<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/08/international-womens-day-barbie-change-patriarchy>
"In 1932, 75-year-old socialist Clara Zetkin stood in Germany’s Reichstag and,
despite being so unsteady that she had to be carried into the building on a
stretcher, managed to give a rousing speech lasting more than 40 minutes. “The
fight of the labouring masses,” she declared, is “the fight for their full
liberation.” She wasn’t a fan of feminism (dismissing it as bourgeois), but it
was Zetkin’s dream that women everywhere, especially the most deprived and
marginalised, might one day be free of all forms of oppression. The Nazis took
power in Germany shortly after. Zetkin fled to Russia and died there.
On the day I went to see Zetkin’s former home north of Berlin in Brandenburg,
now a museum, there were no other visitors. Despite her iconic status in her
own time, she has been largely lost to history. Her bravery is remembered
usually as a footnote to the fact that she helped found what we now know as
International Women’s Day.
We can only guess at what Zetkin might have made of how pitifully watered-down
International Women’s Day has become. For all its revolutionary beginnings,
today it’s more about empowerment brunches in corporate meeting rooms, or women
on minimum wage serving pink cupcakes to women in expensive suits outraged at
why the
Barbie movie didn’t win more awards. It’s mainstream. So mainstream
that the Conservative party, while it calculates how to fly vulnerable
refugees, many of them women, to Rwanda, wishes women everywhere a happy
International Women’s Day. Even the Labour party has sacrificed bold idealism
for a don’t-rock-the-boat centre ground in which nothing really changes except
for the tone.
As the cupcake icing melts in our mouths, we forget that women like Zetkin once
believed that wholesale change was possible. It’s a strange state we find
ourselves in when we consider that most of human history has in fact been about
social experimentation. As far back as we have records, people have been trying
out different modes of living, testing out democracy and farming, knocking down
powerful leaders when they became despotic, branching off to form new
communities, sometimes across continents and oceans. Sometimes these attempts
have failed; other times, they’ve stuck. But they all prove how remarkably
versatile we are as a species, capable of inventing countless forms of social
organisation."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
