The Cognitive Dissonance of Women's History Month

There's a lot of absurdity involved in being a woman: while we make up half of the entire human population, in many ways we are treated as a minority by society.

We are disproportionately underrepresented in government, the media, and corporate boards, and even to this day the U.S. has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which would guarantee the equality of women and men by law. And the repeal of Roe v. Wade has already been making devastating medical and economic impacts on women across the country.

In the United States, violence against women is so prevalent and so normalized that the statistics themselves beggar belief:

An average of three women are murdered each day by men they know, such as a current or former intimate partner (1) (for comparison, men are overwhelmingly killed by other men, and in over a quarter of those cases by strangers); 4.8 million women experience intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year (2); in 2019, nearly 1,800 women were murdered by men and the most common weapon used was a gun (3); globally, the U.S. ranks 34th for intentional female homicides (femicide) at a rate of 2.6 killings per 100,000 women (4); and early data shows that rates of domestic violence and violence against women rose during the pandemic.

Also, don't get me started on the sexualization and objectification of women in media and advertising, and the clear links between objectification and violence against women.

So against the backdrop of... all of this... we have Women's History Month: a time to celebrate and acknowledge some exceptional women while ignoring the plight of all the others, as our rights continue to erode, and our pain and struggles are trivialized and ignored (or fetishized).

It's an uncomfortable juxtaposition. I feel a similar unease whenever I hear the word 'empowerment' as applied to women's rights. As a woman, I would much rather be powerful than be empowered, which seems such a tepid alternative. Empowerment is more of an empty slogan or a vibe at this point; it holds no material value or meaning (this is something I'll write about in more depth next week, I think).

And as a Black woman, I often worry that women's concerns are too often subordinated to other causes: I cannot celebrate the critical activism of the Black Panther Party, for example, and ignore the troubling misogynoir and sexism that pervaded the organization. Even speaking from my own personal experience working in activist spaces, I have seen sexism and misogyny rot otherwise progressive coalitions from within.

In the end, while I'm grateful that Women's History Month exists, the cognitive dissonance of our society recognizing the month even as it undermines the very women it purports to celebrate strikes me as... well, as absurd.

Citations (partial, I could send you a syllabus):

(1) Bureau of Justice Statistics,?Intimate Homicide Victims by Gender

(2) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),?Understanding

Intimate Partner Violence?(PDF)

(3) "When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2019 Homicide Data". Violence Policy Center. September 2021.

(4) Intentional homicides, female (per 100,000 female). UN Office on Drugs and Crime's International Homicide Statistics database.

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