Legacy Honors All Contributions

Originally Published on March 30, 2010, in The Centre Daily Times.

The intriguing and ambitious theme for this year's Women's History Month is "Writing Women Back into History." Commemorating this theme could mean different things to different people.
To some, it will mean highlighting women who have succeeded in the public arena by honoring pioneers in politics, sports, science, medicine, arts, literature, public service, government and other domains in the world outside the home. Most people would not contest the place of these eminent women in the recorded annals of history.
To others, celebrating this theme will mean recording the contributions of women in both the public and private spheres. They will write women back into history by accepting the notion that our history is more than the history of conquests or the governing of countries and includes human experience in the public and private realms.
In addition to honoring women in nontraditional roles, they will honor women’s contributions in traditional historic roles as midwives and healers, mothers, farmers, inventors, philosophers, weavers, storytellers, environmentalists, religious leaders, elders, warriors, nurturers, caretakers, wives and daughters. They will recognize women’s pivotal role in nurturing humankind and sustaining traditions that have ensured the survival of our species to this day.
Of course, who gets written back into history depends on the point of view of specific historians and what they consider significant enough to be recorded as history.
Consider the recent example of a video “A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything” that went viral on You Tube a few months ago, with 2.2 million views. Created by Jamie Bell, from the U.K., it illustrates the history of our planet from creation to modern times and chronicles the rise and fall of species and civilizations.
His well-made, entertaining video is a testimony to his hard work and creativity, and earned him an A grade. Yet this17-year-old did not include a single woman in his brief history of pretty much everything. Even more troubling is that this omission of more than half the world’s population is lost on many of the video’s admirers.
The absence of women in Bell’s video is not surprising because including women is still an afterthought in many scenarios around the globe.
For me, writing women back into history requires the same mind-set of respect and sensitivity that made it possible for women to finally, in February, serve on U.S. submarines or to pass the 1990 law requiring women to be included in all federally funded medical research and clinical trials or to start blind auditions for musicians in the 1970s.
Writing women back into history will also mean honoring the contributions of women in our personal histories. For me, it means valuing the role of my homemaker grandmothers as much as the role of my grandfathers, who are identified and valued for the jobs they did outside the home.
It means acknowledging the work my grandmothers did in raising large families and their skills as counselors, financial planners, businesswomen, healers and keepers of history.
We all need to be active witnesses to the myriad ways in which women contribute in today’s world both inside and outside the home, even as we continue the work needed to allow every woman the right to self determination, to live a life free from violence, be head of a household, vote, drive or ride a bicycle.
Writing women back into history allows us the expanding opportunity of recognizing women’s history as part of our collective history and of accepting women’s issues as human issues.
It could also foster recognition of the importance of what is traditionally considered “women’s work” and expand it to be “men’s work” too in today’s world.
If men and women view women’s work and history as our collective legacy, it would be a phenomenal return on the minimal investment of one month focused on almost 50 percent of the population.

Women's History or Our History?

Originally Posted in the Common Threads Blog
Centre Daily Times, March 25, 2008

It is March again, and time for another Women’s History Month.

This whole month, schools, colleges, and organizations plan special events to celebrate our focus on women’s realities.

My daughter, who is in fourth grade, has been designing postage stamps along with her classmates, that celebrate women’s achievements. She finally settled on a “Women Save the Earth” theme, focusing on Rachel Carson’s pioneering Silent Spring,that first elaborated how the chemicals we put out into the world seep into our environment. Her classmates focused on many other achievements by women in space, and other frontiers.

Celebrating these pioneers of the past is important for fostering our leaders of the future. It is also important to celebrate ordinary women, who are creating small improvements in the present time, by following their dreams and performing their duties, changing our collective landscape, one step at a time.

On the first day of spring break, my daughter and her friend got to meet one such present day ordinary woman - as they climbed aboard an FA-18 Navy Fighter plane at University Park Airport. They got to ask a lot of questions of the female pilot, one of the two people in the two seater plane, and learn about her job - of both piloting the plane, and dropping the missiles.

