Essay On Gender Equality

We cannot achieve gender equality until we end gendered discrimination. Great strides have been made in the last century to even the playing field; for instance, women are no longer required to have their husbands sign a form that allows them to have a credit card, and women are beginning to assume a dominant presence in careers that they legally were not allowed to have in the very recent past. However at a very basic level America's legal system supports a type of discrimination that seems trivial on the surface but, at its core, represents a fundamental societal flaw that emboldens discrimination against women. Simply put, until women are legally and safely allowed to be topless anywhere a man can be topless, we cannot achieve true gender equality. The history of women being forced to cover arbitrary parts of their bodies to adhere to modesty laws is rooted in the Victorian Age. Horrified by the erotic exhibitionism and sexual lawlessness of their Georgian parents, Victorians collectively reshaped society into a passionless assembly of citizens painfully concerned with adhering to strict morality and modesty. A shift in women's fashion from loose, low–cut, flowing gowns to high collared, long sleeved dresses was the most visual change in the shift of values (Boyd). Women's bodies, once glorified and revered, were seen as scandalous and inherently impure. By the late nineteenth century contention over female sexuality through the burgeoning yet highly influential

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