Female every day
Twenty-nine years ago I celebrated my first International Women’s Day. The year was 1992. I was a 20 year-old college sophomore in the United States, and International Women’s Day had been in existence for 81 years.
Why did it take twenty years of me living as a girl and young woman in the world to learn about the only day of the year dedicated to celebrating women globally and heralding international calls to action for our collective equality?
I know the answer lies in the long tail of patriarchy. Yet, that doesn’t satisfy my curiosity about how patriarchy does what it does. How did an entire system activate and operate for so many decades to keep International Women’s Day outside of the list of annual celebrations that were observed in my family, my school, my community when I was a girl? What is that system silencing and shutting down today? A torrent of examples pours out of my mind: all the patriarchal insults I and the girls and women around me experience. It is overwhelmingly easy to conjure up examples of patriarchy at work today.
And so today — 110 years after the birth of this day — I’m thinking about all of this. I’m celebrating International Women’s Day this year by sharing the ocean of thoughts and feelings that are coming up for me on this one day of being female in the world: March 8, 2021.
