Tuesday 05 May 2015

Criado-Perez: ‘We deserve to know about the women...'

Darling Caroline,
I don’t suppose you’ll hear about this during the day and worry, but it is already on the BBC website and it may be on the news tonight. So just to let you know I am, of course, fine: I’m in Bangui and this was in Boguila, in the north-east of the country.

“This” being the killing of about 20 people, including three of our national staff, inside the hospital run by MSF. It was armed militia looting, looking for money. Local leaders were having a meeting at the hospital and nobody knows yet what caused the shooting.

It’s hard to explain the mixture of pride and misgiving that greets each announcement from my mother about which new crisis she will be attending in her work as a nurse for Médecins Sans Frontières (a non-governmental organisation that provides humanitarian aid in crisis zones). On the day I got this email, from the moment I saw the word “worry”, misgiving took over and my eyes leapt from the first line to the next paragraph. My mother is always telling me not to worry. I didn’t want to read any more of her hedging and placating. I wanted to know what, this time, she was telling me not to worry about.

“Shooting,” I read. “Inside the hospital run by MSF.” “Killing”. “Three of our national staff.” I wasn’t worried. I was terrified.

It wasn’t till later, after I’d scoured every news website for what little detail they revealed, and fired off an email full of unrepeatable language asking why on earth she wasn’t being evacuated and sent home, that I read the crucial sentence. This shooting, although it had taken place in an MSF hospital, was not in her hospital. It was 400km north of where she was.

I was able to dispense with the images of my mother taking cover as pitiless militias roamed the corridors of her workplace. But I couldn’t let go of the worry. The last time my mother told me not to worry, she was about to sail on a boat into Misrata harbour, under shelling from Gaddaffi’s troops, to evacuate war-wounded from Libya. I’ve learned to take my mother’s exhortations not to worry with a pinch of salt. In fact, it’s when she tells me not to worry that I start worrying in earnest.

I try to keep the panic in check when it comes to Mum. No one wants her mother to keep heading off into danger; but I can’t help feeling my desire to keep her here, and safe, is selfish. It’s selfish because she could be helping people who in practical terms need her far more than I do. And it’s selfish because I know how happy, how fulfilled, her work makes her. I also know that that feeling is gold dust, especially for women. Especially for women my mother’s age. Especially for my mother.

Mum’s story follows the lines of those of many intelligent women of her generation. Bright enough to be pushed a year ahead at school, but born too early for university to be an automatic destination. A decade or so of throwing herself into the religion of the time: free love, free travel and hippy experimentation. And then, love, marriage, three children, and putting her life on hold to raise those children and support her husband’s career.

I didn’t know much about feminism growing up, but one thing I became increasingly aware of was a sense of my mother’s dissatisfaction. We moved from country to country, following my father’s work. Each new country meant a new language, a new culture, and, for my mother, finding a new way to give her life some meaning beyond home and family. Just as she got her teeth into something, Dad [a businessman] would announce he was being sent somewhere new. She would have to give it up and start again. She did it willingly – but that didn’t make it any easier to handle.

But then, in her 50s, divorce. To us, as children, it didn’t come as much of a surprise, but to my mother it seemed like the end of times. I remember watching with helpless teenage horror as she withdrew into herself, becoming a desperate, suicidal stranger. She had nothing, she said, and no one. Having spent her life following someone else around the world, she didn’t know who she was any more.

But slowly, step by step, she started to wonder whether this personal tragedy might be a chance for yet another new life, this time of her own choosing. She had always wanted to work with Médecins Sans Frontières, ever since she first heard about them in the 1970s when she was a nurse in London. But back then, she’d never had a chance to do more than dream.

Apprehensive but ever practical, she figured out what steps she needed to take to be in a position to apply for a job with them. And then she started taking the steps, one by one, until there were no steps left. Stepped out of excuses, she applied for a job. And she got it.

Since then, my mother has emailed me from the Central African Republic, Libya, Tunisia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Turkey, Colombia, Uganda, Nigeria… after a while, the missions blur into one another, apart from the moments of terror that stick out, when I can’t concentrate on anything other than the latest news update. All I’m left with is that indefinable mix of pride and misgiving, misgiving and pride that this woman, my mother, didn’t let life defeat her. She didn’t listen to a society that told her that a woman’s life ends when the wrinkles appear and the children leave. She proved that, in fact, the end of one phase of a woman’s life could mark the beginning of a whole new one.

The media would have us believe that all women over 50 have retreated to the nuclear bunker built to protect the world from the horror of a woman beyond the first blush of youth. There is a very simple explanation for this discrepancy. Men are fully human individuals. Women, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size”. Rather than being human ourselves, we are a foil to male humanity.

This misrepresentation has to stop. We have to stop ignoring real-life women or reducing them to demeaning, stereotypes. There are women from our past whose achievements need resurrecting. And there are women in our present whom we must not ignore or allow to be forgotten.

Here are three women who not only push at the boundaries of what it means to be a woman. They show us that we don’t need to become more like men in order to succeed, to lead meaningful, fulfilling lives, or to be whole humans. We deserve to know about these women who show us what can be done and how to do it. We deserve to know how brilliant, how game-changing, how inspirational it can be to Do It Like a Woman.
Victoria Henry: ‘It’s very much about what you do with the fear’

When Victoria Henry formed part of the six-woman Greenpeace team that was the first to climb the London skyscraper the Shard (at the time, the tallest building in the European Union) as a protest against Shell’s drilling in the Arctic, she was surprised to discover the difference a woman’s perspective can make.

Continue Reading: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/03/caroline-criado-perez-extract-do-it-like-a-woman-pioneering-women-feminism




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