Among many other reasons, Meghan Markle is very well known for her efforts on bringing hope to communities that need help and for creating awareness when it comes to gender equality. She has helped to generate wider access to water in Rwanda, making things a little easier for the girls who used to walk miles every day to bring clean water for their families. She has met Indian activists to discuss the improvement of girls’ education; and also encouraged women to vote All of this in an attempt to convince people to do everything they can to elect to power a person that cares about the rights of those individuals, and to avoid voter suppression. Markle even told Gloria Steinem, during a conversation with the activist, about how important it was to her that Prince Harry called himself ‘’a feminist’’.
However, Meghan Markle’s views on equal rights between the sexes are not something that she only started understanding as an adult. Contrariwise, she seems like she already advocated for justice since she was only a child. All the way back in 1993, she was a participant on a social studies assignment that ended up being aired on the Nick News television show. 11-year-old Markle stood out as she pointed out how sexist some product commercials were back then. A specific one, that promoted a cleaning product for dishes, was fully directed towards women, while another one approached mothers as the only ones who were in charge of giving medication to their sick children. She was incredibly critical and outspoken on how problematic those clips were and said that ‘’moms’’ should not do everything, like washing plates and caring for their kids. She went as far as writing a letter in cursive to the corporation that released the dishwasher advertisement to request that they replace the word ‘’women’’ for ‘’people’’ – which they did. In her opinion, everyone should question companies with offensive positions and write to them, doing their part for a bigger change on how things were – and still are – viewed in our society. According to Markle, who spoke on this response during a UN Women’s Conference Speech, in 2015, that was the moment when she realized the magnitude of her actions.
Markle continues working, until this day, on flattening the giant inequality between men and women, being a voice and an advocate for feminine rights, and working in alignment with causes like the Genesis Women’s Shelter & Support, The Loveland Foundation, Women for Afghan Women, among many others. It is extremely interesting to see someone who used to be a senior member of the politically neutral British royal family stand up and support efforts on making the world a better place little by little, and her feminist attitudes as a child leave us thinking about how major it is to educate children on social problems.
