Happy International Women’s Day!

~ Clarissa

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Let’s give ourselves a gift and elect a woman president!

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Published by Clarissa

19 thoughts on “Happy International Women’s Day!”

  1. It was “celebrated” in Turkey yesterday. Of course, the Turkish government considered it a “security threat” and reacted violently.

    The official reason cited for the demonstration ban was security concerns, but with increasing frequency and brutality, Turkey’s Islamist ruling party – under the direction of President (and former prime minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan – has cracked down on any and all institutions not in line with his Islamist agenda.

    In the past, Erdogan has drawn ire for commenting that Islam defines the role of women as motherhood, adding “You cannot explain this to feminists because they don’t accept the concept of motherhood.” In an earlier comment, he told a delegation of women’s rights activists “I don’t believe in equality between men and women.”

    Violence against women in Turkey has skyrocketed since Erdogan came to power. According to the Turkish Ministry of Justice, from 2003, when Erdogan took power, until 2010, there was a 1,400 percent increase in the number of murders of women.

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    2. This kind of anti-woman crap will now intensify in Turkey given that there is no more need to pretend to respect human rights to mollify the EU. From now on, the EU will swallow any kind of abuses on Turkey’s part in exchange for Turkey agreeing to have the refugee problem placed on its shoulders.

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  2. I usually find them silly but enjoyed today’s Google cartoon doodle (or whatever they’re called) in honor of International Women’s Day.

    Too bad about Turkey. I don’t know much about it but the little I do know makes me think Attaturk would be disappointed.

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    1. In our Russian-speaking countries we celebrate men’s day on February 23 and then women’s day on March 8. So everything is fair.

      We don’t have mother’s or father’s day, though.

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      1. Just to clarify i was being 100% sarcastic… hence the /sarcasm tag. Just wanted to be sure. I am super far from a whiny MRA so wanted to ensure.. I think I hear the whooshiing sound of my joke going over many of your blog commentors heads!

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    2. LOL. Man day is celebrated concurrently with Children’s Day (which as everyone knows, is every day except the second Sundays of May and June).

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      1. And I believe there is an ‘official’ International Men’s Day in November – maybe the 19th? My university department charged the men with planning and organising something celebratory after they complained about the women organising a small event last year (we booked a meeting room for an hour, brought photos of women who’d influenced our careers and our ideas to pin up with a paragraph of notes under each, brought snacks from home and invited all students and colleagues regardless of gender to come along and see the display or just socialise and enjoy the snacks). We even have a male admin staffer in the office, so just as women’s day event was set up by the women, the men’s day event could be set up by the men. Nothing actually happened – they were all too busy with important things to actually get organised. They were still mad that “no-one made it happen for us”.

        We have an informal women’s group – we meet once a semester for a brief business meeting or short report from someone about a conference session they’ve been to or recent research on women in the academy/gendered aspects of learning and teaching that they’ve read, or sometimes a visiting older women will tell us about her career path, then for general chat – which sometimes ends up being about things like self-presentation or childcare or interpersonal stuff with colleagues of both genders, but also has covered living overseas, conference networking, publication strategies, field gossip, academic politics and national politics that touch on academia, cats, cool stuff in our disciplines or classrooms, and all the other things academics talk about when they get together. It usually revolves around food of some sort – e.g. a lunch out, a potluck, a coffee morning or tea party – somewhere outside the office (we’ve had picnics on the lawn outside our building, lunch at a place just down the street, tea at individual’s houses). The men complain… they want one. They could organise their own, of course, but they don’t want to. They want someone to do it for them, they’re too busy, or the absolute stupidest reason I heard “none of us can organise or bake”. No, it wasn’t a joke, but it was a particularly clueless older male who said it.

        Apparently the impetus for the women to do stuff – our minority status in our STEM department, concern about the number of younger women who leave the field after MSc or PhD, experience of low-grade misogeny, appreciation of our relative privilege as educated women and desire to make sure we do as much as we can to encourage other women, possibly our acculturated bias towards some kinds of social activity and co-operation – is “unfair”, and should be offered up in service of the poor disadvantaged males.

        Right. Until Male Colleague gets taken aside after a meeting and lectured about their inappropriate, neurotic over-dramatising and I get publically praised for my passionate commitment to excellence for making the exact same point in somewhat emotive tones (sure, I used my hands and my voice was excited and emphatic, but male colleague was red in the face and banging on the table, I think we were both expressing more public emotion than is normal in the repressed Anglo-Saxon world we occupy), I’m going to focus my little share of impetus and energy for sectional effort on women (and on anyone in my own small field, since we often lose out to ‘sexier’ science and I’ll help out anyone as I can within our larger academic world, introductions at conferences, recommending talks, sharing tips, whatever).

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        1. This is precisely what the entire men’s rights movement is about. I’m subscribed to a few men’s rights blogs, just out of curiosity. I’ve been reading them for years, and all they write about – and I mean literally ALL they ever right about – is how evil feminists don’t do this or that to defend men’s rights. At first, I tried commenting on these blogs and asking why they need feminists to fight for their rights. But it’s useless because all I hear in response is that I’m one of those evil feminists who refuse to defend men’s rights. It’s the weirdest thing ever but there are apparently quite a few of these men who feel horribly downtrodden and even abused by women not organizing a men’s rights movement for them.

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          1. You have to find it funny, don’t you? Because otherwise it’s tragic…

            And a little part of me wants to ask them if their Mummy still books their doctor’s appointments and buys their underpants as well.

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    1. It’s like people have the attention span of sparrows. Hillary is trying to make herself viable for the general election. Bernie is not. It’s not a hard mystery to solve.

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  5. Does anyone have a screenshot or something of the Women’s Day Google Doodle? I have a different Google Doodle for certain reasons.

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  6. Meanwhile, in my country we’re fighting about surrogacy and civil unions for both hetero and homosexual couples (the two things are linked together), and the discussion is getting heated.

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      1. Oh yeah, in fact, some feminists cry foul over the commodification of women’s bodies and the progressives and other feminists say that a woman “renting her uterus” (that’s how we call it) is akin to manual labour.
        It all revolves around women’s rights over their bodies, which is important, but the rights of the future children are just mentioned en passant. 😦
        (The conservative? They are all about gay parents being “against nature”)

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        1. I agree completely, this issue should be about rights of children first, second, and into infinity. But it never is. It’s all about which adults get to have a toy they really want. 😦

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