The View | The rise of women in Hong Kong
Courageous women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir, among others, helped lay ground for what’s been an era of advancement
A funny thing happened recently. The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) secured a provisional District Court judgement on behalf of a male customer against a club that offered gender-based discounts at its ladies’ night events, after the club operator failed to give any notice of opposition.
If we compared local women against local men, the improvement in the economic status of women would be even more pronounced
The equal opportunity idea, when applied to gender, is intended to advance human freedom and personal choice for women against general cultural, economic, social and political constraints. It is outrageous that discounts on ladies’ night could constitute a constraint on either men’s or women’s human freedom or personal choice.
Our modern ideas about women’s rights can be traced to the 18th and 19th centuries, when they emerged alongside the acceptance of liberal republican values.
The first wave of feminist thought led to the successful campaign for women’s voting rights by activists such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Mary Wollstonecraft.
This was followed by a second wave of feminist writing that stressed the social, economic and cultural constraints on women.
This new phase of feminism gained particular influence in England and France through the work of such writers as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, who both urged women to pursue a new cultural liberation that extended beyond the realm of political rights.
In her short book A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf argued that women were restricted in the pursuit of artistic work by lack of money or time away from family obligations. The independent, creative woman needed “a room of one’s own” and some financial autonomy, and she needed to resist the deep cultural message that said “women cannot create as well as men”.