Passé for whom? And so what for us?
Print Friendly Version| From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB | March 19, 2008 |
| Vol. 5, No. 23 |
Fortunately, I've been reading newspapers. Otherwise, I may have missed the major story of the 21st century: The woman's movement is over, I hear. And from a reputable source: young women in this country who consider their mother's concerns for the role and status of women to be "so passé" as one young woman on a recent CNN International interview put it in regard to the present election season in the USA.
But, just back from India, I find myself having to deal with another dimension of the question called "When is a problem not a problem?" And one part of the answer, at least, may be, "When it's not yours."
Never discount the role of distance in the valuation of the human enterprise, however. There is a point at which simply being "human" together is not enough to bridge the distinctions of life. Every place has its own "culture" -- it's own pace and food, customs and social expectations, filters and ideals. And culture is no small part of what it means to be human. To rate our own circumstances as the norm, then, can be a very chancy exercise, indeed.
If I ever saw culture in tension with ideals, for instance, it was in India where the Global Peace Initiative of Women launched an international conference titled "Making Way for the Feminine for the Good of the World."
Here was a culture that both embodied and contradicted the very concept of the role of the feminine in society at one and the same time. Here was tension enough between the ideal and the actual to make a person question the humanity of the human race.
Religious figures there talked about "Oneness," the Hindu principle of the inseparability of all beings, both genders, all persons, all peoples, and the goddesses whose gifts form the backbone of Hindu civilization. The Indian Daily Times, on the other hand, trumpeted the differences between what is true and what is actual for women with blaring cacophony and troubling regularity. Tension between the ideal and the real, we learned -- between the status of goddesses and the status of women -- was not the exception; it was the rule. The stories of women belie the religious images of women and beg the question why.
A teenage dalit girl, for instance, who had gone outside "to answer nature's call" died after four young men doused her with kerosene and set her ablaze for daring to protest their previous molestations. Local residents and party officials blame police for failing to protect women. (Sunday Hindustan Times, March 9) The good news? It is, at least, now a crime to murder a woman, even one of the "untouchables." The bad news? The public and blatant murder of women is still common.
The airlines celebrated International Women's Day by flying the Kingfisher Airbus A-320 from Delhi to Bangalore with an all-women crew. The good news? Some few women have had the opportunity to receive that kind of education. The bad news, two-thirds of the children not in school in India are female. (Hindustand Times, March 9)
According to Renuka Chowdhury, Women and Child Development Ministry of India, "over 6,000 dowry deaths were reported every year between 2004 and 2006" in India. (The Times of India, New Delhi, March 12) Translation: Women whose dowries were considered too small by the groom and his family were murdered in order to give the groom the opportunity to marry again. And get another dowry.
In one case, the young woman from whose parents the groom demanded a four wheeler van, committed suicide. (The Times of India, March 6)
The number of cases registered under "crimes against women by husband or relatives in 2006" was 164,765 -- an increase of almost 10,000 over the two years before it. The good news? Some women are registering the family abuse that comes with marriage. The bad news? Most of the women of India have no recourse at all either to legal help or to police protection, let alone the literacy to pursue the issues at higher levels.
Or more to the point: The few laws designed to protect women that are on the books, in other words, are more about myth than meaning. Without the education of both women and men, without a literate female population that is essential to changing social attitudes of a culture, women go on at the mercy of the males around them.
In another of the daily articles on the abuse of women, 30 percent of the 5,035 suicide cases in the state of Ghujarat, were housewives. Worse, the number of female suicides are rising yearly. "Recent studies," according to Ila Pathak of Ahmedabad Women's Action Group, "have indicated that 78 percent of the women in the state are subjected to domestic violence in their marriages. This has serious bearing on the psyche of the women who feel trapped since she cannot live in an abusive environment. But in most cases is not welcomed by her parents. Suicide then remains the only alternative." The good news? They're counting the women who die. The bad news? Counting the dead after years of ignoring them is not stopping the problems.
At the end of the Global Peace Initiative of Women conference, the 450 delegates said their three major commitments to women were 1) Education for and about women; 2) Support for and to women in leadership and 3) A respect for Oneness that creates respect and reverence for differences.
Maybe. But back here where we're told by women who have jobs, have status, and have money that the women's movement is "passé" now, there are some other questions to answer.
First, is there anything about the status of women that we're not seeing in our own culture, whatever ideals we promote both spiritually and politically? And second, if women here are really equal to men in power and economic security and social standing, what are our younger liberated women doing to help the rest of the women of the world reach the same status they have?
Whatever the philosophical tensions in our own life, whatever the issues to be brought to the discussion of the status of women, there is an image burned into my mind that simply will not go away. As we drove across the country, we passed through one village after another, all of them engaged in a common work -- brick making, cement carving, selling dung fuel, goat herding. The last village was a village of painted-up, prettied up prostitutes who surrounded the van looking for work. The oldest prostitute was at most 13. Selling the girls to the army camp down the road was the business of that village, the driver said matter-of-factly. After all, they were only girl children. What else were they worth?
From where I stand, I think we ought to look again at the question of whether or not the women's movement is over, should be over, can ever be over unless and until smart women do something about it everywhere. Why? Because, according to Elisabeth Bumiller in her May You Be the Mother of A Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India two-thirds of the women of the world live in villages, that's why.
