Sunday, March 09, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: Fightingest women By Erma M. Cuizon
A LOOK back at the women’s movement will show how things have actually changed, at least mostly in the urban areas, thanks to militant women of the past few years here and the Americas and in Europe.
And now, do women take their freedom for granted? And must the battle continue?
In the editorial list of this newspaper on page A14, for instance, is an untold story of sheer equality between men and women---22 journalists in total in the editorial staffing, 13 of them women!
In 1964, said The Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, she worked “in the sex-segregated research pool at Newsweek magazine.” This was the same year when Betty Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique,” hit the streets.
There are, of course, many more things to do to give the woman all her rights at home, in the work place, in marriages. But will the loud fight keep on after the Filipino woman, say, got the right of suffrage in 1937, then her equal rights at work, also her right to get elected to a position?
Of course, feminist Friedan admitted, there will still be the rights to watch over. But she also saw another stage of the revolution, a quieter, more meaningful one. If things will come to an ideal situation for women, her dignity and freedom served, what next?
After her very successful Mystique book sold out in 1964 and inspired the fight for women’s rights in the US, Friedan wrote “The Second Stage” about two decades later.
The next stage goes beyond public life and politics, she says in this book.
But perhaps the best way to appreciate the women’s movements anywhere in the world today is to remember how things in relation to women used to be.
Listen to Homer saying in 8th century BC in his play, “The Odyssey,” “One cannot trust women.”
A painful but interesting observation came from physician Hippocrates who said, “The female is less perfect than the male.” This is probably not so different from what Aristotle honestly saw, that “the female is as it were a deformed male.”
A Hebrew prayer saw the woman as simply unwanted. “Blessed (art thou) who did not make me a woman.”
In India, it was only in the 1800s that the practice of suttee (the suicide of the widow expected to burn in the cremation of her husband) was outlawed, and during the British governance. The girl infants could even be killed by midwives at birth in what was called “mercy killing.” In old China, the girl offsprings were said to be sold out as slaves, and parents prayed for boy children. This is not to talk of the unfair practice of binding the feet of young girls, perhaps to keep them from straying.
Years after, there were attempts by the women to develop a voice. But they found out it could best be heard only along other public or class concerns, as first shown in a country in Latin America. The woman’s cause was fought side by side with the revolutionary fight for equality of class. It seems the woman had to find a mode by which to get on to be heard.
In the ‘50s in the American scene were educated married women who didn’t know what to do, staying at home, after the household chores were done. It didn’t look like a problem, either---a mother and wife was expected to be happy and contented in a comfortable home. But the women felt a sense of frustration, what was it?
So it took loud, intent women to fight for women’s rights. They marched in a blast, like in 1970 in New York when Friedan, with tens of thousands of women behind her, demanded for equality for women. Friedan, who died at 85 in 2006, made it to history with her Mystique book published in 1963 selling over 1 million copies in the next year.
Now the woman is in the profession, in politics, in business. Perhaps it’s not quite real equality, said Friedan in her Second Stage book, but there’s something that goes beyond all the fights. It can’t forever be “absolute power games and irrelevant sexual battles.”
There will be a restructuring of institutions, in the face of the new women’s rights won---new terms with the family, with love and with work, said Friedan.
