By Refraction

NEUSTAETER: There shouldn’t be an International Women’s Day

Mar 3, 2019 | 6:00 AM

THIS COMING FRIDAY, March 8, is another annual International Women’s Day.

The celebration of International Women’s Day began in some parts of the world just after the turn of the 20th Century and was adopted by the United Nations 1975. But while it is a national holiday in some countries, I don’t even remember hearing about International Women’s Day in Canada until I was an adult.

As far as I can recall, March 8 was of no significance in my corner of the universe when I was growing up: there was no education in my classroom about the historical and ongoing repression of women, there was no acknowledgement of the progress women had made toward equality by my teachers, there was no discussion about it among my peers and I don’t remember talking about it around our kitchen table at home.

It wasn’t until the age of social media that I began to sit up and take note of the significance of International Women’s Day. But then I also noticed that instead of celebrating or championing it, many people were taking to their keyboards to complain about their irritation at its very existence.

Every year while people tell vulnerable and often outrageous stories of how women have experienced and continue to experience inequality, many others trumpet their belief that International Women’s Day should not be acknowledged at all. Whether it’s because they think inequality has been resolved, don’t think it’s fair that there isn’t a widely acclaimed International Men’s Day or they just plain don’t want to hear about it, there is always a contingent who raises their outraged voices about International Women’s Day.

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If you fall into the group of people asking “why is this a thing?” category, let me take this opportunity to say that I, too, think there shouldn’t have to be an International Women’s Day.

Women should always have been able to: receive an unobstructed education, collect an equivalent paycheque with their own name on it for equivalent work, open a bank account or obtain a mortgage without the signature of a man, legally drive/vote/obtain birth control, walk safely through their own campuses or go for a run after dusk, gain access to and maintain privacy concerning their own medical records, receive a divorce, have the right to paid maternity leave, choose their own spouses, etc.

Women should always have been free from: genital mutilation (government sanctioned or otherwise), sex trafficking, child marriage, spousal rape (legal or otherwise), travel with a mandatory chaperone, domestic abuse, taxes specific to their gender, restrictions on career options, gender-based abortion, outrageous beauty standards, limitations in sports/faith communities/workplaces, etc.

I believe those things should also be true for men.

But until all of those things are true for all people, we’re still going to have to have an International Women’s Day, aren’t we?

I, too, dream of a day when International Women’s Day is completely unnecessary — when society recognizes that it’s insane for half of the population to be considered a minority group, when all women in all nations are considered equal with men, when we have corrected the horrifying inequality that women have had to and continue to have to suffer because of the pervasive nature of patriarchal thinking, when the days of gender inequality are so far in the past that the biases are broken and the wounds are healed.

International Women’s Day isn’t about being a bra burner or a man-hater and it shouldn’t be about girls running the world, emasculating men or the triumph of one gender over the other.

International Women’s Day is not about agreeing with every woman’s opinion but about her right to have one, it is about parity not superiority and it is about genders being equal if not exactly the same.

We have made major progress when it comes to understanding one another and are taking meaningful steps toward true gender equality, but we have long way yet to go.

So while we may think that there shouldn’t have to be an International Women’s Day, until Egyptian women are no longer sexually assaulted at terrifying rates, Iranian women aren’t segregated in the workplace, South Korean women earn more than 1/3 of that of their male counterparts, Saudi Arabian women are permitted to leave home without a male or guaranteed a fair trial, American women have pay equity and a female President, Indonesian women aren’t banned from dancing, Canadian women no longer pay the “pink tax” and women in every democracy can vote, we will just have to decide to be deeply grateful that there is.

So happy International Women’s Day this Friday, friends. At least for now.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.