2.11.06

Woman: So many things in a single word!


Women have been important to the mankind since the beginning of the years. It doesn’t matter if they have lived hard in countries in which they are regarded as an object or an inferior being. It seems that they find an invisible and spiritual strengh that make them present at the most important events in their societies. It is said that there is always a woman from behind a famous man (how many things does a woman say to her husband on a bed?!). Their fragile bodies and natural obstacles from their culture are not able to stop them thinking over or even acting by themselves when it is necessary to do so.
There is an uncountable number of women that made history: Virgin Mary and all the saint women of the Catholicism, Cleopatra, Queen Victoria, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Eva Perón, Margaret Thacher, Condoleezza Rice, Olga Benario Prestes, Sarah Kubitschek de Oliveira and so on, just to mention holy people and politicians. There are writers, educators, scientists, civil rights crusaders, artists, entertainers, and others.
In spite of that, nowadays, even in the developed countries, women have always made an effort to achieve the place they deserve in the world. They have faced all kind of prejudice in such a society. However, many things have changed, mainly from the middle of the last century on. Little by little they are doing almost everything men do. Women are already competing with men for places in good universities, private or public jobs, the armed forces, and professions that were practiced only by men before.
I am a man, but I respect women and, finally, I ask a question that I know it cannot be answered now: How Would (or will) the world be run by women in the future? Naturally it would not (or won’t) be “tiresome”. At least this is Catherine Morland’s thought in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

“But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in... I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome”