The Women’s movement has failed to appreciate its success. The feminists of yesteryear predicted that the women of today would embrace the rights hard won for them with open arms, leaving the kitchen in herds to challenge the so-called male world, beginning with its workforce. What they didn’t expect was for women to remain in the home and return to traditional care taking positions in society, rejecting the professional for the personal. What they missed was that included in the rights they earned for their daughters was the right to care for future daughters, the right to choose the traditional caretaker role of mother, wife and homemaker.

American women today have rights equal to their male counterparts. We are protected as full citizens under the Constitution of the United States of America. Furthermore, we have options within society born of these legal changes. It is these very options, and the women who opt out of a professional career for a personal one, that beg the question, for the militant feminists of our mother’s day, whether the women’s movement was successful at all.

The women’s movement did not fail: It succeeded in garnering equal rights (although equal pay has yet to be seen) for women in the United States and inspired comparable movements in other nations. The antipode to the feminist success is society’s (created of both men and women) dismal failure to recognize the burden placed upon the emancipated woman.

It is considered, incorrectly, “a man’s world” simply because certain societal expectations and biological realities make the world a much more challenging place for women. Women carry too great a burden, and often choose to accept this overwhelming burden. The laggard changes to male life across generations continue to impede not only women’s development outside the home, but also society’s transition to a balanced and truly equal life for all genders.

Traditionally, a man’s life is simpler than a woman’s. He is born, cared for, educated, raised to provide financially for his partner or family (if he chooses to have a partner and family) and then he dies. This process has remained relatively unchanged for centuries. The static male role’s foil is the dramatic change in women’s lives; from the conservative and traditional role as first daughter, then wife, and finally mother to the modern female life position of someone with almost too many choices and expectations.

As little girls we are told we can do anything. What we hear is: “you can do everything,” and do everything all at once.

As a consequence of new rights, women are expected to perform outside of the home in the workplace. Women can do it all – run the office and the home. Men are equally capable of care taking, however it is still not common that they take on the role, forcing their female partners to do so. (I hope that with our generation this continues to change.) You can be an educated woman, take on the male workplace and lead a company as CEO and have a family nestled securely into the perfect home with a happy and securely masculine male figure standing equally by our side. Many women are realizing that raising children and running a home is a profession unto itself, and giving up their position as CEO. Other women are forfeiting their position as mother, and sometimes also as wife, for their profession, because they appreciate that the years in which one builds a career are the same in which you raise your family.

The world is what we as women make of it: We have laws to protect us as well as an innate and necessary position in society to give us power. How we use this is up to us. The women’s movement has proven that whether men play along or not, society is moving towards a shared responsibility for children and the family.

Feminism today is not the ball-bashing, man-hating “ism” it once was. Modern feminism is humanism – the pursuit of equal rights and responsibilities for all people regardless of race, gender, sex, sexual preference, ethnicity or religion.

We have not lost the battles of the feminist movement; new battles have been forged by those we have won.

S.J. Port is a Collegian Columnist.