Gender inequality exists as an import today as well as being part of our history.

Western societies import but fail to assimilate cultures very different to their own. It may be that women in highly patriarchal societies see subservience as loyal obedience and who has the right to suggest otherwise? The contentious issues surrounding full face-covering garments, likewise, create two main views: one that they are degrading, and the other that it is actually a freedom of choice. European countries tend to send quite different messages with their laws on this issue, some favoring and some banning them.

As voting is never affected significantly by such matters, clearly  the electorate sees no cause for concern.

Indeed, one could argue that things are getting better. The importation of cultures that see women as inferior to men is a comparatively recent phenomenon and yet, for decades, improved race relations in the West have been matched by gender equality now enshrined in law. Some tendencies and trends may be negative but, overall, perhaps gender equality is unassailable?

Since the Suffragettes chained themselves to railings to get the vote, women have stood up for themselves. They have moved into the workplace, headed businesses, joined the military and run for the White House. In the second half of the twentieth century it seemed that women could only ever go from strength to strength, always equal to, and often superior to, men.

Of course men are larger and faster, generally, so sporting events match opponents by gender. This is hardly sexist, though, and no different to the matching of same gender fighters by weight-class. Besides, in almost every other area than physical sports and manual labor, women can do everything men can do whilst men, it has to be said, are unable to give birth.

Women are clearly superior in this respect.

In modern society, unless a culture is dominated by ultra-conservative religious imperatives and traditions that insist on keeping women firmly repressed and contained, many women have greater equality than ever before. Although single mothers now are an accepted norm in Western society, often able to work and support the nuclear family unit without recourse to husbands, historically the opposite was true.

In the preindustrial agrarian society, families were vital to community and social stability, according to Functionalists. Marxists and Feminists disagree, but the consensus model is still compelling. The role of the woman was vital.

The imperative in a more basic society was to survive. In a harsher and more demanding medieval world, co-operation outweighed personal rights. A man would hunt, farm and fight and a woman would deal with children, prepare food, mend, and probably still find time to engage in arduous labor in cottage industries to supplement the income of the family. This was commendable and suggests great strength of character.

In those long gone days when the strong would survive and the weak would die, patriarchal religions encouraged monogamy and fidelity to strengthen both the family and society through marriage. Leadership was expected from the husband as the head of the household.

Although the Functionalists saw this as a wonderful arrangement, Marxist thinkers did not, preferring to believe that wives were exploited by husbands to do domestic service for no wages. Feminists agreed that such roles were not enough for women and that men were unfairly controlling.

Perhaps both sides had valid arguments but, wherever one stands on these questions, the fact is that today women have gained an equal footing with men. There are surely exceptions where the letter of the law is not properly followed and that is surely wrong.

For the most part, women have achieved the equality status they always richly deserved.

Hopefully, no forces of religious fundamentalism and intolerance will negate this progress. Let the fantastic gains made by women in the last century never be wound back to where they were over a thousand years ago.

May the feisty feminists who did such a wonderful job of empowering women in the twentieth century not be cheated of their hard-earned legacy by another bunch of patriarchal men in the twenty first.