Choose your own adventure: International Women’s Day 2011
Chances are, if it weren’t for facebook status updates this day would have gone unnoticed in your life. The women’s movement is over, isn’t it? I know for a fact that you have better things to be doing with your $54 Victoria’s Secret Bombshell bra than burn it…and feminist, isn’t that just another word for lesbian?
Get real, ladies. Little do you know, you’re in it right now. You are in the women’s movement. Each time you negotiate your salary, utilize your right to vote, remember you have a college degree, take your birth control, and pour yourself your morning cup of coffee, you are in the women’s movement. You may not feel like an activist, but simply by taking advantage of the rights and freedoms won for YOU by women in previous generations, you are making a statement. Sorry to break it to you, but you’re a feminist.
For me, life is sort of like a “choose your own adventure” book. I make a decision, turn to page 109 and see where it takes me. I complain about it a lot, the decisions that is. That’s because they stress me out. But you know what would stress me out more? Not being the decision maker in my own life. So I remind myself how fortunate I am to have that stress in my life. It means I control who I am and what my life looks like. What an amazing thing!
But life isn’t like that for millions of women in this world. According to the United Nations, “Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce half of the world’s food, yet earn only 10 percent of the world’s income and own less than 1 percent of the world’s property.” Women are raped. Women are assaulted. Women are forced into prostitution. Women are infected with HIV by their husbands. Women are abused. Women are paid less than their male counterparts. —- And not a single one of those things are confined to women in developing nations.
We have made a lot of headway in the women’s movement here in the west, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think we have reached the apex of equality. Though I feel like my life is a “choose your own adventure” book, because I am a woman, there is a chance a man might take that from me at any moment. One out of four of my female peers have been raped. That is not the adventure they chose.
So on this International Women’s Day, I invite you to choose your own adventure and help to empower other women to choose theirs.
Some ideas:
Donate or volunteer at your local women’s shelter or victim’s advocacy agency.
Help a woman feed her family or put her child through school by buying her beautifully made, fairly traded goods @ www.handcraftingjustice.org
Help a woman become an entrepreneur with a micoloan @ http://www.kiva.org/
Educate yourself. Read. Open your eyes. Travel. Meet women. Look them in the eye. Hear their stories.
And then tell me you’re not a feminist. You can still wear your bombshell bra. I promise I wont tell.