The peace-loving part of me was happy that my daughter did not like the “missile dropping part,” but loved the “piloting part” of the job. And I could sense the enormous impact that interacting with this woman had on the two nine year old girls - it expanded the possibilities of women’s roles in their eyes. And I know she would have had the same enormous impact on nine year old boys too.

I thought of that pilot yesterday, as I heard that the US death toll in Iraq has reached 4000. Of these, 95 were women, 2% of the total death toll, which is small compared to the 50:50 male female ratio in the real world, but is the largest death toll of women in any war since WWII.

These deaths of female soldiers are a part of Women’s history, and Men’s history, as much as the deaths of male soldiers are a part of both histories. For each of these soldiers has a family of men and women, whose lives and realities are unalterably changed by the deaths of their loved ones.

Ultimately, celebrating the history of women in March is a useful exercise, if we remember this history is just a vital subset of our collective history – and that if we focus on it throughout the year, we will not need to set aside a special month to celebrate and reflect on it.

How Unbiased are our Judgements?

Originally Posted on the Common Threads Blog,
Centre Daily Times, Feb 27, 2008

The first two months of 2008 have brought us reports about the divisive riots in Kenya, the sectarian rivalries in Iraq, the tensions in Serbia and Kosovo, and the divisiveness of our own election primaries.

As a writer who focuses on the common threads that link us all, it has been depressing to try and figure out why the links between people break down, and why nations fracture along religious, ethnic and tribal lines, and even along gender, age, race, and class lines.

How do we lose the common bonds we share as human beings? When do certain aspects of our identity, be it religion, gender, ethnicity, political ideology become more important than our common humanity? When do our differences begin to matter more than our commonalities?

I don’t know the answers, but know that we lose a lot when we begin to divide up into groups.

I have often seen little kids, separating out into groups of “boys” and “girls” at elementary school. And now, a friend who lives in a major metropolitan area tells me that in the very diverse elementary school her child attends, there are many kids from different racial and ethnic groups, and kids in elementary school play at recess in groups formed along racial and ethnic lines.

Are these groups inevitable, I wonder?

I turn to Blink, the wonderful book by Malcolm Gladwell, in an attempt to understand how we are arriving at these groups - how do we judge who to hang out with? Is it similar to how we judge on who to vote for? Who to hire for a job?

Gladwell uses scientific research to demonstrate how we make “judgments” in the first two seconds of any interaction, via an “unconscious” mechanism. Many a time, these snap judgments, which we may call our instinctive reactions, may be right on the dot.

But they are not always infallible. Many of our prejudices and dislikes towards others can stem from these snap judgments. So that we can pronounce that someone looks a leader, or that someone looks like a terrorist, just on the basis of a snap judgment.

In the last chapter of his book, Gladwell writes about how the number of women in orchestras in the US went up by five times, once the rules for auditions were changed three decades ago, to have musicians auditioning from behind a screen. Once the screen hid the gender of the musician from the selection committee, more women were hired, thus proving the previous existence of bias on the basis of gender.

Perhaps a similar process to select our presidential candidates will help – analyze their records, without giving them any face time with us – in order to make sure we simply vote for the most competent person. Would such “screens” have given us presidential candidates who are more diverse – including more women and more people from all races? And filtered out irrelevant parameters like gender, race, age, religion and so forth?

The data from the classical music world showed us that women were being excluded when no screens were used. And it is not a stretch to say that this has happened, and is happening in other areas too.

After all, women were the last group to get the right to vote, are playing catch up in getting to positions of power, including the presidency, and are judged differently by our society, which includes the media.

I wish there was a way to use such “screens” in the world of politics, like in the world of classical music auditions - "screens" which would help us judge, based only on the records of the candidates, and not based on any other irrelevant factors which can cloud our perceptions.

Indian President Pratibha Patil

Originally Posted at Common Threads Blog
Centre Daily Times, July 25, 2007

On July 21, 2007, I read Gavin Rabinowitz’s news report entitled “India names its first female president.” My family and I were amused that he focussed more on gender discrimination in India, than about the new president of the largest democracy in the world.

