Emma Watson's UN speech

Emma Watson's speech at the UN on the occasion of the launch of HeforShe,

a campaign that aims to encourage men in achieving women's rights was
hugely popular, and rightly so. It was an eloquent and refreshing oration
from a passionate young feminist.

However, the concept of HeforShe is interesting but not new. Men have
always been involved in the fight for women's rights, and have been vital to
the success of many campaigns, such as for women's suffrage and women's
admission into, and matriculation from, universities. Without the help and
support of men in positions of power, women would never have gained many
of their human rights in the areas of political involvement, education, legal
representation and healthcare.

For example, women were first admitted to Trinity College in 1904, in the last
year of George Salmon's provostship. He had opposed the idea for years,
but finally acquiesced when a majority of board members supported the
decision. It was men such as these board members who made women's
advancement possible.

Similarly, it was due to the support and work of men, as well as women, that
women's colleges were first set up in Oxford and Cambridge. Girton College
was established in Cambridge in 1869 in Cambridge and in 1897, Oxford
University followed suit and opened Lady Margaret Hall. Once women could
study, universities moved with more speed towards allowing them to
matriculate and appointing female professors.

Many individual men have been recognised as activists for women's rights,
such as William Godwin, who was Mary Wollstonecroft's husband. He gave
his daughter by Mary Wollstonecroft, Mary Shelley a superior education and
she went onto to part-found the genre of science-fiction with her grotesque
novel Frankenstein.
Another similar example of men's contribution to gender equality is the
White Ribbon Campaign, set up in 1991 in the wake of the cole
Polytechnique massacre, to galvanise men to end violence against women.
In many situations, it is the combination of determined women and the men
who stick up for them that has changed society's expectations of women.

Emma Watson is right to say that gender equality is everyone's issue. There
are two sides to every argument and if women are expected to behave one
way, men are under just as much pressure to act in another way. If women
must be fragile, then men must be strong and so on. I've taken this quote in
full from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All be Feminists, because it
perfectly explains the terrible effect of gender inequality on boys and men.

'We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them; we

stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very
narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and
we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of
fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability.
We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have
to be, in Nigerian speak, hard man!'

The HeforShe campaign recognises that gender inequality effects men and
boys just as much as girls and women. However, men may feel less inclined
to change the status quo, because it appears to benefit them by affording
them more opportunities and power.

Watson also attacks the mistaken idea that many people have of feminism
and that fact that is it widely viewed as man-hating and incompatible with
wearing make-up and high heels. However, feminism is a complicated
ideology with many different strands and it is a concept that has evolved
over time, changing as the issues facing women have changing and shaped
by previous struggles. There are as many different takes on feminism as
there are on, say, conservatism, and not even feminists agree on what they
support.

The HeforShe speech is a highly personal speech and although I can relate to
some of Watson's experiences, she is a very privileged woman whose acting
career attracted a great deal of media attention and made her rich while still
relatively young. In 2013, Emma Watson's net worth was $50 million, which
is rather more than most of us have at 22 years of age. Fortunately, she
doesn't allow this to distract her from the important things, namely that
women are still under-paid, under-valued and under-educated in most parts
of the world.

As well as the text of Emma Watson's speech, there is also her delivery to
consider. The speech received a standing ovation, but personally, I feel that
her slightly emotional delivery undermined her important message.
However, it detracts very little from an engaging speech that neatly sums up
a modern, progressive kind of feminism.