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Mary Wollstonecraft\'s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and Harriet Taylor\'s The Enfranchisement of Women (1851) were early works that demanded women\'s equality. Liberal feminists of the 19th century campaigned for legislation for women\'s rights, believing that legislation would solve the problem of women\'s subordination. In the early 20th century, militant activists such as the Women\'s Social and Political Union took collective action for equal rights and opportunities for women, in the form of votes for women. In 1968, a strike by women workers at Ford in the UK demanded equal pay. Even after the introduction of the Equal Pay Act (1970) and the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) in the UK many activist groups continue to campaign for equal pay and equal opportunity, which are not sufficiently covered in the legislation.
A criticism that some feminists have levelled against legislation for equal pay and opportunity is that, although in theory this legislation should grant economic equality for women, it does not legislate against the structural inequality that occurs before women enter the work arena. Some feminists have argued that the patriarchal organization of society resists any real reform of inequality, but relies on tokenism to try to vindicate itself from claims of discrimination. One area that has been researched by feminists is education. Here it has been proved that boys take ‘masculinzed’ subjects, science etc. and girls take ‘feminized’ subjects. The result is that girls and boys are not then equal in the work market.
Kate Millet\'s book Sexual Politics states that in the USA in 1970 women were better qualified than men doing comparable work, and in the UK the Equal Opportunity Commission in 1992 states that women have more GSCEs and more degrees than men. The Equal Pay Act (UK, 1975) was amended in 1984 to require equal pay for equal value. The problem with this is that in many of the jobs held by women there are no men doing comparable work so that enforcement of the law is impossible. The Equal Pay Act does not take into account the fact that many women are engaged in unpaid domestic work or part-time work, nor does it provide child care for working women, in so doing women are still disenfranchised.
It should be noted that Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination laws are not worldwide, and where they are in place they do not successfully deal with class, racial discrimination, or with the many aspects of patriarchy that inform women\'s lives. TK
Further reading Olive Schreiner, Women and Labour (1911); , Harriet Taylor, The Subjection of Women (1869). |
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