Feminism Reflection

Word Count: 369

Feminism is paving the way for future women through any sort of influence. A feminist is someone who is actively doing this but one does not need to be a feminist to work towards that goal. There are many different ways feminism can show itself in society. When we think of feminism, we often think of protests and strikes and fighting issues such as the wage gap and right to vote. This can be an accurate representation of a feminist. For example, Bernadette Devlin was a very active Irish Civil Rights leader and politician during her time. Even from childhood she was defiant towards authority and fought against unfair rules and treatment which she then used in her leadership with the Irish civil rights movement. But we also see feminism through the recognition of the stories of women from all different places. We see this recognition from Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Nisa would not have had an opportunity to tell her story without the active work of another woman, Marjorie Shostak, who was willing to put it on display. Even Simone de Beauvoir became popular during her time because she was a new type of representation that society had not seen before, and women all around her were able to relate to what she said in her novels, and she was able to give them different perspectives on life. Margaret Mead and Beryl Markham both paved the way for women by working towards a job and breaking societal standards to do so. Both of them had a traditionally male job and became the best because they could, which in turn would make way for more women taking these jobs in the future. Sometimes, like in Nien Cheng’s story, the feminist act was simply to fight and demonstrate that women cannot be broken as easily as her torturers anticipated, and in this way she showed the world the strength of women. All of these women wrote during a time where women’s voices were not heard or counted and yet all of their written experiences pushed women forward simply by telling their stories through books let alone doing what many of them did during their lives.