Kaljang Sherpa

My mother Pelu Sherpa is a very strong person and there aren’t many things in the world that can put her down but one thing that has been pushing her back since the day she was born was her gender.

My mother is from Nepal but not the capital rather from a small village and unlike in New York, the traditions there are very different in Nepal. From a young age my mother wanted to have an education as parents would usually send their sons to school and keep their daughter home working in the field or doing house labor.  This was one of the greatest hardships she had faced as she understood the value of education at a young age when she was denied the opportunity.

Being a woman, she was also denied the choice of marriage as arranged marriages are very popular there and when arrangements were being made, she did not have many options. After coming to New York, she saw great opportunities as she would go to free classes to learn English whenever she would be free from work and she was gradually assimilating into America. After living in New York for three years, she was again attacked for her gender as when she was leaving a live-in-job as a housekeeper and babysitter. They refused to pay her for her month’s work she had done and had made sexist comments to her. They said, “You are a woman, there is no other job you can do”, and comments like these are something she had been hearing for a long time so she wanted to take action. She went to Adhikaar, an association that was created for immigrant women of color to understand inequality experienced by Nepali communities in New York. They were able to help obtain what was lost but she soon realized that she wasn’t the only one facing this as her female companions wer’re also going through the same things. She began to go to rallies and events held by Adhikaar to support others like her in the same predicament.

Kate Sheppard is known for her many accomplishments as she was the leader of the women’s suffrage movement in New Zealand, created the Women’s Temperance Union and helped women obtain the right to vote.

Kate Sheppard was born on March 10, 1847 in Liverpool, England and in 1869, she immigrated to New Zealand with her family. She married Walter Sheppard in 1871. At this time, she started joining the various social and religious organizations and helped found the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Soon after, she went on to become appointed the national superintendent of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and she used this position to help create great strides for women’s suffrage in New Zealand. Her motivation to improve the state of womanhood was so great that she began organizing different petitions and public meetings. As she grew more popular, she would develop ties with politicians and the media, which allowed her to spread her word. She even created pamphlets called Ten Reasons Why Women of New Zealand Should Vote and Should Women Vote?.

As her message was being noticed, she started supporting many other women rights such as the right to divorce, guardianship of children, the use of contraception, abolishment of corsets, and many more. She soon was able to obtain 30,000 signatures supporting the woman suffrage act and presented it to Parliament. As a result, she was able to successfully make New Zealand into the first country to establish universal suffrage, stating that adult citizens have the right to vote no matter the race, income, wealth, and ethnicity or any other factors.

Kate Sheppard’s actions in New Zealand made her a pioneer of the woman suffrage movement and paved the way for the future. Her accomplishments are forever remembered by New Zealand as they have replaced Queen Elizabeth II from the $10 bill with her.

In the world, there are many extraordinary people, two of them are Kate Sheppard and my mom, Pelu Sherpa. They have faced great difficulty and created great change in the world for their gender.

Through my research paper, I realized that in the world there are people with unlimited determination such as Kate Sheppard. I was astounded by her ability to continue pursuing her goals as she was not given her status on a platter but earned it by climbing up the ranks. Kate Sheppard created great change in the world and she started it in New Zealand, making it the first country to have universal suffrage. In a time when women were ridiculed for attempting to gain the right to vote she was able to stand up for them and be the people’s voice. She was able to lead the country towards change and her impact is remembered through women’s ability to vote and her face on the $10 bill.

My mother is someone who doesn’t give up easily as she doesn’t let her past hold her down. She was not given the opportunity of higher education because of her gender but the fire of wanting to learn has not died out. In most cases, when a cousin tells me their story of how they weren’t given an education, it lacks the spark of wanting one and they blame it on their parents and usually, they give up on education. To this day, my mother is always willing to learn new things and always wants to improve her English. She believes that education should be for all and that gender should not be something that separates whether someone goes to school or not.