International Women's Day and Women in 2014
Friday 14th of March 2014 | Category: Opinion | Written by: Leoarna MathiasLast year I wrote a blog for the Mum Network about International Women’s Day. Another of these took place last week. The anniversary of this worldwide event is as good a moment as any to assess the progress we women are making around the globe.
Over the last week all kinds of seemingly unconnected stories about the place of women in global society have competed for my attention. A woman who takes a quick pit stop to eat her own lunch and breast feed her baby is rudely attacked by a facebook troll – and a campaign about the acceptability of breastfeeding in public is born. We’ve written plenty before about the need for balance in the debate around breastfeeding, and this incident, unpleasant for the victim but illuminating for society as a whole, tells us there is as yet a distance to travel.
In my weekend newspaper I read about the attempts by some in the Italian parliament to create a working wage for stay at home mothers. The reason, in part at least, is the fear by some politicians and policy makers in Italy that many female victims of domestic violence are not stepping forward for fear of lack of financial independence if their relationship’s break down.
I also catch site of an advert from Amnesty International calling for action against the government of Mozambique, who are about to pass a law that allows rapists to marry their victims, and by so doing, prevent the possibility of a prosecution. To us this seems to be the worst kind of ‘get out of jail free’ card. Injustice, misogyny and violence towards women appears ingrained in African society, but even in first world nations like our own there are still two women a week murdered by their partners. And the radical changes to our own legal aid system mean that it has become much harder for those on low incomes to seek help if they wish to divorce or gain a court order in relation to their children.
So, issues big and not so big that are affecting the lives of women can be found all around this fair planet of ours. They lead us to conclude that ‘fair’ isn’t, perhaps, the word that best describes the experience of many women, both far away and close to home. The very purpose of International Women’s Day is to acknowledge that Women's equality has made positive gains but the world is still unequal. As a mother, raising a daughter – and a son – I, like everyone else, wonder whether I have done the right thing. Bringing new life into a world that is still, thousands of year into supposed civilisation, not always a great place for a women to be, does cause me concern. The fact that 1 in 3 European women have been victims of sexual harassment really does suggest that there is a long, long way to go. But, I am a generally glass-is-half-full sort of person, so I’m going to focus on raising our children to be respectful of all, to understand, respect and assert their own personal boundaries (and those of others) and who knows, perhaps one of them will be a world-changing campaigner who brings about real and lasting change for women.
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