About 25,000 brides are burned to death each year in India because of insufficient dowries. The groom's family will set the bride on fire, presenting it as an accident or suicide. The groom is then free to remarry.
In a number of countries, women who have been raped are sometimes killed by their own families to preserve the family's honor. Honor killings have been reported in Jordan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and other Persian Gulf countries.
According to the World Health Organization, 85 million to 115 million girls and women have undergone some form of female genital mutilation. Today, this practice is carried out in 28 African countries, despite the fact that it is outlawed in a number of these nations.
Girls are often kept from receiving education in the poorest countries, but every unit of growth in female secondary schooling results in a corresponding growth in the economy...
From Anais Nin, writer: "Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."
And here is a dream, calling us to action:
It is estimated that redirecting 5% of worldwide military expenditures would release more than half a billion dollars a day for programmes to improve living standards.
Yesterday, March 8th, was International Women’s Day. This morning I want to recognize and celebrate it in three ways –by a little telling of its history, by making a connection with a famous Unitarian, and by suggesting a challenge which the day presents.
In its various incarnations, ranging from a communist holiday to a U.N.-sponsored event, International Women’s Day has been celebrated for almost 90 years. Its origins are even older. On March 8th, 1857, women working in clothing and textile factories ('garment workers') in New York City staged a protest. They were fighting against inhumane working conditions and low wages. The police attacked the protestors and dispersed them. Two years later, again in March, these women formed their first labour union to try and protect themselves and gain some basic rights in the workplace. American women commemorated this event through the next half-century, which in the industrialized world was a period of expansion and turbulence, booming population growth and radical ideologies.
On March 8th, 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter work hours, better pay, voting rights and an end to child labour. They adopted the slogan "Bread and Roses", with bread symbolizing economic security and roses a better quality of life. An international conference met in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1910, and proposed a Women's Day which was designed to be international in character. The proposal initially came from Klara Zetkin, a German socialist, who suggested an International Day to mark that strike of the garment workers 60 years earlier in the U.S. The proposal was greeted with unanimous approval by the conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, including the first three women elected to the parliament of Finland, and the following year, 1911, International Women's Day was marked for the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. The date was March 19th, selected by German women because on that day 63 years earlier, in 1848, the Prussian king had promised the vote for women. Over a million men and women took to the streets in a series of rallies. In addition to the right to vote and to hold public office, they demanded the right to work and an end to discrimination on the job. Russian revolutionary and feminist Aleksandra Kollontai, who helped organize the event, described it as "one seething trembling sea of women."
Less than a week later, on 25 March, there was a tragic fire in New York City. Over 140 workers, mostly young immigrant girls working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, lost their lives because of the lack of safety measures. The Women's Trade Union League and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union led much of the outcry against this disaster, including the silent funeral march with a crowd of over 100,000 people. The Triangle Fire had a major impact on labour legislation, and the horrible working conditions leading up to the disaster were remembered on International Women's Days afterwards.
As the annual event developed, it took on the cause of peace as well as women's rights. Russian women observed their first International Women's Day, spotlighting peace, in February 1913. (Alas, World War I began the next year.) In 1915, Klara Zetkin organized a demonstration in Berne, Switzerland, to urge the end of the war, and women on both sides of the hostilities turned out. The most famous International Women's Day was the 1917 strike "for bread and peace" led by Russian women in St. Petersburg. The strike merged with riots that had spread through the city and which ultimately forced the Czar Nicholas II to abdicate; the provisional Government which was then set up granted women the right to vote. The historic strike took place on February 23rd on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, but by amazing synchronicity it fell on March 8th on the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere.
Aleksandra Kollontai, who had helped organize the 1911 event 6 years earlier, became a minister in the first Soviet government and persuaded Vladimir Lenin to make March 8th an official holiday. During the Soviet period, the holiday celebrated "the heroic woman worker." Today it’s still a Russian holiday, and is celebrated very much like Mother's Day here, with flowers or other tokens by which families show appreciation for the women in their lives. (Keep that link with Mother’s Day in your minds; I’ll be coming back to it.) International Women’s Day was kept in the United States during the 1920s, but then dwindled. It was revived during the women's movement in the 1960s, but (naturally) without its socialist associations. In 1975, the United Nations began sponsoring International Women's Day, and four global United Nations Women's Conferences have focused on women's rights and participation in the political and economic process, and have helped to make them a growing reality.
