by Jaye Green

Created on: April 14, 2009

The Modern Woman often has no idea that she is the culmination of how many years of struggle. She doesn 't realise that attending school was not 'of right'. That holding a job outside the home was an action fraught with danger.

The Modern woman simply doesn't know how hard her mother, grandmother and perhaps great grandmother fought for the right to vote.

The modern woman takes her rights, her opportunities for granted. She can not envision a time when she was the property of her husband, when she was not a full person in law, when she could neither vote, nor take a loan in her own name, or be treated as an adult.

The modern woman, like Athena, springs fully grown into society never noticing how she is omitted from history. This is because one of the 'rights' her mother forgot to fight for, is the right to tell Herstory.

History is aptly named. It is His story. It is the story of what men did. Women are often relegated to camp followers, concubines and consorts.

Those women who could not be avoided; i.e. Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, are not dealt with as leaders but as place holders, who were simply there while his story unfolds.

American History is clear; 'All Men are Created Equal.' As a sop, it is said, 'Male embraces Female', but that has never been either de jure or de facto true.

Women fought for the right to vote. History disguises the fact that the only reason Woodrow Wilson signed the Bill into Law was due to pressure put upon him by outside forces; for having held America up as the great Liberator, for the International community to learn how women were imprisoned and starving themselves to death to get the vote, and he displayed disdain, would simply not do.

Women fought for the right of contraception. Many women went to prison for advocating contraception, and were charged with murder when they procured abortion, because women had no right to their own bodies.

This fact, still in evidence today, is rarely understood by the modern woman who, born in the 70s/80s has no inkling of how hard her foremothers worked to gain the rights she might toss away in ignorance.

Had women gained the right to tell herstory, then perhaps the Modern Woman would understand all the hardship faced for her to gain the rights she blithely exercises. She would not be so willing to allow herself to be pushed back into the '50s paradigm where she was the 'home' and 'baby' maker. Further, she would not need to 'prove' she can be superwoman and do it all.

Learn more about this author, Jaye Green.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.