Gender Inequalities: Yesterday and Today

There is this question which has been plaguing me for quite some time now. The front pages of all newspapers around a year back ran the story of a woman who had been picked up from a Chicago night club by a group of young men, and brutally raped and beaten up, before she was cast off in a darkened alley somewhere. No matter where I went, this was the only piece of news which interested people enough to keep on talking about it, with of course their own views, deductions, and analyses. Good enough, as majority of the people were all for the criminals getting severe penalty for the monstrous atrocity they had inflicted on a 37-year old woman, a mother of two. A woman, subjected to severe physical torture and mental trauma, deserved the support and emotional encouragement for the attainment of justice. And doggedly determined and resolute in this pursuit of justice for a wrongly treated woman was the Commissioner of Police. Admirable! Justice eventually was meted out, with all the convicts given life imprisonment.

And there comes the cause for question. While there had been innumerable people who had been with her, if not physically, in her strife for true justice, there were also some others who deduced that for a woman who lurks in night clubs in the dark of the night, inebriated and intoxicated, what happened was no surprise or shock. And we still say that gender inequality exists no more. No one raises a brow when a man wanders in night clubs, or gets drunk, or befriends strange women. It is normal. It is common. He is a man. But even in this day and age, a woman frequenting a night club and indulging in alcohol is deemed “immoral”…. “licentious.”

We are in the twenty-first century; we call ourselves civilized, modern, liber...

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...le, position, behaviour or identity). This distinction was fuelled by the motivation to counter biological determinism or the conviction that biology is destiny, as behavioural and psychological differences are triggered by social, rather than biological causes. As the famous claim by Simone de Beauvoir professes, that one is not naturally born a woman, but rather becomes a woman. “Social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 18).

Works Cited

Bhaskar A Shukla. Women On Women: A Feminist Study. Saroop & Sons, 2006

Perry, Marvin. Western Civilisation, Brief Voume II, 10th Edition. Cengage Learning

Marks, Karl and Engels F. The Communist Manifesto. New York. 1948

Martens, Lorna. The Promised Land?: Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic. SUNY Press, 2001