Women originally had no rights in this country, and women were considered to be the property of men and not properly "people" the way men were. It was only in the 1850s that women gained the right to have visitation or custody of their children after divorce, and prior to that it was not even a question that the children would stay with the father and the mother would never see them again if he didn't allow it (and he typically didn't). We only gained the right to vote in 1920. We gained the right to have our own bank account in the 1960s - and the right to our own credit cards in 1974. It took until 1978 for the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to be passed, making the extremely common practice of forcing women out of the workplace as soon as they became pregnant illegal. Sexual harassment was not a crime until 1964. It was 1993 before the entire US agreed that women who were married could be raped by their husbands and that it should be a crime for them to do so. I could go on all day describing the rights that women have had to fight for and have only gotten within the last hundred or so years - rights that men have had for hundreds if not thousands of years. Is this not evidence of a systemic structure of oppression, the fact that women had to fight to be allowed even these most basic of rights such as the right not to be raped and to be able to determine for themselves whether or not they wanted to be stay at home parents or continue working? To own a bank account, to be free from sexual harassment? To vote?
To this day, women are consistently barred entry into most prestigious jobs and fields of study in favor of men, and despite being a little over 50% of the population, women hold less than 25% of government positions in the US. A woman has never been president, and we got our very first female vice president during this term. Women constitute less than 25% of judges. Of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, under 8% are female. Male doctors outnumber female doctors by a ratio of over 3:1. Women are consistently pushed out of male-dominated fields (think engineering, the hard sciences) by means of bullying and sexual harassment, which is almost never punished. Additionally, fields dominated by women are considered to be "lesser" than those dominated by men and command significantly less pay, respect and prestige; Fields that were dominated by women in the past that are now male-dominated (such as computer programming) see a vast increase in pay, respect and prestige once the women are pushed out by the men; Conversely, fields that were dominated by men that become female-dominated (think teaching, biology) see a vast decrease in pay, respect and prestige. Men in female-dominated fields (male teachers, nurses) are paid better than their female peers and are promoted more quickly. Whether in male or female dominated fields, the leaders in the field (managers, bosses, CEOs) all tend to be male. The pay gap still exists, with women making roughly 80% of what men make, regardless of what field they are in.
Women are still considered the default and primary parents in ways that seriously negatively effect them. For example, during covid shutdowns, over 800,000 women left the workforce in September 2020 alone. At the same time, men picked up jobs. Women were not only being laid off and fired at significantly higher rates than men, but also were vastly more likely to be pushed to quit their jobs in order to perform childcare and homeschooling duties when the schools and daycares shut down. Considering the ways in which the economic system punishes women who leave the workforce at any time and for any reason to do with having children, such as taking maternity leave or being a SAHM until the children begin school, this obviously has a seriously detrimental effect on the positions and future earnings of almost one million women that men do not suffer because men are not expected to give up their jobs to provide childcare when schools and daycares are not an option. Mothers are also more often the ones who have to take time off if the kids are sick, to attend school functions, etc. and schools are more likely to call the mother if they need a parent to come pick up a child or attend to a situation even if the mother is working full time and the father is not, all of which has a negative effect on the woman's career.
Additionally, women are discriminated against in medicine overall. Women are markedly less likely to be believed by doctors when they discuss their issues, more likely to be handwaved off, and more likely to have their pain and suffering dismissed as "mental illness". Women's pain is taken less seriously than men's pain, and they are less likely to be prescribed painkillers. Medicines and treatments are almost universally trialed only on men, which causes issues for women who have unexpected side effects. Obstetric violence - that is, the abuse of women who are in the process of giving birth - is rampant and goes completely unpunished. The maternal mortality rate in the US is among the highest in the developed world, largely due to lack of adequate care and (primarily male) doctors not believing women about their own symptoms and pain.
In the area of actual mental health issues... well, women used to literally be lobotomized if they failed to quietly and nicely perform their expected household duties, got upset if their husband raped them, and so on. Medically unnecessary electro-shock therapy, sexual assault as "treatment" (when doctors would use vibrators on unwilling women in order to "treat" their depression), etc. were also all used to torture women who did not fulfill their societal role with a smile. Women who are mentally ill are discriminated against within the system, even today, with things like performing expectations of femininity such as wearing makeup and shaving their legs being held as signs of how their mental health is doing, with women who refuse to shave or wear makeup reporting that their stays in in-patient care were lengthened and they were specifically told that the doctors did not believe they were getting better due solely to their refusal to perform femininity. Women still struggle to be taken seriously regarding their mental health issues.
Let's... not get into the plastic surgery industry and the way they prey on young women and girls (they have TikTok accounts now!) and "train" them seek out cosmetic surgeries that can leave them without sexual sensation, with painful nerve damage, etc. I would be here all week.
Rape is at epidemic levels pretty much everywhere in the world. Femicide - the targeted murder of women and girls - is epidemic all over the world. Trafficking, which primarily targets women and female children, is rampant all over the US and the world. In many countries, sex-selective abortion and the murder of female infants due to the perception that they are "worthless" and that male children are more valuable has led to a deficit of millions of women who should be alive today. Child marriage, which virtually always involves a female child and a male adult, is legal and happens in nearly all of the world, including in the US where, so long as the parents consent, children are legally permitted to be married off as young as twelve. Pornography is rampant and all of the most popular categories involve women being degraded, beaten and raped by men, including men pretending to be male relatives, and this is seen as socially acceptable.
Look at all of this - and there is more, there is so much more, I could go on for hours about this but I have food waiting - and tell me that the patriarchy doesn't exist, that there is no systemic structure of oppression. When women have had to fight for decades just to get the basic human rights that men have enjoyed for thousands of years. When women are still oppressed and discriminated against in virtually every area of society. When the rape of women (by men) is epidemic, and every man has hundreds of thousands of videos of women being degraded, beaten and raped by men accessible on his cellphone at all times. When women are still barred from accessing positions of power in practically every area and industry.
