Street Harassment: Women and the Dangers of Public Spaces

Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? If we are dealt a set of experiences and characteristics shaped by our formative childhood years, are our adult choices not a series of actions pre-determined by those characteristics or influenced by them in some way?

The problems arise when actions affects other people - and societal norms demand laws and social conduct that respects and protects the safety, both physical and mental, of each of its citizens. So although we may have impulses, desires and thoughts that would lead us to act in aggressive manners, for the social cohesion and growth, we cannot allow those actions to run amuck. Except, it seems, when it comes to violence against women. Half of Canadian women will report being physically or sexually abused after the age of 16. On average, every six days a woman is murdered by her partner. Yearly, 40 000 arrests are made due to domestic violence, about 12% of all violent crime - but since only 22% of incidents are reported - the cases of abuse are much higher.

A Woman's Education, A Woman's Body

Education, being a historically male privilege, had its bouts of serving women's fortunes: the 1500-1600's in Europe were a fruitful time for women, where the renaissance meant women could seize different powers in the forms of knowledge of the arts and sciences, literature and politics. The era brought with it a great many female rulers and a decline in mass violence, where kingdoms sought reforms of justice and increased education as higher goals. In this time, it was written, in The Instruction of a Christian Woman by Juan Vives in 1520:

"But she shall leave all such light and trifling pleasures, wherein the light fantasies of maids have delight, as songs, dances and other such wanton and peevish plays. A woman, saith Plutarch, given unto learning, will never delight in dancing. 

But here peradventure a man would ask, what learning a woman should be set unto, and what she shall study? I have told you: the study of wisdom, the which doth instruct their manners and inform their living, and teacheth them the way of good and holy life. As for eloquence, I have no great care, nor a woman needith it not, but she needeth goodness and wisdom.”

The 1600's in Western Europe saw the downfall of women's education and women's rule: violence accrued and royalty pushed their troops into battle. Military leaders were now only male, and as women were forced out of the public realms that previous education had enabled them access, they were now seen as unfit to rule over wars - quite the opposite of the previous century's powerful commanders including Mary Queen of Scots or Catherine de' Medici.

Reflecting on the degradation of female royalty in this era, it was Mary Wollstonecraft that wrote, in 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women: 

"Women are in this deplorable state everywhere, because truth is hidden from them so as to preserve their ‘innocence’ (the polite name for ignorance), and they are made to take on an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around in its gilt cage it only seeks to adorn its prison.