Thoughts on INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY
INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY should be a cause for celebration amongst all women but increasingly I am concerned this celebration is reserved for the young and the woke. Perhaps it has been ever thus; we become sidelined as we grow older, just as powerful men can search fruitlessly for meaning in their retirement.
The sisterhood stands strong, as I believed in the sixties, but over time powerful clever women forged ahead with little consideration for the realities of their lesser sisters. Today our spokeswomen are the intellectual left or young ‘very driven’ noisy women.
Again the average sisters are left behind; if we are not part of a marginalised group we have little relevance.
An ordinary woman of the vast middle class is of no interest to the sisterhood…she is, in effect, boring. Her small tragedies are irrelevant in the big battle for the spotlight of media attention. Seminars of women speakers are run by the intelligentsia of the left, woke to their core. Some are quite old, my age, but have been playing the spokeswoman game for so long their views can be delivered sleepwalking.
These older women mix it up with the young strident female voices of today to give themselves a sense of relevant modernity when all the time they hide behind their old grievance stereotypes of condemnation of others not so tough as themselves.
Similar to the overturning and chipping away of concrete forms such as statues, ideas are being thrown around, indeed forced down our collective throats that are repugnant to vast silent majorities.
Why is it older women are increasingly feeling the least-valued group on the planet? Where once the term ‘invisible’ was thrown around, now it is more that of being an irrelevance that has crept into the dialogue of nations.
Yet we are the wise old team who have gone through the hazards of living lives incorporating most of the values of our parents. That we are the last of the descendants of a war-torn era of suffering both in the world arena and economic. Our parents lived through a world war and a depression.
This week I celebrated my birthday…double seven and as I looked around the table of guests, sixteen of us, I thought we could rule the world! Every talent was sitting there, politicians, lawyers, professors, artists, arts and fashion entrepreneurs, gardeners, writers, women who were grandmothers, women who had never had children, women who had adopted children (me), women who had gone through divorces, women who had lost money or made money. We were all there with our truths and our secrets and we shared, as good women will, many of those with our friends that night. We could do this because none of my friends has a mean heart, they all share in common, compassion for their fellow women. Some enjoy gossip but all have a sense of humour and a group of us decided that humour is, probably, the most important attribute a human being can have. I recently spent an evening sitting opposite one of our great prime ministers, John Howard, who told of the experience of meeting Vladimir Putin and one impression gained…… he had no sense of humour.
I worry about young Western women today, living in the ‘wash’ of turmoil from male-bashing. Where do they stand before many become mothers and where will they stand as mothers of sons? Where, indeed, are the nervous fathers of those putative sons?
Women’s Day is a topic close to my heart.
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