Today there is a small but growing number of women in the parliaments of Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, and in the fall of 2002, the Moroccan parliament is hoping to bring women into 25 percent of its seats. Historically, legislation concerning women has not distinguished among them by race, ethnicity, or class, by marital status, age, preference, or capacity, assuming marriage and motherhood to be the overriding obligation and destiny of all women, and conflating childbearing with child rearing. Hypatia 7(3): 23–38. 1985. Men have termed women "the sex"; defined them primarily in terms of their sexuality; and, as masters of family and public power, created and staffed the institutions that control female sexuality. For example, some religious scholars in ninth- and 10th-century Iraq were prescribing more restrictive roles for women, while elite women in Islamic Spain were sometimes able to bend these rules and mix quite freely with men (see Walladah bint Mustakfi below). During the Colonial era…, Women's movements are among the most global of modern social movements. Dr. Toyin Falola is an African historian and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair Professor in the Humanities and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. As more and more countries have been swept into the global economy and information network, women's movements, often linked (and sometimes subordinated) to nationalism, have appeared around the world. This form of scholarship elicits new knowledge and conjectures about human possibilities. If we look at the history of sports all the way to its beginning, we would have to say that women in sports is a relatively new concept. Some women rose to a particularly high status. There are numerous women teachers, preachers, and Islamist leaders in contemporary Iran, one example being Zahra Rahnavard. http://www.pbs.org/visavis/women_mstr.html Offen, Karen M. 1988. "Women, Culture, and Violence: Traditional Values as a Threat to Individual WellBeing" Journal of Social Philosophy 31(4): 439–446. Separated into family and polity, society became a male world of civic virtue. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. It also parallels a major controversy among feminist theorists that cuts to the heart of moral issues regarding women. In all cases, many citizens are dissatisfied with the law. From precolonial times to the early 21st century, the role and status of women in Nigeria have continuously evolved. Boxer, Marilyn J., and Quataert, Jean H., eds. Campaigns for "equal rights," grounded in the assumptions of liberal individualism, became dominant to a greater extent in England and the United States than elsewhere. A History of Women Philosophers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gilligan, Carol. Culture: A Rich Mosaic Gender Issues in Islam: During wars and revolutions, traditional notions of women's place and struggles over woman suffrage have been eclipsed by calls for female labor and patriotic support. Other women came to power through fathers or husbands. Following the Iranian Revolution and the overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979, a new Islamic Republic took control of Iran and implemented various different laws regarding religion, society, culture, and women. Despite the negative examples of Wollstonecraft (dead after childbirth and infamous more for her unconventional lifestyle than for her contributions to radical philosophy), Marie Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges (author of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, 1791), and Jeanne Manon Roland (dead on the Jacobins' guillotine, ostensibly for having violated the boundaries of conventional femininity), and despite increasingly restrictive legal codes and an ideology of domesticity that won widespread support across class lines, new philosophic currents, based in the Enlightenment concept of human perfectibility, generated the first organized movements for women's rights. Offen, Karen; Pierson, Ruth Roach; and Rendall, Jane, eds. One cultures norm can be distinct from another culture. Quranic rights for women were not always followed, depending on the strength of local patriarchal customs. 1991. Gender Roles Across Cultures 03-16-17 / Rich / Corporate Relocation , CQ: Cultural Intelligence , Cross Cultural Training , Culture , If you live in the world today, you’ve inevitably seen how interactions and expectations can differ depending on the culture and gender with whom you’re working.