Many women who left their gatherings carrying goodie bags were not left any wiser about gender injustice, says Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
Pretoria - I am, with each passing year, increasingly convinced that Women’s Day is a lost opportunity. I recognise why the holiday exists and believe that it is the right thing to remember the efforts of those women who demanded that their voice be heard at the time when women were treated like children – to be seen but not heard.
Furthermore, I applaud that the women who marched on the Union Buildings represented a multiplicity of races, cultures and classes.
It is easy for us today where we have far less hang-ups about hanging with people of different colours to not fully appreciate the extent of racial divisions at the height of apartheid up to the 1990s where it was against the law to even fall in love with someone of the “wrong” colour.
I have, over the years, decried that Women’s Day tends to be a political equal of Mother’s Day but honouring all women regardless of whether or not they are moms.
From where I am seated, Women’s Day does nothing to remind women and men about the deeper point of the 1956 march which was to remind the powers-that-be that anti-women sexism was unacceptable as anti-black racism.
The march was more than just about carrying a dompas. It was about human dignity and gender justice.
This year’s reminder of why I believe the day is a lost opportunity was courtesy of a City of Tshwane member of the mayoral committee Eulanda Mabusela.
For purposes of this column, it is essential that I depart from normal rules of not needing to categorise people by colour or sex, and spell out that Mabusela is a woman.
Mabusela, an ANC councillor, told a gathering to launch her city’s Women’s Month programme that the government had created many projects to empower women and patriarchy no longer existed.
“There is something very wrong with women these days. There is no longer patriarchy; instead women have the pull-her-down syndrome. Women lie about each other to men,” said Mabusela.
She went on to add: “Because women do not work together, we have problems with nyaope and the prostitution industry”. Mabusela said all these things at the home of ANC stalwart, trade unionist and women’s rights activist Frances Baard.
Now if a public representative of an organisation that has a long history of progressive women’s agenda does not know what patriarchy is, what are the chances that a simple woman who assumes that men are “lucky” to enjoy the benefits they do, will fully appreciate the impact of patriarchy?
One wonders to what extent those like Mabusela who believe patriarchy is a figment of the imagination attribute instances when women of childbearing age or mothers of young children fail to land jobs they are qualified for because the employers think they will spend time away from work nursing their ill offspring or on maternity leave.
How does she explain that senior cabinet ministers must pass the test of being beautiful over and above their competence?
Why do they think that lesbians and not homosexual men are singled out for “curing” of their sexual orientation?
Looking at the many programmes that various organisations and businesses carry on on Women’s Day, I doubt that many women, let alone the men who have been beneficiaries of a patriarchal society, are left any wiser about the realities of gender injustice in their immediate spaces.
I dare say that many of the women who left their gatherings carrying goodie bags with all sorts of stuff were not challenged enough to ask deeper questions about the sex-power axis.
In fact, chances are that an all-day pampering session that included facials, manicures and pedicures, meant many women went home with goodie bags stuffed with items that further entrenched stereotypes that women are just interested in looking pretty and eating chocolates.
I have been accused of being envious for asking how all these pampering sessions advance the women’s agenda.
The total exclusion of men from the day tells its own story. Some men even take exception to being wished a “Happy Women’s Day’.
It is as if gender injustice exists in a vacuum and not as a project by men to advance men’s interests to the exclusion of women.
Men and boys, who over generations have come to believe that their advantages are naturally occurring, need to be made aware of the extent of gender injustice that exists, before they can be expect to act differently to their fathers.
I am under no illusion that breaking sexist traditions will be easy.
I do wonder though whether changing the name to Gender Justice Day will not shift the focus a little more to what Women’s Day intended to achieve in the first place?
* Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya is the executive editor at the Pretoria News. Follow him on Twitter @fikelelom
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