In much of the world, gains in women’s rights elude a silent majority

(The Global Mail) Many years ago, not long after I first read The Female Eunuch, I stopped writing Christmas cards and started sending annual International Women’s Day cards instead.

A few years later, I was working in the Middle East and sharing an office with Palestinian journalists who were members of the Communist Party. They gave all their female colleagues red roses on March 8 – which was weird, but it’s always nice to get roses.

In 2003, The Globe and Mail sent me to open a bureau in Johannesburg. There I discovered that Women’s Day was a national holiday, with street festivals and concerts, recognizing the bedrock role of women in the country’s struggle for freedom.

This week, the newspapers here in New Delhi are full of good old-fashioned rants by feminists about enduring inequality – and also ads urging men to splurge on diamond trinkets and fancy chocolates for the women in their lives.

It’s 100 years old today, this holiday – born of the desire of women in the socialist movement in Europe to have their particular demands recognized within the workers’ struggle.

Clara Zetkin, who first proposed the day, and her feminist sisters had, in essence, three spheres of concern. They wanted political inclusion for women; economic equality; and what you might call personal autonomy. These needs were more difficult to articulate in 1911, but they were core to all else: the right of women to decide what happened to them, whom they married, when they had sex, when they had children, the right to live a life without violence.

Much of it, of course, they won. I am the beneficiary of their struggle; if you know it’s International Women’s Day, you likely are too. Yes, the gender imbalance in our Parliament is dismal; there is an ongoing disparity in pay for equal work done by men and women; and access to abortion is not uniform across Canada. But Ms. Zetkin might well look on the gains of the past 100 years with satisfaction.

Until she looked south. The silent majority of the world’s women know nothing of International Women’s Day; they remain mired in the struggle for the most basic freedoms.

Of course there has been change, particularly in the past 25 years, for women in the developing world. In China 100 years ago, almost all women were peasants; today they make up nearly half the list of the country’s most powerful new tycoons. In Egypt, women have played a critical role in the political upheaval of recent weeks. In Rwanda, women hold more than half of parliamentary seats, and they are using them to put forward innovative policy in a number of fields.

The same things that brought change to the developed world – a shift from subsistence agriculture to an industrial economy, a gradual opening of access to education that created a class of women able to push for political change – lie at the root of the changes in the south.

I saw it vividly in Sri Lanka two years ago when I spent the day with four generations of women in the Perera family – a wrinkly, twinkly great-grandmother, who told me about giving birth to her daughter in a dirt-floored house by lantern light; that daughter, who got through primary school and worked as a maid; her granddaughter, a poised young woman with an MBA and a rising career with an airline. The family is not wealthy, living nine people in three rooms. But they have come almost unimaginably far.

Yet when I think about the places I’ve lived and worked since I first started mailing out the cards, and the 40-odd countries I’ve reported from, that family feels like a rarity. Instead, the people who come to mind are the 11-year-old Ethiopian girls whose bodies were destroyed by the children they tried to birth, and Radhika, a haunted Indian woman who was gang-raped in the Punjab as punishment for a romance across caste lines.

Many years ago, not long after I first read The Female Eunuch, I stopped writing Christmas cards and started sending annual International Women’s Day cards instead.

A few years later, I was working in the Middle East and sharing an office with Palestinian journalists who were members of the Communist Party. They gave all their female colleagues red roses on March 8 – which was weird, but it’s always nice to get roses. The Global Mail

Posted in: World