Epistemology and Women's Rights

Lately I have been struggling to wrap my head around the meanings of our class readings. How does epistemology relate to the struggle for women's rights? What strikes me first is the fact that anything that we take as truth must always be taken into further consideration. Who determined this truth, how did they discover it, and why is this truth relevant are some of the questions that these readings tell us we must seek to answer before we can fully commit ourselves to these truths. These questions seem especially important to consider when we realize that many truths regarding the lives and circumstances of women are not knowledge that women themselves have come to agree on, but rather the knowledge of women has been determined by men who have tried to find and reinforce reasons for the otherness of women. In order to create a patriarchal society that keeps its women well within the confines of a birdcage, many truths have been created considering the abilities (or disabilities) of women, justified by both religion and science. I think that this is the kind of knowledge that must be reformed and reevaluated before it is accepted wholly as truth. The origins and reasons for knowledge create the subjective force behind truth and once we can understand that not every fact can be taken at face value, greater steps can be made in changing the way we think about knowledge and how we come to understand and accept this knowledge.