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Page 1 of 3 What is a woman – revisited.
About a year ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek-but-still-serious article “what is a woman?” I’d like to go back to that question, if I may.
The role of a woman is something I think about a lot. Mainly because I am a woman. In our discussion “how many hats?” on the Work/Life Balance section of the forums, we discussed how many roles a woman has to fulfil, and also the fact that whatever women are doing, essentially they are ‘just’ themselves doing things. This discussion started of a long chain of thoughts for me...in the interest of not boring my readers too much, I’ll cut out the middle and head straight to the end.
In a celebration of International Women’s Day (8th March, every year) some friends and I were invited to the Kurdish Women’s Group in our nearest town. Apart from yummy food, groovy music and good company there was a political agenda. Those Kurdish women had achieved something that the western woman can hardly appreciate. They had booked a room at the Kurdish Cultural Society, said that no men could come in, had left their children at home with the men and had invited a group of strange women to join the fun. Three men turned up, one tried to take something from the buffet and was chucked out, one brought his 2 year old son to be breastfed and then left again, the other fixed the PA system and was then thrown out.
P, who was our ‘guide’ explained to us that this would not have been possible 5 years ago. With tears in her eyes, she told us how proud she was of the Kurdish Women’s Group, which she had co-founded 10 years before.
She had moved to Switzerland with her husband 21 years ago. She was brought up in Turkey by ‘liberal’ parents and then spent 7 years in Germany. She could speak no German but had a great attitude, a kind of natural when it comes to feminism! Shortly after moving to Switzerland, to a strange land with no friends or family around her, her tiny child became ill. She had no idea where she should take him and could not understand all the German around her. At last, in desperation, she knocked at a neighbour’s door, a Turkish woman. The Turkish woman asked her if she was a Kurd. When she answered “yes”, her neighbour refused to help her. Crying, she pleaded with her neighbour to help her, she thought her child might be dying. Her neighbour looked around anxiously and then whispered to her where the nearest doctor was. As soon as the doctor saw the child, he called an ambulance. As soon as her child was well again, she vowed to learn German and to promote women’s rights.
We asked her what the Turkish woman had been scared of. She told us that Turkish women who she has spoken to since have told her that if the woman had been seen helping someone Kurdish, her husband would have been informed and she would have been beaten.
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