(no subject)
Hi. My name is prairiesky, and I’m a feminist.
I realize that all of you are like, “Uh, prairie? We knew that. This isn’t news.” I see that now. And you can all just be quiet and listen to my rant.
Oh, but first: a picture of where I was when I had this revelation. Pretty, no? It looks like a castle from the inside, too. :D
I’m not a man-hater. I just need to be clear on that point. Sometimes (okay, almost constantly) I suggest that men are stupid, useless and/or incompetent, but I don’t really mean it. I only mock out of love. *grin* I do think that men have a good deal of responsibility that they don’t always live up to. Since I’ve been lucky enough to have wonderful men in my life who have proven that men are capable of being worth their salt, I tend to have expectations on the higher end of things of men in general. I also acknowledge that the status of women in North America has come a long way. I mean, as of 1929 women are officially considered to be people in Canada, so that’s good.
And yet…
- Even in Canada, 80% of health care employees are female, vs. 15% in management positions. (To take an example that’s personally relevant…)
- Of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty in the world, 70% of them are women.
- Women (and I know this is a generalization - the numbers are here) work more and earn less than men.
At the same time that women produce 75 to 90 percent of food crops in the world, they are responsible for the running of households. According to the United Nations, in no country in the world do men come anywhere close to women in the amount of time spent in housework. Furthermore, despite the efforts of feminist movements, women in the core [wealthiest, Western countries] still suffer disproportionately, leading to what sociologist refer to as the “feminization of poverty,” where two out of every three poor adults are women. The informal slogan of the Decade of Women became “Women do two-thirds of the world’s work, receive 10 percent of the world’s income and own 1 percent of the means of production.”
- Richard H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p. 354
- Over half a million women die every year in childbirth. (In sub-Saharan Africa, mothers have a 1 in 16 chance of dying in childbirth, compared to 1 in 4000 in North America.)
- In parts of Africa and the Caribbean, young women (aged 15-24) are up to six times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS than young men their age. (A survey of 24 sub-Saharan African countries reveals that two thirds or more of young women lack comprehensive knowledge of HIV transmission.)
- Girls are less likely to receive even a primary education than boys.
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea. Somehow, growing up, I got the idea that feminism was about the right to have any career I wanted and to be paid the same as a man doing the same job, or about marrying someone who would share the housework, or something. Those are admirable things, and I’m really not convinced that we’re there, even in Canada. Attitudes need to change. But being a feminist today - it turns out - is not about “equal rights for women” so much as it’s about “basic human rights for women”. So.
“Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.” - Nellie McClung
Some references:
http://www.dosomething.org/tipsheets/the_8_millennium_goals
http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/WomensRights.asp
http://www.unicef.org/sowc07/docs/sowc07.pdf