Women Rights

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Women Rights
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The term women's rights

• The term women's rights refers to freedoms and
  entitlements of women and girls of all ages.
• These rights may or may not be
  institutionalized, ignored or suppressed by law,
  local custom, and behavior in a particular
  society. These liberties are grouped together and
  differentiated from broader notions of human
  rights because they often differ from the
  freedoms inherently possessed by or recognized
  for men and boys, and because activists for this
  issue claim an inherent historical and
  traditional bias against the exercise of rights
  by women and girls.
• Issues commonly associated with notions of
  women's rights include, though are not limited
  to, the right to bodily integrity and autonomy
  to vote (suffrage) to hold public office to
  work to fair wages or equal pay to own
  property to education to serve in the military
  or be conscripted to enter into legal contracts
  and to have marital, parental and religious
  rights.Women and their supporters have campaigned
  and in some places continue to campaign for the
  same rights as men.

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The Middle Ages

• According to English Common Law, which developed
  from the 12th Century onward all property which a
  wife held at the time of a marriage became a
  possession of her husband. Eventually English
  courts forbid a husband's transferring property
  without the consent of his wife, but he still
  retained the right to manage it and to receive
  the money which it produced. "French married
  women suffered from restrictions on their legal
  capacity which were removed only in 1965." In the
  16th century, the Reformation in Europe allowed
  more women to add their voices, including the
  English writers Jane Anger, Aemilia Lanyer, and
  the prophetess Anna Trapnell. Despite relatively
  greater freedom for Anglo-Saxon women, until the
  mid-nineteenth century, writers largely assumed
  that a patriarchal order was a natural order that
  had existed. This perception was not seriously
  challenged until the eighteenth century when
  Jesuit missionaries found matrilineality in
  native North American peoples

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The Enlightenment

• In the late 18th Century the question of women's
  rights became central to political debates in
  both France and Britain.

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Suffrage, the right to vote

• During the 19th Century women began to agitate
  for the right to vote and participate in
  government and law making. The ideals of women's
  suffrage developed alongside that of universal
  suffrage and today women's suffrage is considered
  a right (under the Convention on the Elimination
  of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women).
• During the 19th Century the right to vote was
  gradually extended in many countries and women
  started to campaign for their right to vote. In
  1893 New Zealand became the first country to give
  women the right to vote on a national level.
  Australia gave women the right to vote in 1902,
  while the USA, Britain and Canada gave women the
  vote after the First World War.Sweden would also
  be a contestant as the first independent nation
  to grant women the right to vote. Conditional
  female suffrage was granted in Sweden during the
  age of liberty (17181771)

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Modern movement

• In the subsequent decades women's rights again
  became an important issue in the English speaking
  world. By the 1960s the movement was called
  "feminism" or "women's liberation." Reformers
  wanted the same pay as men, equal rights in law,
  and the freedom to plan their families or not
  have children at all. Their efforts were met with
  mixed results.
• In the UK, a public groundswell of opinion in
  favour of legal equality had gained pace, partly
  through the extensive employment of women in what
  were traditional male roles during both world
  wars.

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• Over the course of the 20th century women took on
  greater roles in society such as serving in
  government. In the United States some served as
  U.S. Senators and others as members of the U.S.
  Cabinet. Many women took advantage of
  opportunities in higher education. In the United
  States at the beginning of the 20th century less
  than 20 of all college degrees were earned by
  women. By the end of the century this figure had
  risen to about 50.
• Progress was made in professional opportunities.
  Fields such as medicine, law, and science opened
  to include more women. At the beginning of the
  20th century about 5 of the doctors in the
  United States were women. As of 2006, over 38 of
  all doctors in the United States were women, and
  today, women make almost 50 of the medical
  student population. While the numbers of women in
  these fields increased, many women still
  continued to hold clerical, factory, retail, or
  service jobs. For example, they worked as office
  assistants, on assembly lines, or as cooks

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Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted
  in 1948, enshrines "the equal rights of men and
  women", and addressed both the equality and
  equity issues. In 1979 the United Nations General
  Assembly adopted the Convention on the
  Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
  against Women (CEDAW )

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