Saturday, March 8 will be International Women’s Day. It is important to take note of this date because we still live in a world where women are not the equal of men. (And full disclosure. I am a late middle-aged white man, who is married and has a daughter that I want to live in a fair and equal world.)
The fact is, there is a concerted effort by some religious leaders to rescind women’s right to vote, their independence and turn the clock back to a time when women were considered property of men. I am not talking about the Taliban, but some pastors here in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, women are subjected to property status or worse. Genital mutilation is still practiced in the world, horribly affecting the lives of women in Africa and Asia particularly.
We are also seeing a rise in violence against women by young men. Most of these men are indoctrinated online and tend to view women as objects rather than human beings.
Why should we be concerned?
Women have made strides over the last century. They are now more likely in the United States to have completed an education than men. And according to the Stanford Review, this in turn has put pressure on the socio-economic situation, in which men without degrees are passed over by women with degrees. In short, a cultural shift is taking place in which women are doing better, but at the same time facing serious pushback from men, who overall aren’t. In a world where women’s suffrage is barely a century old, this means that women, through no fault of their own, are being seen as a disruption to an old order, i.e. male privilege and dominance. It is no coincidence that there is a concerted effort to eliminate programs that promote equality in an effort to get back to the old order.
The problem with going backwards is that nobody wins. While cultural upheaval is a natural part of the process of attaining “e pluribus unum,” any attempt to stop half of society, women, is a violence committed on society itself. All we have to do is look at Afghanistan to see what sort of world that society looks like. We tend to dismiss it because it seems too foreign to western eyes. But for those who tend to look at the world through the spectacles of the Old Testament, it looks pretty darn good.
And repressing women to help disadvantaged young men is itself a non-winner. Women and men, especially in our country, should be considered our most precious resource. Something to be nurtured and invested in with equal emphasis on success.
Women doing better and advancing is something to celebrate and not try to squelch. Our world changes and with change there is always some sort of handwringing and pushback. Ultimately those actions are because change threatens established power and money. Note the leaders and billionaires out there today. How many women are there? We’ve got a long way to go before women rule the world. And the way the world is going we cannot afford the time to dawdle. Let’s give women, our daughters the chance to have a life in which the sky’s the limit. We all will be in a better place because of that.
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