Women's Suffrage

Before Ms. O'Connell's presentation, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the whole women's suffrage movement. But that notion proved to be very wrong. I barely knew anything. I assumed that, since it now seems logical, the nation just came to realize that depriving women of this right was unjust and ridiculous. Not that simple.

When reading the cookbook article I was shocked that in order for women to get their voices heard, they still had to do something as stereotypical as writing a cookbook. They had to get their point across by doing what they knew, and what society knew, best in that day and age. This meant using their "housewife" skills to further advance their goal of suffrage. When Ms. O'Connell showed the ads and write ups that were anti-suffrage, I couldn't help but grin. As a man who boils water in order to make Mac n Cheese on a regular basis, I found it comical that people were making it out to seem as if a man boiling water was the end of the world, and that society would plummet if women were given the right to vote. So many people did not see women's suffrage as an obvious right, which really surprised me.

I also assumed that since these suffragettes were fighting for equal rights for themselves, they would also support equal rights in all other regards. Wrong again. To learn that some of these women were huge racists seemed incredibly hypocritical and selfish to me. They are arguing that it is their Constitutional right to vote, yet it is not an African American's? They want their voices to be heard in the democratic society because they feel repressed, but that is only because they are white? All of this seemed both disturbing and confusing to me. I enjoyed how the Tennessee congress man's mother wrote him a letter to tell him to vote in favor of women's suffrage, and also enjoyed the fact that he listened to her.

The article about the waves of feminism also proved to be interesting to me as I had not previously heard of feminism in "waves." Since the definition of feminism is equality for men and women, I don't really agree with the whole wave notion. I think that if the goal of equality has yet to be achieved, it has yet to be achieved. Regardless of women getting the right to vote or the Civil Rights Movement, equality has yet to be reached, So why do we look at it in waves as opposed to a bigger picture? In terms of the waves, I don't really believe a fourth one is there. I think that the third one essentially covers all that is left to gain that equality, and even though it says it lasted from 1988-2010, I don't believe it has ended. I think that third and fourth wave can be one in the same, and therefore the fourth one is unnecessary.