Margaret Wente, that paragon of uninformed and self-serving reporting, published “For the Free, Educated, and Affluent, Welcome to the Century of Women,” a column in The Globe and Mail. In it, Wente stated that “in the West, International Women’s Day doesn’t mean much anymore.”
Apparently, according to Wente, “the war is over. We won.”
She goes on to state several supposed indicators of the social health of women. In Wente’s little world, our daughters and granddaughters aren’t “buying” International Women’s Day because they don’t see sexism in their world.
Putting aside the obviously glaring ignorance on her part about the true nature of International Women’s Day, her focus on current trends “in the West” is incredibly misleading.
Wente gives the example of Robert Dewar, the Manitoba judge who let a rapist off without jail time because apparently “sex was in the air” and the victim dressed in a way that invited the rape. According to Wente, no one sprang to the defence of Dewar, so therefore we’ve come a long way baby.
I suppose in Wente’s closed circle of affluent and influential friends, no one did jump to the defence of Dewar, but one only has to read any online story about the case to see that many people are coming to his defence and calling his ruling a moment of sanity in an otherwise insane justice system.
And it’s not just online trolls making these statements. Law students at Osgoode Hall were recently treated to a lecture by a Toronto police officer on how to prevent rape. The conclusion: don’t dress like a slut.
Blaming the victim for rape is so prevalent that the New York Times was recently able to publish an article in which an 11-year-old girl in East Texas was lambasted for “dressing like a 20-year-old woman” and hanging out with the wrong crowd, as well as for the sin of having a mother who doesn’t keep track of her.
Girl blames
The girl’s punishment for these horrible crimes against sensibility? She was gang-raped over several hours by 18 teenage and adult men. According to the NYT article, the community at large blames the girl and her mother for the crime. No one asked why the mothers of the men who raped her didn’t do a better job watching their kids.
According to Wente, we live in times where women need not fear such stigmas. According to the United Nations Population Fund (2005) we live in times when “gender-based violence is perhaps the most widespread and socially tolerated of human rights violations.”
According to Statistics Canada, women are more likely to be abused by and killed by their spouses. The abuses they suffer are more as well. In “Measuring Violence Against Women” (2006), Statistics Canada also reported that women who have left their partners “report rates of spousal violence and homicide that are disproportionate to their representation in the population.”
I wonder where the “free” comes from in Wente’s title. When women aren’t even free to flee abuse without suffering further risk for abuse, how does that make us equal?
Wente claims that because we have control over our reproductive rights, we’re “free.” She fails to mention that though Canadian women are legally free to get an abortion, many women across Canada have no access to one. And why does “reproductive rights” mean just the prevention of pregnancy? I’ve reported in an earlier column on the lack of federal funding and regulation supporting women who want to but can’t get pregnant.
When a women who wants a baby can’t have one and a woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant is unable to terminate the pregnancy, what real reproductive rights do we have? When the greatest risk of death to a pregnant woman in North America is homicide by partner, how free are we? When the Canadian government continues to fund programs that support only full-time workers, yet the majority of part-time workers are women working part time because of the necessity of child care, what use are our reproductive rights?
Wente claims that women who read her column belong to “the freest, most educated, and most affluent group of women in all of human history.” And yet worldwide, women do two thirds of the work while earning ten percent of the income and owning one percent of the property. Does that sound like the war has been won? Even in “the West,” the world of wonder where Wente claims our daughters need not fear sexism, our daughters face an economy that values men’s work over women’s.
Still at a disadvantage
Our daughters face a future where, though they may have equal opportunity on paper, they know they won’t get that promotion because they took maternity leave last year. They are still much less likely to be elected to political office, to have a career in the sciences, or to become the director of a company. And they are much more likely to be blamed for those inequalities.
Wente was born into an affluent family and attended prestigious schools. So one wonders why she can’t be insightful enough to see that even if here at home we faced no more battles on the women’s rights front, International Women’s Day is about supporting women’s rights worldwide.
Here in Canada, affluent, educated white women do have more freedoms than many others. But take away the affluence and the colour of your skin and you may be an Aboriginal woman who faces a five times greater risk of being murdered than your white counterparts. Or maybe you’ll just go missing, like the 500 other indigenous women who have disappeared over the last 20 years.
Or maybe, if Wente hadn’t had the good fortune to be born into a wealthy family in North America, she’d have been one of the 60 million girls worldwide who is assaulted on her way to school, or one of the seven million girls who has absolutely no access to any education at all.
The world has always been a better place for the affluent and educated — women or not. But International Women’s Day is not about class or status, it’s about the universality of sexual harassment and assault, the necessity of reproductive rights, and the everlasting question of how to care for children and elderly family members while pursuing outside work.
We in the West have made progress on these fronts, but the battles have not ended. And for the majority of women around the world, the battle has hardly started.
I look forward to raising my sons and daughter in a world where women of all colours, classes, backgrounds, education levels, sexuality, and nations are equal.
But we aren’t there yet. So rather than celebrate our victories, perhaps we should be teaching our children how to accomplish what we haven’t — that’s what International Women’s Day is really about.
