Women's Day has come and gone

March 8 was International Women's Day- and I'm embarrassed to say, I had no idea. But is it really my fault? After all, the media barely even touched on it. So I went around digging today for articles on IWD, and sure enough, I found a mix of relevance and perturbation:

• The Women's Rights Blog very mutedly reported on Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice's speech in Brussels on Thursday at a conference of women leaders entitled, "Women: stabilising an insecure world." The blog highlighted Rice's call for actions over rhetoric, encouraging the education and protection of girls and women.

• The blog provides a link to an article by Sarah Collins, published on The Parliament.com. The article was just as muted as the blog post, simply relating select quotes from Rice's speech and commenting on EU parliament president Hans-Gert Pottering's suggestion to create a special EU envoy for women's rights in international relations. No further information was provided on the feasibility or background of this proposed policy.

• I found another article about the conference, posted on the Daily Star in Lebanon in the form of two "first person" accounts by writers Benita Ferrero-Waldner and Margot Wallstrem. Much more detail was provided, as well as detailed and informative references to the implications of the conference. Ferroro-Waldner and Wallstrem bring up issues of war ("women are often disproportionately affected [by war] due to their traditionally more vulnerable place in society") as well as issues of refugees ("80% of the world's refugees are women and children"), along with issues of sexual violence and rape, climate change and environmental degradation. They lead each paragraph with strong statements, such as "Without education you cannot have social stability," and "We believe the key to a stable world is sustainable development." The article also touches on their opinion of women's roles, stating that, "Women make a difference in part because they adopt a more inclusive approach toward security and address key social and economic issues that would otherwise be ignored." It concludes by listing the key obstacles that still stand in the way of women's contributions: "[Women] remain marginalized in decision-making, peace-building and peacekeeping operations. Under-representation of women in politics still persists worldwide, including European. Only 6% of ministers worldwide and 10% of parliamentarians are women. And we all know that the famous "glass ceiling" is still in place."

• To my dismay, I also found some ghastly commentary against IWD and feminist movements in general, published on the Fox Business website and originally posted on a website entitled "The Eagle Forum," which presents itself as "Leading the Pro-Family Movement since 1972." The article, published on March 7th, referred to IWD as "serving to advance radical feminism in the form of promoting pro-abortion and pro-gay rights legislation, Title IX, government babysitting services and government wage control, commonly camouflaged as 'pay equity' or 'comparable worth.'" It refers to women's groups as "feminist groups," and denounces international women's solidarity by claiming that, "Radical feminists know that they can't complain about American women because we are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived, so they search for oppression in other countries using taxpayer dollars." The article concludes that, "The United States should seriously reconsider lending its stamp of approval to future IWDs."