Today is International Women’s Day. Whether it is celebrated internationally is another matter. However, listening to BBC’s Radio 3, I note that most of the music being played there today is by women composers. Happily the time when Clara Schumann, a child prodigy and noted composer in her own right, felt she had to give up writing music after marrying Robert in order to give him the limelight and, instead, start looking after the house, cooking for him and producing babies has long since passed, at least in the westernised world. There are, unhappily, other regions where even the playing of music by both sexes is forbidden. Thankfully the UK government has finally relented and issued visas for the Afghan Women’s Orchestra.
When did I first realize there was a difference between men and women? In the bathroom! ‘She hasn’t got one!’ I exclaimed to my aunt when I first saw my little cousin for the bathtub. ‘That’s right’, answered the amused aunt. ‘She’s a girl’.
When was I first attracted to girls? At my infant school I recollect the lovely Lesley Hayes. In my mind’s eye I can still see her dark curls, her blue dress and her sweet smile.
I remember girl’s names in my primary school: Janet Lowe, Jane Seaton among them. But not many of the boys. My universe was clearly gravitating towards the fairer sex. Later I realised that adjective did not just refer to hair colour but to a more equitable ethical outlook .
When I moved to my secondary school the fact that there were no girls there and not even any women teachers did not at first concern me. In fact I enjoyed being among boys and not worry about the sugar and spice sex.
Puberty then arrived and with it the changes in my body, particularly the advent of hairier regions. One schoolboy seemed concerned about this and said to me that he had liked me but that now my fledgling whiskers were putting him off. I subsequently realised the different permutations in sexual attraction but soon settled for the hetero variety. Apart from a couple of encounters with differently aligned males I have stuck with women. In particular with my wife with whom I have been both amorously and legally aligned for coming up to half a century now (and longer if we include our often clandestine teenage encounters).
For much of the time that I grew up women were (and still are) sadly not considered and treated as men’s equals. As a boy I had a lady doctor and cannot forget matron’s regime during my stay at Greenwich’s Miller hospital where I had been rushed to with appendicitis. My mother was a fully working mum. Indeed so fully that it was dad who usually got me and my brother our tea when we returned from school. At least I had several female role models to illuminate me at a time when women were as scarce as Great Auks in such environments as politics, business and engineering, and when women working on buses were limited to issuing tickets and not driving them.
Cultural sexual segregation continued with my advent into university life. It seems incredible that when I entered Cambridge there were no mixed undergraduate colleges and that until 1948 women could not get a degree! I remember a pamphlet issued during my stay there concluding that there was a distinct correlation between student suicide and the small number of women undergraduates. Certainly the competition between males to grab a suitable girl for the May balls was fierce. Sadly, there were some undergraduate suicides while I was there: whether they were due to the absence of women I know not.
I can securely state that women have not only saved me but given my life new meaning and taught me so much about generosity, kindness, understanding, sacrifice and above all love. In an age where feminicide continues to be rampant, where in too many countries women are relegated as second class citizens and even (un)-glorified slaves it is imperative for all males including myself to respect, respect, and continue to respect women not just on this day but on every day of the year. There is so much men owe women – their own birth for a start – that an eternity of lives would not be sufficient to return what men owe women.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 2024
You are the glint of sunlight
glanced on the rain-sodden path,
the unrecognized scientist
x-raying the helix of life,
the hidden smile
half-seen in the boorish crowd,
the lady of the lamp
amid the waste of the wounded.
You are the awakening kiss
among the sleeping multitudes,
the unrealized composer’s wife
hiding your music in his,
the wisp of buds
amid the long barren wilds,
the novelist of life behind the creaking door
painting unseen sentiments.
You are the single ray
penetrating the underground,
the poet of myriad islands,
creator of adoration,
the eternal quest
inviting beyond the beyond,
the schoolgirl which no bullet can stop
from her lessons, her future.
You are the changeless inspiration
of all searchers for knowledge.
the will that is
against the should that might,
the pure laser of love
cutting through evanescent sham,
all wonders of the past
collected now to colour the future.
You are the white iridescent wing
that explodes into a rainbow of hues.
my golden country of lost content
that shoots her love beyond the reach of time,
the planet born from the sea
with a thousand heavens in her eyes.
You are Woman, fount of the earth
and this is your resplendent flowering mimosa day.
