Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. In addition, feminism seeks to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. In the past, females had an obvious disadvantage in terms of political, economical, and social rights. Thus, feminism served as to provide females with equal rights as males, and they used to play an important part in achieving that goal.
However, in the current days, it has been a widely debated topic, on whether feminism is still relevant, as anti-feminists have stated that in today’s era, there is hardly any more gender inequality, and thus it is not necessary to continue promoting feminism.
I refer to the article: Why Feminism is Still Important: A Reflection on Today’s Society
http://sche0021.hubpages.com/hub/feminismaustralia
This article states that females are being treated more and more equally as time passes. However, there are still many inequalities between the 2 genders. Therefore, to solve this problem, feminism is needed, and thus is relevant in today’s context. They even stated the example, in which in Australia, when women called to report a man’s breech of a court order against them, 73.2% of the time police took no action.
I agree to some of the points this article has made. It is true that currently, women are still more involved in taking care of children than men, while men are usually the ones who brings home the bacon, and work.
However, I believe that this occurs because of the inherent difference between man and woman. The fact that woman are the ones who get pregnant and are the ones giving birth to the child, makes them more suited for the role of child care. Feminism has no way of stopping such a thing from happening.
Besides that, feminism may be exaggerations of a patriarchal society. Men and women are of equal footing, feminism has thus already served its purpose, and is not needed anymore. They have an equal opportunity or chance to be lawyers, CEOs, police officers, or enter into any other male dominated profession, according to their choice.
Some anti-feminists believe that feminists are now not just seeking for equal rights between man and woman, but allow for woman to be superior compared to man. If this is true, then feminism will not be needed anymore.
Furthermore, women have many extra rights, like custody of child, where mothers tend to have a better chance of gaining custody of a child compared to fathers. Even if people are biased against woman in certain areas, women are also being treated better than man in some aspects, and thus it all cancels out.
However, in many countries, gender discrimination in widespread. In my opinion, that is the only place where feminism would be relevant.