International Women’s Day?
by Rajani Kanth
March 8 is , of course, International Women’s Day.
I find myself bemused: should we be impressed by its largesse, or is it , simply, another, the by now standard, UN-style, hype and hypocrisyday?
For grim paradox and rank hypocrisy are , more brazenly than ever, become the ruling geist of our times.
After all, Saudi Arabia was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights Council Panel; and President Obama was awarded the Nobel PeacePrize.
Nice going: affirming, neatly, all the values of Western Civ., we are so very pleased to admire.
But, no , even the UN did not ‘invent’ the Day: it merely adopted it.
It’s provenance was, in fact, more substantive: after women gained suffrage in Soviet Russia in 1917, March 8 became a national holiday, and remained a commemorative day in the world socialist movement.
The UN simply appropriated it, in 1975.
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At any rate, in point of fact, only 6 nations – yes, 6 – legally speaking, guarantee, equal rights for women: Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg, and Sweden , in the 21st century, despite decades of UN declarations and commitments.
And this data comes from a World Bank Report – Women, Business and the Law 2019: A Decade of Reform ,- International Bank for Reconstruction and Development , 2019 – by the way: not from a Code Pink dossier.
The US score, in this Report, is 83.75 – as against a perfect score of 100 , scored by all the European nations named above – placing it behind Mexico, Colombia, and Zimbabwe.
Now we want to build a wall against the first, named above, one must note: is it, perhaps, lest it ‘contaminate’ us by its example?
In fact, the US doesn’t even count among the first 60 countries on the list of 187 countries.
Maybe that should give us pause, before we flaunt the high banner of leading the ‘free’ world: certainly, we don’t cut it anywhere close to it – in Women’s rights.
Au contraire , the US – the only Western nation to make the grade – is amongst the Top Ten nations where women are at highest risk ( Survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation) for violence, with India leading the pack.
The US also ranked #3 in world Rape Crimes stats, with 1 in 3 women experiencing assault in their lives, with 68% of cases going unreported, and 98% of rapists never spending even a day in jail, . South Africa leads this pack, with Sweden – yes, Sweden – a close second.
So, claiming the high ground of ‘democracy’ means little as regards women’s rights ( and various other social rights).
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Not that the rest of the world is worthy of any high(er) commendation.
No: far from it.
With an average score of 74.71, the typical country gives women only 3/4ths the rights given to men: on paper.
You’d think, on paper, it could give it all away!
But, the World Bank – with a woman CEO – will yet remind us of the catechism of ‘progress’ (lest we forget): the average score, ten years ago, was 70.06.
So, as far as they are concerned, it’s ‘getting better all the time’: i.e., we’re on track.
Oh, well: maybe it’s all part of an incremental march to the promised land.
Yet is it a path marked with pitfalls: as we should know, by now, there is no guaranteed uni-directional linearity to such matters.
Democracies revert to dictatorships, reformist societies to reactionary regimes, and so on.
We, in the US, should know that: after all, we ourselves were something akin to a ‘democracy’, but a short while ago(before devolving into an oligarchy as we are, currently).
Ditto, with Women’s rights.
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Fact is, the price of any such ‘right’ still remains eternal vigilance, and an ever-readiness to struggle.
No one ‘gives’ it away (women, of all human groupings, know this fact intimately).
Unless we’re talking of due ceremonials like International Women’s Day, which are most liberally dispensed, and with much fanfare.
It’s part of the essential bromide of the system.
The UN panders utopian rhetoric, the World Bank purveys socio-economic amelioration, and the IMF provisions financial relief.
All for sheer goodness’ sake.
What a benign troika – the Three Marketeers – of global welfare !
Dr Pangloss would have approved.
Still, International Women’s Day is yet worthy – despite its dubious, multilateral, sponsors – if only as a day for due, even dire, reflection.
On one of the most gross iniquities of our time.
Against which women continue to struggle, as indeed they have – for millenia.
If the day be dedicated to honoring their struggle, then it’s worth the name.
With 253000 women (age 12 and above) still suffering assaults, every year, right here in the US – that’s one every 107 seconds, 40% below 18yrs. of age – there is little to celebrate.
Sorry, World Bank: that touted ‘Decade of Reform’ needs to read a whole lot better – to be worthy of any real jubilation.
[©R.Kanth, 2019]
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Professor Rajani Kanth, Author of Coda, and Expiations, is Trustee of the World Peace Congress
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