Lorraine Courtney Yes, we still need Women’s Day
INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day is here again and with it the misguided notions that women don’t need a day to celebrate ourselves and that, like Take Your Dog to Work Day and Fried Green Tomato Day, it’s a fake holiday dreamed up by some marketing brain or feminazi.
The very first one happened in 1908 when 15,000 New York women took to the streets to protest over bad working conditions and their right to vote. One year later the inaugural national Women’s Day took place. It continued every year since and was acknowledged by the UN in 1975, which decided to officially sanction the day as a holiday.
Yes, there’s increasingly a glossy Hallmark feel to the day, and it’s getting put through the commercial ringer more than ever this year. I’ve never seen so many press releases: hotels, art galleries and shops all trying to cash in on my identity as a woman.
I’m in two minds about Nike’s new ad for International Women’s Day too. It features footage of Serena Williams throughout her career as she voices over an account of all the ways she’s been criticised for not being womanly enough before saying “but I’m proving time and time again that there’s no wrong way to be a woman”. While it’s an empowering spot, it’s also trying to sell us new shoes.
Brands, this is not Christmas or Mother’s Day all over again. There is a political message here that shouldn’t be diluted by your need to make sales.
The other thing is that the women who need International Women’s Day most have likely never heard of it. We see female academics, politicians and board members but rarely the everywoman next door. You see the typical approach to International Women’s Day is “inspirational” women on magazine covers promoting a cause, or even just themselves. Role models are all well and good, but sometimes the reality of so many female lives is better.
An elite and privileged celebration of International Women’s Day supping wine at a poetry reading means nothing if does not take care of the larger society where women worldwide are going through unending, closed cycles of poverty, inequality and disempowerment.
Still, the day is an important tool. It furthers the conversation around gender parity and I’m on board with it if only because it highlights the continuous issue that half the it planet deserves more. Women have used the day to draft declarations of equality, question socially constructed gender roles, and pressure governments to enact anti-sexist legislation.
We’ve made a lot of progress as women over the last decades. The opportunities I had are a world away from the prospects for my grandmother. In her day, the pinnacle of a woman’s aspiration was to get a husband. And once she’d snared him, her job was to have his meals on the table and his socks washed.
With all that, however, women continue to be disproportionately responsible for caring work, under-represented in governments, over-represented in poverty, and
outrageously at risk of violence, sexual harassment and assault.
Let me throw some stats at you. Worldwide, around 781 million people aged 15 and over remain illiterate. Nearly two-thirds of them are women. Just one-in-five members of lower or single houses of parliament worldwide is a woman. Women on average earn less than men. In most countries, women in full-time jobs earn between 70pc and 90pc of what men earn. Women work as much as men, if not more. When both paid and unpaid work such as household chores and caring for children are taken into account, women work longer hours than men – an average of 30 minutes a day longer in developed countries and 50 minutes in developing countries. More than 125 million girls and women alive today have been subjected to female genital mutilation.
You don’t need to be a woman or a feminist to see the importance of International Women’s Day. You just need to care about one young girl who you wouldn’t want to be denied an education, get unfairly paid for her hard work, be a victim of domestic violence, have her genitals disfigured, or get less respect than her male counterpart as she goes about her day.
It’s sad that we still need a special day to cope with the other 364 days of oppression we all have to deal with – just because we’re women – and I do think it’s sad that for just one single day our agenda is everyone’s agenda. But I’m still glad we have this one day to talk about women’s issues while the rest of the year belongs to men.