"Everybody Works but Mother, She's a Suffraggette"

Ms. Kirchman’s talk along with the excerpt from Invisible Women highlighted the unwritten and forgotten historical perspective of women, and how it negatively impacts our society. One aspect that I found interesting was the discussion around the “male default.” Even down to day-to-day conversations, it’s considered “gender neutral” to refer to any group of people as “guys.” This issue becomes significantly more troubling when these defaults carry into the medical world. Medical images and studies focus on hundreds of years of research on almost exclusively white males, making information pertaining to the female body to be thought of as “specialized.” Treatments and diagnosis also cater directly to male physiology, meaning that women have less proficient medical care. For example, ADHD was discovered in women almost a century after being discovered in men. This was because the research studies done on the condition had exclusively male participants. ADHD presents itself differently in males and females, so only collecting data on male participants was not conducive to being able to diagnose ADHD in women. This gap in data remains the reason women get ADHD diagnosis much later in life compared to their male counterparts. 

Another interesting idea that was brought up was the concept of zero sum thinking, which is the idea that one person being given more rights inherently takes away from your own. This idea was extremely prevalent during the suffrage movement, however many people still have this mindset. It was eye opening to see the political cartoons from the 1920’s depicting a household in which the mother was a “suffragette.” Not only did these show the animosity towards women having increased rights, it ironically highlighted the amount of unpaid labor done by women. When there was not a woman constantly maintaining the home, it was depicted to be disorderly and unkempt; and how dare those jobs be left to a man. The unpaid labor done by women is expected as well as enforced, yet still remains greatly unappreciated.