Rights—many think of them as something everyone is entitled to since birth. But often we see these rights favor people depending on their sex, race, religion or sexuality. This piece focused on the areas in which women lack some of the rights that their male counterparts receive, where men have certain areas of privilege. The two events, the ERA movement versus today’s wage gap protests were the inspiration for this piece, seeing how the both of them look strangely similar to one another, considering that they are both protests for areas in which women have been short-changed of these rights. Based on the similarity of these two events, the artists, Kaylee Flagg, Jason Gilmore and Charles Keller, feel that American needs to continue to support the closing of the wage gap and male privilege.

            The ERA movement was a series of women’s protests all over the United States. Its goal was simply for women to be deemed equal to men in the Constitution. Despite all of the protests and coverage, the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified. And then in present day, you see similar events. Wage gap protests struggle to bring to awareness the injustice in male privilege in the workplace, specifically the pay check. These two things, being decades apart, are still very similar in the sense that women are still being treated as less than men.

Both the ERA movement and the wage gap protests involved a lot of rallying in the streets. Protests were the biggest thing with these movements, even being quite a few years apart, the message was the same. Women should be deemed equally both legally and socially. Since the start of the ERA movement, women have gained the right to vote, more positions in congress, along with more representation in government. But the wage gap between females and males in the United States is still there. It is inherently unfair for men to be paid more for the same work as women. On average, women make 71% of what men earn. Without the closing of the wage gap, where men and women earn the same money for the same work, sex injustice will continue to go without punishment. With awareness, recognizing that the world needs feminists, people can gradually help demolish the wage gap.

The silhouettes are a way of making the viewer look at the piece and think, rather than regard it as something to “look nice”. It is meant to highlight how very similar these issues are without the details of the time. Silhouettes are created by drawing the outline, and cutting it out onto black paper using xacto knives and a cutting board. We first started out by looking at common images between these two events, and then gradually planned out sketches of our idea of what the event should look like.  In this piece, scale was used in order to emphasize the people in the middle, by making them larger. The two women in the center are meant to symbolize the women fighting for equality in the past and present. In the works, we used positive and negative space to add an extra element, balancing the white with the black values. Anything that crossed through was inverted.

The mentality towards women in the United State needs to improve. Women need to stop being seen as subordinate to men, when there are so many reasons, moral and scientific, proving that females and males are equal. The more we continue to let this go on, the more damage will subsequently done to the future generations of women.