Examples Of Women Discrimination And Oppression

Discrimination and oppression are two main struggles that women had to face this led many female authors to discuss the struggles that follow women throughout history. Simone de Beauvoir, Bell Hooks and Christine Delphy asked questions and thought critically about the real meaning and function of women and feminism. First, Simone de Beauvoir in her article "The Second Sex" wonder about what is the appropriate definition of a woman as she differentiates between female and a woman. In the same article Simone compares women with men as she argues that women are always associated with weakness while men are associated with power and strength. She also, compares women to the situation of other oppressed groups such as the proletariat, the Jews
Throughout her article she looks at different definitions of feminism as the definitions differentiates in different countries such as in America and among different groups of people such as the bourgeois white women and the poor black women. She claims that another issue of feminism is the discrimination happening between women themselves and that their interests and aims from the feminist movement is different as the bourgeois women who dominate the feminist movement define feminism as equality with men while the lower groups do not define it in the same way knowing that men in their groups are oppressed and discriminated against. Hooks looks at the issue that defining feminism as the equality with men removes race and class as the factors that determines the degree of discrimination someone will receive. She also, looks at the issue of females creating a counter world which is a world where there is no or a little connection with men as women will focus on creating that world instead of looking at feminism. Finally, she argues that the phrase "I advocate feminism" is the right phrase to use as it give women the ability to join other movements unlike the phrase "I am a feminist" which signifies a full commitment to feminism
People are known for creating divisions among classes, races and other things as a result of the social division that occurred to sexes it has been regarded to one sex as the superior while, the other is the inferior which is females. She also looks at the idea that because gender is socially constructed, the roles, expectations and obligations of both gender vary from one society to another. Delphy claims that the term gender gathered all the social differences between the two sexes, she also looked at the fact that the term is singular which suggest that we treat the two sexes equally and finally, it anchored the idea of hierarchy. As she claims that we associate gender with sex so we believe that it is a social division determined by a natural division. She looks at the two arguments on the theory that sex causes gender first, the biological sex and procreation between males and females while the second argument looks at the biological sex as a physical traits. In this article Delphy discuss the idea of Derrida about the importance of difference and things can be differentiated by opposition to other things. One of the concepts that Delphy wonder about in her article is what if both sex and gender were both social differences as some French feminists refuse to