‘Balance for Better’ is the UN theme for International Women’s Day 2019.

On 8 March 2019, along with the rest of the world, India too will be celebrating International Women’s Day. Lectures, cultural events such as staging Chitrangada and Chandalika, reciting poems by Tagore, Mallika Sengupta and Krishna Bose are routine, while politicians of various party colours will invariably mouth platitudes and clichéd resolutions about the welfare and empowerment of women. But of course there will be a systematic eliding of the much tossed around Women’s Reservation Bill seeking 33 per cent reservation of Lok Sabha seats for women.

In the 21st century, Indian women are seen in advertisements posing with subsidised gas cylinders consolidating the idea that women are born to be cooks. We have accepted that patriarchy’s definition of women’s unpaid domestic labour as labour of love; for women are conditioned to accept that they are expected to be user-friendly, self-sacrificing, uncomplaining, silent sufferers. In a gender-balanced world, we need to see rural women with laptops, not gas cylinders. This is perhaps what the United Nations has underscored for the International Women’s Day 2019#Balanceforbetter.

But then this is the era of cultural and economic globalization. Women who are even moderately affluent, educated, employed or are homemakers, who have some dispensable monetary resources will dress up with greater care on this special day for women, globally and locally. So on 8 March, women worldwide will be persuaded to pamper themselves by visiting beauty parlours, spas, shopping malls, elite restaurants and resorts. Needless to add, generous discount packages will be offered. In India, the attractive advertisements will mostly be worded in English, with sizzling fairskinned women beaming from hoardings and television ad breaks. Perhaps this is what the African American poet, Maya Angelou, meant when in her poem she described herself as the “Phenomenal Woman” ~ “Pretty women wonder where my secret lies/ I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size…”

Significantly, in Kolkata, Saraswati Puja day, which hitherto was exclusively about the worship of the Goddess of Learning, has of late, according to the consumer goods industry, become synonymous with Valentine’s Day with its roses and teddy bears. Similarly the resistance movement, that initiated the International Women’s Day, is now re-interpreted as a day for women’s self-indulgence by urging them to spoil themselves with goodies. In fact the English language seems lexically challenged as we notice the phonetic intimacy between being good and purchasing goods and goodies.

So can we say that all the battles for women’s rights as human rights have been won and as a result IWD has been joyously reinvented like all the consumer-goods centric celebrations, as birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day , Friendship Day, Rakhi day et al. In India, the target consumers urged to celebrate IWD are of course the tax paying middle class which includes the New Middle Class in New India, the upper, middle-middle and the lower middle classes. The wealth tax payers are in a different league, for who to pay or not to pay tax is a dilemma that can challenge the vacillating Shakespearean Hamlet!

So how did International Women’s Day originate? Quite significantly as May Day was marked by a labour movement in capitalist USA, similarly IWD is often traced back to the march of thousands of women garment workers through the city of New York in protest about their dismal working conditions in 1908. The protest was organized by the Socialist Party of America followed by the observance of National Women’s Day in 1909, which then expanded to thousands of women coming together in Europe and Soviet Russia seeking voting rights and better working conditions and protesting against the ongoing World War I. In fact, in many countries, 8 March is declared as a national holiday and in some as a holiday only for women.

The United Nations declared 1975 as the International Women’s Year and began celebrating International Women’s Day on 8 March from 1975 onwards. In 1974 Vina Majumdar and others tabled the Towards Equality status report on Indian women. The deliberations led to the setting up of Women’s Studies Centres in many UGC funded universities. IWD is celebrated in these women’s studies centres with enthusiasm through workshops, talks and debates.

Moreover, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995 created a historic roadmap signed by 189 governments, which focused on 12 critical areas of concern, and envisioned a world where each woman and girl can exercise her choices, such as participating in politics, getting an education, having an income, and living in societies free from violence and discrimination.

It is interesting to take a quick look at the International Women’s Day themes in the past three years. In 2016 it was Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality; in 2017 Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030; in 2018 it was Time is Now: Rural and urban activists transforming women’s lives. This year, the theme of International Women’s Day as outlined by the United Nations is Think Equal, Build Smart, Innovate for Change.

The clarion call essayed by the United Nations women’s organization #Balanceforbetter focuses on marching towards a gender-balanced world, where women are not regarded as the Other. One hopes a concerted effort will be made in India to root out sexual exploitation, sexual assault, rape, murder, acid attacks, dowry deaths, child marriage, abuse of the girl child, female infanticide, female foeticide, marital rape, sexual harassment in workplaces and domestic violence among others.

In this connection, one cannot overlook the recent somewhat abortive Metoo campaign restricted to the niche culture industry and the appalling Sabarimala temple case which was thankfully recently resolved after 35 lakhs of women formed a protest chain and the temple board revised their earlier resistance to the entry of menstruating women into the temple precincts.

Both men and women need to realize that gender equality is not for any exclusive benefit for women but for the benefit of every citizen of a nation, from children to adults. As Amartya Sen had observed, “Women are, in this broadened perspective, not passive recipients of welfare enhancing help brought about by society, but are active promoters and facilitators of social transformations. Such transformations influence, of course, the lives and well- being of women, but also those of men and all children ~ boys as well as girls.”

The International Women’s Day observed on 8 March each year is a shake-up call. It is a gender sensitisation day, it is a day not about women’s exclusivity or exceptionalism, IWD is about gender inclusiveness and gender equality, it is not about stimulating the negative vibes of misandry and misogyny. The annual ceremonial celebration of International Women’s Day is about a committed aspiration towards realizing the harmony of androgyny, so that the phenomenal woman can say with both pride and humility:

Now you understand Just why my head’s not bowed. I don’t shout or jump about Or have to talk real loud. When you see me passing, It ought to make you proud.

(The writer is former Professor, Dept of English, Calcutta University)