It’s International Women’s Day! Today is the day to celebrate everything we women have accomplished over the years! Hurrah! Well, hurrah for me – some people claim we should abolish this day, because equality has already been established. I don’t think this is the case just yet. Quite the contrary. That’s why my friend Marjan and I are planning to support feminism, and other things, in a podcast. Want to know what it’ll be about? Read on!
In their research they conducted especially for International Women’s Day, Ipsos discovered that Generation Z men are more likely to think that women should obey their husbands than Baby Boomers, and a third of the men belonging to the younger generation think men should have the final word on important decisions. I don’t know what to say. Have we really gone back in time, back to that era when we weren’t allowed to work, vote, or even have a bank account? No, that’s just it. According to the same research (which, shockingly, also mentions that women should not appear too independent or self-sufficient, if it were up young men), Gen Z men also believe that women who have a successful career are considered more attractive. As long as we’re not more successful than them, apparently.
Again, I don’t know what to say. And that’s the problem: clearly, this is not the time to be quiet. This is not the time to sit back and let things play out, especially when you hear all these manosphere influencers spouting their misogynist messages. Instead, it is the time not to obey our partners, it is the time to be wildly successful, and it is most definitely the time to appear independent and self-sufficient – nay, it is the time to be independent and self-sufficient. Let’s show them what we’re worth. Let’s make them try to keep up with us. Let’s celebrate this International Women’s Day louder than ever.
I’m currently reading Marilyn French’s classic but controversial 1977 feminist novel The Women’s Room. My friend Marjan and I are planning to talk about it our upcoming podcast, which will feature the two of us talking about books we’ve read. The interesting thing about it is that she’s in her sixties, while I’m in my thirties, and we’re bound to have some different views on the books we’ll be reading. Every episode will have theme, and we’ll read two books about it, a classic and a more recent one. We’ll compare and contrast the way these themes are dealt with, focus on the time in which both books were written, and of course also talk about what we think of them. The theme of our first episode will be women who’ve left behind their spouses. We’ve picked Cathy Sweeney’s debut novel Breakdown as the modern equivalent of French’s novel.
I’ve only just started The Women’s Room, but I find myself very much unable to put it down. It’s considered a landmark in feminist fiction, and I understand why: it’s a staunchly feminist novel, it is unapologetically pro-women’s rights, and I love it. Of course, it’s presented in such a way that women are good and men are bad, and I don’t agree with that at all, but I like French’s aggressive tone, especially because it was written almost fifty years ago. We women can survive without men; we don’t need to stop working because we’re married, we don’t need to stay at home and do household chores because we’re married – in fact, we don’t need to be married in the first place.
What we do need, however, is to remember that women’s rights don’t come easily. When I was in London last week, we visited the Houses of Parliament, and I looked at the statue of this man (I guess it’s symbolic I can’t remember his name) which was damaged over a hundred years ago because a suffragette had chained herself to it. In the UK, women literally fought to receive the right to vote. In the Netherlands, things didn’t get that heated, but needless to say, men didn’t suddenly decide that we could vote, too. We need to work hard at this.
So that’s what we’ll continue to be doing. Not just today, on International Women’s Day, but on every day of the year. We will continue to be doing this, and we won’t stop until we really have established true equality and don’t need it anymore.
And not a day sooner.
How do you celebrate International Women’s Day? Do you consider yourself a feminist? What did you think of The Women’s Room or Breakdown? Do you think we should take the manosphere and their toxic ideas of male superiority more seriously? How do we tackle this? Which other feminist novels would you recommend, both to women and men? And: will you be listening to our podcast? Please let me know in the comments! And don’t forget to follow me for more book-related posts!
The Open Book 