Aneeshka Vyas | Women’s Day Supplement Coordinator
Featured image: Aneeshka Vyas is a third-year kinesiology and health science student. | Courtesy of Aneeshka Vyas
I first found out about International Women’s Day when I was in high school through a chain text my aunt sent. I remember being so thrilled that there was actually a day for women.
Just for us!
Now this may seem like a trivial thing, but for the time and place I was living in, things were vastly different.
I was catcalled, touched inappropriately for the first time at age nine, told that I was fat, looked too old for my age; the list goes on. This was not a unique experience either. I had seen women around me being treated like disposable and invisible objects.
My mother, a school teacher, would come home from work and tell me all the stories from other female staff members with unhappy married lives—their husbands would earn good money but not contribute a penny to the house. Since their wives were working, they were believed to be able to run the household on a meagre teacher’s salary.
I was once told of a heated discussion in the staff room where a male teacher was talking about a highly publicized rape case and how the victim—who succumbed to her injuries—deserved it because she was out late at night with a boy.
That was her crime.
This ethos was a major part of my childhood. All I wanted was a little respect for my gender and I found solace in reading about feminism on the internet.
Coming to Canada for my undergraduate degree, I was excited to live in a country where I wouldn’t be ogled at for wearing jeans. In all my enthusiasm, I signed up for an English course about women in literature. We learned about Simone de Beauvoir and her belief in the necessity for women to liberate themselves sexually, politically and economically from the status of the other in society.
She used the word “other” for women since they were not considered equal to men, and in her own words as quoted in The Second Sex: “The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.”
This class was when I began understanding that feminism was multifaceted. It is a rich movement and is an umbrella for a multitude of causes, which is why I chose the theme of this year’s supplement to be faces of feminism.
Since coming to Canada, I have seen many different takes on feminism. I have met people who don’t accept it, which is largely driven by their crude, incomplete knowledge of it, and I have met people of different backgrounds and identities who wholeheartedly support it.
I was in a class taught by a male professor who was covering gender equality. After his lecture ended, I went up to thank him, for I had lost all hope on ever hearing a male talk so much in-depth on the subject of gender equality. He told me how it was essential for men to talk about it in order to set a better example for others.
Living in a multicultural city also exposes one to the different stages of female empowerment experienced by women of colour. Some are lucky to see more representation of themselves in the media than others.
The main goal of the articles selected for this year’s supplement is to emphasize all the progress women have made throughout the years, including the endeavours of the feminist movement and occupations that may not be immediately associated with women, such as in the creative arts and photography.
An effort has been made to provide a positive spin on feminism and female empowerment and all the other movements it has joined forces with, such as the LGBTQ+ movement. However, only talking about the positive side is like only looking at day and ignoring the night. This kind of approach threatens to minimize all the struggles and efforts that are being put forward, and these efforts will continue to be put towards the goal of achieving a just and equal society.
Heart-touching open letters and poems are present in this supplement to remind us that the struggle still exists, but also that we are powerful when we are together. We provide strength to each other. We have succeeded in the past and we will succeed in the future.
