Womens Suffrage Movement example essay topic

When the Womens Suffrage Movement was deemed a success in the early 1920's, women lowered their voices, apparently satisfied with their accomplishment. They did not dare to acknowledge the remaining gender-related inequalities, much less vie for their decline. For over a century, women had fought for the most basic of rights. Mary Wollstonecraft laid the path for future women to follow, but women did not follow this path until they started to become used to the minuscule amount of attention that Wollstonecraft afforded them.

When this happened, women began to see more room for improvement in their treatment and rights. The step proceeding Wollstonecraft was Womens Suffrage, and when this was achieved, as previously mentioned, feminism again became quiet. After three decades of inactivity, women again began to see more rights that males were allowed yet not them; so again, feminists began pushing for advancement in their cause. This renewal of interest, however, was not only because women saw room for improvement through familiarity with established rights of women.

During World War I and Russian revolution, women were allowed to occupy various traditional male roles, even if for no reason other than necessity. Though these tasks did help in the advancement of women's ideas of their ability, they also added to the girlish identity of all women. Russian women joined the revolutionary struggle as rebels against a future as a dutiful wife of an authoritarian husband or a life of poverty and toil in a factory. They became Marxists because of the Marxist critique of women's oppression being rooted in private property and the family. The middle-class feminists offered independence only for women of wealth.

Risking death, prison and exile, the women revolutionaries entered an egalitarian world. They ran printing presses and workers's tudy circles alongside their male comrades. Rejecting the indecisiveness and self-defeating caution of the moderate socialists, most went on to accept Lenin's leadership during and after the revolution. They worked to make women's liberation a high priority, to win over women to the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks to women's emancipation. Women did come into action with the entry of the working class into the arena of industrial struggle. The story of women workers industrial struggle between the 1870's and 1905 is best told by Kollontai, a leading participant in the revolutionary movement.

The movement of women workers is by its very nature an indivisible part of the general workers movement. In all the risings and in all the factory riots, which were so distasteful to tsar ism, she took an equal part, alongside the working man. Working women played an active role in the unrest at the Krengelmskaya factory in 1874; women were involved in the 1878 strike at the Novaya Pryadilna factory in St Petersburg. In 1885, they led the textile workers in that famous strike in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, when the factory buildings were destroyed and the tsarist government was forced to hurry through, on 3 July, a law banning night work for women and young people. At a time of unrest and strike actions the proletarian woman, downtrodden, timid and without rights, suddenly grows and learns to stand tall and straight... participation in the workers movement brings the woman worker towards her liberation, not only as the seller of her labor power but also as a woman, a wife, a mother and a housekeeper. Kollontai does not glorify working-class women.

She paints them warts and all. She notices their lack of perseverance and the weakness of the political socialist element among them (as soon as the wave of strike activity died down and the workers returned to work whether in victory or in defeat, the women would be scattered and isolated once again).