Women agonized over the years of being inferior in society and often experienced gender inequality in many fields. Even in the smallest unit of society, which is the family, women are often treated as inessential and insignificant. They are seen as incapable of extravagant things; that is why some do not have the freedom to join the army as their family members believe they could not handle the challenge. In other words, most women are deprived of the liberty to reach their total power simply because they are women. Even in politics, some women in the position often go through rejection and voicelessness as their ideas are treated as a joke. Most people believe that women in politics are less strong and incompetent.
However, women's opinions in politics will somehow change once you hear these female leaders who have influenced their own country. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia, was banned from politics for thirty years but eventually ran into the position of presidency and won in 2006 and re-elected in 2011. On top of that, she won a Nobel prize together with Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman for their "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
Another inspiring woman that genuinely breaks the gender disparity is the State Counsellor of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, who led a peaceful movement for human rights and democracy. Even though she was under house arrest for fifteen years, causing her to limit communication with the outside world, she still received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and was released from house arrest in 2010.
Carl Anderson, the author of The Beast in the Theatre of Marina Carr, implicates the same thought regarding women empowerment. According to him, "This text dwells into womanhood and woman as an outsider, and that was clear for me, I wanted the beast connotation to metaphorically describe a female existence that cut down our traditional view on a woman as a princess, white and innocent." The novel correlated with Jacques Derrida's perspective about how humans should engage with different types of beasts. In other words, women and men do not have the same stand in life. Both of them are allowed to express fear, strength, and weaknesses in life regardless of gender. The book will serve as enlightenment about how we view people based on their gender, particularly women. Like the mentioned female political leaders above, we should never stop ourselves from reaching our power. Through this book, we will be able to acquire confidence and strength that somewhere along with rejections, we can still achieve the ends of ourselves regardless of our sex.
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