If you just met me, it would not be long before you would hear me take off on the invisibility of women. But if you knew me for many years, you would know its nothing new. I remember wanting to be a priest not a nun, wanting to be a baseball referee, wanting it to be okay that I was the tallest in the whole grade school. Its not that I always wanted the other side of the mountain, I just wanted/want both sides of the mountain to be an option. Obviously things did not get better as I got older and got more information. Its omnipresent; inventors, poets, theologians, philosophers. mathematicians etc. mentioned are almost always men and with the tiniest bit of inquiry, there is a woman who is not mentioned (Thank you ~ Hypatia).
In the early 1980's I wrote a letter to Steven Allen about his PBS series, Meeting of the Minds. This weekly short play featured a fascinating table of 4 famous people from different centuries chatting over a lovely dinner. My primary admonition was that the guest list was ALWAYS one woman and three men. Then I could not resist ranting about dinner guest, Martin Luther as he was a miserable husband; supported by his diligent talented wife, Katherine, who financed the entire household with her fishery, laundry, winery and brewery. Martin would sit at the dining room table, pontificate endlessly with his students and, to exclude his wife, he would switch to Latin when she came in the room. So rather than being excluded from the fireside chats, Katherine Luther taught herself Latin. For several pages I went about each of the male guests, Gandhi, Shakespeare, Bacon, Plato and their female teachers. Yes, Steve wrote me back, thanked me for my many insights. He said that he would love to confer with me about women to invite to dinner and the men's true muse but the show had not been renewed.
Just last week Oprah had on Mohammad Yunus, the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He is the founder of the Grameen Bank and was introduced as the inventor of micro-credit. His first transaction was 28 years ago when he loaned $27 from his own pocket to a group of people. Over the years he and his bank have loaned over 6 million dollars with the repayment rate of 99%. It is particularly fantastic that 97% of the borrowers are women. "If a woman is making money, the children become immediate beneficiaries," Dr. Yunus says. "They went to school, they are better fed, they are better clothed."
But then I remembered hearing Gloria Steinem speak on a panel, November 13, 2006 at Barnard College. She mentioned that she was thrilled with the tremendous work of Mohammad Yunus but that micro-credit was really started by a woman Ela Bhatt of Ahmedabad, India. She founded India's Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in 1972 which, among many more services, makes small loans to women. "SEWA organizes women to ensure that every family obtains full employment. By self-reliance we mean that women should be autonomous and self-reliant, individually and collectively, both economically and in terms of their decision making ability." Today there are over 700,000 SEWA Sisters. (You may enjoy a brilliant documentary The Shape of Water about SEWA, Women in Black and several other Women First* organizations.)
SEWA is explicitly based on the teachings of M.K. Gandhi who taught the importance of home industry in which self-employed members organize for social change, "Following the principles of satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), sarvadharma (integrating all faiths, all people), and khadi (propagation of of local employment and self-reliance." Of course I could go on for a bit that Gandhi cites his greatest teacher to be his wife, Kasturba.
It isn't that is always matters if a man or woman did something first. I celebrate the message, the art, the invention, the advancement which is above and beyond the gender of the person who brought it into this world. However I am maddened when the gender is misrepresented, disregarded, trivialized and often, that invisible gender is alleged to not be competitive, capable and contributing to the advancement of humanity.
*my coin
Comments