Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy. ~Henry Kissinger
Upon reading this when I was deciding what to write about this month I forced myself to stop and think about the infamous “Battle of the Sexes”, when and why did it begin and will it ever truly end? When you look specifically at the statistics as far as the connection between women and education or the workplace it is obvious that things are changing. According to the US department of Labor, in 1950 about one in three women participated in the labor force. By 1998, nearly three of every five women of working age were in the labor force. Also according to the US Department of Labor, among 1998 high school graduates, more women than men enrolled in college. As of October, 938,000 young women who graduated from high school in 1998 were in college while 906,000 young men were enrolled." The trend of more women attending college continues. Although the motives behind these changes have not been polled or made into statistics I would guess that the biggest motive that women have for this behavior is to prove to men that despite having been oppressed and seen as the inferior gender that we are in fact the superior gender. Because history does point out the assumed superiority of man, women feel as if there is in fact something to prove when in reality there isn’t. This issue is very old and can be shown in our in class reading of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” as she describes how women writers can be tainted by a underlying meaning to their work that is in response to something else or trying to prove something and how this can make the piece of literature lose it’s integrity. Today, as the tides are changing between men and women I think that we are losing the hunger for equality and become obsessed with being superior to all others. Personally I do not wish to be a part of either the dominating or dominated group. While searching for this equality or justice I feel that some women have lost track of what it means to be independent. I predict that in the next few decades women will become the dominating gender and I can only hope that we do not end up oppressing others as we were oppressed in history.in conclusion I would like to add a quote that I thought fit her just nicely. “You don't have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.” ~Jane Galvin Lewis
