Ida Manton
Senior Adviser, Negotiations and Conflict Resolution
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” - Ida B. Wells[1]
I had to pick up my daughter earlier from school today and I noticed a huge poster in front of her classroom that read: Who Runs the World? A few pictures of girls and women between the question and the answer, but then with big letters it said: GIRLS!
On the pictures I saw Malala—a victim of the conservative, oppressive male world that gaslighted her, wished she was gone and shot her in the face; Greta Thunberg – the girl who managed to mobilize the youth all over the world to rise and loudly request that our male-dominated power structures take climate change seriously. Many other valuable activists were also on the poster, but I was standing in front it and could not help but thinking these girls are not running the world, they are screaming out loud and they are heard by many, but often not by those who have both power and responsibility to create a world in which our girls would not have to be scared that if they want to go to school someone might find that threatening, or if they feel responsible for the only planet we have, the US President would call them “trublemakers”, with “anger issues”.
And yes, I was thinking, we got where we are because some women in the past stirred trouble, stood up and simply did not accept the misogyny that was installed and emboldened for centuries with carefully crafted storytelling, with oppressive structures and spreading fear, with economic inequality, moral stigma and dogma spread across most of the religions. For some women all of that was unacceptable, they saw through it and they did not want to be someone’s chewed gum or a walking womb. They sacrificed a lot for the change that followed to become even possible. It’s mindboggling to me that through myths, stories and convenience, somehow, somewhere, someone decided that men are superior to women, that women are evil and demonic, and that for centuries a small minority challenged that and the changes happened only in the last century. Most of the human history has oppressed women and our equality would not have been possible without some exceptional men who understood that they can not talk about other injustices and not support women who needed to be liberated. Women today in many countries of the world are able to have equal rights with men—to vote, to work, to decide if we will marry or not and who, to go to school and to live in dignity. Not everywhere. Many women are victims to domestic violence, to sexual harassment at work, are trafficked as sex slaves and are forced into arranged marriages. They do not rule the world. They bear the heavy weight and often have no courage to fight back because there are consequences. Others do. Their anger, their disobedience, their resistance to being humiliated and abused by the system, by their husbands, fathers and decision-makers, make them leaders towards liberation, freedom, non-discrimination and civil rights. Most of the progressive elements of our societies would have not taken place if there were no clashes between conflicting parties with mutually incompatible ideas, usually a group with a request and the state structures that did not allow for peaceful integration of such changes. If it was not for the work and sacrifices made by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), I wonder whether today women would have the status in society that gives us right to equal participation in public life. If Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott chose to avoid the conflict and obey the rules of the society they lived in, there would have been no mass rallies and marches, but women would have not been in leading positions in business and politics today. But we do not run the world. And we shouldn’t run the world. I wish there were more women in politics, I wish we have more capable women in leading positions in international organizations, not because they are women, but because they are the best fit for the job. As much as I like the prospect of having a woman as the next UN SG, I wonder whether in time of moral decay, accelerated evolution and digital transformation the gender of the next Secretary General should be what matters so much. Now there are many arguments why we need more women in leading positions, but I would somehow like to fast forward to a time when we will not care whether a person is male or female, transgender or what their sexual orientation is this or that; when we would not care if they are black or white or colored, if they are from this or that region or country.
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A great mind must be androgynous[1]
I wish we would see the human in the people, the professional in the potential candidates and the ability before their disability. In order to get there we do not need to scare the young boys with a lie that girls run the world. We don’t need to keep shaping men into insecure rejects and we don’t need to punish the current men for the sins of the millennia of repeated and reinvented mistakes done by other men. Instead of deepening the gap between the genders, maybe we incorporate what is good and what works for us from both, into one and embrace androgyny on the spectrum, something that the new generations already live without thinking too much about it. I remember years ago when I was writing about Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, I wished I could have a phase when I am a woman and then to be given a chance to experience the same life as a man. I thought that was such an amazing literary opportunity to entertain the complexity of the character. But I was never sure I could be the same person if someone took away everything that is very “male” in or about me. I am molded by men and women, by men-behaving women and very girly men and I am not sure we can even gender attributes and characteristics without being biased and simplistic to a point that our opinions become irrelevant. A young person today does not thing if some old grandma should decide if jeans are for girls or boys, if piercing is for girls or boys. Her opinion is irrelevant as the emerging cultures are guided by different norms and are much more relaxed about the walls that previous generations built around the gender-based identities.
