A Story of Two Women
“The success of every woman should be the inspiration to another. We should raise each other up. Make sure you’re very courageous: be strong, be extremely kind, above all be humble.” Serena Williams
“So here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated.” Malala Yousafzai1
Many of you, dear reader friends, have the gift of making yarn or thread or pieces of fabric into beautiful things. Your nimble hands and sharp minds knit, quilt, crochet, or cross-stitch with ease and pleasure. I admire you, but I am not one of you. I have done a few pieces of embroidery in my day. The pieces mark my two daughters' births, one piece for the alphabet and one for numbers. All of these crafts keep hands busy while we chat, watch TV, listen to a podcast or music, or wrap ourselves in silence. Instead of crafting, I have discovered an app on my iPad called Wonder Color. To begin, I choose a blank outline picture, and then I fill in the coded colors. I think that I have done a couple hundred! Lol! Usually, I prefer gardens or woodlands, oceanscapes, or still-lifes. I don’t usually color pictures of people, but the one displayed below was breathtaking in its pre-color form. I knew there was a story there.
As the colors embellished the blank spaces, a genuinely human story began to emerge. Two women. One younger, one older. Maybe a Mother and daughter, but I let it be that they were two women separated in age, observing something adverse. Let’s study the young woman first. She is garbed in traditional Eastern clothing—a sari with a hijab covering her head. There is no design, so perhaps this symbolizes her lack of life experience (compare to older woman’s hijab). She may be in her teen years. Young people often respond to a stressful sight with anger. Notice her deeply furrowed brow, and her eyes look like they could kill. Her lips are clenched. A scowl line appears between her eyes. It is deep. She has suffered this affront before.
The older woman is married. Her hijab of fascinating designs may be information that she has lived through many events. Some happy, but many worrisome, such as the display before her. The horizontal lines on her forehead are often called “worry lines.” These lines indicate that she has bottled up a large amount of stress. Older women often carry the weight of family and tradition. Unlike the angry, glaring eyes of the younger woman, her eyes are thoughtfully calculating the scene she is seeing. Her mouth, in a sad downward shape, reveals no emotion. Her hand touches her chin in a way that shows she is thinking about what the event means, how she can help, or that she may be resigned to helplessness. Her hand still appears young. A tuft of grey hair. Maybe she is in her forties, but her life has seemed longer than that.
Imagine that the incident involves another woman being berated by men in the village, crushing her for breaking a rule imposed upon women. In August, “An Afghan woman has been killed by Taliban fighters after she was caught in public without a head covering not long after the militant group’s leaders promised to honour women’s rights.” ”2
The two women will walk home silently, clutching each other’s hand, each thinking thoughts of how they can overcome this violence, this oppression, this misogyny. They will talk clandestinely within their precious circle of women friends over half-stale Indian tea. They will talk of a time when they will be spared the constant shroud of inferiority. They will discuss the means to their desired end. Meanwhile, their sisters worldwide will commiserate as they face their own cultural complexities of being women.
Why is Gender Equality so universally impossible? Why is it so universally unthinkable to men in power? The profundity of gender status is understood very differently between women and men. Men who champion the Women’s Movement are to be highly esteemed. We are all humans, every one of us created in God’s image. In God’s eyes, we are equally valued. Why do the differences in our human shells cause such a power struggle? Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the Moral Universe is long, but it bends toward Justice.” God works without ceasing, helping his children to create justice everywhere. Our day of Justice is at hand if only we press towards it.
We are the two women in the picture. We struggle to make sense of the cultural status, and our guts are determined to banish the cruelty of inequality. Be strengthened by the knowledge that GOD desires no less than dignified equality for His daughters.
“Let’s not falter. Let’s unite and watch change come. Shall we?”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-full-text-malala-yousafzai-delivers-defiant-riposte-to-taliban-militants-with-speech-to-the-un-general-assembly-8706606.html
https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/afghan-woman-killed-for-not-wearing-a-burqa-after-taliban-pledge-to-uphold-womens-rights/news-story/12a28fdff1ee93dc572bc372b0d09b5a
In view of the freedom and respect Jesus imparted to women, it's especially sad when Christian men pracitice misogyny.