GENDER STRUGGLES

I had written in a blog post that women are treated as chattel more so in some parts of the country than others. This observation came from my look at women in politics; there is an obvious difference. Comparing the treatment of women by Republicans verses Democrats in respect to electing women to public office, democrats treat women more as equals. For example, of the 20 Senators sworn in for the 2013 session of Congress, four are Republicans and 16 are Democrats. Treating the subject of specific legislation, secular laws favoring women’s rights drag far behind gender-neutral issues. I felt that I had to use the expression “gender neutral” because we simply do not categorize any laws as favoring men over women; they all favor men. If they favor women they are specially rendered, an aside. Having said that, consider the idea that Republicans seem to think men can tell women when to reproduce (abortion, birth control, marriage rights) and can establish working conditions and wages for them that are unequal to their male counterparts. Regardless of political party, men treat women differently than they treat each other. I see this as part of the “selfishness verses altruistic struggle”, which I have identified in previous blog posts as a fundamental part of political restructuring. 

Something I find interesting is dated evidence of our continued but obviously unfinished task of humanization embedded in our political history; the evidence is in the Constitution of the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment, [1865]:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. 

Compare this to the Nineteenth Amendment [1920]:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the Untied States or by any state on account of sex.

It took 55 more years to release women to vote, that it took released slaves to vote—of course, it is more complex than just voting. Now, 103 years after we males “gave them the right to vote”, we are still struggling with gender differences in politics.

If you think that is slow, compare the lot of women in well over 2,000 years of religious society; Sharia Law verses Biblical Law and then compare that to the status of women in secular Law, which is our current law. Things are slowly changing, more slowly in Muslim countries than in so-called Christian dominated countries. Some parts of christian countries change more slowly than other parts . . . red verses blue state. Nonetheless, we are now reaching a rate of almost logarithmic rate of change in secular countries.

My interest in biology forces me to come to a shocking conclusion; our rapid humanization seems to be switching us from a billion year natural history of male dominance in our bestial beginnings to a more and more egalitarian society. We, as a society, are struggling to change what seems to have been genetically wrought over billions of years—it is not nurture it is nature. All evidence would suggest we are gaining ground—an assessment based on the idea that we are doing the right thing; moving in the right direction for the survival of man.