TWO GREAT WOMEN

In 19th century one of the few acceptable jobs for women was nursing. The most famous nurse of this time was Florence Nightingale. She was born in 1820 into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and was named after the city of her birth Florence in Italy. She hated money and fought her family to become a nurse. In 1845 the Crimean War started and she went to help in a military hospital in Istanbul. During the Crimean campaign,  Florence gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp", deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times: She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds’. Florence Nightingale wrote books on nursing, raised money for hospitals and pioneered reforms in the nursing profession and hospitals. She is famous around the world for her influence on modern nursing, too.

 

In 1900s poor women worked in very bad conditions. Middle and upper-class women stayed at home, but some British middle-class women worked as teachers or nurses and a few were doctors, anyway they still did not have the vote . In contrast, men have a vote even if they could have no job or be criminals . A growing number of women thought this was very unfair and their leader was Emmeline Pankhurst.

Emmeline Pankhurst was a political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement. Her real surname was Goulden. She was born on 14 July 1858 in Manchester into a family with a tradition of radical politics. In 1879 she married Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. He was the author of the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which allowed women to keep earnings or property acquired before and after marriage.

 In 1889, she started her first political group with the help of her husband: the Women's Franchise League, which fought to allow married women to vote in local elections. In 1903, she started the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) to fight for the vote for women. The word “suffrage” means ‘the right to vote’ so the newspapers called Emmeline and her followers “suffragettes”

Emmeline's daughters Christabel and Sylvia were both active in the cause. British politicians, press and public were astonished by the demonstrations, window smashing, arson and hunger strikes of the suffragettes. In 1913, WSPU member Emily Davison was killed when she threw herself under the King's horse at the Derby as a protest at the government's continued failure to grant women the right to vote.

 Like many suffragettes, Emmeline was arrested many times over the next few years and went on hunger strike herself, resulting in violent force-feeding. In 1913 in response to the wave of hunger strikes, the government passed what became known as the 'Cat and Mouse' Act. Hunger striking prisoners were released until they grew strong again, and then re-arrested.

In 1914, the action stopped because of the First World War. Emmeline turned her energies to supporting the war effort. “What is the use of fighting for a vote if we have not got a country to vote in?” – Emmeline said.

Women did men’s jobs during the war and this increased the pressure to give women the vote.

At the end of the war in 1918, women who were more than 30 years old and who were married with a home got the vote. Women did not get the same voting rights as men until 1928.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

At the start of the twentieth century, British women had no rights. if a woman had any money, it belonged to her husband. Poor women worked in very bad conditions. Middle and upper-class women stayed at home. Many women did not go to school.

In fact, since the Bible, because of Eve’s treachery women have always been considered second-class beings and  in the Middle Ages some of them were considered witches, persecuted and condemned to the stake.

Up to our times men have always attempted to prevent them from doing anything important in the social, economic or political fields. From their infancy they have been educated towards marriage and having family in the attempt to limit their role as perpetuators of the species.

 The first feminist movements began in the 19th century. The first Woman ‘s Rights Convention assembled at Seneca Falls in New York in 1848 to demand female suffrage and equal opportunities in jobs and education. In the U.S. women won the right to vote in 1920. In Great Britain the Equal Pay Act in 1970 stated that a woman doing the same work as a man qualifies for equal pay and conditions of employment. The Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 required that equal job opportunities should be given to men and women and an employer cannot ask for either one or the other, but both. all this thanks to the fact that in recent years women have been demanding improvements such as equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, equal treatment by the law and so on.

Nowadays, the dividing lines between the roles of man and woman have become less defined and in the more highly developed countries they are given the same education; a girl is encouraged to learn a job, to build up a life of her own, even if when she marries or has a baby she is expected to arrange her job and career aside to be a wife and a mother.

The increase of household gadgets which reduce the time spent on housework and the decline in size of families, and the more need of money increased as well the number of married women who go out to work. So, more and more families depend on double incomes and the opportunities available to women are much greater than some years ago. But, most women’s desire to have a job stems from economic reasons and from values of independence and self sufficiency too.

Even if working wives still do most of their duties as housewives too, they think they have the right to develop their own capabilities. Some young husbands are more “egalitarian “ and share everything with their wives.

In our time there are more female managers, lawyers, and politicians too, but they are still outnumbered by men and most of them are often steered towards the jobs that men do not want.

Some women have risen to high-powered positions, becoming female versions of the male or making personal sacrifices and putting career ahead of all other aspects of life. The biggest problem to face for them  is how to be engaged in a career and have a family as well. Many of them give up marrying, some divorce, others have no children.

AVVISO PER GLI ALUNNI DELLE TERZE

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