I took a little break from blogging in the past month. But in a milestone achievement, I managed to write around 12000 words in the form of personal journaling as a part of the WriteAPageADay campaign. After the month long break, I decided to write about a topic close to my heart,women’s empowerment and BreakTheBias, today on International Womens Day.
Women’s Empowerment
Wikipedia defines women’s empowerment (or female empowerment) to include, accepting women’s viewpoints or making an effort to seek them, raising the status of women through education, awareness, literacy, and training.
Worldvision Australia defines women’s empowerment as “promoting women’s sense of self worth, their ability to determine their own choices, and their right to influence social change for themselves and others”
Empowering a woman means to enable her to take strategic and life changing decisions independently. A large part of it comes from
a) inclusion of women in decision making processes.
International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day celebrates the achievements of women in cultural, political and socioeconomic fronts. At the same time it is a big part of the women’s rights movement which includes amongst many things, gender equality, reproductive rights, economic rights etc. IWD was a product of labour movements in North America and Europe way back in the 20th century and its initial seeding was the female suffrage (right to vote)movement in New Zealand.(wiki)
The fights for Voting Rights!
It was on 19th September 1893, a landmark legislative law was passed by the governor of New Zealand, Lord Glasgow. This law made New Zealand the first self governed country in the world which empowered all adult women by giving voting rights in parliamentary elections.(nzhistory.gov.nz)
Can you believe it that prior to this women did not have the universal right to vote in any country in the world! Even in the great democracies like United States and Britain, women got voting rights in 1918 and 1920 respectively. Prior to 1893, several provinces and annexed countries had given conditional suffrage to women which were either rescinded or not equally applicable for all women citizen.
For Indian women,the Constituent Assembly of India agreed universal female suffrage in April 1947, by which was finally effective from 26th January, 1950. With Saudi Arabian women getting voting rights in 2015,all women in democratic countries with elections now have voting rights. (wiki)
Voting rights was a huge step in empowering women because it helped in including women in the decision making process of electing a government which will run the country. What is happening the country will have a direct effect on our lives . So dont forget to exercise your voting rights with no exceptions, because it was gained with a lot of fight.
BreakTheBias
For me an empowered woman is one who is not afraid to either go with the flow or against it. The decision is solely hers. Gender roles are often pretty strictly defined in our society. Deviation from the norm is often frowned at and looked down upon. This is where we have to BreakTheBias.
Our appearance. The clothes we wear. How we behave,ladylike or not. Whether we work in the office or work at home. Whether we are traditional or not. All of these should be our personal call. We should not let society (which in 2022 is still largely patriarchal) decide it for us. If somebody wants to change her surname after marriage, that’s totally her wish. And its equally acceptable if she does not want to.
Its amazing to me that we still consider it to be the norm that a child will be known only by the father’s identity. Its high time we normalize including surname of both parents in a child’s name or no surname at all.
Please dont Judge!
Sometimes we see a reverse form of gender bias. In the sense, I have often seen women judge other women based on the fact that she likes to cook or bake or sew or do household chores enthusiastically. Its often looked down upon by the “Woke Women”. But that is again a form of bias. Letting our personal experiences and privileges decide what another woman should do or not do is a step back in the empowerment process. Just because something never happened with you does not mean it can not happen with another woman. If we don’t stand up for women’s rights (which include the obvious and the not so obvious) putting aside our personal biases, we will be retrograding the fight that all the women before us have fought.
We should continue to crusade for women’s rights, gender equality and parity, gender sensitization, women’s empowerment and not let anything deter us. Often we find people belittling women who are proud and loud warriors of gender equality, with jokes about feminism and creating general stereotypes. Whenever you witness anything like this, call it out, protest because its highly needed to BreakTheBias.
The United Nations theme for this years International Women’s Day is “Gender Equality Today for a Sustainable tomorrow”. I will write in my next post how climate change and sustainability and related with gender equality.
On International Women’s Day I take a personal oath to do my bit, however minuscule it maybe, to make a difference and try to BreakTheBias.
This post is part of Blogchatter’s CauseAChatter campaign
Superbly said. The reverse gender bias is also a thing. We may or may not follow “stereotype”, it is totally our wish. Did not know that NZ was the first democracy to give voting rights to women. Thanks for the info in this post.