In 2022 these women exemplify what courage really means

Growing up I never thought of myself as a feminist, my view was that men and women both had obstacles to overcome, but also had opportunities, and we were better off just getting on with it.  Shows what a bubble I lived in – and I’m old so it was an even smaller bubble than now, as I eventually came to learn.  If you grew up in the 50s getting a good education, where the women in the neighbourhood mostly all worked at jobs they enjoyed, and everyone seemed to respect each other – at least from my idealist young eyes – then feminism seemed like overkill.  Well, first of all, I’m eternally grateful for that small bubble I grew up in, and, secondly, boy, was I wrong.

Here it is 60-70 years later and look at what’s happening in the world.  Sure, things have gotten better in many places, but for many whose personal acceptance and freedoms have improved, that acceptance is weak enough to always be suspect.  Just ask our friends, family members, and acquaintances in the LGBTQ+ community, even in Canada.  Or ask anyone who falls in the category of visible or religious minority.  Human beings have such a long way to go to harness their compassion and understanding.  It takes courage to live as a possible target of these societal inequities, these societal cruelties.

In my view, the award this year for role model to the rest of the planet for exhibiting courage – along with every Ukrainian – goes to the women and girls in Iran and Afghanistan.  I cannot begin to imagine how much courage it must take for women to publicly protest against the authorities in Iran or the Taliban in Afghanistan.  The repression they’re protesting is really a result of their sin of having been born a woman.  In either country, beware if a bit of your hair might be showing from beneath your hijab.  Beware of prison, rape, torture, or death.  Because a bit of your hair might be seen by a man.  Try to absorb that.

There’s plenty of reason to protest, but to put yourself in the position of as likely as not being raped, beaten, jailed, having your family targeted and/or even being publicly executed is – in my humble opinion – being remarkably courageous.  I get the fact that it must seem like there’s little to lose; we can’t live like this, enough is enough.  But still, protesting in the context of these harsh regimes takes mindboggling courage.

Protesting the arrest and death of Mahsa Amin in Iran [Image source: Le Monde]

In Afghanistan the Taliban not only requires women to be completely covered in public – and preferably just never seen in public in any way, shape, or form – they have now taken away the right for any young girl or young woman to go to school.  At all.  Ever.  From kindergarten to university.  Never to learn to read and write.  To learn mathematics.  To learn history and geography.  To learn to help others.  To fulfill their full potential to help expand the economy of their exceedingly poor country.  They want women – of any age – to be out of sight, as if they don’t exist except to produce more males to dominate women.

University students across Afghanistan took to the streets protesting the latest attack on Hazara students [Image source: Al Jazeera, courtesy: Bano] 

As of this week, the Taliban has not only prohibited any woman from working at all, but they have decreed that no international aid agency can have any women working in their humanitarian relief efforts.  At all.  Regardless of the fact that the aid agencies have made it clear that they cannot operate without their female employees, all of whom take great care to be fully covered.  The female aid workers constitute 30-40% of the aid workforce and their female employees are the only ones who are able to assess the needs of struggling Afghani women and children.  This in a country where something like 70% of the population now relies on international humanitarian aid to survive and now the Taliban is saying “too bad”.  I know, it is absolutely impossible to comprehend this mindset.  Impossible.  Their self-destructive edicts in the name of their extremist ideology are cruel and senseless beyond belief.

So, again, there’s every reason to protest, but when you stop and think about the mindset of the authorities who even think up such needless and self-defeating decrees, you get a sense of what the official reaction will be.  Not pretty.  Such courage.

These protesting women in Afghanistan and Iran are standing on the shoulders of women throughout the past two centuries who have protested against social injustices and often met with beatings and jail time.  Women in Britain were active in the anti-slavery movements starting in the 1820s and earlier.  Women in the U.S. were instrumental in the anti-slavery (abolitionist) movement in the 1800s as well.  Rosa Parks played a pivotal role in overturning long-fought segregation in the U.S. South when she refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white man and was arrested for “civil disobedience”.  This was in 1955, to give a reminder of how painfully long and slow the march for equality is.  And meanwhile, I was living in my little bubble.

But now it is 2022, just a few days short of 2023.  And look at the hill we still have to climb with respect to women’s rights in several parts of the world.  And that’s just women’s rights.  There are other human rights – respect for all humans to be who they are – that are being trampled on or at risk of backtracking all around the world.  Discrimination and mindless hatred persists; kindness and compassion are too often in short supply.  One of my hopes for 2023 is that progress continues to be made on all fronts with respect to human rights.  And that the courageous women of Iran and Afghanistan – and those men who have the courage to publicly support them – stay safe and succeed in their mission.  Their mission is simply to be able to live as fully functioning human beings in their own countries and to contribute to the well-being of those countries.  That’s all anyone wants.