This month, a large scale event titled Women’s Expo has been planned by the Ministry for Women Development with the purpose of celebrating ‘womanhood’ and with plans afoot to gather women from all spheres of life under one banner.
The month of March also regularly sees women’s organizations start preparing fervently for rallies, meetings, seminars and other events of similar nature to commemorate women’s day on March 8. The purpose of this internationally celebrated day is for the rest of the species of this world to acknowledge ‘women’ as a formidable entity and to give them equal status and their due rights. Much is said and done for ‘women’s issues’ on this occasion, women’s problems are highlighted and pledges are made at various forums to deal with the injustices inflicted on them.
While ‘issues involving women’ are many and their rights as equal, human citizens of this world need to be granted to them by the ‘other gender’, I have often wondered how much liberation is actually being given to women by stigmatizing all the problems which concern them as particularly ‘women’s issues’. Shouldn’t they just be ‘issues’ as serious as, say, treason or murder or any other criminal offence? Why is domestic violence just a women’s issue? It concerns her children too which may include a male child and it definitely concerns her barbaric husband who is a man. So why can’t it be labelled a ‘man’s problem’ because it is clearly the men who are psycho enough to wreak violence on a specie which has been given a different shape and energy level by God? It is the men who have to realize that a distinct body makeup in no way defines inequality of mind or human status.
It was after all the need to balance life’s cycle through procreation that women were created. They are ‘partners’ of men as outlined in the Quran. In fact, when Adam and Eve were removed from heaven and sent down to earth, God addressed them on an equal level and commanded, “Get ye all down from here ...” (surah Al Baqarah, ayat 38).
So isn’t it the men — who have a problem accepting the fact of equal sovereignty of women — who should be singled out as freaks and have a day dedicated to them? Women’s problems are the human race’s problems just like any other social evil — corruption, alcoholism, adultery etc. Why get marginalized as an entity whose problems are apart from mainstream issues?
Unfortunately it is the liberated women who have instigated this marginalized attitude. And they are happily assisted by some men who jump onto the bandwagon to exploit the situation and gain acceptance as ‘liberated men’ deeply concerned for ‘women’s rights’ — though how far they exercise this equality away from the limelight and in their own houses will never be proved.
More than celebrating Women’s Day — as if women are some freaks of nature — there should be a day for men outlined to ridicule their baseness and their innate weakness in accepting women as a worthy entity. And in cases of violence, domestic inequality and other such instances, a law particularly defining ‘men’s psychological behaviour’ should turn these crimes into punishable ones.
The rampant marginalizing of women has affected many areas and now we have a special ministry for women development and women’s electorate seats separately outlined. While women believe these are necessary steps towards their liberation, these actions actually genderize the issue. Are we not capable of competing with men on equal levels? Are we ‘mentally challenged’ cases who need a separate forum? Perhaps some women do. Isn’t it why ‘women’s problems’ are kept alive as separate issues so that some women on social and political circuits — who would otherwise probably not get any other forum to wield power — can maintain their elevated social workers’ status?
Feminism and women’s lib chant made immense progress in the early 20th century, when starting from the Suffragate movement of Mrs Pankhurst in 1903, English women won the right to vote in 1928. From then on many archaic codes of conduct began changing and feminism gained enough ground to do away with fastidious ideas concerning women’s dress codes, hairstyles, and social behaviour etc. But having attained that liberation, women’s issue had become such a strong political weapon that ambitious women — having got the taste of power wielding — could not help but pursue their liberating agenda on the ‘women’ platform, with their ‘cause’ becoming a nuisance in the scheme of things still working under male domination. And to get it out of mainstream, men turned women into a ‘special entity’ and subsequently, the same happened with their problems.
The initial victory of women’s acceptance as a force to reckon with got lost in bizarre feminist movements that followed and women lost their greatest distinction — the refinement of their femininity. We forgot that God created Eve as a finer version ‘different’ from his initial creation, which was the crude male form. How can women who are far superior in intellect and form be equal to the uncouth men?
And now we are trapped by the male gender in a subsidiary role and celebrate the International Women’s Day with great fanfare and feel proud that we have a ‘special’ place on world map. By celebrating a women’s day, aren’t we acceding to the misnomer that it is a man’s world?
Women have a much larger role in life than is generally believed. They are the ones who shape the male psyche. And most Pakistani women have acquired people’s confidence by proving their worth more than once. They may be a housewife, a corporate executive, an entrepreneur, a politician, a asocial worker or a media person coming from either a feudal family, a lower working group or from the urban yuppie culture. At the end of the day, they all strive to demonstrate sound qualities of leadership, and they succeed almost every time.
If the future of women is to be secured, the gap created between women and the rest of the world has to be bridged. Getting beyond the gender persecution mania we must do away with separate women’s forums to make ourselves heard.
And as for defining women’s issues, I often find myself in a dilemma and struggle with the classification. Could some one tell me how to classify the problem of a woman molesting a male child? Is that a woman’s issue or a man’s? And when the man of the house attacks the woman or her son and she in turn kills him in self defence because she happened to have a knife in her hand, is this a woman’s case of domestic violence or a man’s? Aren’t these simply acts of violence under any category, removed from the stigma of ‘women’s issue’? n
This month, a large scale event titled Women’s Expo has been planned by the Ministry for Women Development with the purpose of celebrating ‘womanhood’ and with plans afoot to gather women from all spheres of life under one banner.