At the Conference in Beijing in 1995, representatives from 189 different countries set goals for the progress of women in various areas including politics, health, and education. The final document declared: “The advancement of women and the achievement of equality between women and men are a matter of human rights and a condition for social justice and should not be seen in isolation as a women's issue.” Although many things have improved in the last few decades, in very few places do women have all the same rights and opportunities as men. On a worldwide level, women's access to education and proper health care has increased; their participation in the paid labor force has grown; and legislation that promises equal opportunities for women and respect for their human rights has been adopted in many countries. The world now has an ever- growing number of women participating fully in society. But it is still true that the majority of the world's 1.3 billion absolute poor are women, and on average, women still receive between 30% and 40% less pay than men earn for the same work.
It has been suggested that political systems have something unique to gain from the participation of women. Some people believe women have a different approach to conflict resolution, so that increasing their participation in deciding these issues has the potential to move the world closer to peace. Research in a number of countries confirms that men show a 10-15% greater preference than women for the use of military force. But bringing one or two women into high-level political positions usually doesn’t have any major impact on policies; the policies only change if women are represented in large enough numbers -- a critical mass estimated at a level of about 30-35%. As it is, only 14.1% of representatives elected to Parliaments or equivalents around the world are women, and the percentage of female cabinet ministers worldwide was only 6.2 in 1996. But -- a bright spot: in early 1995, Sweden formed the world's first cabinet to have equal numbers of men and women.
One area in which women have gained very little access is at the highest levels of diplomacy and political decision-making related to peace and security. Of the 189 highest ranking diplomats to the United Nations, only eleven are women. Throughout the history of UN peace-keeping, there have been only 2 women in top decision-making positions. While women have been very active in calling for an end to war and the arms race, they have been less visible at the negotiating table. Yet as Secretary-General Khofi Annan has said,
We know that conflict prevention requires imaginative strategies. We know that conflict resolution, peacekeeping and peace-building calls for creative and flexible approaches. In all these areas, we have seen examples of women playing an important role -- not least in my own continent, Africa. And yet the potential contribution of women to peace and security remains severely under-valued. Women are still grossly under-represented at the decision-making level, from conflict prevention to conflict resolution to post-conflict reconciliation.
And it’s women and children who suffer the most lasting effects of today's conflicts. In war-torn countries, often a significant amount of the male population is lost to conflict. The remaining women are forced to flee to areas of safety with whatever of their family remains. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that typically 75% of displaced people due to war are women. They become both the breadwinner and primary caregiver to their families. They usually don’t have the training and skills needed to secure jobs that adequately provide for their family. Their dislocation often brings them to poor, insecure regions, where they have no access to health care or education, and where they may fall victim to systematic gender-based terrorism and violence.
In response to these harsh facts, women are saying, as Julia Ward Howe wrote in 1870,
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!” The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.
Ah, yes – Julia Ward Howe, and the second part of my reflection. Howe is best known as the writer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but she also published poetry, plays and travel books, as well as many articles. She was a New England Unitarian, part of the larger circle of the Transcendentalists, and she became active in the women's rights movement in middle age. Julia and her husband Samuel worked together for the Sanitary Commission which championed public health measures, and as a result of their work they were invited to Washington by President Lincoln in 1862, during the Civil War. The Howes visited a Union Army camp in Virginia across the Potomac, and there they heard the men singing the song, "John Brown's body lies a’mouldering in his grave." The original tune was written by a Southerner for religious revivals, but it became the best known Civil War song of the North. Someone with the Howes that day, who knew about Julia's poems, urged her to write a new song for the war effort to replace "John Brown's Body." She described the events later:
[I]n spite of the excitement of the day I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. ..... I searched for an old sheet of paper and an old stub of a pen which I had had the night before, and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking, as I learned to do by often scratching down verses in the darkened room when my little children were sleeping. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me.
