I’m a proud member of “The Women’s Issues Club” at my school (Horace Mann in New York City), which is dedicated to discussing gender equality. We recently helped organize a “unity assembly” for our peers, which was meant to celebrate students’ diversities and help us understand our own community. We discussed many issues (such as race, socioeconomic class, sexual identity, gender identity and gender equality) and also produced a video that featured different students and faculty members explaining why they need feminism.
I was encouraged that this video helped my peers better understand feminism based on their reactions. Many of my male classmates genuinely praised the Women’s Issues Club and were shocked by the facts about gender inequality presented in the video. For example, one of my friends told me he thought it is “so unfair that Viagra is covered by health insurance but plan B isn’t.”
Right after the assembly, I went to my US History class, which is taught by a teacher who has been at Horace Mann for over thirty years. After class, I asked my teacher if he thinks his students’ perception of diversity (especially gender equality) has changed since the 1980’s. He affirmed that things have definitely changed over the years, but told me he still sees sexism in our school. When he first began teaching, he said, racial and gender history wasn’t part of the curriculum. When he taught about women’s rights, some boys in the class would close their notebooks and not take notes because they believed it was “unimportant history,” which made him angry because he was (and is) a feminist. However, there were few actions he could take at the time besides a scolding or a bad participation grade. He also noted that many boys and men didn’t call themselves feminists because they believed it was emasculating but that now he believes people have a better understanding that feminism is actually about equality for everybody.
Despite his opinion about the progress that’s been made, I think it’s undeniable that there is still a lot of sexism in my school. Many male students make sexist jokes and/or comments. For example, the other day a boy in my English class asked me if I was on my period because I was passionately expressing my opinion. Further, many students still do not call themselves feminists because they believe feminists are “man-hating” women with a grudge against the world. They don’t understand that feminism means social, political, and economic equality of the genders and that hating men is misandry, not feminism, and that they are in no way the same thing.
I am a feminist because I know I deserve equal rights to men. I know that my gender should not hold me back. These beliefs encouraged me to plan the Unity Assembly and I do believe the assembly accomplished its goal of broadening people’s minds about social issues. But will this assembly’s impact actually last or will people go back to disregarding equality? Only time will tell, but I know that I will continue to plan events like this until I no longer experience sexism in my daily life.
