When thinking about who and what women in our society are, one must look to the past as well as the present. When the popular TV show Leave It To Beaver was aired, the fictional mother featured, June Cleaver, became the embodiment of everything American society wanted a woman to be. She ran her household while her husband worked, cooked, cleaned, and maintained order all with a smile on her face. She looked great doing it too.
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Nowadays we know that although a woman's role as a wife and mother are vital, women can perform the same careers that men do with just as much effectiveness, although they face many stressors that men do not, and face judgement whether they decide to raise a family, pursue a career, or do both.
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We live in a time and place where women of any ethnicity, even those born into difficult circumstances, can become successful.
Picture: oprah.com
Some of the wealthiest entertainers in our country, and the world, are women.
Picture: usmagazine.com
However, the sad reality is that many women in our country, and across the globe, do not share such good fortune. The overwhelming majority of those who suffer sexual or domestic violence are women.
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In some countries, particularly those in desperate poverty like many parts of Africa, the majority of women will be raped during their lifetime.
In some countries in the Middle East, women are not even allowed to show their faces in public, and they face harsh consequences for disobeying the laws that oppress them.
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Although the oppression of women in America is not as dramatic and in-your-face as some countries, it still exists. Women like Miley Cyrus are both praised and demonized for showing their skin, but women who don't show skin are judged just as harshly. No matter what they do or how they act, society will find some way to judge or criticize women in pop culture and in the day to day lives of ordinary women.
Picture: theblaze.com
Some music, movies, and art in popular culture stands up for women and speaks out agains the violence, judgment, and criticism they face.
Song: Keep Ya Head Up by Tupac
Other popular entertainment, and unfortunately it is probably the majority of it, uses women as props and presents them as sexual objects. Women are bombarded with unrealistic expectations of beauty on top of expectations of domestic and professional excellence.
Song: Cherry Pie by Warrant
Despite all the seemingly insurmountable challenges of being a woman in this world, women everywhere thrive and overcome. My mother is one such example. She has worked her whole life, both in and out of the home, to raise her family. She is one of the strongest, most resilient women I have ever known.
Another such woman is my girlfriend Natsumi. She is independent, loyal, and extremely intelligent. She came to America for college and reads textbooks in English that I don't even understand. She excels in a major that is mostly male, and is not intimidated by the idea of being a woman in male-dominated industries, even in a country like Japan that is still very traditional in its views of women.
Despite the fact that society in every country across the globe demeans, judges, and oppresses women to some degree, women still contribute to society in ways so important they could never be measured.
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