Frederick Douglass Feminism

As a young girl, my head was always up in the clouds. Sure, my favorite book was a 300 page novel on the early life of Abraham Lincoln and I was playing the piano before I could even count to a number that high, but I had absolutely no grasp of the social phenomenon that existed around me. I never questioned why my parents would excuse my brother for behavior that I would be punished for. I was never jealous of him, and we got along fine as children; perhaps I thought my parents were gentle with him due to his ADHD. Or maybe I had the intrinsic knowledge that boys will be boys and their sex at birth has a larger influence on their behavior than how they were raised: the knowledge that they could behave however they wished. I was first introduced to feminism when I was fourteen, and perhaps understanding has made me cynical. Could this be an example of dangerous knowledge? Like Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, learning about the social issues in the world has been both liberating and precarious. Although my life is not in danger, he and I share the same experience of opening our minds to a less than ideal reality. For Douglass, the reality was the utter brutality of racism and the chains which shackled him from living as a free man, whereas for me it was the …show more content…
In America, women’s issues are slowly being fixed. While we still face blame in rape cases, are pitted against each other in the media for entertainment purposes, and are held to unrealistic standards for both our bodies and our sex lives, women in other parts of the world are in a much worse situation. From acid attacks to genital mutilation, they face inhumane treatment for even so much as speaking. Although I do not have the power to directly aid these women as of yet, I hope that through learning and educating others on the notion of equal rights presented in feminism, I will be one of thousands of individuals spreading this