Okay, so, like, I am a huge advocate of people having control over their own rights and stuff. Like, if you want to go ahead and buy those knee-long Converse(although I will judge you forever), you totally should. It’s your right. If you want to abort your baby, it’s your right. If you want to marry the person YOU love, but religion says no: civil marriage all the way baby. Plus, if you’re Muslim, civil marriage respects your RIGHTS and splits everything up 50-50. I am huge on rights. And, like, if it weren’t for WW1 you could say none of our rights would be present or anything, which would be, like… really not cool.
Basically, WW1 was like a super huge war and so like naturally that had a huge effect on the economy of almost all the European countries. Like, because the war was so crazy, people had to use a lot of their money and waste it on weapons and stuff. And so all the countries that had been previously doing pretty well and stuff, that all changed ‘cause they were totally broke. Everybody had used loans and borrowed money and stuff and after WW1 they had to pay them back and that was super hard. This was especially hard for Germany, because the Versailles Treaty made her pay for all kinds of stuff, and she was totally struggling to recover. Everyone was in debt and it was not good, so people just started printing more money, which was only effective temporarily, causing difficulties and issues later. The only country that was like totally okay was America, and she had previously helped a lot of the European countries before actually involving herself in the war. So they all kind of owed her, giving her the greatest economic power between them and being the only truly capable, strong one in this period. So, countries that had previously been known as the strongest economic powers like France had lost their position as this and instead the US started to become the strongest power. As such, she started to gain the highly regarded position she still claims in economics. She stopped being an unimportant country and became one of the strongest economic powers, which was huge for the future of the world, and for America as well of course.
But all of these changes in economy are the reasons that rights started coming in. Once you’re unhappy with the state of your economy, you need to step it up, you know? It’s like when my parents were always giving me an allowance of 50 LL a week and I was like, totally struggling. I regularly had to borrow cash from friends and pay them back because I’d find myself a couple thou short, and it was awkward and embarrassing. And so I was like, okay guys, where are my rights as your daughter, you know? And so that’s what happened with women in WW1 too. As daughters of these countries who had experiences hardships due to economy, they stepped it up and started changing things. A ridiculous amount of people had died in this war, so much that they call the generation of that time “the lost generation”. And this had left so many dependants, which were people who depended on men and were in need of help. They had to be supported through pensions, causing more economic problems for the country. Countries needed better economies, and women wanted to help in that- and if they entered the workforce, they could feed their families too. So women entered the workforce. They helped greatly in strengthening economies, and so people started to respect them more in society, as opposed to just in economy. It’s like me, after my parents had taken my allowance issue into consideration and seen how helpful I could be and productive if they gave me more rights, they started to respect my ideas and opinions a lot more. They would consider my arguments and ideas, and that’s what happened in WW1 too. People started listening to women, improving their rights and eventually giving them the right to vote. Equality began between man and women, and it was thanks to WW1. And this wasn’t just women, but everybody started to have more rights- like trade unions and workers started to fight to get what they deserved for the work they had done in the war, and they did. This changed their social position as well as their economic.
So, like, rights are super duper important to me. But I might never even know what it feels like to have rights and improve them or maintain them if it weren’t for WW1 cause, as a woman, I might not have even had any if not for the social and economic changes that resulted from WW1. Everything changed after those, and arguably for the better- at least from a woman’s point of view.
No comments:
Post a Comment