Gender Problems

'Gender problems' prove to be one of the most serious general humankind troubles in all spheres of life. It happened so that this movement in Europe and America was initiated by a couple of prominent ladies that determined the way it was going to develop within the next few centuries.

So, initially gender movement formed itself as the womens' right movement. However, this notion is much broader and more complicated at the present moment. In Europe, for example, it was only in the 15th century that woman was acknowledged a human being (due to the fact that it was a woman who gave a birth to Jesus Christ) and in the 16th that at least some women were permitted to participate in public life, including Jane Anger and Aemilia Lanyer. Queen Elizabeth I was one of the governing queens in Europe that established leadership among women. At the same time, an overwhelming majority of women throughout the world were deprived of the educational, voting and basic human rights primarily up to the 1920s-1970s. Several countries, located in the Middle East principally, continue to abnegate female voting rights.

As for Islam, women were provided with more essential rights under the early Muslim reforms. They concerned marriage, divorce and inheritance. Still, a husband remained to be in the lead and responsible for family running.

It is no surprise that Europe was the first region which set up considerable alterations in women's social position and community's attitude towards it. It was the Age of Enlightenment that realized all the advantages of equal lady's position. Mary Wollstonecraft was the first feminist writer and philosopher that tackled "womens' question" in a serious way. She was the first to point to the incomplete female education and upbringing as two main stumbling blocks on the way to universal equality.

In the 19th century, it was a voting right's movement that forged. It was named "suffragism". The strugglers fought for universal suffrage but it was completely realized by the 1970s only. It was United States that supplied own female citizens with this kind of privilege. It happened in 1869 and 1870 in Wyoming and Utah correspondingly. However, they were deprived of this right 20 years later. All-American female voting right bill was passed in 1920 as the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In Britain, the most radical feminist movement and combat respectively was led by Emmeline Pankhurst. After a century-long period of strikes and ultimatums, the British Parliament passed a bill permitting women over the age of 30 to vote. In New Zealand and Australia it took place in 1893 and 1902 agreebly.

Nowadays, the 'gender' is understood as the entire aggregate of womens' freedoms, rights and obligations that must be universally observed all over the world.