{{B}}Women's Rights Movement{{/B}}
1．Women's rights are guarantees of political, social, and economic equality for women in a society that traditionally gives more power and freedom to men. Among these rights are control of property, equality of opportunity in education and employment, right of voting, and freedom of marriage. Today, complete political, economic, and social equality with men remains to be achieved.
2．Male control was obvious from the time of the earliest written historical records, probably as a result of men's role in hunting and warfare. The belief that women were naturally weaker and inferior to men was also found in god-centered religions. Therefore, in most traditional societies, women generally were at a disadvantage. Their education was limited to learning domestic skills, and they had no access to positions of power. A woman had no legal control over her person, her own land and money, or her children.
3．The Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, which caused economic and social progress, provided a favorable climate for the rise of women's rights movement in the late 18th and 19th century. In 1848 more than 100 persons held the first women's rights convention in New York, and the feminists demanded equal rights, including the vote.
4．In the late 1960s women made up about 40 percent of the work force in England, France, Germany, and the United States. This figure rose to more than 50 percent by the mid-1981s. A commission under the President was established in 1960 to consider equal opportunities for women. Acts of Congress entitled them to equality in education, employment, and legal rights. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act, initially intended only for blacks was extended to women.
5．The objectives of the women's movement included equal pay for equal work, federal support for day-care centers, recognition of lesbian (女性同性恋) rights, making abortion legal, and the focus of serious attention on the problems of forced sex relations, wife and child beating, and discrimination against older and minority women.