Ship of Fools: the trouble with International Women's Day

Thread: the trouble with International Women's Day Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by luvanddaisies (# 5761) on :

I've been seeing all these posts scroll by on my FB timeline today about International Women's Day*, and was listening to the radio as I woke up this morning.

I think that the idea is that I, being a woman, am supposed to feel empowered, affirmed, motivated, and maybe a little bit warm and fuzzy. I don't. I look at the stories and features popping up and realise that all the women featured in them are impressive. They've achieved something, whether that's a Nobel Prize or digging themselves of an addiction or conquering an illness or sacrificial charity work, or raising a family, or defying expectations and stereotypes or even just being cool and badass in some way.

I'm not any of those things. I'm nearer to forty than to thirty. I don't have an impressive career, or an other half or children. I'm not a success, and I'm neither cool nor badass. I've consistently not achieved whatever it is that I'm 'supposed' to have achieved, and I'm not someone who can say I'm comfortable in my own skin.

Don't get me wrong, some of the articles and profiles ans things I've read today have been really interesting, and I've found their subjects impressive and inspiring, but I can't identify with them, that's like a piece of toast aspiring to be a lion-tamer. All I share with those women is that I'm female. I live in a country where women's opportunities are relatively equivalent to those of men, I'm white, cis, and while I've never been rich, I've never known proper poverty or deprivation. I have no excuses, but I've achieved nothing. I'm happy to celebrate those impressive people and their achievements, but there appears to be an expectation that we females should all be able to identify with them in some sort of sisterhood sort of way, but I'm just not feeling it. I feel if I identify with them as some sort of global sorority that I'd diminish it by not having anything to contribute.

I know it's not the spirit I'm supposed to have approached it with, but it's where I'm at. Is it just me, or is anyone else feeling less inspired and more convicted?

*International Men's Day is in November, just in case someone feels like asking why there isn't one of those.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

I guess I can say this because this is All Saints. I have met you. You are cool and bad-ass. No question about it.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

I was talking with a friend from the Ukraine the other day, and she said that a lot of her friends are vetoing the day. Because it was a national holiday in the old Soviet Union, and the Ukraine (or, at least the parts of Ukraine not occupied by Russian troops) has been systematically shedding all traces of the Soviet era - in part as an act of defiance against Russian empire building that is quite literally tearing their nation apart with war in the east and the Crimea already annexed.

Posted by Yangtze (# 4965) on :

I agree with Le ROC, I think you're pretty cool.

But interesting point about whether women 'ought' to feel sisterhood with all other women.

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

To me, it's just too large and disparate a group to feel solidarity with. I mean, over half the world population. I can empathize with smaller groups, but a group that is held together by nothing but gender and species? I could only do that if there were some horrible opposition to contrast it to--and I'm sorry, but "human males" are occasionally horrible and too often in opposition, but not to the degree that would cause me to regard them as aliens and women as a solidarity bloc in contrast.

Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

From the About Page of the official website:

quote:
International Women's Day is a collective day of global celebration and a call for gender parity.

It isn't that all women are the same or that all will lead lives that garner world attention. Just that women are capable and should be allowed to perform how they might.
It is that women are no less than men.

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

I love International Women's day. For many years I would take my daughter out to lunch on March 8th; I miss doing that now that she's at University.

Isaac Newton said that if he had seen further it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Boys take those giants for granted. Girls grow up not knowing that female giants exist; they're not in the history books, they're not on the road signs, they are under represented in historical plaques. Edinburgh has more statues of animals than women; apart from Queen Victoria there are hardly any statues of women.

Women in history are like those "magic eye" pictures. They're there, but you have to squeeze your eyes and squint a bit to see them.

In my subject area, everyone "knows" that women in Victorian times couldn't pursue a professional career whilst married. Most people "know" that women in Victorian times didn't pursue careers. They "know" that women who studied, passed a college entrance exam, boarded away from home for two years at college then worked for a probationary year to qualify as a teacher, only did it as a "fall back" in case Plan A - Get Married didn't work out. Everyone knows that, right?

