Critical Introduction

Hello and welcome to our blog “Gender Equality”! We are a group of four undergraduate students at the University of Maryland currently analyzing rhetoric. Over the years we have noticed that there is a misconception that comes with gender equality; a lot of people think it is only a problem that influences women. However, through our experiences we have seen how gender inequality affects both men and women negatively. There is no country in the world that guarantees complete gender equality. As a result, we wanted to “go back” in history and see how gender attitudes have changed over the years in an effort to comprehend why such strong inequality still persists to this day.

The two texts that we chose were “Respect” by Aretha Franklin and “I’m a Feminist” by Emma Watson. As we analyzed the song “Respect” we quickly realized that Franklin makes an empowering anthem for women in an attempt to combat gender inequality. Five decades after the release of the song gender inequality is still ubiquitous. Emma Watson introduces the HeForShe campaign which points out the need for both men and women to stand together united in order to fight gender inequality. Both the song “Respect” and the speech “I’m a feminist” vocalize the exigence of gender equality ultimately attempting to catalyze broader social empowerment.

We thought it would be important for readers to learn about the attempts these two women have made to combat gender discrimination in the past since this is still an issue today. This is the right time to have this discussion because the same things that Aretha Franklin and Emma Watson wanted to change are still true today and women are fighting to change that. The United States recently had the Women’s March which was a success because millions of women came together to show support and appreciation for each other. Preceding the march, the newly elected President of the US had made some sexist and discriminatory comments against women and that is one of the reasons feminism is still needed today. We hope that after viewing our blog, readers will consider the unfair limitations society has put on women over time and be moved to support the feminist movement's’ attempts to put an end to problems associated with gender inequality.

We wanted our blog to have a mixture of most important and least important rhetorical analyses throughout the blog. Therefore, we did not post the least important or most important ones first. We mixed it up so that there would be an even amount of importance throughout the blog.

Gender inequality is a human issue that we hope our readers will be aware of after viewing our blog and our texts’ analyses. The ability to acknowledge a problem and take action is important in our society so that progress will be made. The fact that men and women are not equal everywhere in the world is astounding. Equal rights should be our goal and beginning to educate ourselves is a great start. In order to dismantle societal barriers we must break free from strict gender expectations that were ingrained in our collective consciousness.