One of the most constant themes of Western - and non-Western - cultures is that women need the protection of men. All of the discrimination that women have faced - their confinement to domestic spaces, their lack of enfranchisement, their limited career opportunities, their higher rates of incarceration in insane asylums, their being sold through marriage and dowry systems - all of these arise from and are justified by the fact that women are the weaker sex. And this weakness is not only metaphorical but also real: Women are physically weak, unable to lift as much as men, or run as fast, or hit a golf ball as accurately. Women are weak, so the story goes from Phoenicia to Troy to Rome to Washington DC. And because they are weak and need the protection of men they do not deserve the same rights that men do.
This is, of course, simply nonsense. But nonsense of a particularly pernicious sort, for it undercuts the rights of women across the world - even though it is based on the flimsiest of logic. This paper argues that, first of all, women should not be considered to be weak (either physically or in any other sense) and that, secondly, even if women can be considered in some objective sense to be weaker than men, it does not follow that women should have fewer rights than men.
The primary reason that women are conventionally considered to be weaker than men is that the socially accepted measurements of strength favor the kinds of strength that men have. The fastest men can run faster than the swiftest women; however, women have better endurance and are therefore in better physical shape after a long run. But speed in a race rather than final physical condition is privileged, giving the edge to men. But why should endurance not be given greater weight - especially in a mechanized world in which brute strength is very rarely needed anymore (http://library.thinkquest.org/21229/articles/nasa2.htm)?
Related to women's ability to endu...