A celibate American sect practised sex equality in its leadership for two centuries
In 1788 Joseph Meacham, head of the Shakers' central ministry, became convinced by a revelation that men and women stood on equal footing. He brought Lucy Wright in as his counterpart and paired every elder with an eldress and every deacon with a deaconess, a balanced structure the Shakers kept for more than 200 years.
The Shakers were an evangelical offshoot of a Quaker community in north-west England who emigrated to America in 1774. They lived strictly celibate lives with the sexes separated: men oversaw men and women oversaw women. No woman in their communities had to be controlled or owned by a man. After Meacham died in 1796, Wright led the ministry until her own death in 1821, and in 1859 Elder Frederick Evans boasted that the Shakers had been first to free woman from the vassalage other religions imposed.
The idea had much older champions. In her 1405 Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan argued that oppression of women rested on irrational prejudice and pointed to advances probably made by women. In wider Western society, the push began with late nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns for the vote and for elected office, along with changes to married women's property rights such as Britain's Married Women's Property Act 1882.
After the Second World War, feminism and the women's liberation movement drove international agreements, though not every country adopted them. A treaty tackling discrimination in schooling came first, in 1960. CEDAW, often described as an international bill of rights for women, was passed by the UN General Assembly in 1979 and took effect on 3 September 1981. As of 2017 gender equality was the fifth of the UN's seventeen sustainable development goals.
Definitions matter. UNICEF describes it as women, men, girls and boys enjoying the same rights, resources, opportunities and protections, without requiring that they be identical or treated exactly alike. Some writers mean equal opportunity, also called formal equality; others mean equal outcomes or representation, known as substantive equality. Parity, a measure of balance, can help reach the goal but is not the goal itself, and neutrality and equity are practices that serve it. The UNFPA notes women remain likelier than men to be poor and illiterate, with less access to property, credit and jobs.
Source: Gender equality
