In 1948, the idea of “Tax Freedom Day” was created. It’s the day in the year when the taxpayers in a nation have collectively earned enough to pay off their annual tax bill. Afterwards, citizens can spend their own money as they see fit. This year, I’d like International Women’s Day to mark such a milestone in feminism: wouldn’t it be wonderful if, after IWD, we declared Feminist Freedom Day? From that day on, we could talk about how women actually want to live their lives.
International Women’s Day has become a cosplay of empowerment.Credit: iStock
We might also choose to focus on the women still living in oppressive family and cultural circumstances, who get nary a cupcake to sweeten their deal. There are plenty of them in Australia and living in patriarchal societies around the globe. Their absence from IWD shows what a cosplay of empowerment the day has become.
With all due respect to the great trailblazers of the past, feminism has too often been the project of imposing a new social expectation. The message has become that only women in paid work have worth. That can be just as stifling as the gender roles that used to constrict us.
I blame a personal hero of mine, the sensational Germaine Greer. Witty, erudite, free-thinking, Greer defined the modern feminist movement for many in the West. Greer was, in part at least, as influential as she was because her writing was funny. Her signature book – The Female Eunuch – was an extremely effective recruitment tool for the feminist cause because even when her arguments fell a bit short, it was impossible for the reader not to want to be the brilliant author.
Thanks to her style, Greer’s theories took hold. But the truth is, many of her ideas about the way women should free themselves of family life were derived from her childhood with a terrible mother, who she believed was made destructive by its constraints.
Similarly, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir’s personal experiences informed their recommendations for others. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, resented her married life and generalised her experience to all women, and all marriages.
Of course, it should be stated that one of the important achievements of this wave of feminists is that they normalised a woman’s right to choose not to have a family or children. But they also created a rut for the incurious and the incautious, which railroaded some women into an existence not of their choosing.
My own mother, who skipped out on an engagement to avoid becoming stuck on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall, conveyed to me that there was nothing more important than ambition. She felt she’d forgone a career during her years living like a vagabond heroine in South America, before meeting my father in Australia and settling down to have the baby she craved.
Corporate women have their special day, but what about the rest?
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09.03.2024
In 1948, the idea of “Tax Freedom Day” was created. It’s the day in the year when the taxpayers in a nation have collectively earned enough to pay off their annual tax bill. Afterwards, citizens can spend their own money as they see fit. This year, I’d like International Women’s Day to mark such a milestone in feminism: wouldn’t it be wonderful if, after IWD, we declared Feminist Freedom Day? From that day on, we could talk about how women actually want to live their lives.
International Women’s Day has become a cosplay of empowerment.Credit: iStock
We might also choose to focus on the women still living in oppressive family and cultural circumstances, who get nary a cupcake to sweeten their........
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