The US elections last year may have marked a historic moment for women in politics with Kamala Harris becoming the first woman to be elected vice president, but to Niamh the fight for gender equality in higher office is far from over. She argues that gender biases and leadership stereotypes continue to disadvantage women as “societal constructions of what it means to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ set the stage for political inequality”.
How much longer will we have to wait to see a woman finally reach the Oval Office? While Kamala Harris has broken new ground in the fight for women’s equality by becoming the first female Vice President-elect, Amelia Brennan argues that “in order to address the perpetual dominance of men at the top tier of US politics, we have to address the inequalities embedded within US society as a whole.”
To the author, “this [the UK] government’s policy on domestic violence amounts to a legislative smokescreen”. How can we overcome this? She argues in favour of the ‘abolitionist feminist approach’ which proposes that ‘we move beyond an oppressive carceral structure and look to create a structure that empowers those who would be victims of violence to escape abusive situations before violence takes place.
How can we deconstruct problematic social structures in modern society? To the author the answer is that it lies in restructuring our education systems. Here she argues that ‘elevating radical feminism from the position of subjugated knowledge will enable a new intellectual hierarchy to infiltrate society and inform our politics’.
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