Gender Bias in Western Society

There is some evidence that over the last three decades of the 20th century, many conditions of traditional Western society were transformed wholesale, owing to the entry of millions of women into the workplace. Some of the transformations, indeed, have been embedded into the law. In a Congressional speech in 1969, Rep. Shirley Chisholm of New York asked why it was "acceptable for women to be secretaries, librarians, and teachers, but totally unacceptable for them to be managers, administrators, doctors, lawyers, and Members of Congress." Chisholm explained that as an African American she was "no stranger to race prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black" (Chisholm).

Much about women's workplace ambitions has changed since 1969. Questions that today may not be asked of prospective employees who are women suggest nothing so much as the degree to which in former times employers felt entitled to probe female employees' private lives: "What is your marital status? Are you g

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women in a position of workplace prestige often "do a certain amount of conversational work to make sure they maintain the proper demeanor to fit their sense of what makes a good person, which entails not seeming to parade their higher status" (Tannen, Talking 177). "Engendered" power ratios operate at many levels in the culture. In The Female Eunuch, first published in 1970, Greer describes the evolution of contemporary language as an attribute of sex bias. Many more terms which originally applied to both men and women gained virulence by sexual discrimination. The word harlot did not become exclusively feminine until the seventeenth century. There is no male analogue for it . . . . Witches may be of either sex, but as a term of abuse witch is solely directed at women. . . . If such linguistic movements were to be charted comprehensively and in detail, we would have before us a map of the development of the double standard and the degradation of women (Greer 279). The Enlightenment environment in which the reformist Englishwoman Mary Wollstoncraft published her pamphlet titled Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 was roughly contemporary with the American and French Revolutions. This first manifesto of feminism and prec
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Approximate Word count = 1659
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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