What I want more than anything is for there to be no need for an International Women’s Day.
Seeing as that’s not going to happen anytime soon, what I want next is for IWD to be dedicated to women living in situations where their survival and the survival of the children in their care is a daily struggle.
Who are the most outstanding and inspirational women? The women who keep on going against all odds. The women who’ll never get their names in lights because the work they do isn’t considered light-worthy. The women who’ll never bust through any glass ceiling. The women who at the age of fifty and more, take on the children of their children when their children can’t do it.
International Women’s Day belongs to the unknown woman. Light a light for her.
No Place For Sheep 
This unknown woman is going to be one of the three or four billion people on our planet on under a few dollars a day?
She is going to live in some village in India, contemplating ending her girl child’s life with sand down her nostrils, because there is absolutely no food, or has been for months. Maybe she lives Ethiopia and has her innards hanging out because she was too young for marriage and birthing at fourteen years old. Perhaps further over in Sudan, she’s been subject to circumcision, and then later raped by a militia gang after a civil war went wrong.
Maybe exhausted in a Latin American slum with ten kids to take care of before she’s thirty, or even someone here amid the heart of prosperity, say an aboriginal kid from a shanty settlement on the outskirts of a respectable Australian country town, abused and driven out onto the streets to make a few bob off services provided for truck-drivers and the like, before she herself succumbs to the consolation of alcohol and drugs.
Progress is a wonderous thing.
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Hear hear Jennifer. Off to finish my quilt for the Addis Abbaba Fistula hospital – run by a wonderful Australian woman.
That is what real feminists do on IWD. And toast the women everywhere who do so much for their families, and continue to do what I can to help.
As soon as the grandson is grown (yes I am one of those women), I’m off to travel the world and try to make a difference. I may even take him with me 😛
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