Tomorrow is the
International Women's Day, another holiday I do not celebrate.
Women's Day once a year, and the rest are men's days?
Many years ago I was asked
to speak at the International Women's Day manifestation in Stockholm, to tell my
poor oppressed sisters about the liberated women of the Soviet Union.
I could not make the date, so I didn't have to explain to my
oppressed sister how wrong she was in her perceptions. Women in the
Soviet Union had to work full-time to make ends meet AND do all the
house work on top of it, because men would never do a thing in the
house, but once a year they were expected to give their wives a bunch
of flowers and a bottle of perfume. After that, they had an extra
occasion to get drunk because it was a holiday. The day after, they
took an extra holiday to treat the hangover.
In school, Women's Day
was about female teachers. At home, it was about mothers and grandmothers, a variant of Mother's Day. In my family, we did not celebrate it. We made the most of it being a holiday and went skiing.
At my workplace in Moscow,
the union – which was just another administrative structure,
nothing like a real union – had funds to give every female employee
a present. After a couple of years of paper doilies and plastic pins,
we asked for cash. The male union reps took a sigh of relief.
If there was anything
political in Women's Day it was about oppressed women in the capitalist
world who needed our solidarity. We didn't care
about oppressed women in the capitalist world because we had enough of our
own problems. When feminist movement started in Russia after the fall
of communism, the highest point on the agenda was every woman's right
to stay at home and take care of her family.
Fortunately, Staffan never tried to honour me on Women's Day. I would have been deeply offended.
My wonderful great-aunt
used to say, when greeted on Women's Day: “I am not a woman, I
am a librarian”. Rather than Women's Day, I'd celebrate a
Hug-a-Librarian Day. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
2 comments:
Beautifully said.
Very interesting. I was listening to an interview of Simone de Beauvoir late in her life when she talked about how shocked she had been when they'd all discovered that Soviet Russia wasn't, in fact, the promised land for all women...
That said, International Women's Day stripped of those connotations remains something that I value. Not simply because of the increase in talks, events, demonstrations in the week surrounding it... but because of the heigtened visibility that's given to them in the media. So I wouldn't say it's just one day in the year of people doing stuff for women's rights: it's one day in the year when the general public is more likely to be made aware of those things.
Post a Comment