Gender equality

This topic reveals what gender equality means and how gender roles are projected to our social reality

Feminism in history

Although a number of women and men have long claimed that women and men are equal human beings, with the same abilities, desires and needs, these were mostly individual thinkers or reformers. Since ancient times we have known many of them (Diotima, Hypatia, but also Christine de Pisan or later Olympe de Gouges, Harriet Taylor Mill or Mary Wolstonencraft). The feminist movement as organized activism can be considered only if there is a line of argument developed by serving on its ideological explanation and particularly organized and deliberate effort by people that create strategies to achieve real social change, and have the capacity to implement them. Based on this definition the feminist movement can be considered in connection with efforts for emancipation in the nineteenth century, especially in the context of the movement for the right to vote for women - Suffrage. Historically, it is possible to talk about two "waves" of feminist movement.

Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges was an influential thinker, writer and author of theatre plays who drew attention to the unequal status of women in France. Although she supported civil rights, which were declared in the French Revolution, by her uniquely ironic language she reminded people that freedom and equality were not acknowledged with respect to women even in revolutionary France. In protest against this state she issued the work Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, where she questioned true equality presented in the key revolutionary document Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen. She reminded people that, despite this fundamental human rights document, which talks about equality for all in France, equality and freedom applied only to men but not women. For that act she was accused of sedition, viciousness and threatening revolution, she was subsequently sentenced to be executed under the guillotine.