I'm sorry this post is so long, but I wrote this in my word processor just because I had to get it out, and wasn't sure what to do with it. After hearing the Alix Olson poem submitted yesterday, I decided to dig it out again and submit it, in case other feminists would like reading it.
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Recently, I went on a WWI tour in France and Belgium. Our party of about 50 were driven around the countries in a coach for two days, looking at battlefields, the scars of trenches, cemeteries and museums. Those who didn't get tearful were at least very sombre and quiet. There was an atmosphere of respect and regret. When we visited the Menin Gate, a collossal building carved with the names of the missing or dead, I wondered whether the reaction would be different if all the names were of women.
In that moment, I was only thinking of the orders being reversed - women instead of men. For this to happen, I imagined, the world would have to be a matriarchy and men and women's roles reversed. But I've had a few months to think about it, and I've realised that that needn't be the case for women to deserve memorials. We deserve them now. In fact, we don't just deserve memorials for women, we need them if we ever want to think seriously about ending war and prejudice. Their absence is an indication of how women are seen in society and it has a bad effect on everyone.
I'm sure there are people reading this who wonder why it matters. What difference does it make that there aren't monuments honouring women for their sacrifices the same way there are for men?
To answer that, let me first say that if there's one thing that those graves prove, it's that simmering under the surface of society (how's that for alliteration!?) is the attitude that women's purpose is to churn out new life and men's purpose to take it away again. It's always there, but it comes to the surface whenever things seem to be getting bad. Take any sort of problem in society - rising gang crime, divorce rates, even economic collapse - and surrounding it is a horde of claims that if only women were women and men were men it wouldn't be happening. But the belief that women's place is to be a baby machine is as deadly as the belief that men are all natural born killers. That attitude is the root of the dehumanisation that perpetuates hatred and war. Without taking the women into account, you've got no hope of finding answers because you've lost half the question.
Now, imagine if the Menin Gate were opposite another structure, this time covered with the names of women killed by their husbands. Currently two each week in the UK, three per week in the USA. Wouldn't take long till they needed more room. Think of the incredible sight of those identical war graves, and then imagine the same cemetery for women who died from unsafe illegal abortion. Those things are not accidents of nature. They are a result of culture, attitudes. I'm not just talking about the west, but all around the world. Patriarchal culture, which doesn't want to acknowledge that making abortion illegal kills more than it saves. Patriarchal culture, which doesn't want to take rape seriously, which doesn't respect women's rights to their own bodies. We've made a little progress in the west since the 50s, but it's not as much as we need and it's being eroded fast, because we're not remembering what we fought for. We saw the graves of two boys who were 13 and 15 in Belgium. How about the hundreds of girls and women who were this age and younger when they died from the causes I've just mentioned because society did not respect their rights to own themselves?
Imagine a custom where everyone wore a flower symbolic of these unnecessary deaths and observed two minutes of silence once a year. Not much to ask. We do more than that for the men who died in war. Small things can create awareness and respect.
As a child, I was aware of the male sacrifice because you can't not be: it's everywhere, you see it on TV, in parks and town squares, in some countries you wear a red poppy in November. You can hardly fail to notice and ask your parents, which leads to an explanation, and so you are made aware of the legacy of war and the affirmation of men's place in history.
All this was right there infront of me, growing up. But it took me many years longer to realise that women had a legacy just as important to our past, present and future as men do. When I say this, I realise I'm getting dangerously close to the same rhetoric that I'm trying to counter. I hope that I can explain what I mean without causing confusion. What I'm NOT talking about is 'a woman's purpose' as mothers of the next generation. The legacy I'm talking about is our struggle to choose - by which I don't just mean abortion. I'm talking about choosing to have our own lives, to own our own sexuality and decide when and how we want to reproduce. That is worth remembering. And we should feel as obliged and inclined to remember it as we are the rememberance of war. At the moment, rights we thought were long won are being eroded by people who claim that feminism has gone too far and women no longer Know Their Place. But then, maybe that's not surprising given that we spend all our time honouring men blowing each other up and none honouring women who struggled throughout human history to be free of their cultural shackles.
The result of our forgetting this is evident when people wax lyrical about a time when women were 'soft' and 'feminine'. In period films and everyday conversation, the days when women were property in the West are usually painted sentimental and romantic, as a 'golden age', our identity and suffering buried under a preference to emphasise how very 'feminine' wearing bone-altering clothing and being a man's possession was. I'm not trying to undermine the suffering or value of what those soldiers did. But surely the irony is clear? Strong women who dare to think for themselves or exercise their right to choose are still demonised, because we've forgotten the struggle.
Anti-choice movements are one very serious threat that arises from not remembering. I won't bore you with more about the Republicans trying to outlaw birth control here, instead I'll tell you about an encounter I had a few months ago with a man with a 'pro-life' street stand who shared this sentiment about contraception being murder. He countered my talk of Choice by comparing women to some kind of artificial robot-uterus they're apparently making in Japan. Why is it that they're able to do this and not be buried under a tide of outrage, as they should be? I am not here to deny anyone's right to disagree with abortion or even contraception. But with a solid reminder of the death and suffering of women pre-legal abortion, it would be that much harder for anyone to propose we return to the coathanger days.
I could list many more reasons why we need formal rememberance for women in the long term, but on the short term, individual level, it would benefit too. It would make life so much more bearable. I, for one, would not feel that my sex is invisible and devalued as part of human history. And it's not only men who visit war memorials - women do too. The problem with anything with a female context is that it's seen as 'a woman's thing' and not something for men to be interested in. But I believe that, given the chance and time, men would be just as drawn to these memorials as women would, and this may allow us to bridge the gender-communication gap a bit more.
So my wish - and my goal if I ever become a billionaire - is that we do for women what we've done for men, and remember them with museums, statues, cemeteries, plaques on trees and benches and every single thing we've done for the men who sacrificed to be done for the women who did too. We can't make progress without it.
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Thank you for this message. You've put into words what I've always pondered.
I was thinking about it recently too.It's 80 years here this year since women got the vote and not a word , yet almost every second Sunday there is a memorial to the men who died in the battle of x.
Thanks for posting . You've put into words what I've always thought.