Honoring women
LINK: ‘Note Verbale’, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Times) – 9 March 2008 Issue
The month of March is International Women’s Month and in particular March 8 is officially marked around the world as the International Women’s Day.
Theoretically, men and women are created equal. Humanity would not exist without one or the other. The paradigm of both sexes is the ultimate expression that nature works, or should work, in harmony. Absent this symbiotic relationship, the world is bound to fail, if not self-destruct.
While both men and women have their innate attributes, in the scheme of the Divine creation, neither of them enjoy the status of a privileged gender. The world needs women as much as it needs men.
But for many centuries as far as recorded human history could recall, women were traditionally relegated as a second class gender. They were treated as slaves. They were not accorded equal opportunities in life and their social and political rights were curtailed. They were the usual object of discrimination as well as physical and emotional abuse. Until now perhaps, there is no country in the world that can lay claim that their women are on equal footing with men in all respect.
A website of the United Nations says that the majority of the world’s 1.3 billion absolute poor are women. On the average, women receive between 30 and 40 per cent less pay than men earn for the same work. And everywhere, women continue to be victims of violence, with rape and domestic violence listed as significant causes of disability and death among women of reproductive age worldwide.
The beginning of this yearly international observance especially dedicated for women itself was itself the product of a struggle for political and economic recognition and emancipation.
March 8, 1857, reports say that women workers in garment factories in New York City staged a protest to fight against their low wages and inhumane working conditions that were met with police attacks and dispersals. In the same month, two years later, these garment women workers were able organize their first labor union.
March 8, 1908, another report says that at least fifteen thousand women marched through New York City demanding for shorter working hours, better pay, voting rights and an end to child labor. They adopted the slogan “Bread and Roses”, with bread symbolizing economic security and roses a better quality of life.
They say that the idea to have a women’s day that is international in character was initially proposed by a German socialist, Clara Zetkin, during an international conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1910 of socialist organizations across the globe to mark the strike of women garment workers in the United States.
It might still be inappropriate to celebrate with fondness and merriment this month or day for women because their struggle lives on in many parts of the world. But it is very significant to observe the occasion as a constant reminder to all that women occupy a very lofty position in society. Their struggle should be every human being’s struggle. Their issues transcend gender equality. Their issues are all about man’s own inhumanity to his fellowmen.
Needless to say, procreation takes place because both sexes exist. The only significant difference is that every human being is conceived in a woman’s womb. Women thus provide humanity their first shelter until they are out to confront the harsh realities of life themselves. If only for this women deserve a better and fairer treatment in this world.
They deserve it more than any men do.
