Ananth Venkatesh

Education: Not in Waste

It is indeed paradoxical that the 232-year old America , the oldest democratic nation in the globe and the most muscular country on the face of the earth, which always espouses the virtues of a tolerant and inclusive democracy, has had a history ridden with prejudices, based on either race or gender.

This wealthy land, procreated as a mighty nation by the entrepreneurship of European immigrants, which encompassed barbarousness in its treatment of black slaves, has historically been intolerant towards white females in the cultural, social, economic and political compartments of society. It is an indicator of the regressiveness of the otherwise judicious and commendable founding personalities of America that they deemed the bequeathment of the right to vote to women unnecessary. For all its enhancement and marvelous accomplishments in innumerable vocational segments, America has culturally and politically been not as forward thinking as some of the other less privileged nations on earth.

America has not elected even one female President in the copious years of its prosperous existence, with the closest it came to witnessing a female occupying a politically pivotal post was in 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro was the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee.

In the light of the resistance in the psyche of many white American males towards observing women holding publicly significant posts, the high-voltage campaign of Hillary Clinton on the hustings with the aspiration of winning the Democratic nomination for the Presidency is a momentously crucial phase in America . It is a reflection of the progressive alteration of the mindsets of Americans, who were for so long devoured by the cultural injustive prevailing in the Western world.

• The mindset which viewed women as incapable of governing.
• The idea of women as a category that needed to stay at home to execute the virtuous commissions of motherhood and wifehood.

Victims of Religion

The reasons of the victimisation of American women due to such blatant unfairness can be traced back to the early years of Christianity, when an unequivocally flagrant approach was embraced by the influential components of the Christian Church, who referred to womanhood as having the ability to assume monstrous appearances if ‘unchecked and untamed’.

The injustice-ridden convictions possessed by males associated with the Churches in the Western world inflicted massive destructions on the morale of females and their capability to think independently. Females were considered as harbingers of cosmic monstrosity and disillusionment, as is evidenced by the description of women by an eminent Latin Father of the Christian Church in the 4th century, St .Jerome, who inconceivably conveyed, “Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word a perilous object.”

Women were referred to as childlike, who always had to be directed by men. The dubbing of females as fonts of seduction and sexual debauchment, who could pervert the “social order” if not confined to the homes, was proof positive of the sexist stereotyping of womanliness in the West. Such generalisations contributed to brutally assaulting the mentality of generations of women thereby rendering them with emotions of being useless and inept.

Domestication

Females were indoctrinated from a very malleable age of the splendidness of domestication and of the immanence of docility in the structure of womanhood. Marriage at a youthful age and subsequent procreation of progeny coupled with dutiful service of their spouses were considered intrinsic to a glorious womanhood and the requisites to successfulness in a woman’s life. Married women in the West had to succumb to the dictums of their husbands and were piteously handicapped as a consequence of legal and judicial prejudice of the nations which they inhabited. Husbands literally were custodians of their wives, who had to surrender everything on entering into matrimonial alliances, ranging from their names to chattels owned by them. These gigantically biased perceptions of women prevailed throughout much of America , right from its commencement as a State, well in to the late 19th century.

Women were regarded as being unsuitable and misfits’ vis-à-vis their capacity to work in professions involving harsh labour, since women were for ages labelled the ‘delicate and frail sex’, unable to do demanding jobs, which were considered to be the domain of men. This was patently untrue since subsequent researches and analyses have unambiguously illustrated the intrinsic powerfulness of women and their ability to endure more physical and mental excruciation than males. In colonial and post-independence nations, women were legally fractured just like their sisters in other European countries. The predilection of a majority of white American males to categorise females as incompetent thinkers not possessing the intellectual perspicaciouness indispensable to reign over a vast country like America severely suppressed the already latent talents of many American females, black and white. The tragedy of black females was on account of their skin colour and race, which was markedly dissimilar to the whites. Ironically, the maltreatment of black females made them subjects of empathies of white females, who also experienced subjugation by males on account of the aforementioned reasons.

It is a measure of the matureness of American democracy and its steady evolution that a woman had a wonderful chance of becoming the first woman President of the land. Irrespective of the meritoriousness of her schemes and the course of action she could have journeyed on as a President, the very actuality of her enacting such a paramount role is a glorious accomplishment of American democracy.

Jobs and Education

The suffocation of white females was aggravated by the societal impediments preventing women from procuring employments in areas of their likings. Some segments in the world of professions in America were out of bounds for women. The professions of engineering and medicine until the final stages of the 19th century had exiguous space for women, being, almost exclusively, territories reserved for males, who were classified as worthy of belonging to these two vocations. Vocations that consisted of many women, like teaching, and vocations where women were scarce, earned them the same meagre income in comparison to the stipends accumulated by the males. Only by the mid-20th century did the scenario look vibrant as America passed a series of laws stipulating that payment of equal salaries for the same amount of work to women is mandatory.

In education, higher priority was provided to boys thereby diminishing the significance of schooling for girls. Most American girls were not even undergraduates during the first few years of the 20th century. Women obtained just 19 percent of all undergraduate college degrees around the beginning of the 20th century, a figure which grew exponentially as the century neared its completion. Only due to the indefatigably astute efforts of several American females, namely, Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, Carrie Catt and some others, all associated with the American feminist movement, was a climate created which paved the way for the passage of laws respectful of the authentic status of women, with these laws being congenial to the demand of equal rights for women.

Conclusion

Considering this divisive and horridly uncivilised past where American females, of dissimilar colours, had to bear the terrible brunt of unfairness and overbearing incorrectness from men in the name of religious mores and racism, the sight of Hillary Clinton competitively contesting against her contenders for securing the nomination of her party to campaign for the Presidential election is a terrifically symbolic moment. It sends a message to the rest of the world, including to American chauvinists, who still exist exiguously, about the attitudinal transformation regarding such issues in America.

Execrable sexism has regrettably raised its head even this time around. Hillary Clinton was jeered, while addressing an audience, by some white American parochialists, who uttered that ‘she go to her home and iron clothes’, a reference to the conventional perception of womanliness in America .

Nonetheless, it is a measure of the matureness of American democracy and its steady evolution that a woman had a wonderful chance of becoming the first woman President of the land. Irrespective of the meritoriousness of her schemes and the course of action she could have journeyed on as a President, the very actuality of her enacting such a paramount role is a glorious accomplishment of American democracy.

“Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it”

Hillary Clinton

Article: An interesting read

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