Women’s Impact in Society - ENSINUS ETP/ INETE

 Women’s Impact in Society – Ironically Written by a Man

                                           

The fight for freedom is one that spans among all genders, social classes, countries, ethnicities and so on, but a movement that today is, more than ever, gaining prevalence and ever-so growing is the fight for Women’s Rights.

Today, gender discrimination is reduced – note, reduced, not eradicated – and with the passing of time and with the increasing loudness of the voices of democracy, the fight for equal rights comes closer to their objective. Granted, there’s still a long way to go, but sometimes it’s important to stop and smell the flowers.

Let’s look at some of the greatest achievements in the fight for women’s rights.

Marie Curie, although not someone who fought for gender equality directly, defied the archaic idea of male intellectuality by bringing forward one of the most important scientific discoveries for today’s society – radioactivity. 

Born Maria Skłodowska, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, she was the youngest among five children of two poor, Polish school teachers. When both of her parents died, Marie spent her time quenching her thirst for knowledge, reading and studying to her heart’s content. 

She saw a way out of the rotten hole she lived in when her sister presented the chance of moving into Paris with the purpose of enrolling into Sorbonne University, to study physics and chemistry.

Once done with her studies, she became a research worker at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris, where she would discover pitchblende, a mineral that contained uranium ore and happened to be much more radioactive than uranium itself. Marie believed that this was due to the presence of another, yet undiscovered element, and course many scientists opposed this belief, doubting her results and theories.

Marie not only proved them wrong by discovering Polonium a few years later, but hammered the last nail into the coffin of her doubters by using her discoveries to conceptualize the first X-Ray machines – mobile ones, too! – that she used to aid victims of the First World War.

An altogether genius woman, and a staple of the scientific community.

Rosa Parks is an icon of freedom for black people across the globe, bringing hope for racial justice when she stood up against the oppressive class. 

Born in 1913, Rosa Parks lived through a very tough time for people of colour in the U.S, when segregation was law-imposed, and initiated the earliest phase of the black rights movement when she refused to vacate an entire line of bus seats for a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, which led to her arrest and to her getting fined. 

This motivated a young Martin Luther King Jr. to push his peers to revolt against the bus segregation laws, that required people of colour to vacate the front half of the bus, and to forfeit their seats in case a white man entered the vehicle while the front half was full.

Later labelled the Montgomery Bus Boycott¸ this movement snowballed into a full-fledged black rights movement that would later lead to the end of segregation laws.

Parks had been a militant of the NAACP – National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People – since the thirties. 

Rosa’s courage was the first step toward the revolution of the oppressed, and it is something to be proud of.

Marsha Johnson was a big moving hand in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. A woman who stood up for herself and for what she believed in, and showed she feared no authoritarian figure when her rights were threatened.

Marsha P. Johnson, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1945, was a black transgender woman who was born into a low-class catholic family, where she faced issues with her gender identity, and with the society surrounding her who would not let her discover herself. Born in a time when “homosexuals were below dogs”, Marsha quickly started questioning her assigned gender at birth, and began to attempt to learn more about herself. She started wearing dresses at the young age of five, and suffered from it, getting frequently harassed and at one point, sexually assaulted.

Once she attained independence through adulthood, Marsha was one of the first homosexual women to attend the Stonewall Inn, originally a gay bar that had recently opened its doors to lesbians as well.

The New York City Vice Squad Public Morals Division (a mouthful that can be easily shortened to the Homophobic Police Force) attempted to raid the Stonewall Inn and detain everyone inside for, well,  being themselves. Safe to say, the patrons did not appreciate the idea, and revolted against the mass arrest, leading to what today is known as the Stonewall Riots.

The police were using riot equipment to try to contain the revolting crowd, but the masses did not forfeit their position, growing larger and more aggressive. Marsha herself, despite having a more passive role initially, eventually threw a brick at a cop’s car, breaking the windshield, in an act of revolt.

Marsha and her friend, Rivera, would later open the STAR House, a shelter for all LGBT teenagers who didn’t have a roof over their head.

Positive and hopeful, yet firm in her beliefs, Marsha did all she could to protect and raise her community.

There are uncountable female icons who shaped the world of today for better. 

Many of which exist today, fighting for a better tomorrow for everyone.

                                                                                     

Written by David Pires