With my feed full of supposedly well meaning but horrendously misogynist, reductionist or patronising posts about among other things how great women (our mothers, sisters, bla bla) are from supposedly moderately educated folk (not that education necessarily does much for your politics – though it should…), with it – still – being the case that women earn ridiculous amounts less than men or cannot even be construed as something else as passive recipients for men’s attention (ref: any online forum which allows men), with it still being potentially highly uncomfortable for women to take the metro, walk the streets, eat ice cream on their own in a park or do any bloody ordinary or unordinary activity in public in the country I live in, I have a hard time feeling any happiness at all.
At least this year, so far,nobody has posted happy pictures of them receiving a vacuum cleaner from their husband for women’s day…
As Madhura said, yes it’s a celebration of an ongoing struggle, so in a way happy could be a word to use. Happy that the struggle exists, happy that it’s alive and kicking, happy that people around me are not subscribing to the rhetoric of there not being any need for feminism any more.
Yet, just as I feel uneasy about “happy labour day” (labour not having a hell of a great time in our current system, not much to be happy about there), I guess I’ll continue to feel uneasy about “happy international women’s day” as long as there’s a need for a women’s day.