I'm 47 and there's no doubt that the feminist movement has had a great impact on my life, from the time at age 16 when I decided to leave the Catholic Church because I had lived next door to a United Church deaconess (who later became that church's moderator) and couldn't figure out why women in my Catholic setup weren't allowed such positions of authority - to the many times I've accessed women's organizations where I found camaraderie, help and a sense of purpose that hadn't even existed (much, if at all) for women who had come before me.
(And no, I didn't join the United Church. I was a free-range agnostic for many years and am now an equally free-range atheist buddhist because those philosophies suit what I believe about life.)
After all of these years, I still very much lament that women are still so extremely oppressed around the world. We in western societies certainly have "come a long way, baby" but even in our so-called enlightened societies, too many women struggle in their second-class citizen situations and too many people (male and female) seem to think that the amount of progress we have made is good enough. It's not.
So, in my regularly melancholy way of looking at the glass as still being half-empty, that's what's been on my mind today. I should also add that I echo some the overall sentiment of what Zoe Williams wrote in The Guardian on Wednesday in her editorial, 'This is Idiocy, not feminism'. I'm not a complete party-pooper but the serious message she imparts is definitely one I agree with.
She's terse. Me? Not so much.
What is not relevant is fun-packed dancing from around the world, spice workshops and fashion shows. Fashion is to international women's rights as Agassi kitchen utensils are to gay rights. Yes, some women are interested in fashion; some gay men own more than one brightly coloured fish slice. But it is an outrage against people who take liberties seriously - who embody the core of feminism by interpreting it as a war that hasn't been won until it's been won for all women - to trivialise these matters.
It could not matter less if yoga is good for you, or women have a connection with the moon, or there's some very interesting storytelling going on in Ayr. What matters enormously is the impact on the enterprise as a whole when it expands to cover animals in art. It's this kind of hijacking of meaningful collective action that did for the women's movement in the first place, that made today's young women think you could believe in equal pay as a regular person, but as soon as you called yourself a feminist you had to stop shaving your legs and start eating pulses. Tell stories and dance as much as you will - but not on International Women's Day. Make your own day of celebrations. Call it Gullible Idiots Unite. Have it in April.
I don't think that women who choose to celebrate these things in those ways are "gullible idiots", but I do see her point. The idea is to celebrate being a woman by hopefully balancing that with the fact that there still really is a war on feminism going on - a war on equal rights for women. And we still need to rally our energies to fight back - hard. We've only just begun to see the promise of progress on that front and we have so many sisters who suffer so much in such dire circumstances around the world who need our help. We have a duty to do what we can for all of them too.
Related: I recently made a list of some of Canada's "smart" female bloggers. Take some time to visit some of them today if you can. "Smartness" is measured in many different ways. An update as well - I'm still working on putting The Eggroll together - a blogroll for Canadian female bloggers. I haven't forgotten about it. I'm just a bit slow at getting things done sometimes. Thanks for being patient with me.
Also related: 5 Things Feminism Has Done For Me
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