Gendered Intersections

Ever since the earliest wave of feminism, women all across the nation have been effected by the battles and outcomes of feminists for centuries. My grandmother being one of those women said during our interview that many of the rights feminists fought for had changed her life before she was even born, as she did not have to grow up under such a patriarchal nation as a young child into her adulthood. The most significant social change that affected my grandmother’s life was the right to vote. Although white women got the right to vote in 1916 provincially and 1918 nationally; which was before my grandmother was born, she remembers how the right for women to participate in something so important and fundamental to our nation brought a sense
Both in the past and present, for many different reasons violence towards women has been a concerning issue for the safety of females in private and public life. Although my grandmother never experienced this type of male domination, she agrees that violence has always been apparent in the lives of females and its effects on the female both physically and mentally are detrimental. Joanna Harris writes in one of her sections of “Gendered Intersections: An Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies” about violence against women. She writes, “It is seen as ‘essential to the struggle to restore dignity to disempowered women’ and ‘necessary conditions to self-empowerment in a socio-economic and cultural context where access to and mobility within public space is still largely controlled by men and where women’s roles and opportunity are frequently defined against their own interests’” (Harris 465). Violence towards women stems from many different areas of society and for many different reasons. Violence towards women in the past was never as much of an issue as it seems to be today and that is reflective on some of the rights women have gained in society that men do not necessarily agree with, an example of this is violence towards women in the