Today is International Women’s Day! It always strikes me as a little strange we actually have to have an IWD in 2021 – as women make up half the planet’s population! But we do.
This year’s theme is “Choose to Challenge.”
Alongside racism and financial inequality, the basic inequality between men and women is something we must challenge and fight. Here in Canada things are changing slowly, so it’s easy to forget that in most parts of the world, things aren’t changing at all. When I visited India in 2020 (making it home just before the first COVID-19 lockdown), I saw women walking vast distances to get fresh water each day. Doing menial work is still the only role of women in many societies. I learned that many of those women I saw were probably given in arranged marriages at a young age.
It irks me that, meanwhile, so many democracies “agree” on the surface that one of the foundational ways to improve society is to empower women, but…
From my outsider eyes, many women don’t seem to have very much choice in their lives. And it’s not happening in only faraway societies right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has done a lot of damage to women’s liberation all over the world. Some girls are kept out of school even when schools have reopened. Some adult women must leave jobs to stay at home to take care of children, endangering their career trajectories. Others work from home while taking care of children with very little practical or emotional support.
It’s hard to address these kinds of issues, and not feel like anything I say is a cliche… simply because we have been saying these things over and over. It’s so hard to change a system that’s been in place for centuries.
MY sense is that for real change to happen, men have to really understand that it’s in their best interest to have women be equal. However, it seems apparent that in many conservative societies, many men don’t believe this. Women and their allies have to push uphill, fighting and yelling and celebrating the women who’ve achieved all sorts of things. But some men just don’t see what’s in it for them, while some actively work against gender equality.
I think in some of the West, this idea is starting to take hold: If you give women more equality, it affects the demands on men and redefines the oppressive demands of traditional masculinity.
In Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, we see that men are so often terrified of failure, and they shut down because of this fear. As they try to uphold this image of being in charge and ultra-competent, it is harder for them to thrive and be fully functional in their lives. If a man really accepts female equality, he learns that he doesn’t have to carry that burden of being responsible for making the world turn because women can carry their share, too.
How do we help men understand that having an empowered woman partner beside them, helping them to run a country or a business, can only be a good thing? At the end the many EFT sessions, the couples we see end up more equal because they have both learned to ask for help, for what they need. These couples step out from power conflicts into real connection, and they both grow.
If only we could use these ideas as a basis for general education, perhaps we’d see more collaborative, open, trusting people who are willing to share power.
It’s interesting to think about how I “live” feminism in the here and now of everday life.
There are a lot of situations where my feminist values pop up:
- When someone in my world (not often) or in my classes (sometimes) asks me something subtly sexist. I say, “That’s a very interesting question. I wonder if you’d be asking a male presenter the same question in the same way?” I definitely know when I’m not being seen or treated in the same way as a male counterpart would be. This has always happened and it has not changed. So I try to comment on the process.
- Sometimes I have a conflict in my head when I’m dealing with people who ask things of me. If you’re an author and presenter like me, you get people asking to publish your work or speak at events. One part of me says, “Oh, thank you so much for looking at my work, and I’ll be glad to do whatever it takes to help you.” But I know my husband would never say that. He might say, “I’m not sure I want to do what you have offered. Here are my conditions/needs if you want to work with me.” When I find myself acting like a “traditional” female and I catch myself, I try then to take a more entitled, assertive stance.
- When someone talks to me, sometimes it’s pretty apparent that they see me only as an older woman of little consequence. I know when I am not seen! So I try to take a deep breath and tell myself to ask for an explanation of the services that I’m paying for, or ask for elaboration of a patronizing response. I try in my response to relay this message: “No, don’t you dismiss me because I’m older and I’m female.” I stand up for my own personhood and for that of my sisters.
- I once read about a study that suggested women make better pilots because they are calmer in crisis situations. But I felt myself, a self-declared feminist, discombobulated when I saw the pilot of an upcoming flight walking past the waiting area and onto the plane. She looked fabulous, a lean figure with blond hair flowing down her back. I actually caught myself thinking, “Really? Can she look like that and fly well?” And I shook my head AT MYSELF because I can’t believe I actually thought that. I try to self-correct my own internalized outdated concepts about women’s roles or abilities.
- When I hear of an initiative to protect or support women, I do what I can. I send out a petition to ask the Canadian Government to regulate the porn industry’s exploitation of children and showing of violent abusive videos where women are hurt and demeaned, to every colleague and friend to ask for their signature. And today, I encourage my friends and followers to join me in contributing to Plan International, a non-profit organization that actively sends money to girls in different societies so they can go to school.
Challenging gender inequality and sexism is important. But I would say that celebrating successful women is equally important. If you don’t show little girls and young women what women can be, everything else is a waste of time. How can a girl aspire to something that she’s never seen, something she didn’t know was possible?
If all a girl has ever seen is her mother not being allowed to work outside the home, and if all a girl has heard is that she will be married at a very young age… Maybe the internet is changing the image of women in oppressive situations. But it’s important to show young girls that there are women who lead (very well, I might add) and women who are successful.
There is a great video on female leadership that I try to share with everyone:
This is one more way that I know how to live my feminist values as a regular, middle-class Canadian. I’m quite conscious of this whenever I talk to my granddaughter:
Me: What do you want to do when you are grown up?
She: I just want to read books!
Me: That’s fantastic. Well, I want to know, what do you want to learn – how might you spend your time?
She: I read this story about a lady who’s a deep sea scientist. Maybe that!
Me: Oh wow, you’d be great at that! That is a wonderful idea! You could help take care of our oceans!
I take any future image she has of being a powerful, competent expert person with a big full life, and I expand on it and push it into the sky for her.
She: What do you do?
Me: Nana writes books, and Nana teaches people all over the world.
She: Is that fun? Could I do that maybe?
Me: Oh, yes, sweetie. And of course you could, too.
As much as I can, I say to her, “You can lead; you can contribute; you have something positive and precious to do in this world.”