Women's Status as Secondary to Men's

From the decade after the Civil War to the years of the Bush presidency women's status remained secondary to men throughout this time (and through the present) in terms of such generally accepted markers of social standing as political power, economic independence and cultural importance, women during this period in many ways ceased to be regarded as only mothers, daughters or wives and became simply human beings with their own identities independent from the men to whom they were related.

Charting the changes that women underwent during this period of time is a difficult one for a number of reasons. To begin with, while some changes can be quantified or at least assessed (women's salaries as compared to men's, for example, or the equitableness of divorce laws), others cannot. How an individual woman (or a group of women) feels about her place in society and the reasons behind that is something that is very difficult to tease out, and it is impossible to know with absolute certainty whether certain women feel the way they do for cultural, historical, personal or psychological reasons. Also, the changes in women's status during this time encompass such a wide range of issues that it is difficult to summarize them with any degree of brevity.

Finally, the change in women's status varies dramatically by region, by class and by race - so much so that to talk about (for example) an Inuit woman following a tradition life pathway and a black female attorney in Atlanta as sharing si

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ricans but was extended to women. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 gave legal protection to women's right to abortion, a year after the second Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress. When Geraldine Ferraro was selected by presidential candidate Walter Mondale to be his running mate in 1984, her candidacy was seen as either marvelous or astonishing (and sometimes both). But as Elizabeth Dole begins making the first steps in her run for the presidency in 2000, her candidacy is seen as perfectly normal, with political pundits commenting not on her sex but on her views on taxes and other policy issues. While critics of women's participation in the political realm often argued that it was too dirty a realm for women, supporters - often women themselves - argued that the female sex was so morally superior to men that rather than being corrupted by entering the public sphere (of either work or politics) women would in fact make it more pure. In an 1891 description of the typical female office worker, journalist Clara Lanza quotes the head of a publishing house as saying he much prefers women clerks to men. Men are troublesome. They complain about trifles that a woman wouldn't notice � if they have a slight headache they stay at home

Category: Government - W