GWS ESSAY Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

GWS - Essay Example the suffragette movement which was originated in XIX-XX century, since 1848, when in the city of Seneca Falls (NY, USA) the congress to protect the rights of women had passed under the slogan â€Å"All men and women are created equal†. Its key issue was to gain the right to vote for women. The congress proclaimed "The Declaration of Sentiments", which raised important issues such as womens equality in property rights in marriage, in the free choice of profession, in getting good education, and so on. The authors of this paper were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott (Lerner 1994). Another important figure in the womens movement in the second half of the XIX century was Emmeline Pankhurst, who was one of the founders of the movement for womens right to vote in elections. One of its goals was to debunk sexism, rooted in all levels of British society. In 1903, Pankhurst established an organization in defense of social and political rights of women (Womens Social and Political Union, WSPU), which had gathered 5000 members in a year (Davis 1999). After the members of the organization have become permanently subjected to arrest and imprisonment for trivial manifestations for the movement support, many of them have decided to express their protest with hunger strike. As the result the health of the hunger strikers was that seriously undermined, which drew attention to the unjustified cruelty of the legislative system of that time, and thus, to the ideas of feminism. Under pressure from the WSPU English Parliament passed a series of laws aimed to improve the status of women, and thus it gave women the right to vote in local elections since 1894 (Lerner 1994). The second half of the XX century (1960s) in world culture was marked by a â€Å"Second Wave† feminism, which was rethinking the role of women in society and was aimed to remove socio-cultural gender discrimination. Its followers understood that various forms of cultural and political inequality of women are