This Saturday was International Women’s Day.

Aren’t you almost glad, first of all, that you barely heard anything about it? Whenever the issue of women’s oppression and liberation is broached in the mainstream, it’s usually the start of a sentence that ends in legitimising racism or agitating for war. The IWD website, fortunately, doesn’t really agitate for Muslim women’s liberation by smart bomb, but it doesn’t really do much else either. It’s a corporate-sponsored day of celebration comemmorating, among other things, the liberating role of technology, and the companies which take women’s advancement seriously.

There is, of course, much progress to celebrate. My sister-cousins haven’t seen anything like the oppression my great-Grandmas would have faced, and hopefully they never will. That’s not to say they don’t have problems of their own.

A woman’s sovereignty over her own body, for example, is in constant need of defense and advancement. Never mind an assault on abortion rights the likes of which my generation has never seen, let’s talk a woman’s right not to be raped - something which increasingly seems to be dependent on her commitment to dress modestly and avoid the company of men. How else to interpret the comments on date-rape, for example, from the likes of John Redwood, who trivialises it as “a disagreement between two lovers as to whether there was consent on one particular occasion.“

Of course. I mean, once she’s gone home with you there’s nothing left to discuss, is there? Not unless you “want to have to take a consent form and a lawyer on a date”. Actually I’d say if you need a lawyer and a consent form to remind you to, erm, not rape people, then something’s already gone seriously wrong. The overwhelming majority of sexual assaults being committed between acquaintances and friends, not strangers hiding in the bush, this is no laughing matter.

Still, never mind Tory crackpots - the idea that some women are just fair game is pretty much the consensus of the legal establishment. Look at the gang-rape victim of whom the defense council said “She may well have been glad of the attention.” Not quite Saudi Arabia, but not great. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A female solicitor comrade recently told of a conversation she had with a male colleague experienced in defending rapists: when asked how he would react if she’d been raped while drunk or provocatively dressed, he responded “You’d know better than to press for charges”. Quite. No wonder conviction rates are so low.

Oppression doesn’t end with the spectacular, though; most of it is spectacularly mundane. Let’s talk about the “health” and “beauty” industrial complexes; businesses that feed on insecurities, that manufacture zero-sized ideal beauties at a time when most of our waists are expanding, that have gone beyond selling diets and girdles to selling operations: cut things off, stuff things in, pump your faintly-wrinkled face with poison for a very reasonable price. Look at raunch culture, the soft-pornographication of adverts and music videos, and the assumption that anyone not prepared to get her tits out for the lads and find it good clean liberating fun is some kind of 1950s throwback prude. This is oppression repackaged, oppression commoditised.

Look, now, at the one sympton of women’s oppression that is routinely acknowledged even among the white men and their sisters: the relative paucity of female faces the higher up one climbs up any given hierarchy. This is a reflection of the disproportionate strains on women - and especially on mothers - in our society, and the inadequacy of the support provided for those who need it. Social stigma is no longer as significant as it once was in keeping women in their place, but economics still tends to have it covered. A paucity of affordable childcare makes it hard to put one’s career first, while the benefits that make family life possible are forever being eyed with resentful frugality by the powers that be.

It was against real life constraints like these that women struggled in the first International Women’s Days of the early twentieth century:

1908
Great unrest and critical debate was occurring amongst women. Women’s oppression and inequality was spurring women to become more vocal and active in campaigning for change. Then in 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.

…

1911
Following the decision agreed at Copenhagen in 1911, International Women’s Day (IWD) was honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on 19 March. More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination. However less than a week later on 25 March, the tragic ‘Triangle Fire’ in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women’s Day events. 1911 also saw women’s ‘Bread and Roses’ campaign.

Within a few years, women in Russia were at the forefront of that country’s antiwar movement, culminating in 1917 when a women’s strike kicked off the February Revolution. Thus goes probably the most radical history you’ll ever read on a website so bedecked with logos, and it’s worth reminding ourselves of the roots of the women’s movement. Feminists are usually held up as the vanguard of the political-correctness police, as “language rapists” getting their knickers into quite a twist about making up words, and I think this stereotype owes more to sexist snobbery than to anything else - but it’s pretty convenient that it’s drowned out our collective memory of radical mass action against exploitation and war.

