First Image, Women Suffrage
Second image, riot girls (grrrls)
Introduction
Voting either by secret ballot or by voice has been in practice for a long time now. However, the notion that all individuals thriving under a democratic government should be provided with the right to vote or voted for irrespective of their sex has been radical for gender and class politics. The first image with the writings vote for women depicts the struggles women have gone through to win voting rights. It depicts the four instances in which they have won these rights, which may include, as part of a universal reform for all citizens, which represents (15 percent of the nations that permitted women suffrage), enforced by colonial metropole or by a conquer which represents 28 percent and after their female counterparts have been entrenched which represents 44 percent. The second image with the message of Riot Grrrl represents a group of white females who identifies themselves as “Punk Feminists” who took part in the early 1990s Washington D.C Olympics. The term Grrrl originates from Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe, who were members of the feminist punk band known as Bratmobile and who coined the phrase “Riot Grrri.” This image represents a more radical feminist group as compared to the first image. However, the two images represent the struggle that women underwent in encouraging themselves to become more involved in the male dominated careers by seeking ways of acquiring equal rights that discourages discrimination at any given point.
The first image reflects the topic of feminism as it addresses the issue of women suffrage, which is the right of women provided by the law vote and to be voted for in the local and national elections. The campaign for its image started intensely before the Civil War. In the 1820s and 1830s, the majority of the states had extended the franchise to all the white men, irrespective of their wealth. The image represents a group of the abolitionist activist majority of whom was women who first met in Seneca Falls to discuss the challenges of women’s rights. It represents the majority of people who agree that American women are autonomous people who deserve their own political identities. The second image represents a movement that opposed the use of language in policing the limits of self-expression among the women. It represents the struggle women have gone through in neutralizing the harsh diminishing terms used to refer to them. To counter such challenges, women decided to come up with their own terms that would neutralize this negative reference, such as, Bra-burning which was a reference to protest against the Miss American contest of 1968 that had gone down in history even though it never took place. In the contemporary world, these that are not afraid of violating Godwin’s Law have recourse to Feminazi, which is a term that depicts a person, typically a woman, who is viewed as holding extreme feminist views. The two images are similar to one another in the sense that the message in them attempts to legitimize agitation for women’s rights by relating it to women’s rights in society. This has been achieved in both images considering that the feminist has actively embraced vocabulary that keeps them on track. While the first image represents a group of women who were in the front line to seek voting rights as well as to protest against sexism racism, the punk movement whose songs were in line with the themes of female empowerment, rape, and domestic violence fought for the same mistreatments that affected women in the society.
The images are different in the sense that the image advocating for women suffrage seems to use polite language that seeks dialogue is coming up with a solution to the problem. Instead of arguing that women deserve similar responsibilities and rights as men because men and women were created equal, it seems to pass the message that women deserve to vote or be voted for because they are different from men. On the contrary, the second image of Riot Grrrl represents a feminist group that relied on change at a personal level rather than highly organized protests and rallies like in the case of women suffrage. Their message focuses on the importance of having individual voices hard as opposed to a strong political message, as depicted in the first image that calls for enhanced voting rights for women. Therefore, the second image aims to encourage women to express their views on matters affecting them without the fear of being labeled as “difficult,” or “annoying.” Unlike the message from the first image that seems to request voting rights, the message from the second image seems to focus on taking the legal powers granted by their predecessors by all means possible.
The intersectional analysis application is essential in understating the two images in the sense that it allows for a two-pronged approach when gathering the facts of the messages passed by the two images. This is because it creates a need for a shift from a single ground perspective to analyze the assumptions that the message from the two images is based on several identities associated with more than a single ground of discrimination. Consequently, this model allowed the analysis between the two images to take place by considering the contextual factors as per the issues surrounding women in the society in the sense that it allowed examination of the discriminatory stereotypes related to the social, legal, and political history associated with women and the nature of feminist movements.
The second image of the Riot Grrrl presents a broader and more radical vision for feminism because it relates to a subculture movement that was blatantly political in its message and resistant to the patriarchal and heteronormative values upheld by the dominant culture. In their attempt to provide non-conforming women a voice in society, the group vocally disagreed with the power structures that propagated diminishing principles of heterosexuality as well as traditional gender roles. As its leader, Kathleen Hanna described the group as the only means of creating a revolution in women’s lives every day by envisioning and developing alternatives to the uniform Christian capitalist way of doing things. Through their strong stand and identity, the groups were able to fight against classism, racism, heterosexism, ageism, able-bodieism, thinism, speciesism, and anti-semitism.
Conclusion
From the two images, it is clear that feminism has changed the predominant views in a broad range of areas in Western society that rages from law to culture. Feminist groups have fought for women’s legal rights in terms of voting, property rights, and other essential matters that affect women in their daily engagements. Therefore, the above images can be used to depict political, economic, and cultural aspects affecting women as well as the solutions and strategies that women have sorted to deal with the problems affecting them in society. This has been achieved because feminist applies political and sociological theories as well as philosophies that are aligned with issues of gender difference and equality. Therefore, the two images depict the struggles that women have undergone in the different waves in the history of feminist movements to seek ways of protecting the rights of diverse women and girls in society.