Blog Post #1

             After reading Pharr, “Homophobia: A weapon of Sexism”, Reagon, “Coalition Politics”, and the many other assigned to us in class, I feel that I can begin to understand the process that it took for women to finally be at today.  Our first day of class we were to define what we thought a feminist was/is, and here is what we came up with, “a person (actively) pursuing equality between the sexes.”  When asking myself if I still agree with that quote after all the reading that we have done- I must say that I do.  A feminist I feel has to take on a certain role that many women can find difficult at times, because it wasn’t always easy to be woman.  At one point a woman had no rights, “in the early 19th century women had no right to vote and limited opportunities for education.  Married women had no right… to their own earnings, to hold property of their own, to divorce, except in extreme cases, or to retain custody of their children,” stated Susan M. Hartmann in her article called Feminism and Women’s Movement.  See women never had such rights then that they do now, and it took a group of activist called Feminist, to set the record straight with the idea of equality.  Susan Pharr thinks that the whole reason of sexism first started with economics, “forced economic dependency puts women under male control and severely limits women’s options for self-determination and self-sufficiency.”  Among the many authors and works that I have read, I have come to the conclusion that I still back up my original quote/definition about what I think makes up a feminist.  It is important to look at how far we have come, and how much is still needed in the future.  Who knows, maybe we won’t need feminist then?