Solo Mother

Happy International Women’s Day

by christina on March 7th, 2007

This year’s United Nations Commission on the Status of Women focusses on discrimination and violence against girls. 200 young people congregated at the UN recently to present their stories, including a sixteen year old girl who had to drop out of school for a time to work in a factory making match boxes to help her single mother make ends meet.

It is sad to see how girls are treated throughout the world. Perhaps it is as simple as the ultimate power that women weild over their own bodies — the fact that only a woman knows for sure who the father of her child is, and lineage can only be accurately traced through the maternal bloodlines — that makes men treat women so. Perhaps it is a fear of the awesome magic encompassed within a woman’s body that makes men fear women, that awesome magic to take the spark of a male and female union and create life. Perhaps it is the age old desire of one kind of person to dominate another. If you watch primates in the zoo, the stronger picks on the weaker, until the littlest monkey is left flinging things at the cage walls. I think women have bought into the system for far too long. I think we have marginalized outselves, by trying to sanitize the process of birth, by striving not to be equal in spirit and value to men, but to be the same as men, by eschewing the honor, love, and laughter inherent in a sisterhood to live disjointed, modular lives isolated from family, hearth, and friendship. I think, if ever a woman stood up and spoke out for what she believed in, what she held to be good and right, free of what she’s been told to think or do or feel, I think this world could be an amazing place.

I think women should embrace women, of all color, creed, faith and philosophy. I think we should unite in the common bond of the life-giver, whether we choose to have children or to procreate in some more symbolic way.

Happy International Women’s Day, ladies. We hold the world in our hands.

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POSTED IN: PSA, love, political activism, ritual