Hardly anyone knows that (in Scotland at least) the Marriage Bar was introduced after the First World War to create jobs for the men returning from the trenches. Or indeed that the emphasis on domestic subjects in girls' education came about post-Boer War when the poor state of health of many recruits meant that the Government decided that Something Must Be Done, and that something was less academic school subjects for girls and more domestic subjects, in the hope that they would raise healthier sons.

History in schools tends to teach that nothing happened in women's history except marriage and babies till - BAM - Mrs Pankhurst and the suffragettes appeared from nowhere. Actually, as graduates had two votes, many educated Victorian women thought that the principle of no votes for women would be ended as soon as women could graduate, and from there it would be a case of extending suffrage (a reasonable plan as there wasn't universal male suffrage at the time.)

Obviously, for most Victorian women, the lack of contraception did mean that life revolved around babies, but my academic area is Victorian career women and that's where my enthusiasm lies.

quote:
I can't identify with them, that's like a piece of toast aspiring to be a lion-tamer. All I share with those women is that I'm female.

Do men feel that way when they walk past Nelson's Column, or see the men on the banknotes, or the buildings named after great men, or even when they sit in history or philosophy classes? Or when they celebrate the saints days of mostly male saints? Perhaps they do. We are surrounded by commemoration of great men all the time - International Women's Day tries to put great / interesting women out there alongside with the men.

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

As a child and young teenager I very much wanted to be a boy. I'm not trans gender - I simply envied the boys.

To a large extent I still do, men in all walks of life seem to have choices which are (still) only available to a few women.

Until we can find a way for men to get pregnant and have babies it will always be so.

I do like hearing the inspiring stories on Women's day. But it shouldn't have to happen. Real equality would make such tokenism redundant.

Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :

Am I wrong to think that it implies that the other 364 are men's days?

Jengie

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Am I wrong to think that it implies that the other 364 are men's days?

366 will be men's days in 2016 - they all are and always have been.

I'm not bitter, just realistic.

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Am I wrong to think that it implies that the other 364 are men's days?

Jengie

International Men's Day is November 19th; that doesn't imply that the other 364 are women's days.

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

Originally posted by luvanddaisies:

quote:
I'm nearer to forty than to thirty. I don't have an impressive career, or an other half or children. I'm not a success, and I'm neither cool nor badass. I've consistently not achieved whatever it is that I'm 'supposed' to have achieved, and I'm not someone who can say I'm comfortable in my own skin.

I'm currently working on a project which has involved flicking through thousands of newspaper obituaries, and identifying and reading relevant female ones. The sheer variety and areas of human endeavour are astonishing. I've come across subheadings (both male) such as "The first man to grow broccoli commercially in Scotland" and "Maker of bespoke fly fishing reels"

What I have been heartened to find is the sheer number of women who achieved in later life. Some of these are women who simply kept buggering on; they've become involved in a charity and twenty or thirty years later they're giving evidence to a government committee, or they've been published after years of writing stories for their own amusement, or they've organised a community event which has mushroomed. I haven't been reading the male obituaries, so I can't compare and contrast, but many, many women who have ended up with fascinating obituaries don't seem to have been doing anything out of the ordinary at "nearer to forty than thirty."

I keep thinking that there's hope for me yet, and I am over fifty!

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

I'm a man working in what is called IT. If there is an area in which women are under-represented it must be IT and especially the more technical areas.

Worse still, I have been working in IT long enough to know that projects (especially) with a higher proportion of women are better to work on and at the very worst no less successful. Also, the proportion of women in IT change much in nearly thirty years except for some recent growth areas like business analysis. The only positive I have seen is an increase in the proportion of women in senior posts, but that could be an indication of the managerial and leadership ability of women vis-a-vis men in the IT profession.

It's all personal and therefore anecdata but I have worked in the UK and overseas and in the public and private sectors, practically everything except academia.

Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :

quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Am I wrong to think that it implies that the other 364 are men's days?

Jengie
International Men's Day is November 19th; that doesn't imply that the other 364 are women's days.

I was not aware there was an international men's day.

Jengie

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