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 International Women's Day













Ilse Bing, Salut De Schiaparelli, 1934. 

  • "Here’s to strong women: may we know them, may we be them, may we raise them".
  • My cynicism has the better of me today. 
  • I was that 'strong' woman who celebrated women on panels, got to applaud their achievements in a room mostly filled with women and raised a glass to future endeavours, always and every time. 
In fact, I may have been on a panel once or twice myself, talking about films or art, and how great my achievements had taken me. If a man could do it and I could too, how impressive that had seemed.  Surely deserving of a stage and mic.

I have chosen Ilse Bing's, Salut De Schiaparelli's image from 1934.  Bing photographed this image in 1934, on the edge of a Europe sliding toward violence and authoritarianism.  It was created for a perfume advertisement, but, when I look at it, I can't help but see something else. This woman appears dead, lilies, strewn across her, perhaps moments before the casket closes.

I'm sorry, I'm not able to celebrate International Women's Day in any form whatsoever, and for those who are, I wonder if you have really taken the time to see how dire our world, and how profound our inequality is.  No amount of panels and discussions is going to change that.

This year International Women's Day is celebrating the theme of 'Balance the Scales'- gathering together to discuss how we might achieve fairness, justice and equality.  A call to END VIOLENCE.  

End violence.

Those two words play in my head, over and over,  because roughly one woman is killed by a partner every nine days in Australia. That equates to around forty women every year.

One woman who may have sat in those same panels,  listening to other women talk about achievements. 

I don't want any more panels, I want action. 

I want a government that recognises what this statistic means and actively implements programs in schools, hospitals and prisons. 

Because one of these women could be you- or your mother, sister, friend, cousin, auntie. 

So, instead of International Women's Day celebrating all that is great with women, on a micro scale, perhaps we should shift the focus to how unsafe women's lives have become, and start using those same panels and forums to build networks of support and resilience against violence.   

I cannot raise a glass of champagne at any gathering while gender based violence continues at this scale. Hate must be eliminated if the scales of balance are ever going to shift.

Instead of patting ourselves on the back, admiring how far we have come since the 70's, how about we look at what is happening now - and have each other's back,  because from where I'm sitting I see a society sliding backwards. 

And every nine days, another woman pays for it with her life.

Stella Grammenos-Dimadis
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