Celebrating the woman

If people were sensible enough, they wouldn’t need to have a month like March being dubbed as Women’s Month to remind the world that women are important in society. Why? Because, plain and simple, women are not just important on March or on any particular one month in the calendar. Women are important. Period.

I don’t think I need to go over the entire history of the Women’s Liberation Movement. I’ve had quite enough of that since my college days when the passion to fight for women’s rights hit fever pitch. The fight can be discouraging and the battle can feel like it’s never going to end primarily because: a) society has been lying when it has been saying that discrimination has gone nada; and b) a lot of women just can’t face reality even if it’s staring at them right in the face.

Discrimination against women may not be that blatant today in the Philippines as it was say, a century ago but fact is, it’s still pretty much around. It’s a silent little monster that’s been slithering in work places when male co-workers or male bosses are too hesitant to give the alpha female the biggest, toughest assignment; or at home when little girls are ordered around to do housework because ‘buluhatong baye na’ while the little boys are spared from doing so for fear that it might turn them into raving homosexuals.

Although there are plenty of women around who are holding leadership positions and making their mark in the dog-eat-dog corporate world or in men-dominated fields, you just can’t deny the fact that they are the exceptions rather than the rule. There is still an undeniable bias for men especially for jobs that require too much travelling with traditional companies believing that the woman simply cannot handle that much stress. I believe that it’s no coincidence that there are more women thrown into office work than on the rough and tumble of field positions. 

The Women’s Liberation Movement was just the start of trying to change society’s attitude towards women but the biggest challenge of all is in trying to change women’s attitudes and mindsets about themselves—especially those who are living in families and places that are highly patriarchal. There are still many, many women who believe that submitting to their husbands completely is the only way to go—hence unknowingly confirming their status as second class. There are still many women who stick stubbornly to gender roles and those who commit the biggest crime of conditioning the minds of their children to think about women the same way and it’s really no wonder why, decades after the movement first broke out, women in places like the Philippines haven’t really gone that far.

Yes, there are outliers but then even these alpha females choose to stop excelling and revert into plain housewives at the beck and call of their husbands the moment they tie the knot..

Sometimes, I start to wonder whether Women’s Month is still worth celebrating because it seems like majority of the women I know are hell-bent on accepting their fate as it is—of being highly dependent on a man, of perpetuating gender roles which really, should have already lost any meaning in the first place.

But then this feeling of being discouraged is washed over the moment I think about how Women’s Month isn’t just a celebration of a battle that’s being won—but it is a celebration of the fight that’s still going on to emancipate not just the women whose sense of dignity are being reduced to ashes in certain corners of the world but that this is a fight for the women whose attitude towards themselves we have yet to change and to mold.

Women are important. I don’t need to say that again and I don’t need to go over a laundry list of why that’s so. Woman is not behind man in achieving his success. She is beside him, to walk with him, and to help him in achieving that success. 

Success, after all, is not a one man achievement. Many of man’s greatest breakthroughs involve a team effort and often, that team has a mother, a sister, or a woman friend somewhere in it. And that alone, is reason enough why every month should be dedicated in celebration of a woman.