Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment: The Journey from Elizabeth I to Modern Times, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment: The Journey from Elizabeth I to Modern Times e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Gender equality and women empowerment… Gender equality means that men and women should have equal opportunities. They need to grow up and learn in the same way, with the same conditions and with the same education. Having equal opportunities is important at first to reach economic independence but also for their personal growth. The target to reach is to create a society that gives to men and women the same rights and obligations in any aspect of life. If we had the opportunity to live in an ideal world and society we wouldn’t need to speak, argue or fight for this topic, but, we still need to talk about it because the situation nowadays is  very different and our generation must improve to change it. Gender equality is a social problem of humanity since prehistoric ages and only one century ago were started the fights in order to defeat this situation; only during the first half of the 19th century with the first wave of the feminist movement the question was addressed with due seriousness. Looking at the history, before that moment, the only clear example of the pursuit of gender equality can be found in the figure of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth received the typical education reserved for male, consisting of a course of studies centring on Philosophy, Rhetoric and Classical languages, but, since the beginning she showed a completely different approach to the power, compared with other female heirs; Her professor, Roger Ascham wrote about her: “Her mind has no womanly weakness” with the unselfconscious sexism of the age, “her perseverance is equal to that of a man, and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up”. During her glorious reign she invested money and resources to make a mythical image of herself. She presented herself as Gloriana, an immortal goddess. She reached the highest peak of her power thanks to the “Spanish Armada Speech” before the defeat of the ‘invincible’ Spanish Armada in 1588. When, before the fight, her English troops were nervous and scared, the Queen decided to speak to the Armada having two main objectives: she wanted to encourage her soldiers and justify her presence in the battlefield even if she was a woman. Elizabeth I explained that she wanted to be the ‘first among equals’.  Thanks to her words and her actions she demonstrated to be an unusual leader not because she was a woman but because she reigned through loyalty of her people and not by tyranny. The most famous phrase in the whole speech is: “...I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too…” Over the years the situation has changed a lot, just think of Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, or, more recently, of Angela Merkel, German Chancellor from 2005 to 2021, but the road is still long and hard. Nowadays we still have too much situations that certify the resilience of gender inequality: -Less than 40 percent of countries offer girls and boys equal access to education -Women continue to participate in labor markets on an unequal basis - Violence Against Women, Sexual Assault and Rape is still a big problem all over the world; - In many countries, at least 200 million women and girls alive today have undergone female genital mutilation.  -Adult women and girls account for 71% of all human trafficking victims detected globally.