When Coleridge and Virginia Woolf talked about how a great mind has to be androgynous, they meant that a creative mind must transcend rigid gender binaries to integrate both “masculine” and “feminine” qualities. I remember reading about this when I was studying their work and thinking that a precondition for every intellectual should be to be both analytical and emotional, assertive and understanding. Therefore, I thought, we all have individual responsibility to compensate for where biology was lacking if we are to aspire to be a better version of ourselves and be more encompassing and enriched, instead of rigid and threatened.
I drew my inspiration, my energy from women who changed history, who did not comply, who felt they have to right the wrongs by exposing the injustices and learning about all of that is important for girls to overcome their imposter syndrome. But as an adult I was standing in the corridor in the school and was wondering how does a boy feel when he sees he is not on the poster that charts the power pyramid? If I had a son, would I have gone to the teacher and asked what kind of message this poster sends to my son and his male friends? Probably, but as a mother of two girls, I was caught up in a dilemma – I liked the fact that this poster was possible, but I also fear the push back and how unhealthy the battle between the sexes will be in the future if there is so much competition and less and less space for blending, for combining or transcending.
My daughter came out of the classroom and as we were leaving I was thinking that while I had to fight to prove myself and open up spaces that were not always available to me and other girls, my daughters will live in a world where the anger and the push back might be even bigger than the one I faced. I feel today sexual polarization threatens humanity’s existence, and it might be worth to try an alternative in which men and women can choose their modes of behavior with less societal restriction and expectations. I worry that the tribalism and “otherness”, augmented by algorithms and polarizing social media, are likely to divide us even more. If we want to erase the lines, we might have to be open to the idea that boys are also emotional and know empathy and girls are assertive, competitive and can do jobs that were traditionally male. We have to upgrade both the analogue and digital space to reflect both narratives and to contain both perspectives. At the moment despite many female tech experts all the tech giants are “bros”. We should work harder on finding ways and creating spaces where we will not perpetuate the myths produced by the dominant worldview but would rather “write a new world into being”, as I remember Carolyn Heilbrun[2] wrote somewhere. She talked about the possibility that maybe the very salvation of our species depends upon our “recognition of androgyny” as a conscious ideal. Her passionate plea for us to move “away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender” inspired me some 25 years ago to study the concept of androgyny and to write my BA thesis about 2 books where the main characters switched (Orlando) or presented themselves to be (Yentl) of the other sex. I was lucky to have a professor, Maja Bojadzievska, who wrote about the concept of androgyny―the realization of man in woman and woman in man—and learned so much from her. This concept, this thinking, has been among us from its source in the Greek mythology through the literature of the modern world. The androgynous ideal shows itself to be a creative and civilizing force conducive to the survival of a truly human society. And instead of drawing more and thicker lines, inventing pronouns and getting upset over nomenclature, maybe we should collectively aspire to individually embrace the opposites from within.
I told my daughter about the poster and she said I am raising some interesting questions. She did not make much of it. To her it was just another poster. Not a big deal. In her words: It is not that deep! Adults just have to let people be and love them for who they are without having to give names to everything. And whoever wants to run the world, let them! But they’d better learn from Spiderman that “with great power comes great responsibility” and if they want power, they need to be effective leaders, great listeners, very generous and gracious, and to like complexity and dealing with people. Some people, men or women, are just not into it and they do not want or aspire to run the world. Maybe even all this leadership and running the world is too retro for the new world we live in.
[1] Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a journalist, educator, activist and truth seeker. She left behind a legacy within the Civil Rights movement. She tackled issues regarding the political, social and economic standing of black people in America and through her writing, she shed light on the racial and social injustices faced by African-Americans during her time.
[2] Carolyn Heilbrun (1926-2003) was an American academic at Columbia University, the first woman to receive tenure in the English department, and a prolific feminist author of academic studies.
Just Access e.V. is a non-party political organisation, whose mission is to support human rights and access to justice worldwide. The views and opinions expressed in this piece and those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of Just Access e.V.
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