Why I can’t wait to see the last Women’s Day
THERE was an inspiring doodle on the Google home page for International Women’s Day — women in lab coats, chefs’ hats, judges’ wigs, astronauts’ suits and — an inclusive touch — in a hijab. The intention was to make the unenlightened think: “Wow, women can do all these highpowered things. Isn’t that just fabulous?” To which my own, irritable response was: “Yes, of course, they, or we, can; why state the obvious?”
Indeed, it’s hard to go through International Women’s Day without a sense of embarrassment.
Celebrating women in this, that or the other field isn’t a feelgood exercise; it’s a reminder of how impossible it would be to put the boot on the other foot. Can you just imagine trying to shoehorn “men in music” into a single day?
This isn’t to denigrate women; there are excellent reasons why there are fewer women artists, for example, than men. If you wilfully excluded women from the salons where ideas were exchanged and artists mingled, and from the studios and academies, well, of course you weren’t going to get them flourishing in the same way as men. But my unease about International Women’s Day is more fun- damental than that. It’s why, in fact, I’d say I’m not a feminist. I’d prefer to define myself as a human being rather than in terms of gender.
Dorothy L Sayers — the creator of detective Peter Wimsey and, more to the point, a distinguished medieval scholar — put her finger on the problem. In a lecture entitled “Are Women Human?” delivered in 1938, she observed: “A woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
“A certain amount of classification is, of course, necessary for practical purposes; there is no harm in saying that women, as a class, have smaller bones than men … or have more patience with small and noisy babies … What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs. That has been the very common error into which men have frequently fallen about women … and into which feminist women are a little inclined to fall about themselves.”
She also observed that the time for feminism had long passed. It wasn’t that she was self-hating, but rather, as another academic put it, “the liberation of women was not a cause Sayers espoused but a way of life she practised on the premises that male and female are adjectives qualifying the noun ‘human being’.” Or, to put it another way, humanity trumps gender.
That’s the approach I think we should all take: humans and individuals first, men or women second. I can’t wait until we’ve seen the last of International Women’s Day — although International People’s Day doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. — ©
A woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man