Tori Amos once sang, "We both know it was a girl back in Bethlehem."
As you may know, March is Women's History Month, and March 8 marks International Women's Day. On that day in Paris, there was a march of 4,000 people from Place de la Nation to the Bastille. They sought to highlight the disparity among genders and the importance of examining gender equality, for France has not attained it even after 100 years since the inception of this day (first celebrated in 1911) by Clara Zetkin.
And of course, I did not mean to exclude the United States from this indictment of failure to uphold the ideals of its constitution; equality still has yet to be reached.
This column will thus address the myth of equality supported and reproduced by modernity, in order to pay homage to all those who have contributed to the progress made toward gender equality and to disillusion those subscribing to a false narrative. In valorizing our technological advancement in a way that defines people living in third−world countries as the primitive "others," who have yet to attain our level of progress, we promote an ethnocentrism grounded in a faulty superior perspective in regard to others.
Our conception of our own modernity leads us to romanticize other cultures and freeze them in time, usually in the distant past, which disables us from viewing others as continually changing and evolving. The disparity between the Western world and the rest of the world in terms of development gives rise to a faulty belief in the equal treatment of all genders in the former. We then may conclude that the Western world enjoys equality, which supports the notion that feminists like complaining and whining over imaginary troubles (rather than staying in the kitchen). Therefore, the current problematic framing of modernity affects present initiatives for Western nations.
If we have reached equality, then of course, the need for feminism disappears, but that is far from the truth. We cannot ignore the fight for gender equality on the basis that the suffering of the supposedly exotic others negates the existence of problems for those in the Western world. Many issues like the wage gap, representation and recognition in all fields, crime and double standards still negatively impact the quality of life for all genders, including men.
Though men benefit from male privilege, the gender inequality still creates problems; though not explicit and often ignored, the constructions of masculinity fuel expectations that factor into societal concerns such as the prevalence of males as perpetrators of rape and violent crimes. As I have mentioned in my last column, addressing masculinity is an essential part of the equation for solving gender inequality.
Returning to the main point, our modernity does not mean the end of inequality, and supporting such an idea ignores the quantitative and qualitative realities. Only a willingness to stop dismissing the plight of all genders and to choose to be aware can stop the blinding effect of our ethnocentrism. Assuming that the major problems have been solved through the progress of modernity and that the minor ones will eventually disappear in the future leads us to an impasse and complacency that results in non−action. Take the time to remove progress from the frame depicting it as a positively sloped line graph rising toward utopia.
In the recent past, the prominent discourse asserted the existence of a new age in America, a post−racial world as a result of Obama's election. In assuming the same flawed logic, I now know our first female president will open the door to a post−gender world — or maybe I'll hop on a plane to the Philippines.
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Elisha Sum is a junior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