The result was a poem, published first in February 1862 in the Atlantic Monthly, called "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and quickly put to the same tune. Julia Ward Howe's Unitarian convictions show in the way that Old and New Testament Biblical images are used in the song to urge that people implement, in this life and this world, the principles that they adhere to. "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." Howe hoped that the song would keep the war focused on the principle of the ending of slavery. Today, that's what Howe is most remembered for: as the author of the song, still loved by many Americans, still hated by many Southerners. Her early poems, and her other social commitments, are mostly forgotten. She became a much-loved American institution after that song was published — but even in her own lifetime, all her other pursuits paled besides her accomplishment of one piece of poetry for which she was paid $5 by the editor of Atlantic Monthly.
Julia Ward Howe's accomplishments did not end with the writing of that song. As she became more famous, she was asked to speak publicly more often. She saw some of the worst effects of the war -- not only the death and disease which killed and mutilated the soldiers, but the effect on the widows and orphans on both sides of the war. She realized that the impact of war goes beyond the killing of soldiers in battle, as she witnessed the economic devastation of the Civil War, the economic crises that followed the war, and the restructuring of the economies of both the North and the South. She was deeply distressed by her experiences and was determined that peace was one of the two most important causes of the world, the other one being equality in its many forms. In 1870, seeing national hostilities arise again in the world in the Franco-Prussian War, she called for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted women to come together across national lines, to recognize what they hold in common above what divides them, and commit to finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe, like many others, began to see parallels between the struggle for legal rights for people of colour and the need for legal equality for women. She became active in the movement to gain the vote for women, and she discovered that she was not alone in her conviction that women should be able to speak their minds and influence the direction of society. A friend wrote that “From the moment when she came forward in the Woman Suffrage Movement ... there was a visible change; it gave a new brightness to her face, a new cordiality in her manner, made her calmer, firmer; she found herself among new friends and could disregard old critics. “
By 1868, Howe was helping to found the New England Suffrage Association. In 1869 she led, with her colleague Lucy Stone, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) as the suffragists split into two camps over black versus woman suffrage and over state versus federal focus in legislating change. (It’s always been hard to keep issues of this kind clear and simple, and probably always will be! As someone said on the Minister’s chat-line a couple of days ago, about peace rallies, “Forget unanimity of focus or emphasis; it’s not going to happen.”) Howe began to lecture and write frequently on the subject of woman suffrage, and pulled together a series of essays by writers of the time, disputing theories that held that women were inferior to men and required separate education. She took up the cause of Mother's Day, which had been started by an Appalachian homemaker who organized a day to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community and called it "Mother's Work Day." Julia Ward Howe encouraged mothers to rally for peace on that day, since she believed they bore the loss of human life more harshly than anyone else. She failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace, but she would almost surely be enthusiastic about International Women’s Day, which is much closer to what she wanted than the way Mother’s Day itself has developed.
And now to the third part of my reflection – the challenge presented to us. I think Klara Zetkin in Germany, Aleksandra Kollontai in Russia, Julia Ward Howe and many, many other activists would be deeply disappointed that women are not yet involved in national and international decision-making in large enough numbers to have a measurable impact on policy. They would want to echo, I think, the words of Michele Landsberg writing about the need for a national child care policy in the Toronto Star last weekend. She said,
Men have dominated Canadian governments since the very beginning, and have never done the right thing for children. The odds are that they never will [but] When women hold sway, the chances of achieving a child-nurturing civilization markedly improve. Just as there has to be a “critical mass” of women in Parliament ..... there will have to be real female power – that is, a majority of women will have to vote for their own interests – before early childhood care and education for all are an absolute given. The men won’t do it until they hear the bell tolling their fate. Let the bells ring out.
I can hear the applause from our foremothers, Klara Zetkin, Aleksandra Kollontai, Margaret Fuller, Anna Jarvis, Olympia Brown, Mother Jones, Lucy Stone, and certainly from Unitarian Julia Ward Howe, who pondered the terrible impact of war in these words: “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone ..... know the cost?”
It’s not too late to interfere with the established order of things. It’s not too late to achieve that critical mass of woman power. It’s not too late to march and protest and rally to the cause of a more peaceful and nurturing world. As we commemorate International Women’s Day, may we renew our determination to work for such a world, in which bread is plentiful and delicious for everyone, and roses are fragrant for the souls of us all. So may it be. Amen.