International Women's Day

March 8, 2010

Today is International Women's Day.

If you are a woman, I encourage you to examine your life as a woman in your place, your time. What can you do, today, to inprove your own sense of equality in your daily life? Do that thing. Start small or start big; that's up to you, but please start. Use your voice to speak up for yourself. Use your feet to carry you into a new challenge. Use your hands to make one change today, to set the stage for other changes in your future. Ask yourself the same questions I ask of men in the next paragraph.

If you are a man, I encourage you to examine the lives of the women you know and have known, as well as your own life. How have you related to women thus far? What jokes do you tell that feed old assumptions and attitudes? Do you see yourself and the women around you as being on the same level? Ask a woman how she feels when she walks down a dark street at night and compare that to how you feel doing the same thing. Notice how many jobs you see as "women's work," even if you would never use that term. Ask yourself the same questions I ask of women in the paragraph above.

You know the issues:

• sexual abuse and assault
• work safety
• equal pay
• education
• safe health options and practices
• domestic assault
• minimizing women through "humour"
• sexism in books, magazines and textbooks
• elder abuse
• access to training and jobs
• lack of safety in our communities
• cultural practices that harm and limit women and girls
• lack of female-specific health research and treatment
• assumptions of weakness, timidity and inadequacy

The list is longer than that, but this is a start. No matter where you live, I guarantee that at least some of these problems are common to the women and girls around you...and just because they are female, not because of general poverty or other situations.

There's so much information out there about women and oppression and rights and equality that I will not write any more about them here. Instead I refer you to some useful resources, adding to the list I gave in my March 3 post, "4 Sites for Women (and Men)," which you can find if you click here.

A very few online resources:

• WomenWatch, the United Nations Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality
• Check out this ezine, Modern Feminism's information about International Women's Day and other topics related to women. (If you're having a negative reaction to the word "feminism," I encourage you to consider your assumptions and see what is being offered.)
• Watch this short UTube video of the Secretary General of the United Nations giving his message about the UN's work to help women.
• Wikipedia's article on International Women's Day, giving a history and brief discussion of the ways it is celebrated around the world

Think about it. Inequality is all around you. What will you do to change that?

Word Wonder - woman

Thursday, March 4, 2010

During the 1970s I was in my twenties, and women's liberation  was gaining a foothold. Many young women were not content to follow their mothers into what were seen as narrowly defined and restrictive roles of housewife and mother. More women were seeing that as workers they were often -- I think I can safely say, usually -- paid less than men were for doing the same job. In addition, women weren't "supposed" to aspire to be carpenters or doctors or backhoe operators; they "should" be happy to be the secretary, the nurse or the teacher, if they were going to work outside the home at all. Women rebelled against sexual mores that restricted, judged and punished actions that were acceptable for men but not for women.

This movement included the examination of language -- the words that were used to describe women. It became unacceptable to refer to an adult female as a "girl." Other previously ordinary terms came under the microscope of social change. Why "man and wife" instead of "husband and wife?" Why use male pronouns to describe all of humanity? Why use the term "chairman" when that position was held by a woman? And so on. Usages that have become more or less the new normal in the 21st century were changed during the turbulent decades since the mid-1960s.

I was one of those young women who questioned old expectations. I examined my thinking and my language and my goals. I talked with friends, family and coworkers, encouraging them to do the same. "Just think about it," I'd say. "There's a lot of inequality going on here." In the early 70s I did a research project called "Sexism in Children's Literature" and was surprised at the overwhelming lack of female characters as protagonists and heroes in those books. Like many in my generation, I became a parent who sought gender equality in my kids' upbringing, through books, toys, pastimes and conversation.

As a lover of words and equity, I decided today to look for the origin of the word "woman." I was surprised by much of what I found. It turns out that, contrary to what I always believed about the word, it was not originally a derivative of or an attachment to the word "man." It is certainly not a combination of "womb" and "man," as I've sometimes heard. Etymologically speaking, the words "woman" and "man" are connected only in their earliest histories.

 

In fact, the story of "woman" begins with the ancient Indo-European root mem-, meaning "to think." Mem- lead to the Latin mens, "the mind" and to the Old English mann. These words referred to male and female humans of all ages.

