A Day for Women

Yesterday was International Women’s Day. I never miss it, because it’s also my brother’s birthday. But this year I couldn’t have missed it anyway - it seems there were countless blogs and news articles touting the occasion!

Honestly, I didn’t read any of them carefully. I couldn’t be bothered, and they all started to blend together in my glazed eyes after a while.

But the headlines and comments that stood out to me, were those that questioned whether we need such a day at all. Shouldn’t every day be women’s day? Does the Day do anything to really help the status of women in the world? Or is it possible it somehow makes things worse?

As for my personal views on International Women’s Day, after spending many years studying women’s issues in countries famous for having serious women’s issues, and after spending many more years trying to help the cause of women in culturally sensitive ways… well, I’ve pretty much concluded that us women just live in our own world. In Anthropology, they talk about the ‘public sphere’ and the ‘private sphere’. The public sphere is the what everyone sees… it’s the world that’s shared across groups and it’s where open discussions are held. The private sphere is the hidden world, that realm of things that is too precious to put out there for everyone to see. This idea always helped me to understand what was going on with women in the Middle East: men live in the public sphere and women live in the private sphere. Men are not inherently worth more than women, or necessarily treated better than women. It’s just that what men say is out there for everyone to hear, and what men do is everyone’s business. In some ways, this makes life better for women, who don’t have to deal with as much of the pressures of hard work, tight schedules, crime and politics. Women live in the private sphere, where the rules are different. Not worse, not better, just different. So, for example, when working on women’s empowerment, I looked more at home-based woman-to-woman mentoring programmes, than projects to help women in the business world. Not that women in business is bad, it’s just culturally different.

In other parts of the world, the public-private paradigm doesn’t work so well, but still, I think that there is a difference between the genders. It’s not one’s better and one’s worse, it’s just different. It’s not universal - I’m sure we all know girls who like hanging out with the guys and guys who like hanging out with the girls, and I know we all like variety in our lives too - but it’s there.

And so, International Women’s Day… I don’t know if we need it. Because the men’s world is better-known, I think there is some credence to the saying that every other day is Men’s Day, and so a Women’s Day is rightly justified. On the other hand, us women don’t have it all that bad. Yeah, many women suffer a great deal in this world, but there are some great things about being a woman, too.

Well, them’s my random thoughts which probably don’t make sense. Did you celebrate IWD?

This entry was posted in women and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.