Opportunities for Women

• The Charter of the United Nations, signed in San Francisco in 1945, was the first international agreement to identify equality between women and men as a human right.

• Human rights are the basic rights that should be given to all people---the right to life, the right to food, the right to an education, the right to freedom from fear and so on.

• The belief in equality of women and men, no matter what their age is called gender equality.

• The word gender applies to men and boys as to women and girls.

• Questions surrounding gender include whether a person is male or female, and how, based on gender, a person is expected to act in a particular society or culture.

Opportunities for Women 2

• Women worldwide have made progress toward with winning the same opportunities and rights as men, especially in industrial nations like the United States.

• In many places, however, women still experience gender inequality—that is, they experience limits on their legal, social, and economic rights.

• This is especially true in the developing world, or nations that are in the process of industrializing and building more modern societies.

• In some developing nations, for example, women and girls are still considered the legal property of their husbands or fathers.

• A developed nation has a high standard of living with a diverse economy and equal rights for all.

Opportunities for Women 3

• Where gender inequality exists, women and girls usually lack the political power, economic opportunities, personal freedoms and choices that men routinely expect.

• Studies by the World Bank and other agencies such as the United Nations show that gender inequality hurts a country or region’s prosperity, or economic well-being.

• Societies in which women have equal rights tend to be richer and children have and easier time climbing out of poverty.

• Research by the World Bank found that if nations in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia had educated girls and boys in the way East Asian countries did between 1960 and 1992, their income per capita (per person) would have been between 0.5 and 0.9 percent higher each year.

Opportunities for Women

• Most experts agree that giving greater rights and opportunities to females will not take away those rights from males.

• Achieving gender quality is making the world a more equal place for both men and women.

• That means ending gender discrimination, or treating one gender better than the other without any fair or proper reason.

Voices from the Past• Pleas to increase opportunities for women

are not new.• People have argued for equal rights,

particularly equal voting rights, for a long time.

• Some of the earliest demands for greater women’s rights came in Europe and the United States.

• In these regions, the Enlightenment spread a belief in human rights.

• Revolutions in England, in the Thirteen American colonies, and in France resulted in more representative government, or governments that reflected the wishes of eligible voters.

• But eligible voters did not include women.• Women also did not enjoy the same rights

and privileges as men.• Four writers who thought this situation

should change are Daniel Defoe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and John Stuart Mill.

Daniel Defoe

• Defoe, the son of a butcher in London, England won fame as the author of novels such as Robinson Crusoe. Defoe, however, had some strong ideas about politics, too. In 1719, he wrote an essay called “The Education of Women.”

Mary Wollstonecraft

• Wollstonecraft, the daughter of a London handkerchief maker, moved around England a lot as a child. As an adult, she opened a school with her sister, Eliza. Wollstonecraft supported the cause of American independence in 1776, and she later went to France to watch the French Revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft 2

• Wollstonecraft wrote about natural rights of both men and women, winning the praise of Enlightenment thinkers in the late 1700s.

• In 1789, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Man.

• In 1792, she wrote her most important book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

• In it, she called for equal public education of both girls and boys.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• “Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy!” cried Elizabeth Cady’s father when his only son died. Elizabeth, who later married antislavery leader Henry Stanton, set out to prove herself equal to any boy. She excelled in school and later helped start the women suffrage movement in the United States. The purpose of the movement was to win the vote for women. (suffrage means “the right to vote”.)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton 2

• In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined with three other women-Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, and Marry Ann McClintock- in planning a women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton drew up a document called the Seneca Falls declaration of sentiments. (Sentiments means “thoughts” or “feelings.”) in it she argued for the right to vote for women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (3)

• This was an revolutionary idea at the time. Women did not, vote or hold elected offices anyplace in the world. But Stanton, the mother of seven children, spoke out strongly for giving women the full rights of citizenship.

John Stuart Mill

• Mill, born in London in 1806, was educated by his father, a Scottish philosopher.

• He learned Greek by age three and Latin a short time later.

• By age 12, Mill knew the philosophy of logic—the study of the rules of sound reasoning, or ordered thinking.

• By age 16, he was a respected English economist.

An Ongoing Issue

• Today many nations, especially developed nations, have put the ideas of Defoe, Wollstonecraft, Stan, and Mill into practice. However, the changes did not happen easily. Women, for example, fought hard to win the vote.

• Women in developed nations have had more success at chipping away at gender inequality than women in development nations. Women and children in developing countries face these issues.

Low-Paying Jobs

• *In much of the *In much of the world, women are world, women are less likely to work less likely to work in non-farming in non-farming jobs. jobs.

High Infant Mortality

• Many developing nations still lack the money to build good hospitals or to provided good medical care.

• As a result, women suffer a far higher loss of children at birth than in developed nations.

• The problem is made worst by droughts, famine, and the spread of diseases such as malaria, cholera, and HIV/AIDS.

Child Labor

• Around the world, especially in South and Southeast Asia, more than 250 million children between the ages of 5 to 14 work at some job.

• About 50 million children in India alone labor in unsafe, unhealthy conditions.

• The family itself might turn to child labor just to earn enough to eat.

Lack of Political Power

• Although women now have the right to vote in most nations, they still do not hold the same political power as men.

• Women in developing nations are making progress.

• However, to date, women remain a minority in world governments.