Rabinowitz reduced Pratibha Patil to one aspect of her whole self, the female aspect, in this article written for the Associated Press. This reduction is similar to the labeling of politicians as “female” or “black” or “Mormon” or “Hispanic” or “Muslim” or “Hindu” or “some other one thing we use to define them.”

Once we label them, we wonder what they will do for their special “Religious,” “Racial” or “Gender” constituencies. Consider Rabinowitz’s comment “Still, it's not clear how much 72-year-old Pratibha Patil - a lawyer, congresswoman and former governor of the northern state of Rajasthan - can or will do in the mostly ceremonial post to improve the lives of her countrywomen.”

All I hope is that Pratibha Patil, in her past jobs, improved the lives of all her constituents who shared or did not share some parts of the multiple aspects of her identity - of gender, religion, language, or her identities as mother, lawyer, woman, wife and so on.

Pratibha Patil is a lawyer by training, and has been in politics for four decades - as a legislator at the state and national levels, as a minister at the state level, and finally as a governor of a state. And she has done all this by wearing what she chooses to wear, and looking how she chooses to look.

On Wednesday, July 25, 2007, she added one more thing to her resume - she was sworn in as India’s 13th president after winning 66% of the votes cast by national and state legislators. And just like other presidents who governed in spite of being male, she will govern in spite of being female.

I am happy that her election to the Presidency has done one thing – it has given us another picture of possibility of how a president can look, and who can aspire to be president – it can be a person who happens to be a woman from Maharashtra, who wears saris, who covers her head, who is a lawyer, a former legislator, and a governor, a mother, a wife, and so much more.

And that for me is the expanding opportunity of this historic moment.

Addressing a Women's History Month Assembly

Originally posted in Common Threads Blog,
Centre Daily Times, March 21, 2007

The Women’s History Month Assembly at my daughter’s school was coincidentally scheduled for March 8, which was also International Women's Day. Another parent and I were asked to address an assembly of Kindergarten to 5th grade students. We both followed a group of fifth graders, who celebrated the contributions of some very eminent women.

I was asked to bring an international perspective to the presentations, and I did that by sharing a bit of the personal and the political.

I shared some of my defining experiences - of growing up in Bombay, India, now called Mumbai, where my sister and I had our dreams nurtured by supportive parents, who strongly believed in education. We went to a girls’ school, where the female teachers, principal and student leaders nurtured our ability and potential– we were given every opportunity and encouragement. My sister went on to become an architect, and I a chemical engineer, and both of us came to the United States to attend graduate school.

I shared with the kids the one constant of my childhood – Indira Gandhi, the first woman Prime Minister of India, who held elected office from 1966–1977, and then again from 1980. Her presence made it possible for us to imagine female leaders, much like for the kids of Iceland, who saw a female President, Vigdis Finnbogadottir from 1980–2000, and the kids of about fifty other countries that have had female leaders.

I also shared with them some of the other facts about the world we all share..
That New Zealand was the first country to grant women the right to vote in 1893, and that women in most countries have had the right to vote since the 1950s.

That, today, Brunei and the U.A.E. do not give men or women the right to vote.

That today, Saudi Arabia is the only country where women cannot vote at all and that in Lebanon, women can only vote if they have at least an elementary education.

That the country which elected the first female head of state, in modern times, was Sri Lanka – they elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike as Prime Minister in 1960 - her photo is the one appearing above.

That of the 192 countries in the world, approximately 50 have already had female heads of state – and these include countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Dominica, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Yugoslavia.

That only two conditions are needed for anyone running for president in the United States – that they are natural born US citizens, and that are more than 35 years of age.

I of course hope that all the kids at that assembly realized that women can become president today, and little girls can aspire to it, if they so wish.

I also recommend to all adults and kids, two wonderful creations, that I came across during this journey – they might reshape our ideas of how a leader would look.

www.guide2womenleaders.com, a site by a Danish journalist, which allows you to take in images of leaders from around the world, and “Madam President,” a picture book by Catherine Thimmesh, which details the “Extraordinary, True (and Evolving) Story of Women in Politics” in the United States.