23 Ways Feminists Have Made the World Better for Women [View all]

1. They quietly propelled the civil rights movement.

Everyone knows about Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but most Americans don't know about the other women involved in organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

In her book, At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle McGuire recounts the many women who copied and distributed fliers, effectively leading the boycott, not only to protest segregation but to fight back against sexual assault. That fight, against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men in the South, had begun generations before Parks, who is rarely granted credit for the breadth and depth of the feminist work she did.

2. They made Americans get serious about gender discrimination.

The Equal Rights Amendment, first written by Alice Paul in 1923, read, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

Proposed as a constitutional amendment that would guarantee all women have equal rights under the U.S. Constitution, the ERA failed to be ratified in dramatic fashion in the late 1970s.

However, the fight to get the ERA passed signaled a monumental shift in American society and sparked a new debate about the role of women and how they should be treated, pushing many states to draft their own gender discrimination laws.

Much More: http://www.policymic.com/articles/87809/23-ways-feminists-have-made-the-world-better-for-women

Lots of great examples here of the many, many positive results of the efforts of feminists.

Of course, we still have a lot of work to do....