Feminism was introduced in the 1960s and has been gaining greater attention since then. Among all the forms of feminism that exist, the most common will be the liberal feminism. Liberal feminism seeks to improve upon the rights for women and attain equal opportunities for them. While I support the feminist movement, I would like to point out that there are several issues raised by feminists that are unjustified.
Liberal feminism has often referred the female gender as “we” to portray the idea of all women being oppressed and being denied equal opportunities as their male counterparts. This would be the greatest flaw in liberal feminism. There are many societies in the world and to group them into an entire body would be to over generalize them. Some societies are more liberal than the others and hence the problems that the women in different societies face must be tackled separately.
To say that women in liberal societies like the United States of America, Canada and Europe face unequal access to job opportunities, equal pay and education will be putting the issues that these women face into better perspective. Upon this point however, I would like to point out that more often than not, the extent of unfair treatment as emphasized by feminists is exaggerated. Taking the struggle that women face balancing family life and work as example, women are seen as being ‘not committed’ to their jobs once they start taking time off for their children or working part time. They will no longer be granted equal opportunities as their colleagues and will be assigned to handle unimportant tasks then. This claim cannot be further away from the truth. The reason why majority of women are facing that problem will be because of the role they play in the society. Due to social interaction, children grow up with the idea that it is usually the woman who takes greater care of her children and hence, this idea sticks with them and comes into play in the future. Should a father have to take on the role of seeing to the upbringing of his child due to certain circumstances, he will be facing the same problem of juggling work and family life as well. We can hence see that certain issues that women face in the society are not confined to the female sex and are most definitely not targeted at women due to their sex but because of the role they play.
Another issue that no longer applies to the society that these women live in today will be the unequal opportunities that women have “unequal access” to, especially in the career aspect. During the world war one, women took over men’s jobs when they went to war. Since then, countless women have entered the work force and the proportion of men and women in the job industry is now on par. Also, to say that the women working the same jobs as the men and not receiving equal pay will be unjustified. In the world today, women do get equal pay rates as their male counterparts and there here will be no evidence to say otherwise. In facts, there are many instances where female job personnel receive higher pay than their male colleagues. The factor of pay depends on the nature and the responsibilities that accompany the job. Should an employee be required to travel regularly or face a higher level of risk with his job, the pay that accompanies him will definitely be of a higher level.
To achieve their aim of obtaining equal opportunities for all women, feminists have to come to the understanding that women in less liberal societies face different issues that most of them face. These women face problems like male domination in the family, rape, no access to education and more. Among the female convicts in the Afghan jail, two thirds of women are in there due to conviction of illegal sexual relations. Women are convicted of murdering their husbands should they disappear and no of proof is be necessary to sentence them to jail. Even victims of rape are convicted of illegal sexual relations as the Islamic rules state so. Such injustice will never be allowed to happen in a country like the United States and in fact will never have occurred to Americans that it exists. In societies like this where extreme cases of female injustice reigns, a different approach must be taken from that of more liberal societies.
More and more critics of the feminist movements have dismissed the feminist movement as unjustifiable and that feminists are divided amongst themselves. This division is true and must be eliminated before the hard works of existing and previous feminists are disregarded completely.
