This Is Where I Talk About Stuff

An African American was considered three-fifths of a person in the 1800s.  They were considered morally, spiritually, and intellectually inferior to white people, and yet in 1885 voting rights were extended to black males.   While racial discrimination regularly prevented blacks from exercising these rights, it was still legally theirs.    And yet, it wasn’t until 1920 that women received the right to vote.

How did people who weren’t even considered people (blacks) receive the right to vote before people who were considered people (women)?  How debased are women in the eyes of men for this to happen? Are they two-fifths of a person? Is sexism really less addressed than racism?  Part of the problem is that sexism is so ingrained into society that it is hardly noticed.

Women are not allowed to be priests in Catholicism, and yet blacks are allowed to be members.  If black people were banned from the church, there would be a major public outcry of racism.  However, women are forbidden from being priests to relatively little controversy.

Part of the problem is that girls are raised inside a culture of sexism.   Women are underrepresented in sports, politics, religion, upper members of companies, and many other fields of work.  There is no stigma against weakness or frailty, unlike that for men, which ends up damaging women’s resolve to face problems when they can default them to men.  Being female, I feel subliminally discriminated against by society and inferior to men in almost every way.  This is my problem and created by me, but I feel that the quietly sexist environment I live in is a huge and unrecognized factor.