Howard Zinn The Patriarchy Of Women
“It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men, the very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status,” stated in Chapter Six of Howard Zinn’ s famous book, A People’s History of the United States. As Zinn has stated in the quote, women and their achievements in history have been rarely mentioned in society which is the sign of treating women as inferior subjects. Treating women as inferior has started since from the day Christopher Columbus had brought his people to his claimed land which later became America. The idea of patriarchy was brought along
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Women were expected to serve the men in the house, either husband or father. Gender-expectations such as purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity became only tasks for women to maintain and fulfill in their lives. While tasks for being born as a woman were already set by society, the right to control of her own life had already been snatched by the man of her house, her father or her husband. Later, the respect between a man toward a woman had been disappeared and men’s greed for complete authority inside his house had overflown. However, the main victims, women, in this matter, are also the accomplices of the problem because women from 1800s and earlier period had also believed and accepted their fate as being supporters of their men. Therefore, women were at their own faults but what worse were the men who used women’s untainted acceptance and belief as a chance to treat them as properties of theirs. In this research, how groups in society had encouraged the treatment of women as inferior and how women from different backgrounds had later resisted and rebelled against the ideal men and society had expected them to
Women were expected to serve the men in the house, either husband or father. Gender-expectations such as purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity became only tasks for women to maintain and fulfill in their lives. While tasks for being born as a woman were already set by society, the right to control of her own life had already been snatched by the man of her house, her father or her husband. Later, the respect between a man toward a woman had been disappeared and men’s greed for complete authority inside his house had overflown. However, the main victims, women, in this matter, are also the accomplices of the problem because women from 1800s and earlier period had also believed and accepted their fate as being supporters of their men. Therefore, women were at their own faults but what worse were the men who used women’s untainted acceptance and belief as a chance to treat them as properties of theirs. In this research, how groups in society had encouraged the treatment of women as inferior and how women from different backgrounds had later resisted and rebelled against the ideal men and society had expected them to