One Woman, One Vote Documentary Essay

The documentary 'One Woman, One Vote' is based on the women's fight for their rights. Back in 1848 women had no rights and once they were married they become their husband's property. Long before the women's suffrage, when a woman was married she ceased to exist legally. Women were treated as second-class citizens, and both the law and their customs restricted them (Dudden, 2014). At this time the revolutionary was mainly centered on the issue of slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton started women's suffrage movement to fight for the rights of women. One of the primary rights that this movement was fighting for was the right of women to vote. This fight was filled with small victories, setbacks, and defeats, and also faced a lot of conflicting ideologies from both men and women.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

According to the 'White Privilege - Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack' by Peggy McIntosh men have over time denied that they are over-privileged even when they acknowledge that women are disadvantaged. Even when men are supporting the fight for women's rights, they are never open to the idea of reducing their privileges. It is very clear that men benefit from women's disadvantages, but they hardly acknowledge it. The article compares the male privilege to the white privilege and the two concepts are very much interrelated. In teaching about racism, the focus is normally on the disadvantages faced by the minorities but never touches on white privilege. The author describes white privilege as an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, passports, maps, visas, codebooks, tools, clothes and bank checks.

When one understands white privilege, it then becomes easy to comprehend why the oppression due to male privilege is mainly unconscious (McConnaughy, 2013). In school, they don't teach about white privilege and how it contributes to the oppression of others. It is very common to find women of color calling white women whom they encounter as oppressive. According to the education system Whites are set to think that their lives are morally neutral, normative, average and also ideal. In understanding the white privilege, it becomes easy to understand the United States is not such a free country. White privilege ensures that one group is comfortable, confident and oblivious whereas the other group is uncomfortable, unconfident and alienated.

In the revolutionary fight in 'One Woman, One Vote' women are bashed for leaving their homes to come and fight for their rights. In the early days of the fight for women's voting rights, Elizabeth Cady was unable to travel so as to take care of her children. Elizabeth was forced to pass her message through letters, articles and local meeting. During this fight, women were threatened, attacked, beaten, tried, arrested and placed in solitary confinement for their actions (Dudden, 2014). In 1972 Susan B. Antony led a number of women to a polling station in Rochester and they tried to ask that they are allowed to vote. The U.S. Marshalls came and arrested Susan for going against the law. Susan B. Antony was convicted of a federal crime by an all-male jury, and she was not allowed to testify on her own behalf because women were assumed to be incompetent to testify because of their sex. In her statement before she went to jail, Susan expressed her disappointment because her trial was based on laws made by men, which were translated by men and the judgment was passed by men, therefore it had to be in favor of men and against women. This documentary shows the obliviousness about male privilege which is the main cause of the women's oppression.

References

Dudden, F. E. (2014). Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America. Oxford University Press.

McConnaughy, C. M. (2013). The woman suffrage movement in America: A reassessment. Cambridge University Press.

McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women.

One Woman One Vote 10min - CAPTIONED [Video file]. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwNFzkfDtZo&t=7s

One Woman, One Vote [Video file]. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycWEnqhHFBE&t=9s