It’s a Woman’s World

Originally published in the Informanté newspaper on Thursday, 10 March, 2016. 

This week countries across the world celebrated International Women’s Day. And while the day certainly has an interesting history – it was first celebrated by the garment workers in New York in 1908, and instituted by the Socialist Party of America – it only became an international phenomenon when Socialists International spread the idea to Europe, and afterwards the Soviet Union, in 1917, declared it a national holiday and granted women the right to vote. It seems the socialists were quite prescient in at least this part of their philosophy, the rest of the world took a while to catch up, as it was only in 1975 that the United Nations joined the celebrations.

The veneration of women should, of course, be magnitudes greater, as the history of civilization is in fact the history of women. Women bear children, care for them, raise them and educate them. It was this need for greater security that first moved mankind from a hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian one. It’s only through quirk and circumstance that men ended up in control of society. It is speculated that the earliest societies were matriarchal, because women could give the gift of life, but that somehow men came to believe their protection constituted ownership of the protected… A galling idea now, but the truth is probably far more complex, and lost to the mists of time.

Whatever the case, power generally serves to entrench itself, and by the time religion developed, a more powerful tool to enshrine gender disparity had presented itself. But women, possessing the same capabilities of men, nevertheless managed to shine despite the odds being stacked against them.

Who does not know of Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt? And yet even the Cleopatra of Caesar was the seventh queen of Egypt of that name. Eleanor of Aquitaine, during the late Middle Ages, was the wealthiest and most powerful person in Europe. She was the most eligible bride in Europe, and by the end of her life she had been not only Queen of France, but also Queen of England. He descendants ruled those nations for the next 300 years. 

Joan of Arc, similarly, is the patron saint of France as she lead the revolt against the English occupation of her people at only 17 years of age during the 1400’s. And speaking of the English, it would be remiss not the mention Queen Victoria, who presided over the largest empire that had ever existed in the world during the 1800’s. In history, that period is known as the Victorian Era. 

But it was not only in the political arena that women shone. Marie Curie is surely known to one and all as not only the first woman to win a Nobel prize, but also for her research into radioactivity. But what about the Harvard Computers, a group of women astronomers who did most of the work on the Draper Catalog, with more than 10 000 stars classified by spectrum. Williamina Fleming, part of this group, discovered the horsehead Nebula in 1888. Henrietta Swan Leavitt, also a Harvard Computer, discovered the relation between luminosity and the period of Cepheid variable stars, allowing astronomers to measure the distance between Earth and faraway galaxies. Edwin Hubble used her work to determine the universe is expanding. Antonia Maury, another member of the group, published the first catalogue of stellar spectra. Annie Cannon, her colleague, expanded on her work and created the first contemporary stellar classification scheme, the Harvard Classification Scheme, which organized and classified stars according to temperature. 

 

Even here in Namibia, we have our own heroic women. Anna Mungunda’s story should be known to all. The only woman casualty of the Old Location Massacre, she became so enraged at the death of her only son during the shootings, that she ran up to the car of the superintendent of the Old Location, covered it with petrol, and set it alight. She was shot immediately afterwards. 

Through the work of these women and the contemporaries, women’s rights have slowly been restored over time, and not without pushback. Even here in Namibia, when the Married Persons’ Equality Act of 1996 was being debated, men opposed it. But the contribution of women to our nation, just as in many nations across the world, could not be denied. 

Even with gender disparity so close to being eliminated, after centuries of relentless struggle by brave women across the globe, there still remains significant obstacles to overcome. While the ruling party has made great strides with its ‘zebra’ policy of gender equality, for which it should be commended, it remains a stain of the soul and the conscience of our nation that Namibia still has such a high incidence of gender-based violence.

Let us never forget that that when we refer to the good, the nurturing and the growing side of nature and our culture, we refer to ‘mother nature’ and our ‘motherland’. Even our national anthem closes with the lyrics “Namibia, Motherland, We love thee.” It’s time to remember that it is ultimately a woman’s world. Men just live in it. It’s time we start acting like it.