Is The Usa Falling Behind in The Women’s Rights Movement?

It is always interesting to ask when something major and important really started. When did the struggle for independence come into its own, when did democracy in this country really start, when did rock ‘n’ roll actually come together, or when did it all start for women that they realized they needed their own rights movement? Of course women have always struggled for selfhood since times immemorial; but when did The Movement officially start? According to the feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, the writer Christine de Pizan who wrote Epistle to the God of Love in the 15th century, was the first revolutionary writer for women’s rights. A quick glance through history easily shows that Sweden in the year 1718 was the first country where women actually had a victory: as hard as it is to believe, the women there were allowed to vote and stand for election as far back as then. Why, women were still struggling for that right as recently as 1919 in America. Some might say that this kind of hstorical resistance in America to women’s rights could be responsible for a certain problem widely known about today, the problem of how America refuses to fully accept the United Nations’ CEDAW proposal, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

The CEDAW proposal is pretty self-explanatory: countries that sign it and accept it and are supposed to change their laws and their entire attitude towards women’s rights. They are supposed to work hard to bring about a climate where the society is encouraged to treat women as equals, and to make laws that treat them as equals and paying them as equals for work. Who would believe it, that America would be the only democracy in the world to refuse to fully accept this proposal? There are only a couple of other countries that America shares this dubious distinction with in refusing to accept it, and those are countries like Iran, and a few little island states in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific.

How is it that the greatest bastion of the women’s rights movement and democracy for all, should refuse to fully go with what sounds like such a great proposal that all but a couple of countries around the world have accepted? In some ways it is just as bad as it sounds; in other ways it is not. Conservative opinion is pretty strong in America, and the patriotic feeling is against how the country would have to take outside opinion from the United Nations into account in making its laws. The United Nations for example feels that legalizing prostitution would bring the profession within, from the fringes of society and give prostitution workers better protection to their health, their safety and their dignity; the UN has been pressuring countries like China to legalize prostitution. Conservative patriotic sentiment in the US would never allow such outside interference in the country’s sovereignty.

But resistance to this proposal gives everyone in the world a chance at a cheap shot at a country that has been at the forefront of the women’s rights movement; it is anybody’s guess whether or not America should ratify the UN’s proposal.