Woman: Looking for a new sky

LONDON: Here are wishes raised by four women in commemoration of International Women's Day of March 8:

oUrvashi Butalia, head of Kali books, India: There are two stories that Indian women are fond of telling. They go like this: sometime in 800 BC, Gargi, a woman philosopher, threw a challenge to Yajnavalkya, a new (male) entrant to the field of philosophy. She asked him two questions. Unable to deal with them, Yajnavalkya refused to respond to her in the marketplace, saying he would deal with the questions later, and he slunk off.

The second story is different: thousands of years ago it is said that Mara, the devil (and a man) came upon a bhikshuni (a woman ascetic) deep in meditation. He scoffed.

What does she think she is doing, he asked. All she needs is two fingers of meditation, for that is all that is needed for her work in the kitchen. The bhikshuni was unmoved: she kept her counsel. For she knew that what she was looking for was not two or more fingers worth of peace, but akasha, the all-encompassing, entire sky.

Several centuries later, we aren't doing that much mediation, but we've been fighting, and hard. We've won some, and lost some.

But like our ancestresses of many years ago, what we haven't lost is the capacity to dream, to wish, to desire. If they thought they could achieve something through meditation and questioning, we know that our goals may be the same, but our methods have to be different.

So if the skeptical young man were to come upon me today, he wouldn't find me standing deep in meditation. Instead, I'd be deep in a campaign, locked in discussion with the state, fiercely opposed to the fundamentalists, fighting for the rights of minorities. If he were then to ask -- as young men in the 21st century might well do -- what I wished for Indian women in this century, I would say an end of illiteracy, poverty and hunger, and, of course, the capacity and possibility to dream and have loads of fun.

In other words, not only the whole of akasha, but a profoundly transformed akasha, a whole new sky, covering a whole new world, And I'd hope that the young man wouldn't then slink off but would stay, cast off his devilish garb, and join in the campaigns and the fun.

oCarmen Alborch MP, feminist, author and former minister of culture, Spain: Spanish society still has to accept the reality of a shared world where men and women divide their rights, responsibilities and emotions equally. I would focus on employment as an area of great inequality. Our female unemployment rate is more than double that of men. Even when we are in the workplace we do not have an equal share of power.

We are not in the hard-core of political, economic, scientific or academic power. We still live in a very male culture and access to these power-centers must open up. We have the academic qualifications; women now outnumber men at university. We've proved our worth but there are still immense difficulties in reaching the top or coming anywhere near it.

We have to educate our society with new values which start with the very basics, eradicating domestic violence against women, but go much further than that.

We have to do so in the family, in schools and through the media. Just one example is fighting the use of sexist language, so common in Spain.

As women we also have to change our own perceptions of how we live and our role in society. The old-fashioned notion that women were nothing except in their relationship towards a male protector figure, as daughter, sister, wife or mother, is changing. The stereotype of the frustrated spinster is dying, but it's being replaced by another equally dangerous one of the woman who chooses to live alone as being selfish.

Finally, we must tackle one of the great sources of poverty -- emotional poverty that follows the great change in women's role in society which has been more recent and intense here than in Northern European countries. There is a great incidence of poor- quality relationships in which men are unable, unwilling, unprepared or uneducated to fulfill women's needs, which causes misery to both sexes.

oNawal El Saadawi, writer and activist: My wish for the women of Egypt is still the same. Now we have moved into the 21st century it seems to me that the faces of the women in my village have not changed.

My cousin, Zeinab, who is the same age as me, looks old and sick. She sits near the entrance to her house with a TV set in front of her. From the village rises a chorus of male voices shouting out the call to prayer from microphones fixed to the top of minarets rising into the sky; competing with them is an electric sign board advertising Malborough cigarettes.

When I hold her hand I can feel the horny knots and cracks caused by long years of labor with a hoe.

She whispers: "When I was a child I dreamed of escaping from this awful life but now I've lost hope. We worked like slaves, tilled and hoed the earth to send our children to the schools and university. Now there are no jobs, and our debts keep growing. Now we eat fava beans canned in California instead of growing enough ourselves."

I see her eyes questioning. What can I say at the beginning of this millennium? Can I speak of a global system, which keeps a million people suffering of hunger, which keeps people destitute? Can I tell them that 443 people (men) own as much wealth as half the people of the earth? Can I show her how to live and fight when that is what she has always done? Can I tell her that the peoples of the world are learning how to work together and that many Seattles everywhere, in the North and South are my wish, and my hope?

o Sandra Coney, Women's rights and health care advocate, New Zealand: "The first wish is for the National Cervical Screening Program to get back on track with adequate money and quality controls. This week, 1,500 women from the regional town of Gisborne have learned that their cervical smears were misread between 1991 and 1996: around 500 of these women may have high- grade abnormalities which have gone untreated for years. The program was set up by a Labor government 10 years ago but was sidelined by the previous government.

My second wish is to see another sexual revolution led by women. The first one was about women earning the right to say yes and now women need to fight for the right to say no -- to reclaim control over their bodies. What I see now is women willingly embracing damaging stereotypes concerning their bodies and their sexual behavior.

New Zealand has a major problem with eating disorders, there's a boom in cosmetic plastic surgery, then we see people like Bernadine Oliver-Kirby, a prominent sportswoman, posing on a rugby magazine cover naked from the waist up with a rugby jersey painted on her torso. How can you expect to be treated seriously and at the same time want people to look at your tits?

My third wish is to see the gender pay gap closed. Women need money. For many years now, New Zealand women have earned 80 percent of what men earn and for women with degrees and higher levels of education, the gender pay gap is even greater.

-- Guardian News Service