One Woman's Outrage Over the Current State of Women's Rights

I'm going to go ahead and say it. Women's liberation hasn't improved women's lives. Don't get me wrong; those women deserve all the praise in the world for their efforts. They set the stage for the women of my generation to actually have equality if we just kept their efforts alive. But over time, less and less women cared about having fighting for the cause because they actually believed that our mothers had achieved equality for us.

Today women live in the same prison, just a different cage. At the same time as the women's movement, there was another movement: the Sexual Revolution. Many women fought for both. But they were fighting for birth control and abortion rights; not what is going on today.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s only turned into another tool of male domination. Whereas in the 1950s women were limited to wife and mother (two not so shabby titles), today we are limited to sluts, whores, and bitches. Personally I would prefer to be a wife and mother with no career prospects then continue to live in a society where men think I am a sexual play thing. What was once an expression of women's freedom has turned into just another commodity that women must supply to their masters. Sex has become the tool they use to oppress us.

Its as if we have had to choose. Once we asked for the right to be recognized as equals in the workplace men started treating us as if we could not also be mothers. Perhaps this is because they could never do all these jobs. I digress. So if a woman is not a mother and wife she turns into the only other role men have prescribe for us: whores.

But no matter, because we are the guilty party. We have sex with them for so many reasons that most commonly don't include our own physical satisfaction. We do it because we like them. We do it because we are afraid they leave us. We do it because we need the attention that we know they won't give us outside of the bedroom.

And the worse sin of all...we do it because we want to pretend we don't care about love and romance. This is the worst sin because it shows that the women who sacrificed everything to help us, their daughters and granddaughters, gain equality did so in vain. We should be ashamed.

Even more importantly, it shows that we have fallen back into that "if you can't beat them, join them" mentality. When did it become so unfashionable to be a woman? Why do we insist on adopting male ideology? Have they made us that ashamed to be women that we want to be them? I always believed that what made women amazing was their aptitude for nurturing and being in touch with their emotions.

Let me come back to the question at hand. How have women's movements affected me? Surprisingly, I struggle with this question often. On one hand, women's movements have opened the door for me to pursue my career aspirations and speak my mind. On the other hand, men's reaction to women's movements and the Sexual Revolution, which many women participated in, have lessened the chance that I will have get married and have children. So it all comes down to which you value more: your career, or family. For me the answer would be family.

Women's movements have changed my life regardless. Do I wish that the women's movement in the US had never happened? Certainly not. I admire those women's' optimism. They truly believed that they could have it all; and more importantly that they deserved it. I too believe that women deserve it all, and if I did not have the right to have both a career and family, I would be fighting along side those women. For me it is men who have twisted that which women have fought for so that they might retain some sort of power over us. Like those women I must now fight against the oppression that men of my time use against me, remembering that it was earlier women's movements that paved the way.