Women in the Workforce
Western female thought through the centuries has identified the relationship between patriarchy and gender as crucial to the women's subordinate position. For two hundred years, patriarchy precluded women from having a legal or political identity and the legislation and attitudes supporting this provided the model for slavery. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries suffrage campaigners succeeded in securing some legal and political rights for women in the UK. By the middle of the 20th century, the emphasis had shifted from suffrage to social and economic equality in the public and private sphere and the women's movement that sprung up during the 1960s began to argue that women were oppressed by patriarchal structures. Equal status for women of all races, classes, sexualities and abilities - in the 21st century these feminist claims for equality are generally accepted as reasonable principles in western society; yet the contradiction between this principle of equality and the demonstrable inequalities between the sexes that still exist exposes the continuing dominance of male privilege and values throughout society (patriarchy). This essay seeks to move beyond the irrepressible evidence for gender inequality and
Ruehl S (1983). Sexual Theory and Practice: Another Double Standard. In Cartledge S and Ryan R (1985). Sex and love: New thoughts on Old Contradictions (4th Edition). The Women's Press Limited: London. 210-223. Regardless of the refusal of key patriarchal institutions to acknowledge the extent to which man have been and are systematically and deliberately privileged by their structures and actions, these dominant forms of power can help produce social change, even if they are only attempting to keep in touch with contemporary society (Cooper, 1995). The process of power is therefore open to change and feminist theorists have shown using their account of patriarchy that the ¥by products' of power (e.g., inequality) can be mediated by the institution which represents it and moderated to be less damaging to individuals (Cooper, 1989). This description of the relationship between patriarchy and structure demonstrates how inequalities in the workplace and in inequality in the home are two sides of the same coin and individual males are involved in the direct and indirect subordination of women simultaneously. The concepts that allowed Walby (1990) to define patriarchy as she has are discussed below, with reference to the work of second and third wave feminist thinkers.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Labour Feminist, Golombok Fivush, Eunuch Postmodern, , Third World, Firstly Walby, East Germany, Theory Patriarchy, Feminist Revolution, Church England, gender inequality, seidman 1994, division labor, sarup 1993, university press, private public, fivush 1995, golombok fivush 1995, golombok fivush, 1998 deconstructing feminist, gender inequalities, ed 1998 deconstructing, burman ed, burman ed 1998, deconstructing feminist psychology,
Approximate Word count = 3538
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page double spaced)
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