While exploring CNN's special series GIRL RISING, I came across an article entitled Teach girls to be more like boys. While the central point is a valid one, in that an important reason fewer girls are in leadership roles is because they do not feel authorised to take leadership roles. But teaching them to be more like boys isn't necessarily the answer. Instead we should be teaching them to nurture and value the strengths that being a woman gives them and how they can use these attributed to be the leaders the world needs. Teach them the value of being women - not to be like boys!
A brilliant explanation of why feminism is everyone's issue. It highlights how the issues feminism champions (equality; challenging steroetypes; justice; care; non-violence) belong to and will benefit everyone. He also acknowledges the role of women (hence the name of feminism) historically and currently in championing these issues and not letting them be silenced and challenges all men to come to the table of feminism, for the sake of both women and men. Nearly three years ago I listened to a podcast called Whatever Happened to the Sisterhood? since when I quietly (but determinedly) felt myself to be a feminist. It turns out I always have been, but a combination of the way feminism has been defined through my lifetime, the message that equality has already been achieved (especially as a young woman educated to a high level and expected to achieve a 'high-flying career'), and living in a society that has valued individual gains over collective movements meant that I had never fully identified with the cause or known how to speak or act as a feminist. Recently I read an amazing book called Reclaiming the F-Word by Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune, since when I have become finely attuned to the ardent need for feminists, who will fight for the collective (not individualistic) rights of men and women to achieve equality and freedom of choice and to shed the constraints placed on us by stereotypes of what we should be like. Our society is not set up for everyone to thrive equally. Until that is the case, I will continue to stand up as a feminist committed to changing the attitudes and behaviour of men and women alike. Best of all, I realised that feminism embodies so much of what I believe in - a world in which people fight for the collective good of all not just the good of themselves; a world in which value is placed in more than just the accumulation of material wealth to the exclusion of all other types of wealth; a world in which everyone has the opportunity to make of themselves what they want to make and be valued for it. Many people call me an idealist, but I prefer to call myself hopeful. In the words of Vaclav Havel: It is not the conviction that something will by definition turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. |
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