Why I don’t celebrate Women’s Day

I was asked this weekend why I didn’t post about International Women’s Day. I’m really passionate about human rights it’s true but I honestly detest “Women’s Day.”

You see, I don’t agree with modern-day Women’s Day and I certainly don’t want there to be a need to celebrate women once a year. I think that if women were equal to men, there would be no need to once a year have a day in honour of women. A day that seems void of meaning in the life of most.

If I’m honest, I know that we so desperately need to be reminded of the value of women. We so desperately need a reason to get up and celebrate women. We so desperately need to fight for the rights that women should have. The truth though, the sad reality is that we don’t. Every day should be that.

How should we honour women? We honour them by treating them as we do men, as human beings not as lesser beings. We honour them by giving them the rights they deserve. The right to make decisions, the right to equal pay, the right to have choices, the right to education, the right to inherit land, the right not to be raped, the right to not be sold to our husbands for a few cows.

We as women need to concentrate on a life of equality, not a day “in celebration of women” that doesn’t mean much more than a status update.

Simone de Beauvoir  said “I cannot be fair about books that treat women as women. My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be considered as human beings. “If I had to summarise my own feminism, it would boil down to this: women are the same thing as people. That’s it. They aren’t a weird, incomprehensible sub-group, they’re just people. This is why Freud’s ponderings on what women might want have always annoyed me: women don’t all want the same thing any more than men do. Why on earth would we? We’re not members of some bizarre cult, we’re just people. So we tend to want the same thing as some other people would want.

– Natalie Haynes for The Independent;

The truth about things

Honestly, that’s what being a woman should mean; being a person, in my opinion. We should be treated no less than anyone else.

There is no International Men’s Day because EVERY day is men’s day. Men wake up and go to jobs where they are paid more, respected more, treated better. They are not sold off in human traffic rings and they are not traded like a commodity. Men don’t need a day to honour them because they get that respect every single day.

I see myself as a feminist. In spite of growing up in an extremely patriarchal society, I have managed to have the kind of life where I am respected as a person in my home and in my life. My husband treats me as an equal and in our home all duties are shared.

You see, being a woman to me, means constantly fighting battles to be equal, I just don’t think that enough women realise what the purpose is behind the hashtag. I don’t think enough men care. I don’t think women will be equal, until the day we no longer need to celebrate that one day a year, given to women.

Too many have lost all understanding of the idea behind Women’s Day. Too many don’t see the point.

We are a long way away from no longer needing a day to honour and celebrate women but it’s important to remember that Women’s Day is not just #InternationalWomensDay.