Gender, Ethnicity, and Class

Equality — racial, sexual, religious, and social — is a fairly recent ideal in the western world, and is still far from being worldwide. A.O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being explains how a hierarchy, with God at the top and gradations below, seemed logical before modern science began raising doubts about the activities, let alone the existence, of God. Thoughts of equality as a realizable ideal began with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. As Marlene LeGates says, references to “reason, nature, and equality began to replace reliance on Christian and classical authorities.” ¹ However, Jefferson’s words, “all men are created equal” were revolutionary. The majority of people in 1776 did not believe that all men were created equal, since the world around them showed otherwise.