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I am 61 years old and had
I am 61 years old and had the zeal 40+ years ago to grasp the moment and break through all the iron-clad traditions of my family and pursue a professional, male-dominated career. I have been a dentist for 27 years now and feel that I benifitted from the women who forged before me, the emboldened ones. I also followed a very traditional path. THe nuns taught me the dignified path. THey produced me. I am well educated and still a "good Catholic." I am not too sure that I am not radical enough for the nuns today. I have been married 40 years. I have 7 little grandchildren, and I think I am fortunate beyond belief. I feel for the women of India and all over the globe. We cannot forget that the struggle continues. Quite possibly, it is not our fault. It could be timing. BUT must stand firm where we are, and cultivate women globally to stand boldly. Each culture is different. In Iraq, President Bush is trying to force Democracy. Are we trying to FORCE equality of the sexes? YES! We are doing just that, and may find the journey convoluted and torturous. I only know that I have broken through traditions that were SO set in concrete in my family. It took compromising and kow-towing to a traditional mother to allow this transition to FLOW. Do not expect others to blast through this process without resistance. By being good mothers and good grandmothers, we can still live in a man's world and be very powerful. We can be holy women. We can love our husbands and receive the respect as wives and mothers and still some of us will break through the glass ceiling and be successful professionals, businesswomen.
Sister Joan, I find your
Sister Joan,
I find your words comforting and inspiring. Because sometimes we do need a fire lit under us to spur us on to doing what should be done as a matter of the natural order of business in a Spirit-led Life. I love your words over and over again.
In reading your column today, I am reminded of a trip my youngest daughter and I took 3 years ago between her freshman and Sophomore Year at Ursuline High School. We went back east (we live on the West Coast)to look at universities she might later attend and to look up our family roots on my mother's side. In two weeks we visited about 7 New England states and about 10 to 12 universities.
One Sunday Morning we happened to be on the Wellsley Campus. My daughter was impressed by the size and beauty of the campus as well as the distance between buildings and the way they seemed to fit into the idealic country-like surroundings that contained them. Close to the Administration Building that was closed, we ran into a woman walking her Black Scotty dog. She was a women with white hair, dressed well and carried herself with a demeanor of respectability and friendliness.
Herself, my daughter and I being the only ones there I approached her. We found out she was the retired Administrative Assistant to the President of Wellsley College, having served under several past presidents of Wellsley. In our conversation with her she related a story of how she attended a French Class with the students. It's basically a Well to do Women's College which admits 2200 freshmen each year who MUST live on campus. Many famous women have passed through the Halls and grounds of Wellsley.
This interesting woman remarked at how interesting it was to see today's young women questioning their language professor over the correctness of how masculine and feminine gender values were applied within the language itself. She noted how in her years of college, the student would NEVER question a professor. In contrast to that she noted that she was amazed at how many young women students no longer saw a disparity between male and female in terms of career position, advancement or compensation. And she shared this story of what her mother had shared with her. Her Mother said in response to "they were treated equally and their was no need to fight for equality anymore",
"If women don't fight to keep the gains they've made, They will lose them. After all WE won the right to vote for women and struggled to win the equality you now enjoy. What have you (the young women of today)done for women?"
I may forget that as senility overtakes me, but I hope my daughter who is 17 now, never forgets that.
Lord God Almighty, Father, Mother, Son and Daughter, receive our prayer that one day the world will rejoice over the healing it receives by recognizing the value of the Feminine Expression of God on Earth, created in Your image with your traits and qualities...WOMAN, ...in a co-creative partnership with men, each of whom hold the other in equal value, esteem and with mutual respect for their unique gifts that they bring to the Table of Humanity functioning in GOD’s IMAGE. Amen/Awomen.
The more we discover how much we are Loved by God, the more we want to do God's Will
If, indeed, the Women's
If, indeed, the Women's Movement is passe, we better figure out a way to remind our younger sisters that without it they would never have attended the colleges they attended. They never would have achieved the careers they have achieved.They would never have had husbands and fathers and brothers and sons who treat them as equals. It was not always so!
If young women have what's theirs and the rest of the world is of no import who taught them these values. Certainly not a movement that saw us all as sisters.
Finally,you young women who are politically astute, what seems more rampant in the current political campaign racism or misogyny?
I, too, wonder why the
I, too, wonder why the younger women fail to see the need to press on with the women's movement, here and abroad. After a decade of sexism, I was finally ordained 15 years ago. My daughter, now 37, attended a church at that time with a woman priest. I asked her how it seemed to have a woman as a priest and her answer - "She's just like the rest of you guys, great now and then and normal the rest of the time." My daughter has no idea of the struggle for women to reach ordination and the stained glass ceiling we face still.
Have we in my generation failed to pass on our struggles to our daughters and granddaughters?
As long as there is one
As long as there is one woman who believes their answer to survival is prostitution and one person who supports the belief and practice of prostitution,the "Women's Movement" is NOT over, it has just begun. Too long have people continued to exploit hunger, whether that hunger be nutritional, social or psychological resulting in the perpetuation of crimes against women and children. Prostitution has long been a crime when will purchase of prostitution be at least an accessory to the commisssion of a crime, or a crime as well. It does not matter if the act is for one dollar or thousands of dollars the result is the same, a degradation of human spirit.
I know young women are
I know young women are saying the women's movement is over. I can't understand it. I know we have come a long way in this country but equality as an ideal and in fact are two different things. Especially in our church, we have not reached equality and too many accept it. That alone is cause to say we have not reached equality. If you don't have it in one area, you don't have it yet. As my husband always says, "you are no stronger than the weakest link".
I hear the awful stories of women round the world. No, we cannot be quiet until ALL women are free and equal. We are a global community today, not a national one. The young women have not learned wisdom yet and do not see the whole truth. Since they have it easier in many ways they think the job is done. It is not!
Asking Western liberated
Asking Western liberated women (younger or older) to help other women around the world is okay as long as they do not come on like "Imperial Feminists"—the sort, you know, who push First World/White values on women who are not First World/ White.
Giving help that is wanted is fine. Meddling (or worse) is not.
Sabithah