Why Women's Day Is Still Important Today

I often hear from my acquaintances of both genders that that feminism is outdated. That equality is achieved and even if not, it has nothing to do with systematic oppression of women. There are other more poignant problems and as for sexism… we’ve dealt with it, haven’t we?

Yes, we have the issues of race, economy, religion, ableism, ageism, transphobia and who knows what else. These issues need to be addressed as well.

Yet Women’s Day is a date when women’s achievements throughout history are recognized and lauded without regard to national, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic, or political divisions. And let me tell you, we need that. Women all over the world still face very similar challenges regardless of their cultural background, age, and race.

Societies evolve and slowly shift from the androcentric worldview that was characteristic of human cultures for centuries. This process isn’t homogenous, but the issues are similar at its core. Women should unite to overcome those challenges.

Building Upon Our Past

Another important agenda for the day is to pay due credit to women whose names were written off the history books or dismissed into the dusty corner of it not because their contribution wasn’t important enough but because of sexism. We should applaud them all, from Mary Magdalene to Ada Lovelace to Rosa Parks. We should bring them out from obscurity—from to Artemisia Gentileschi to Nettie Stevens to Rosalind Franklin.

I must stress here that celebrating women doesn’t mean that we should completely renounce everything that stems from patriarchy. This worldview had its time. It took us where we are now. Now we should build upon it and progress further. Thank you, next.

It’s the same with everything in our world. We should be grateful for the achievements we benefit from but we must know the price and must try to solve problems that we inherited along with it. That is the very reason we need Women’s Day—to commemorate and recognize all the effort that was put to push us as a society in the right direction. Women’s suffrage, the sexual revolution of the 60s, the feminist movement of the 70s—now is the moment to remember those who lived in a world less free, less kind, less equal, and kept making it better, because those women refused to ignore the problems of their time.

For a Better Future

Denying problems today won’t help. We must keep moving. That is why apart from the Women’s Day we need also Equal Pay Day and #metoo movement. Today women do face workplace harassment. Today the only chance for equal opportunities in the workforce is positive discrimination, such as creating dedicated space for women writers, or women programmers, or women artists. Even today child brides, an abominable phenomenon, exist even in the USA. Today human trafficking and sexual slavery still target women in the developing countries. Today rape is still rampant on campus. This is the world we inherited.

Now imagine how our world would look like if women in the past said: “Nah, everything is okay as it is. We are happy to be an aberration from what 'human' means, to be lesser than men. We can exist without education, without voting, without any means for living except being someone’s wife, without the right to inherit, without being a legal entity at all” (yes, that is why we have a tradition of taking a married name—women used to belong either to fathers or to husbands as dumb property).

That would be an even lousier world to live in. So today is the time to remember this. To count our blessings but also to improve things as women before us kept doing. So that one day our descendants could count more blessings and say “thank you” to us as well. So they could name our generation as one that ended workplace discrimination, closed the pay gap, and drew the final nail into the coffin of rape culture.

I have a little dream.

I hope I will live (even as a conscience stored in a data cloud) to see the day when people will shrug and ask each other why their ancestors would bother with establishing such a peculiar day. Why would they insist on spelling out the obvious truths? Why would they fight to prove something self-evident? Maybe they will just ignore this day and it will become first an old-fashioned rite and then a memory preserved only in course book of cultural history.

But this time hasn't come yet. Let’s bring it closer, ladies and gentlemen.