“It’s given me the power to speak my well-educated mind as it has for many other women. I’m sorry that that force of aptitude may be too great and intimidating for you to handle.”
“I don’t consider that a good thing. Your education seems more like indoctrination.”
This is a recent Facebook argument that occurred this past week, from the comments on a shared article about a growing, popular thought of repealing the 19th Amendment. Whether that’s completely impossible, whether the words were then deleted or not doesn’t matter, because it uncovered an ugly reality of sexism's sustained existence in our national consciousness.
It may be helpful, first, to define indoctrination. Its definition, according to Dictionary.com, is “teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs without questioning them.”
Knowing this, the interpretation of the original quote is that a woman's education is a lie, that it is propaganda used to force equality between women and men. This quote defines women’s education across our nation as a tool to trick women into thinking they are equal to men by having the same education as them.
Is he right? Is what he said, and what we’ve interpreted his quote to mean, a tough wake-up call to the natural inequality of women? Should we discredit our nation's top leaders - doctors, lawyers, teachers, CEO’s and creative minds - who happen to be women because of their gender?
It doesn't really matter if we do, because these people will be discredited based on their gender anyway, even though they're just that: people. Just like a man of any race, a woman of any race is a human being, just as he is. Women have minds just as powerful and creative as men's, since biologically their brains are formed in the same way. Those brains hold the same capacity for intake of information, memory, sense, and so on. Women are limited not because of how we are built by nature, but because of the prejudices of society.
People chose to be blind to that concept: the concept of societal constructs and what they exist for. Seen from a fundamentalist view, they exist for finding purpose within our community, but seen from a conflict theorist perspective, they exist to dictate where our power goes and keep it at the very bottom. From the fundamentalist view, we are given the role of caregiver because within our communities we need that. From a conflict theorist's view, women are kept at the bottom so as not to interfere with what’s at the top. In fact, the people at the top are afraid of women taking their place, which is why they’re put down time and time again. There might be more views to this sociological lens than I’ve mentioned here, but I’m not a SOC major, so I promise I’ll miss some of the details. However, I can tell what the issues are from the surface and where they came from.
There really is no more need to assign the role of caregiver in a family household. The way families are built now is different than they were fifty or so years ago. The entire family seems to take care of the young because both parents will work in a household. The reason for that is because both parents are more likely to have gone to college or have a career that they plan on keeping.
American families are changing, and because of that, the social constructs should be brought up to date, or dismantled altogether.
If you’re more of a fact kind of person and you need more evidence, don’t worry - I have it for you.
20.5 million students enrolled and are attending the 2016 fall semester currently across the United States. This is an increase of 5.2 million since 2000. 11.7 million of that 20.5 million are females, meaning that there are more women attending college this semester than men. That means that in about ten years those women are going to be in the workforce all over the country, making this country what it is, just as their male co-workers will. If you're skeptical, please go to this link and check out the stats on this. The growing education in this country is something to be proud of and to keep going regardless of gender, race or age.
But then there are people that believe this:
“Women have this thing called pregnancy that knocks them out of the workforce for a couple years which would set them back as far as earnings go and when it comes to work they tend to choose fulfillment not income…. What you call inequality has nothing to do with equality but the choices people are and should be free to make. If you choose to be a mother, then you should be that. If you choose to be a doctor, be that. But don't expect to have it both ways and expect no consequences of your choices.”
Women are very aware that they might chose to have a family one day. They might make the choice to bring something into this world that brings them more happiness and joy than anything else on earth can provide. However, judging on those numbers of women attending college to make careers for themselves, they seem also to know that they will work around it. More women now than ever are working mothers. In fact according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 60.6% of married-coupled families have both parents working.
So saying that pregnancy knocks women out of the workforce for years is not a valid statement. There are some people who choose to stay with their children for the first few years of having them, but then there are plenty of women that take the maternity leave and go straight back to work because they have to provide for their families. Crazy concept, women having to provide for their families. This is the American family now, and it’s still evolving. That's why our constructs should as well deleted words.
This person also said:
“Equality is a failed concept that only leads to ruin. Call me stupid all you want, but it won't change the fact women only vote to steal from men so they can pretend to be independent.”
If women steal from men, why is it that they’re striving to work? Not only do women take 47% of the U.S. total labor force but within that is a 73% full time employment rate for women. Those jobs that have the highest percentage of female employees include registered nurses, medical and health service managers, tax examiners, revenue agents, education administrators, accountants and auditors, medical scientists and financial managers. All of those are pretty important to our community as a whole, and those fields are being dominated by women. You can check those facts here.
Why am I bringing up this ONE person's perspective on women?
Because there is more than one person out there that believes in this; he’s just the one who’s most vocal about it. Time to wake up from the nebulous, undefined concept of gender equality. There will never be equality while people have the ideology that, because another person is a different gender than they are, they do not have the same capacity. They do.
If you’re a guy who thinks they know this or knows he knows this, I know you have friends that think like this person does. You could even be someone who knows someone that thinks it’s OK to abide by the social construct of treating our women like objects. You know what I’m talking about, too: the friends that grab girls as they walk past or the friends that call out to girls from across the street. Even saying “be a man about it,” or referring to a group of boys and girls just “boys” (I’ve seen this happen multiple times on purpose). The more you encourage or let this behavior be, the more it will grow. It will linger until we make unacceptable in our society. It’s a construct you can get rid of just by speaking up.
This all sounds like a certain candidate who is running for president, and his ideology on women seems to be stuck in the past. What we need is progress, because statistically speaking, women are doing just that. Take that into consideration when you’re considering your vote because this all sparked from one simple comment: “What good has the 19th amendment actually done?”
And that is backtracking. That is what American DOES NOT need.
