Feminism: What is Actually Feminism? Is It An Ideology to Make Women More Superior Than The Men?

Annually, on March 8 the whole world celebrates the International Women's Day as a symbol of feminism movement and women empowerment. Generally, it can be seen that International Women's Day creates louder voice compared to the International Men's Day that are celebrated yearly on November 19 and of course we have only heard the term feminism but not 'masculinism'. The question that is going to be answered in this paper is what are feminism and what are the goals? Is feminism an ideology to bring down the men and make women the superior gender or maybe feminism has nothing to do with that kind of purposes?

Historically, feminism movement started since the French Revolution, specifically after the Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizen in August 1789. Before French Revolution, the disparity between men and women were great as the men had all the privileges such as getting employed, receiving decent wages and being able to involve in political activities meanwhile women never had place in any form of political activities as they were only bounded to household chores such as cooking, cleaning and taking care of the families and even if they work, they were being paid lower than the men. As stated in the declaration, it only mentioned ‘men’ in the gender aspect and it was assumed that women were not the citizen of the French Nation. Thus, it triggered the women citizen to begin seeking for equality in the social aspect and of course to redeem the women’s right to be included in political participation such as the right to vote and be in a political position.

By definition, feminism and women empowerment movement are meant to advocate equality between men and women. The women empowerment movement was meant to fight for equality for women in the aspect of employment, education and political. The women empowerment movement has brought its effect where as it can be seen nowadays, women can already participate in political activities, women are entering schools and women are having the same occupation as the men.

The feminism movement have brought a lot of justice to women such as women nowadays have already received proper education, we can see women in the political positions and we can see women having good career. However, if women have already achieved the equality they demanded, why is feminism still advocated until today? Feminism still exists today because gender segregation still happens especially in professional field due to traditional stereotype. In order to prove this statement, a research made by Plickert and Sterling in studying law graduates employability have found that women still have not made the same progress as men in getting leadership position and partnership even though the number of women entering law school is equal to men in 30 years already. The gender inequality in employment is caused by the traditional stereotype where it was said that women are only suitable to work in domestic related occupation such as teaching, nursing, administrative and cooking meanwhile men are occupying 'man-suitable' jobs such as engineering because it has been stereotyped that women are lack of rationality and logical thought. So, these are the reasons why the feminists nowadays are still being advocated. It is because the current era's feminists are trying to fight for equalities that have not been achieved yet such as gender wage-gap and gender segregation in job opportunity. Other than that, the feminists also are trying to raise awareness regarding women's freedom and safety. For instance, on social media we can see a lot of people are trying to raise awareness on rape cases that when a girl is raped, it has nothing to do with what the girl was wearing and what time was she out of the house. When a girl got raped, it is totally on the rapist, not the girl's apparel and such.

To conclude, feminism is actually about achieving equality between the genders, it is not an attempt to make any of the gender more superior than one another. People might perceive feminism ideology negatively due to radical feminism ideologist, the feminazis that tend to make feminism about making women superior than the men but that is not the true purpose and goal of feminism. It does not even represent the true definition of feminism. In addition to that, some conservative and radical religion activist also reject the idea of feminism because they still believe the traditional role of women and men's supremacy. The religion activists make feminism looks bad on other perspective. Lastly, it best to believe that the fight for gender equality should be supported by both genders, not only by women because equality brings benefits to both genders, not women only.