March 8, 2019
With Woman’s Day upcoming, I have been expectantly asking around me : “Woman’s Day ! How does it feel to be a woman ? What is it like for you to be a woman ?”
Sadly, again and again, I am appalled by the answer I get : “I don’t see any difference in being a woman. For me, it’s the same thing to be a man or a woman. There is no difference….”
Or then, we turn to the work still to be done for equality… equality of rights at work…. Equality of rights at home…. In society at large….. gender violence still prevailing. It is them and us.
So I ask : What would it be like if you were a man ? Would you enjoy that ?
There is a minute of silence. A minute that lingers and turns into a long break hanging in the conversation. Something feels weird here. And once more, the comparison : I would have liked that when I was a teenager. But with time, this has faded away. I have managed to hold the reins of my life the way I wanted to.
So … what about us ? Who am I ? I am not the woman my grandma and for that matter, my mum used to be, I am now an equal of men. (Or nearly so, we are almost there).
But does that mean I am no longer a woman ? Does that mean I don’t know any more what it is to be a woman ?
What shows between the lines is that… now that I have become a man’s equal (or nearly so…), now that I can hold my life together and become the master of my own fate, I can’t be a woman. As lurking in the depths of our mind, being a woman is still some kind of a subcategory, of a subclass….
It slaps me in the face that equality could be robbing us of our womanhood, the worst swindle of it all. NO ! Wake up ! We are equals, YES. But let us proclaim our difference as a measure of what we can bring to the forefront, to our society, to our companies, to our banks, to reclaiming our health. Not only are we physically different but we have a million-year past of laughing together, of child-bearing, of nurturing, of kindling that feeble endeavour of growth and creating the right setting for it, of embracing and of seduction, of finding our source of strength in other women and in Nature. Women have a different approach to it all - communication, love making, education, medicine, finance. Let us explore these differences and our strengths for being a woman.
As I look to the sun, the stars, the moon, rivers, plants and animals, I can see they are all different and of all kinds. Why should we humans be so insipidly boring ?
Holding in-company workshop - Being a woman at work -
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