User:Adrahakdemir/Gender equality

Gender equality is something that women have been fighting to have for centuries. Since the beginning of time, women have always had the most on work piled on their plates, for it almost always to go unnoticed. Dating back to the 1600's, the Iroquois Indians present themselves as a community of people that did just that. Sara Evans goes into deep detail in explaining the hardships that both men and women had to go through in order to help others survive, along with themselves. "Not to say that men were of no help, they did a lot of the hunting, trading, and handled warfare situations, which is very important to be able to thrive especially in that era. Although they helped in that sense, the women of the tribe had tremendous responsibility when it came to raising a family, and raising a community. They were in charge of cooking, cleaning, properly raising their children and members of their tribe, creating textiles for others, immense amounts of agricultural work, along with many others. These women tended to do all of these things single-handedly until their children were old enough to help out with those types of things. While they did have this much to take care of, they also did have more responsibility than men when it came to leading their people. Because they were home more often than the men were (due to their own responsibilities), they were the ones that had to take charge in directing their people what to do, were the head of the household, and even called the shots when it came to declaring war on others or not" .. Something like this is considered a matrilineal kinship - where a woman is in charge, as opposed to a man. This is considered to be gender equality, if not more, for the women during this specific point in time. Things during this time seem to be going quite well for them during this period, only for things to take a drastic turn for some time in the near future as cultures expand.

As this typically was the case during that era, there have also been certain instances of there being a matrilineal kinship in certain cultures, only for that kinship to be stripped away from them to transition into a patrilineal kinship. Transitions from matrilineal to patrilineal kinship had become more common as colonies began to grow. This is very famously known to have happened to the Cherokee women in the early 1800's; Theda Perdue explains more about it in depth in her document Cherokee Women and the Trail of Tears. "There have been not only one, but two separate occasions where the Cherokee people were kicked out of their homeland by others without solid reasoning. The Cherokees were originally established in the general vicinity of the Mississippi River, only to be forcefully relocated to what is known today as Oklahoma. After finally finding land suitable enough for themselves, they were threatened with death punishments if they didn't migrate to a different settlement again. This soon became know as the "Trail of Tears" because of the mass amounts of deaths during their migration. During this time, the Cherokee's were still under matrilineal order, but that did not last at all. The people felt as though because of the current problems and devastations they were going through meant that there was no longer any place for them to be under a matrilineal kinship any longer" These people felt as though the main problem was that the people in charge of making orders was the women, not the fact that they were continuously being kicked out of their home settlements because of presidential figures.

It seems as though that ever since these points in time, there has been a massive decline in what rights and freedom women were allowed to have. There was a consistent increase in what was expected of a woman, and if they didn't meet those standards, people would turn their noses away from them. This is something that had remained consistent up until the 1900's, or the industrial era. During this time, women had the ability to work, but mostly because there was a demand for it. Although jobs were tedious and lasted for long hours, women finally felt like they had finally been given a right that they had been deserving for quite some time. When they began to notice the unfair labor treatment and the difference in wages that the men were being paid with, they felt like they finally needed to take a stand to be compensated and treated as fairly as the men were for the same jobs and tasks they were doing. It has taken women immense amounts of blood, sweat, and tears, to be able to fight to get to just minimal things that they needed during those points in time. An example of this would be the hourly wages - they fought for weeks and were mercilessly beaten by policemen, but eventually got a slight pay raise for less hours. The women were pleased for the time being, but then realized that it really did not seem to make that much of a difference. These women worked hard, fought hard with their blood, sweat, and tears to be able to be given just slight rights during that era. Although even in modern times, we still are not being treated equally to men in the workplace, our ancestors have paved the way for us to be able to fight for what is rightfully ours as well.