* * * * *

There’s another way of looking at boardrooms and parliaments full of men, of course. There’s an urge to ask, what if half of those CEOs and half of those MPs were women?

There are some feminists for whom that would be enough (and some who would demand all-female boardrooms and parliaments). Indeed, if we define a feminist as one who struggles on behalf of her gender and against the other gender, there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be the locus of her struggle. But I don’t think it would have meant very much to the women who burned to death in the Triangle shirt factory, to the women who marched in New York and went on strike in St. Petersberg. I don’t think it means very much to my indisputably betesticled self that there are so many men on the various boards of directors either.

* * * * *

Perhaps the first campaign in which I’ve taken part from the very start is the defense of abortion rights, and this campaign has already involved probably the most confrontational demonstration I’ve ever been on, ever. And yet, a number of people I’ve spoken to about it have expressed surprised that I even take a position on such a womanly issue, let alone that I can get that worked up about it. I can actually get quite worked up about a lot of things, given the right atmosphere, and besides there were almost as many men as women on the aforementioned demo.

To me, it’s obvious that men should stand up for women’s liberation; to say otherwise is akin to saying that racism is something that only Black people should stand up against(or Brown or Jewish or Polish or Irish people, or whatever, in seperate movements for Black/Brown/Jewish/Polish/Irish liberation) . It’s absurd. Not only do we all have a duty to stand up for the oppressed whoever they may be, but the only meaningful way in which we have to stand up to the various discriminatory -isms is to deny them, to transcend them. Black and White Unite against the racists; so too must men and women stand together against sexist oppression.

It’s very very simple, surely? But it doesn’t seem to go without saying. Take the example of the campaigns on violence against women, and the Reclaim The Night marches in particular. These are important events, in which there is certainly much to admire, but I still failed to be inspired when it came to Manchester the other week. The main march was for women only, with a secondary (mixed) march for “friends” under the slogan “these hands won’t hurt women”, or something along those lines.

From what I’ve heard the event was a considerable success; hopefully it will feed into a new era of politically aware and politically active young ladies, as well as raising awareness of the problem… but still, there’s so much more for we men can do than staying in a seperate section meekly promising not to be part of the problem. We could learn from the fight for abortion rights in the 1960s and 1970s when, of course, women took the lead - but when massive victories were won by trade unions, mobilising men and women. Why let ourselves be divided, why make ourselves easier to conquer?

But making women’s liberation a women-only fight doesn’t just miss the point about liberation; it misses the point about oppression. Oppression brutalises the oppressor, and a society that pits men against women is doing its men no favours either. Women are oppressed in different ways to men, but I’m ultimately no happier about being a mammoth hunting bigot than my imaginary is about being locked in the kitchen all day. Fathers rarely face the same uphill balancing act that single mothers do, but men to do work the longest hours of their lives right around the time their partners are giving birth - precisely the time they’d be most inclined to spend time with their new families.

Men tend to work longer hours full stop - this sucks for women, glass-ceilinged into the lowest paid jobs, but it’s not exactly fun for us either. Is it the same? No, but it’s another side of the same coin, and the fight for a fairer society free of sexism is our fight too. Suicide and mental illness are more common among the male population by orders of magnitude, and we die quicker too.

Emmeline Pankhurst would have had me sent to die in the trenches or had me interned, so that a woman could have taken my job. But the mentality that got women the vote by killing off a generation of young men is the same mentality that pushes women’s retirement age to be as high as men’s and gives everyone a paycut in the name of equality. For all that she was an awesome campaigner, by the time she became a Tory MP working class women would have had far more in common with working class men than with the esteemed Mrs Pankhurst (now Sylvia, she was the smart one…). Ask my Mum; she’s always hated Thatcher.

Women’s oppression is as real in 2008 as it was in 1908, and women’s liberation needs to be just as real too. Real liberation doesn’t mean bullying hijabis, praising responsible corporations or giving men a pay cut - it means recognising oppression, and fighting it together.