At this moment in time, American women take their independence and personal freedoms for granted. A realization that women around the world do not have life as well as American women has become more recognized; especially as we learn more about women in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Contact with women's rights subjects, including the Women's Suffrage movement and the equal rights movement, often only come from history or government classes for American women. How these events influenced the freedoms that American women have today comes from no more than a general understanding. Today, an American woman would give little thought about personal freedoms unless there was controversy about equal pay or job advancement in the work place. Thought has rarely been given to an earlier time when women around the world had little or no say in anything concerning their lives.
Throughout most of the world's history, social and political systems were of a patriarchal design. This meant that males were superior and had supremacy over females. First to their fathers or male family members, then to their husband and family, women have always been servants to men. From a man's point of view, a woman was obviously the deficient sex. The viewpoint was that women were naturally inadequate. Besides a weaker biological body, women were perceived to have difficulty with any kind of rational thought. The principle was that women were entirely incapable of investigating new concepts , generating original ideas, or evaluating innovative impressions about the world they lived in.
Profound things happened in the eighteenth century that changed the way a number of people viewed the world. Europe was the center of the world in the 1700' ...