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Feminism Has Changed Over The Years

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Feminism has changed over the years. It’s grown into a much more defined value in today’s society. Is that enough though? Not necessarily. The problem with the feminist movement is that it’s lost traction because of the diverse subgroups. It’s pretty hard for all the groups to conform onto one idealistic view of what feminism should stand for in our society. One thing stands out between all the groups though that they can agree on, and it is that women should be equal to men. Why hasn’t this been always a key thing though? Well, for America at least, this dates back to the Native Americans. Native Americans had men go out to hunt for food and do all the “strong” manual labor for the women as they sit home, cook, clean, and nurture the …show more content…

So what gave anyone the idea that women are unfit to do what’s now culturally accepted as “manly” tasks? In my opinion, we just assumed without doing research. Within my paper, I will be focusing on the core group of feminist in my mind, the Liberal Feminists. I’ll be focusing on two major people that helped contrast the feminist movement and more specifically, helped shape what liberal feminist is. Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the key liberal feminists that defined the term liberal feminism. Betty Friedan is another big factor in what she wrote on liberal feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was a writer and defined liberal feminism in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mary Wollstonecraft’s main goal in writing the book was to give the vision of what an equal lifestyle of women being equal to men. Mary sees that women are socially oppressed and essentially abused/treated unfairly for the unjust cause of being a woman. Women are viewed as objects of pleasure for men and society and that is completely wrong because they are people too. Men are taught to be big and strong, full of pride, and to take on any challenge. Women are taught from even birth to become mothers. “Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will

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