Published On: Mar 02, 2011
Last updated on:: Mar 02, 2011
Views: 667
We humans love a celebration, a cause we can get behind and rally for, an excuse to get together in a meaningful way. It's been going on for thousands of years. The calendar is peppered with "Days" - Valentines, Christmas, Mother's, Father's. Do we know what we're celebrating? Does it matter?
March 8th 2011 is the centenary of International Women's Day (IWD). It began in 1911after a Copenhagen conference of working women from over 100 countries, decided unanimously to support a motion to establish an international day for women. This day would celebrate the achievements of women and press for their demands - equality of rights, pay and freedom. It's a national holiday in China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria.
Interestingly, there is also an International Men's Day, which began in 1999. We have equality in 'days'! Nice.
What is equality?
IWD has made it to 100, but what's it all about now? What are we focused on? Equality in pay and civil rights is laudable and there are still many parts of the world where women live without them. We have a unanimous belief that all humans must be treated equally under the law. But what if our system of measuring equality is fundamentally flawed?
The feminists (including my mother) fought for equal pay and equal rights when I was a child. I distinctly remember my mother's passionate speeches at the dinner table regarding a woman's right to education and the political arena, our right to have children
and a career. It sounded great to me - have everything!
Patriarchal Equality
The equality that we have actually acquired (in Western democracies at least), is equality with the masculine - a right to be treated the same way as men in a masculine, action-oriented, rational-thought dominated world, where the attributes of the feminine are dismissed and suppressed. Economics, capitalism, politics, a globally competitive marketplace - there's no place for intuition, receiving and nurturing there!
Make no mistake, I am very appreciative of the sterling efforts of women the world over to create and promote equality for women, but somewhere along the way we have lost something precious.
The major structures of our society reject core values of the feminine as wishy-washy, unrealistic and irrational. Treatises could be written (and probably have been) on why this is so, but you'd be reading this for days if I included them, and in the long run,
WHY isn't important.
True Celebration of Women
Imagine if we used IWD, not to push for what we see as deficient in the world, not to measure women with what men do/have/are, but to
celebrate what we LOVE about the feminine: softness, nurturing, great strength and tenacity of spirit, beauty, multi-functional awareness, compassion, life-giving, mothering, intuition, receptivity, gentleness, passion and love.
If everyone connected with what they love about the feminine on IWD, imagine the respect that would be afforded to women the world over, the admiration and the celebration of the feminine in our lives. In honouring the feminine, we all (male and female) honour those qualities in ourselves. Respect and true equality (where the qualities of both masculine and feminine are afforded equal importance) naturally follow.
So on March 8th, luxuriate in what you love about women, celebrate it, honour the women in your life and the feminine in yourself.
© 2011 Pollyanna Darling