Speakers of Old English wanted to be able to distinguish between a female human and a male human, so they came up with wif-man for female-human and wer for male-human. By the way, it was only later that wif (meaning "female") became our word "wife."

During the Middle Ages, the pronunciation of wifman slowly changed into  wimman, possibly because it was easier to pronounce without that f in the middle. Various dialects changed the spelling to wummon, wumman, wommon and womman. These changes probably account for the spellings we now see: woman and women. Through those same years, the male wer was supplanted by mann to refer to a male person. The only common vestige of wer in English today is found in "werewolf."

Just as mann started as a gender neutral term for "human" and only later added the specific sense of a male person, the word "girl" followed a similar path. It also started out as a gender neutral word, though for a young person of either sex. It wasn't until the late 1300s that it came to mean a female child.

This little investigation has led me to drop my assumption that the word "woman" is another example of the many ways women have been seen as secondary, afterthoughts and "also rans." Though oppression of women cannot sanely be denied, I know that some things have changed in the last few generations. Some things most certainly have not.

The point for me is to remind myself that I can only help myself (and others) move forward if I open my heart and mind to new information, to changing realities and ancient truths. Being willing to examine my assumptions helps. Drawing on youthful enthusiasms as well as aging perspectives helps, too.

I'm proud and grateful to be a woman. This was not always the case, but it is today.

Excuses, Excuses...?

Thursday, January 21, 2010

For some reason, I haven't been able to get anything written on this blog for the past week and a bit. Couldn't think of a topic, focused on other projects, whatever. I'm not sure. Sometimes I find it's hard to tell the difference between an excuse and a reason.

Was it reasonable to work on other writing projects so much that my committment to regularly write on my blog lapsed? Hard to say, since my committment to those other projects is strong, too. That might -- might -- count as a reason. Maybe the extra time daily tasks have taken as a result of living on crutches for the week constitutes a reason. However, because of the knee and the crutches, I've also spent a lot of time sitting...so maybe I could have gotten to the blog after all? Such a quandry. It's certain that playing those second and third games of solitaire (nearly every day) is an excuse. Okay, that was too easy.

In mulling this over, I've not only come up with a topic for today, I've also seen yet another way our upbringing, gender, culture, age and other factors affect us. Reasons and excuses are both closely tied up in what we have been taught about work and leisure, success and failure, a person's value. As life goes on, we add to those teachings or change them, but it can sometimes be hard to shake loose old ideas that don't actually work for us anymore.

So, for me? I'm deciding today to be grateful for the positive examples of encouragement, honest effort, and satisfying results with which I was raised and to add a dose of forgiveness. Then I'll try not to let this happen again, but if it does, I guess I'll have to consider writing about time management.

The Day After

Yesterday was December 6.

Here in Canada, December 6 is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. This day was established in 1991 by the Parliament of Canada to mark the anniversary of the 1989 murders of 14 women at l'École Polytechnique de Montréal. Only women were killed that day, because the killer consciously targetted women.

Since December 6, 1991, women, men and children have gathered in school gyms and community halls and churches across Canada to focus on the grim realities of women and children who live -- and die -- in violence. In my area, we gathered yesterday to listen to the daughter of a local woman who was murdered by her partner and to Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, the president of the Native Women's Association of Canada. We lit candles for the fourteen women murdered in Montreal twenty years ago and for every woman in our area who has died violently. None of this was done to stir or condone hatred of men but, rather, to acknowledge the lives of these women and to remind everyone present that violence against women and children continues.

Hatred is not a solution. For me, it is not an option. It is my hope that every person who attends these gatherings or reads this post or loves another person will transform his or her thoughts, feelings and words into action.

This short list of links is a starting point for those of you who would like more information. Please do something -- today, the day after December 6 -- to become more aware, to change your words and ideas, to act. Every single human being is worth it.

The Montreal Massacre -- coverage in the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) archives
Violence Against Women -- an international journal
YWCA December 6 Fund -- offers interest-free loans to women leaving violent homes
Men for Change -- a pro-feminist organization dedicated to promoting gender equality and ending sexism and violence
Learning and Violence -- a website that explores and explains the impact of violence on learning