After enduring two years of the Italian Festa della Donna, I had, perhaps naively, entertained hopes that here in Vietnam, if it was marked, it would be a rather more political affair. Vietnam is, after all, still a nominally communist country, and communism has historic ties to the date. The 8th March 1917 was deliberately chosen as the start of that year of revolutions in Russia because of the demonstrations due to take place to mark Women’s Day. OK, different countries, different regimes and nearly 100 hundred years of water under that bridge, but you see my point?
So I was a little disappointed last week when my students described something very similar to the Italian version. A sickly sort of middle ground between Mothers’ Day and Valentine’s Day, but with (to my admittedly jaundiced mind) a darker undercurrent. Give the Little Lady some flowers and chocolate, pat her on the head, tell her she’s bella, and turn a determinedly blind eye to the lump in the middle of the carpet from all the crap you’ve just swept under it.
We may lack an awareness of the day in Britain and the States, but at least when it is marked it tends to be with the sense of anger and righteous indignation that it really deserves – that equal pay has still not been fully achieved, that political representation is still not truly representative, and that rape is a weapon of war. For a far better argument than I can give here, take a look at Mariella Frostrup’s article in The Observer last weekend [Feminism's Global Challenge]. Tell me, please, how giving flowers, or granting a day’s free admission to Graeco-Roman ruins really contributes anything to redressing those imbalances?
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