What makes a woman important?
What makes a woman important?
Is it the type of clothes she wears, food she cooks, or man she marries? History has often looked down upon women as little more than mothers and wives.
Nevertheless, women were important long before the campaign for women’s rights became popular. They have been the driving force behind some of the greatest inventions and discoveries in history, but the widespread view of a female’s role remains simplistic. It is only because of relatively recent developments such as women’s suffrage that the societal regards of the woman has begun to change.
The value of a woman as equal to a man was first seen in Sumer, an early Mesopotamian culture, which reached its peak around 2,800 B.C. Women there could run businesses, become priestesses and act as judges in court. They could even become scribes, a job almost always given to a man in ancient cultures. While most girls were trained to become sturdy housewives and good mothers, the rights allotted to them in Sumer were the first of their kind. Cultures that arose in the Fertile Crescent after the fall of the Sumerians rarely gave women rights at all.
The forward-thinking Sumerians were literal millennia ahead of most civilizations in terms of women’s rights. When the Sumerian civilization collapsed around 2,000 B.C., the idea of feminine equality collapsed with it. Women were second to men for almost 4,000 years, at which point the campaign for women’s suffrage gained momentum.
About halfway through the 19th century, women internationally began to push for the right to vote. It would take nearly another century for American women to gain suffrage, but the rise of prominent figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the U.S. and Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Davison in Great Britain helped drive the movement further. These women were revolutionaries; without them, women may never have gained suffrage at all. Their actions showed that women were not the fragile personalities so often ascribed to them throughout history. The greater public now viewed women as women had hoped to be viewed for generations: that they were just as strong and powerful as men.
In conclusion, while women have held different roles throughout history, they have more often than not been less than equal to their male counterparts. However, women have always been important. Whether a priestess in Sumer or a protesting suffragette in the twentieth century, what makes a woman important has not changed over time.
A woman is not important because she is rich or pretty; she is important because of her character. Women who raise children and run households contribute just as much to their communities as women who hold political offices. After all, the next generation of young girls will grow to be the strongest women yet, and society needs to be prepared for that.
Emma Riddell is a ninth-grader at Trinity High School.