Tokenism wasn’t worth celebrating
IS it just me or are there other women out there who don’t really give a toss about International Women’s Day?
To be honest I find the whole thing a bit patronising.
how, pray tell are we supposed to celebrate this women only day?
Burn our bras — again? Sacrifice a male at dawn, or just spend the day patting each other on the back simply for being who we are?
I mean, it isn’t as if we had a choice on what sex we were born!
Fact is I’ve never needed another woman to tell me what I can do, whether it be kicking a footy, scooping crap out of blocked guttering or asking the boss for a pay rise.
Never needed anyone to tell me about my sex or what I am capable of achieving.
Nor do I need a band of 50 women to back me up.
I can stick up for myself quite nicely, thank-you very much.
So a special day to celebrate being a woman is a tokenistic non-event to me.
Ask men their response to International Women’s Day and most are vaguely supportive, carefully tiptoeing around the question for fear of saying the wrong thing.
As one man put it, “Gawd, don’t ask me! Far too risky for a bloke to have an opinion nowadays”.
So how on earth did we come to this?
During my years as the Addy’s women’s editor, every week was dedicated to some kind of women’s illness or other. In fact by the end of my stint, I could have qualified for a medical degree, given the information studied and written about on all aspects of women’s health.
While I enjoyed the job, even back then it struck me as odd that there was never any acknowledgment of men.
This despite the fact women’s health inevitably had an impact on the men in their lives just as men’s health issues had an effect on the women in theirs.
But these were the “women’s” pages, so no room for men here. In fact men were an irrelevance.
Needless to say I wasn’t unhappy to see those pages fold when I moved on to another position.
As a young copper at Russell St in 1970, female police had to resign from the job before they married, most finishing up the night before their wedding.
Within a couple of years that had changed but female police still faced the regulation of having to leave once they became pregnant.
There were no public appeals for change, no demonstrations outside police headquarters and certainly no great hue and cry from women’s rights activists marching in the streets.
It all changed thanks to some pretty serious discussion and conciliation between senior police officers — male and female — and the understanding and acceptance that rules as they stood were unreasonable and unfair.
As difficult as it may seem for some, these changes came about purely through the combined negotiation and co-operation of both sexes.
Yes, that’s right, men and women working together.
But back to International Women’s Day.
What’s it all about? Apparently the day is aimed at the recognition and celebration of women’s achievements and to highlight public awareness to women’s issues.
But isn’t that what we already do every day of the week?
I mean, hardly a day passes without some story relating to women’s rights or issues being highlighted in the media.
Of course there are still examples of inequality, but very often these days it is the male on the back foot so we still haven’t managed to harness the real meaning of equality.
Lastly, there are women in my life who have influenced and helped shape the person I am today. But there are also men who have contributed in a very positive way towards that.
Should I ignore their contribution because of their sex? I wouldn’t reckon.
And speaking out, expressing one’s opinion is also part of living in a democracy. It is not the sole right of one person over another based on their sex.
So consider for a moment the backlash if a man had written this column. He’d have been hung, drawn and quartered.
Surely we’ve come further than that, haven’t we?
As for International Women’s Day, it’s about as meaningless to me as International Men’s Day.
Don’t expect to see me celebrating either any time soon.