Feminism’s social media footprint is prolific and over the top, you’d think institutions and society in general would have assimilated gender equality completely by now. Yet it does not take a survey to realise that men and women are at a saddle point. That’s what the March 1917 cavalry of revolutionary women understood, because the patriarchal world of their time had draped them in second-class linen.
It’s the same old fray today; the disparity between men and women … in corporate and public South Africa is epic. Gender inequality reverberates through our society. Patriarchy and how it has entrenched the gender imbalances in society has been examined often, sometimes with emotive superficiality and at other times with personalised heat (the latter being most probably on social media). Often times, the discourse on patriarchy and gender inequality is managed with a sensitive delicacy that exposes more than it obfuscates, compounded by theatricalities. I read a paper once, written by a Wits Honours student; vehemently denouncing efforts and/or calls for men to be an integral part of the proverbial journey to liberating women by changing the landscape of opportunities to allow for women to have meaningful roles in corporate and public South Africa. With didactic insight, she posited that (although in somewhat clever and more lucid articulation) it’s an outright paradox that would stupefy de Beauvoirian feminists. I got the point.
Like someone facing mid-life crisis, we need to ask “what now?” – I won’t attempt to be philosophical about this, but the medieval phenomenon of systematic women subjugation and patriarchal domination belong in history lectures, not in the realms of existentiality.
Even in an often cacophonous, emotional society, issues of women empowerment and gender equality should be dealt with decisively because it is the Wheels of Change we crave: it’s no orchestra, men can’t pull the strings while women run out the string to find the tune and pitch to the tone set for them.
Women too can flow…true in March 1917, true in March 2019. Happy International Women’s Day! #WoMandla.
Sphesihle Nxumalo
26 March 2019