The show I decided to watch is called Cable Girls, it is a Netflix series that currently has 5 seasons. It’s actually a Spanish show that gets translated into English, and it takes place in the 1920’s in Spain. During this period of time, Spain has just gotten their first national telephone company in Madrid. The main characters are the telephone operators, or known as the “cable girls,” who are four young women who get jobs at this company, but it becomes more than just work. It depicts a progression that’s being made during a time where women are starting to gain more equality with men. Throughout the entirety of the show, these women continue to break barriers and go against the norm of a what a “lady” should be or act like. For example, one of the characters Carlota falls in love with a woman named Angeles, who happens to be her manager, while she’s still in a relationship with a man named Miguel, which then proceeds to be an open relationship between all three of them. In order to continue her relationships, she defies her parents and moves out of her home and comfort and breaks societal rules to pursue her life the way she chooses it to be. Carlota and her partner Angeles continue to receive scrutiny from outsiders and get shamed for their love, but they continue to persevere, while also having the support of Carlota’s boyfriend Miguel, which was the shocking part of it all. As the show goes on, Angeles comes to the realization that she wants to go through a gender transformation which was also a very foreign concept during this time period. After much research, Angeles finds a hospital that was known to have done these transformations before, but after arriving there she was shocked to see that it was church members in disguise and they held her captive thinking they could “cure” her from wanting to change genders. This show relates to our class in the sense that it shows the difficulties women had to and still go through to justify their choices and their desires/aspirations. It also gives a look into how far we have come as a society now, but yet not too far because there are still people who judge and think the way the characters did back in the 1920’s. Women have the right to do whatever they please with their bodies, and who they choose to love or be attracted to. The show just goes to show that if not a specific person, that there were always situations that tried to control women from doing what they really want to do.

I am interested in exploring issues of the women’s rights movements and the search for equal opportunities and rights as they are related to women, gender, and sexuality studies, especially the work of Gloria Steinem who focused on equal opportunities in work and education during the time period of the 1970’s.

Feminism means to work towards achieving gender equality. To believe that everyone is born equal, despite race or sexuality. Feminism is about working against the systems that are built to keep certain groups of people oppressed. It includes a fight for acknowledging how race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic statuses affect feminism. It allows people to look at how things not in a way of how it is, but how the world can be.