By Annabelle Higgins
First of all, to each and every reader, Happy International Women’s Day! Ladies, today is your day; across countries, cultures, borders, and boundaries, we unite to celebrate being a woman in every way one can be, in every sense of the word and manifestation of that experience.
For me, celebrating International Women’s Day looks like hosting a dinner party with friends, bringing us all together over good food (with a subtle suggestion that the guys in attendance bring us all chocolate) and honouring the women in my life who have made all the difference from day one, e.g. my mother, aunts, grandmothers, and cousins. There is no one way of enjoying today, as long as you rejoice in your own identity — as long as you allow yourself the freedom to express exactly what being a woman means to you.
There is certainly a lot to think about; for instance, women have studied at Oxford for over a hundred years, but when we think of how the university is in fact older than the Aztec Empire (if you didn’t know that, there’s your mind-blowing fact of the day) and the last constituent body of the University to admit women only did so in 2016, the disparity becomes jarring. Still, an impressive trail has been blazed in that comparatively short time; we have had the likes of Malala Yousefzai, Emily Davison, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher, and Vera Brittain (to name a few) pass through our halls, enriching our history with their legacies. Just think — the students of today could be the people making up tomorrow’s ‘Famous Women in Oxford’ webpage. It started with Annie Rogers — it continues with you.
But this isn’t about awards or fame or some kind of ceremony. There is no special validation of femininity in having done something, in having changed the world — such things should not be memorialised in gendered terms, and women should not be paid attention to solely for stirring up revolution. There is so much beauty in the quiet, in what is often unseen, in the roles so many women play that are not given nearly enough credit — when we celebrate our mothers, do we truly understand exactly what it is we are honouring? There is something comforting about being able to trace the tales of all these women, but not simply because they were women; their greatness is not predicated on gender. Just so, while International Women’s Day is a celebration of gender identity, it does not celebrate women’s achievements despite their womanhood; instead, it reveals the glorious liberation of taking pride in a communal identity that is as fluid and shifting as the individuals that constitute it, realising just how narrow-minded it is to conceptualise womanhood in any other way than the all-encompassing. The act of celebration is not a reaction to injustice; it is, rather, a gleeful taking up of space, the glorious proclamation that ‘I am, and that is enough.’
So when you celebrate International Women’s Day, you celebrate a group identity that does not collapse in the face of prejudiced negations that say you need xyz to qualify as a woman, patriarchal systems, or condescending ignorance that knows not its place. Today, the invisible thread linking all women by their heart of hearts glows just a little bit brighter, a little bit stronger; today, we can eat, drink, and be merry in the knowledge that being a woman does not have to be a label, but an embracement of who we are. In reality, this is true of all days — but the 8th of March is a nice reminder. And so, to conclude…
Happy International Women’s day!
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