Someone told me i was ” dancing around an idea called “Intersectionality” and that i was ignorant. I looked it up and i’m still super confused about what i did. Could you please explain it with examples or something ?
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Suppose you’re a woman in the early 20th century, and you notice that society is pretty unfair to women. You get a bunch of friends together, and you campaign for things like allowing women to vote and go to university. If you’re exceptionally self-aware, you might notice that you and most of your fellow campaigners aren’t just any women – you’re pretty much all wealthy, educated white women. Why is this?
Well, the poorer women are mostly too busy doing their jobs and looking after their families to worry about whether they can vote, and many of them face problems that you have never dreamed of. For example, there is a whole underclass of women who have run away from their abusive husbands, or who have had children outside marriage, and they pretty much all live in extreme poverty because there are virtually no jobs or financial support available for women who are married or have kids – after all, they’re supposed to get money from their husbands. In fact, you might notice that a lot of your comrades look down on those particularly unfortunate women and blame them for their problems, and actively oppose taking any action to help them.
Those kinds of patterns were very common in earlier feminist movements. They were dominated by wealthy white women, who were often pretty conservative and bigoted themselves, and were largely oblivious to the needs and opinions of other subsets of women. While their campaigns certainly achieved positive change, they arguably failed to focus on the most important problems affecting women. Intersectionality is about recognising and trying to combat this pattern – even within a group that faces oppression, there are still people who have it worse than others, and there is a tendency for them to be ignored or shouted over.
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