The word feminist has a very harsh connotation that comes along with it. When people think of feminist they think of the radicals in which they hate men and believe they are lower. This is not true, being a feminist, as defined by Merriam-Webster, “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” To make that easier to understand, it means that a feminist believes in equal rights, equal opportunities.
Feminists don’t hate other women for wanting to stay at home and take care of the house and family. It isn’t viewed as terrible, in fact, it is extremely important to the progression of family. Feminists don’t despise men either. They are capable of doing just as good of a job as women can in many situations, such as parenting. Men need to have better recognition when it comes to feminism. From this, everybody will have an impact on his or her lives.
The award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her famous TED talk “My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.’ All of us, women and men, must do better.”
The danger of a single story Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Adichie discovered that African culture is based on diverse narratives, and therefore, people should not just base their arguments on one side of a story they hear on another person. Adichie narrates that Fide came from a poor background; however, she was shocked to observe the beautiful basket that was made by Fidel’s brother when she paid a visit to Fide’s family. Adichie’s American roommate had a single story of Africa in which she believed that she had nothing similar to Africans, and that, to her, was something impossible.
