* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Jacquie Church Young is a professor in New York. She features in What do women's rights mean to you?, a multimedia production to mark the launch of TrustLaw Women.
What do women's rights mean to you?
"The battle for women’s rights is not over here. We tend to think it is, and one of the things that scares me the most having a daughter is whether she will just sit back and let things be as they are because they seem so much better, but they’re really not.
"We just have more in common than we have that separates us, and so if women around the world could bond together and support each other, I think that would be really helpful. We’ve got to keep educating our girls."
What rights do you think all women should have?
"I had the opportunity about 10 years ago to spend some time in India ... The women I talked to and met in small rural villages in India had some of the same concerns of women in small rural villages here in the U.S.
"We worry about whether our daughters will get a fair and equal education. We worry about rape and being sexually abused, being abused in general by the men in our lives.
"We worry that if there is a case of sexual violence in our workplace, will we be able to prove it and how will we be treated? Will we have the same equal opportunities that seem so obvious to us but really we’re still struggling to achieve?
"So talking to women in India just reminded me so much of how long we’ve come in the U.S. and how very far we have to go."
What is the most important right you wish you had in your country?
"When I think of women’s rights, I think of the legal and constitutional rights I’m given as a woman. The rights that I have that are protected that allow me to be equal to men and everyone in our society. So women’s rights for me are those legal protections that are there to allow for less gender discrimination.
"I wish that in every country women had all the rights that men do, that we have the right to education, to equal healthcare, and that as a whole we have all the same rights as humans.
"In theory in my country it is better than in many others, and I think that in reality it is, but we still have a hard time living up to the laws that are provided for us. We still have a hard time enacting those rights and making sure they’re guaranteed.
"I feel like in my country I have a lot of rights already. It may be hard sometimes to enforce the rights that I have.
"Discrimination has become more subtle over time and so it feels to me that even though I have rights, sometimes when those rights are contested it’s hard to prove that they’re being contested.
"The one area of life that I feel that there is major discrimination that isn’t acknowledged is in the area of healthcare. I wish that tests were done equally. I wish that medications and basic needs for women were provided in the same way that basic needs for men are provided and I don’t think that we have that yet.
"It’s almost harder in some ways when we have so many rights to acknowledge the subtle discrimination that still exists and the ways that women are still oppressed in our society that appears on the surface to be so equal.
"I think we still have a lot of struggles here, and the more I’ve travelled throughout the world, the more I feel like we’re not so different, us and people who are struggling for basic human rights, because even though we have them on the books we’re still not living up to them."
(Interview by Courtney Harvey)
