"EQUAL RIGHTS EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES"

It is disturbing to see that in society today I see as many unjust women as men. Most women have declared that women and men should have equal rights and I, as a woman, have to agree. However, many women today are abusing their rights for their benefit. What happened to equal rights? We may have equality in rights but we are not created equal, yet in some situations, e.g., in the workplace, many women lash out their anger and blame men. We are put on earth to do different things. We are built differently and we think differently. Naturally, women and men will have disagreements now and then. However, women must recognize that misusing their rights to take revenge for what men did in the past will not solve anything. Many women still believe that most men today view women as inferior, but when the fight for equality becomes distorted, women can be as sexist, prejudice and biased as men.

Many men have subtly degraded women for many years. It's either that many women do not notice it or choose to look the other way. In the essay, "Invisible Women", Yun Yung Choi explains how one man, Confucius, changed the lives of women for the worse in Korea. Choi states, "Throughout the first half of Koryo period, which lasted from 918 to 1392, and throughout the Yi dynasty, women were important and contributing members of their society and not marginal and dependent as they later became. Women were, in large extent, in command of their own lives." She also states, "With the introduction of Confucianism, however, the rights and privileges that women enjoyed were confiscated" (187). In her essay, Choi quotes from Confucian proverbs such as "Men are honored, but women are abased" and "A daughter is a 'robber women' who carries household wealth away when she marries" (187). Still today, many men have the same thoughts that Confucius had. I have worked with battered and abused women before. Many of these women are strong and educated, but they were still physically and mentally abused. Sometimes these men with their ill minds have gotten away with it. Why do some women let men get away with this kind of behavior? When women allow men to rape our minds of our thoughts and rob our rights, we are telling them we are insignificant compared to them. What makes men (and women) so special that they get away with injustice towards the opposite sex? Both men and women have to learn that they do not possess the right to mistreat the opposite sex.
Most women understand what women before them had to go through when they were degraded and treated as second-class citizens, but are women abusing their rights that many strong women have fought for? Many women who wanted to end discrimination at home and at work in the late 1960's and early 1970's started the Women's Rights Movement.