Don’t get me wrong, I know better than anyone that men appreciate women. But their appreciation rarely extends past the tops of the knees. Women hungered for men to see them in a different light, one of competency, intelligence and rivals in the workplace.
It was in the early 1960’s when women in the United States began recognizing that they could work outside the home. Not feeling pressure to adhere to the way it has always been, women began stepping out on their own into jobs of a clerical, supportive nature and succeeded. This lead to the women’s liberation movement in which women began to reject the stereotypical roles their mothers embraced and headed out into the man’s world of work and wages!
Men were not enthusiastic about women entering the workplace in those roles other than supportive…after all, isn’t that what women were for, the support the men, the supremacists, the more intelligent forms of life? As these lowly women were forced to take on more and more responsibilities within a company to “support” the men, they realized that they themselves were doing the men’s jobs and still getting paid women’s wages. This did not sit well with women who not only worked outside the home, but maintained the grocery list, washed the laundry, cooked the food, managed the finances, supervised the homework and played taxi cab driver for the family and its dog. Managing all of these things on a daily basis made a women pretty efficient in the workplace where there were multiple tasks that needed to be accomplished simultaneously. Meeting deadlines and answering phones were the mere beginnings of woman as a supreme group of individuals.
Women decided that they were the intelligent ones, the supremacy group. Women were the ones with the brains and the heart to take on all that they had on their proverbial plates and still succeed in the work place…and they wanted to be compensated accordingly!
Today, gender does not necessarily determine your salary, although there are still many hurdles yet to be crossed. Supremacy as a concept has not lost its fire, either. There are many groups of individuals that, for one reason or another, feel that they are most superior to another group. This power must be shown and submission must be obtained in these orders.
Supremacy groups have come to the forefront since the dawning of the age of Martin Luther King. Today, we celebrate his birth, his life and his death. Hopefully more will come to the realization that Martin Luther King’s birth was a planned, important even in American History and that Supremacy, whether superior to a group of people or ideas, comes at a cost…and sometimes that cost is one’s life.