Feminist

There is a public speech by Steve Wisbey, and the transcript is published by Strictly Speaking. You can access this speech transcript through the link: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/strictlyspeaking/contestants/STEVEWISBEY.htm. Moreover, there are a series of photograph by Memac Ogilvy and Mather Dubai revealing the widespread sexism. You can access the photograph though: http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/10/women-should-ads.

The aim of Steve’s speech is to appeal men to stand for women rights, whilst the photograph uses special idea of Google searches to demonstrate the stereotype view of women.

I think the most distinctive part of this speech is from a man’s point of view to stand for women’s rights. He expresses his feeling about women at the beginning of the speech. He treasures women’s production and the important role of women within a family by stating “ they make a house a home”.

After that, he provides an example about salaries between men and women to explain there is no equality between these two groups of people. In fact, there are a substantial number of inequality problems in our life. In addition, the impact of cultural globalization makes these problems even more outstanding. For instance, in ancient times, women couldn’t receive good education in China. People regard that women’s ability is far beyond men’s ability. And the elders’ traditionally believe that the innocence is the virtue for women. It consist with one of the photograph that indicating by the words “ women should stay at home”. Moreover, with the passing of time, there are still a few people in some poor countryside of China considering fostering girls is useless. They don’t care the fact that they already have many children and they may not be able to afford the future expenses, they still want boys. Some families even ignore the law, through scientific and technologic methods to know the gender of the baby. If the baby were a female, they’d rather do the elective surgery or other advanced methods to execute abortion than bring her to the world.  The result shows that in November 2007, the born ratio between men and women was 119.58: 100 which is the highest ratio all over the world at that time. It means there would be more and more bachelors in China and that may cause several serious social problems such as rapes. As is in Anne Phillips work, these are disturbing uses of culture.

Furthermore, he demonstrates the aim of this speech is not to highlight the disparity, but the change and the reclamation are what he wants. At the end, he appeals to everyone to think of how they would like the whole society to view their mum, wife, daughters and sisters, in addition to stating that the gender equality will not work without men.

Arnot and Dillabough (1999) concluded that the opportunity construction of schools must provide the demands of women who desire to gain experience within an economic sphere (p.169).  In the western developed countries, gender balance in education is much better than that in developing countries. For example, in commonwealth countries, such as Australia and England, there are lots of girls’ schools offered to female learners to attend. These schools teach girls similar knowledge as boys. Moreover, these schools also offer special skills to the students, helping them get fully prepared for their future. In the same way, schools should educate boys to recognize the equality between genders and tell them the importance for girls to live within the society. Their workplaces will become much more active and interesting because of the peculiar existence of women.

Reference:

Arnot, M., & Dillabough, J. (1999). Feminist politics and democratic values in education. Curriculum Inquiry, 29(2), 159-189. doi: 10.2307/3185890

Xinhua News. Retrieved October 28, 2013, from http://news.xinhuanet.com/newmedia/2007-11/14/content_7070554.htm

UN Women as series reveals widespread sexism. Retrieved October 28, 2013, from http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/10/women-should-ads