After 8 March?

International Women’s Day has perhaps never been a real celebration of women. One ought to speak instead of a celebration for women, given that it has never been fully converted into an occasion for serious analysis of the irreplaceable role and significance of being a woman. Founded in the USA exactly a century ago and later developed in France justly to claim rights (as an extension of female trades-unionism) that had hitherto been denied and put an end to abuses and discrimination of every kind – especially on the labour market – in a profoundly male-dominated, if not downright misogynist context, International Women’s Day now forms part of a social fabric which has radically changed in recent decades and in which emancipation, though not yet acquired in toto , has at least achieved satisfactory levels. But that doesn’t mean that everything is sweetness and light, far from it. However, what can be said is that several steps forward have been made in a century of progress: from the right to vote to maternity leave (now complemented in many States with paternity leave, testifying to a cultural reversal inconceivable just a few years ago), from the recognition (in part) of housework to the stipulation of female quotas in public competitions and electoral lists. These have by now become firm points.The fact of having over-commercialized the event – almost as if it were Mother’s Day or Father’s Day – is a mistake that conceals a danger. There’s a good deal more to International Women’s Day than the fragrance of mimosa. Rather like the iceberg and its tip. An ever more media-focused celebration is not enough to show what’s happening below the water. A proof of this is the fact that, until recently in Europe, 8 March meant almost exclusively the presentation of comparative statistics: women hold less positions of responsibility than men; they are paid less than their male colleagues; they are not sufficiently considered. In short, the prejudice of the “woman as object” is still widespread. The problems here are undoubtedly real, and must be addressed until a definitive solution is found, both by women and by men, both by politicians and by so-called civil society. But are we sure that the problems of women will then be solved? And that the recognition of full equality between the sexes – what’s more, from an essentially “Western” point of view – will be satisfied with the achievement of what is due to women and natural in terms of equality on the workplace and in terms of legal curbs on preconceptions and attitudes that are as odious as they are deep-seated in human nature?Looking in the third millennium at International Women’s Day from a Eurocentric point of view is no longer enough, and above all doesn’t do justice to the hundreds of millions of women who still live today in conditions of virtual slavery, psychological or real, in every corner of the planet. Woman as the “property of man” is the condition of life experienced on a daily basis by mothers, wives, daughters and female workers in Africa and Asia, without forgetting the pockets of exploitation and ignorance that still resist in Europe and in North America. It’s not always delinquency or gratuitous wickedness that’s to blame. Far more than might be thought, cultural customs and traditions persist that are wedded to “religious beliefs” and imprison women in cages that even the worst European statistics on female employment or maltreatment do not enable us to imagine. What appear atrocious violations of human rights (female circumcision and infibulation are two of the most shocking examples that the international community has been combating for years without particular success) are regarded elsewhere as “natural” practices that women themselves accept as natural and indeed as essential for their femininity and their allotted role in society.In the Europe of the Charter of Rights, in the Europe of commitment to the spread of democracy and the vindication of civil rights, we must also ask ourselves what the European Union is doing, what its governments and citizens are doing, other than gathering data and publishing statistics. Programmes against female violence, campaigns to raise awareness and eliminate poverty, the improvement of conditions of work, laws that promote equality between the sexes: these are important and necessary building blocks, but by themselves alone, and especially without a shared willingness to engage in reciprocal intercultural dialogue, they are not enough to build an international regime of real equality for women all over the world.