Russia today celebrates one of its annual state holidays – the International Women’s Day. As befits the status of the holiday, we are all having a day-off, so even though this is Tuesday, I personally feel like my Sunday has been extended, and I already want to get back to work and out of the house.
2011 is hailed a highly auspicious year, and it is already a year of many great anniversaries, so it is particularly wonderful that this festival celebrating womanhood and women’s rights has turned a hundred years. Indeed, even though the women’s rights movement looks like one lengthy marathon, one cannot argue that since 1911 the world has seen the rise of many great female leaders, starting with Clara Zetkin. To use Virginia Woolf’s comparisons, women have left the common rooms and got themselves rooms of their own and even their own money. Sometimes they even kicked men back into common rooms, whereby we now sometimes talk about paternity leaves for working men. The last hundred years have seen a lot of things that were previously thought impossible for, or impertinent to, women.
Over the last several years every IWD has had a theme. This year’s theme is the access to education, training, science, and technology. It is important that women have the same opportunities to be trained and receive education in the fields they choose, as men do. There is possibly still a fair deal of misconception about a woman’s capabilities, which starts with how the woman is brought up, whether or not she and her environment believe in her ability to lead, to learn, to stand on her own two feet. Most importantly, though, in my opinion, we need to review the reasons for women’s education. A woman needs to be educated not merely so she can compete against men, or that she can make a difference. She needs to be educated so she can help her man and her family better. The more she can read and analyse, and the better she learns to apply the knowledge to her own life, the bigger will be the number of happy, fulfilled families. I would insist that a woman’s main duty in the family has nothing to do with cooking, or washing, or bearing and bringing up children. The duty has to do with communication, with being a friend and dear counsellor to the man. If this is achieved, then two people can naturally swap leadership roles.
I send my hearty greetings to all my women friends, readers, and female relatives of my male friends and readers, as well as to my Grandma and Mother. The post is spiced up with the Soviet postcards from the family archive. They come in a wide variety of styles: one features Russian dolls, another – a traditional blue-and-white Gzhel ornament, and several more are decorated with flowers. One of those cards was presented to my Grandma at work. As for me, I and all my female colleagues have received tulips of all colours from the male “quarter” of the company.