When I first started Womenfound, if I ran a Google search for
"women's organizations," I wouldn't get much of what I was looking for
by way of aid organizations. Today if I type the same search term,
Google will deliver pages and pages of relevant results for me. In fact
today, in honor of International Women's Day, Google itself featured a
Y-chromosome graphic with an embedded video wishing all a 'Happy
International Women's Day.' So too did countless other organizations
from multinational behemoths to small aid groups -- all seeming to
acknowledge and offer a collective nod for #IWD. In a digital age, where
a start-up can take off with a trendy hashtag , the idea of women
supporting women has taken off with the intensity of a viral tweet. The
idea, indeed the ideal, that women should help women has caught on.
In
the US, women have started helpful ventures, both for-profit and
non-profit, at a record pace. So much so that Network Solutions, a big
tech company, started a blog called Women Grow Business to help women
continue to navigate the business world and steer their start-ups to
success. Kathy Korman Frey started 'The Hot Mammas Project,' where she
aggregates success stories of women so that a sisterhood of 'mean
girls,' turns into a sisterhood of supporters. Her objective is to
demonstrate how much support can lend to success.
Across the Middle East
and North Africa organizations founded in the US or UK work
collectively to empower women. Some include Women for Afghan Women, The
White Ribbon Alliance, The Hand Foundation, Journey Home Foundation, Aid
Afghanistan for Education, Women Thrive and Women for Women
International. The message is the same -- women, we are women too and we
are here for you. Here at home, our struggles are less of life and
death and more of success or greater success. Not to be forgotten are
the millions of women who still struggle in lands apart from ours, for
the basic rights of self determination, corporal control over their
bodies, awareness in reproduction and the right to be counted as fully
human and not treated as chattel.
This month, to coincide with International Women's Day, a documentary film titled Honor Diaries
was released to global accolade, featuring nine women form the Middle
East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan. To be sure, each had
their own stirring experience with the discrimination that comes with
being a woman in many parts of this world. But what was strikingly
common was the call on the part of each of the women, who themselves
were activists in their own way, to become united with others in the
same cause.
The issues were wide spread across the panoply of abuses
that comprise the systemic dehumanization and exploitation of women
around the world. They included child marriage, female genital
mutilation, honor killings and gender apartheid; but their plea was
uniform -- raise your voice in solidarity with women around the world
and help them rise up for change.
In truth, change does not
usually come in one swoop -- at least not forward change for advancement
in any cause. In patriarchal societies, the top-down order is guarded
fiercely by an entrenched hierarchy that disincludes women and sustains
the pressure that keeps them quiet and dutiful, by sheer force of bodily
harm.
The threat of abuse or grave injury maintains the traditions
that even enlist women in the generations-long customs that keep their
daughters submissive and obedient. One of the most disempowering
customs of traditional patriarchal societies is the ritual of giving
away a daughter. While often the so-called marriage is the product of
back room dealing among them men, the process itself reduces the woman
to nothing more than an object of pleasure for the groom.
The traditions
vary slightly from place to place, but for the most part the communal
physical preparation of the woman, the dress down preparations before
hand, the dress up preparations for the ceremony itself an finally the
community attendance of the consummation and the blood soiled rag that
is often submitted as proof a virginity freshly lost, all reduce the
woman to her lowest common denominator as a gender. The ritual and its
intended message serve to inhibit any voice that may be screeching from
inside to stand up and be counted as a person and not as an unremarkable
member of an exploited gender.
This disempowerment is amplified in the
case of child marriage -- a veritable scourge of the 21st century and a
travesty that we still preside over them in a modern world. As women,
indeed as people, we ought to have the power to demand this lowest
modicum of human decency not to marry children to the highest bidder.
Still, we use the excuse of culture and the cover of tradition to infuse
depraved men to perpetuate a practice that we know in our hearts to be
wrong.
This year, let's stop. Let us stop turning a blind eye to
acts that we know are wrong, to manifestations of customs that have no
place in our world and the carrying out of traditions in the name of
cultures gone-by. Awareness must replace ignorance and education must
replace the folklore that keeps an entire gender crushed.
"The
right of women and girls is great unfinished business of the 21st
Century," said Hillary Clinton less than a year ago. She is right. From
South Africa to North America, from East Asia to the Middle East, women
retweeted and reposted the message that we are not just a gender, we are
people with passions, plans, dreams and ambitions. We demanded that we
be counted fairly in civic life, in legal code and in school houses
across the globe.
For some, the struggle is for equal pay and the
rights of privacy in the choices we make. For those women, an
emancipated society that offers the choice to work, reproduce and speak
out is the good-fortune that life has dealt. For others the struggle is
to speak at all, to be knowledgeable about basic human rights and to be
able to preserve the essential dignity of having control over the
corporal self.
For those, life is lived in traditional lands were
education is hard to come by and rarely offered to girls, basic rights
are to be fought for and often withheld, and a voice or choice are the
elusive struggles of a lifetime. For them, those of us who are lucky
enough to have a voice and a means by which to amplify it have a duty to
speak. We have a duty to raise our collective voices and bring
awareness to the plight of the many who live silent lives under the
brutal stare of patriarchs who expect subservience over all else. Under
the guise of tradition, millions of women live a lifetime of abuse and
the threat of force perpetuated by communities that either know no
better or are too afraid to speak up.
Let us resolve this year to speak
for them, until we can give them the strength to begin to speak for
themselves.
SOURCE;huffingtonpost
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