Passé for whom? And so what for us? - Womens Rights/India/Global
Joan Chittister 19/3/08
Fortunately, I’ve been reading newspapers. Otherwise, I may have missed the major story of the 21st century: The woman’s movement is over, I hear. And from a reputable source: young women in this country who consider their mother’s concerns for the role and status of women to be “so passé” as one young woman on a recent CNN International interview put it in regard to the present election season in the USA. But, just back from India, I find myself having to deal with another dimension of the question called “When is a problem not a problem?” And one part of the answer, at least, may be, “When it’s not yours.”Never discount the role of distance in the valuation of the human enterprise, however. There is a point at which simply being “human” together is not enough to bridge the distinctions of life. Every place has its own “culture” - it’s own pace and food, customs and social expectations, filters and ideals. And culture is no small part of what it means to be human. To rate our own circumstances as the norm, then, can be a very chancy exercise, indeed. If I ever saw culture in tension with ideals, for instance, it was in India where the Global Peace Initiative of Women launched an international conference titled “Making Way for the Feminine for the Good of the World.” Here was a culture that both embodied and contradicted the very concept of the role of the feminine in society at one and the same time. Here was tension enough between the ideal and the actual to make a person question the humanity of the human race.