Ain’t I a Woman?

Today, the 8th of March, women and men across the world celebrate women’s rights or are protesting against sex inequality. In most of the western world, women have equal rights to men and in these times we women can do many things our great-grandmothers could only dream of. Yet, here we are in the MeToo era calling for safe spaces and claiming that rape culture is omnipresent. At the same time, we don’t seem to concern ourselves with the struggles of women in the developing world. We don’t even have the balls to call out misogynist practices such as female genital mutilation (FMG), forced marriages and honour killings in our own so-called liberal countries. Transgender and gender non-binary activism are turning the concepts of gender and womanhood on their heads. So what are we to do with International Women’s Day in the 21st century?

How an International Ladies’ Day came about

 International Women’s Day was born at the International Socialist Women’s conference of 1910 held in Copenhagen, Denmark. At this conference, Clara Zetkin, head of the Women’s Office for the German Social Democratic Party at the time, made a proposal for a yearly International Women’s Day. This proposal was unanimously accepted and the next year on the 19th March the first International Women’s Day was observed in a few European countries. In 1913 the Day was moved to 8 March and International Women’s Day has been honoured on this date every since and is now celebrated across the world. More than a century later, many of us have reached the mountaintop of sex equality, yet we don’t seem able to appreciate the view. Instead, some women take on a cloak of victimhood and battle for the gold medal in the Oppression Olympics.

 MeToo and Toxic Feminity

This year’s International Women’s Day comes two weeks after the conviction of Harvey Weinstein. The disgraced movie mogul has sexually harassed and raped hundreds of women for decades and has been able to get away way with it for so long due to the power he yielded. Although his conviction is a big deal, Harvey is just one man. One man of thousands who abuse their power and sexually assault women, men, and children. Plenty of people claim the MeToo movement has gone too far. Whatever side-effects it might have produced, this medicine was highly necessary. The question is now how we can use this activism to create a society in which perpetrators of sexual assault are immediately held to account, not just in Hollywood but also in far less glamorous workplaces. While we need to be able to call out men when their conduct is inappropriate, we also need to talk about our own behaviour. Toxic femininity is an issue that is rarely raised yet needs to be addressed.

 What is Womanhood?

As transgenderism, gender fluidity and gender non-binary have become hot topics on the media agenda in recent years, defining sex and gender, and as a result, womanhood, has become a true minefield.  Are sex and gender just based on your genitals and secondary sex characteristic, on the way the outside world perceives you, or just on what you feel your gender is? What does believing you are a woman while you are a biological male feel like? And how can you know what it feels like to be a woman as a biological male when you have never experienced life as a girl or went through female puberty? Is womanhood like life: just what you make of it? There are millions of different female experiences determined by culture, class, race and sexual orientation and, apparently, even biological sex. Yet, there are certain experiences that almost all women share and perhaps in that lies the essence of womanhood.

 Seize the Day

International Women’s Day is a reason for celebration, commemoration or protest.  Whether you are female or male, pro-MeToo ar anti, gender-bending or not, let this day be a reason to express your love and admiration for the women in your life. Today you can honour the achievements of great women from history and the present day. Today you can express your solidarity with all women in the world. Whatever you do; happy International Women’s Day.

image: Indianexpress.com