International Women's Day 2011

This is the day when I woke up this morning celebrated by my boyfriend through text message in my cell simply with "Happy International Women's Day" words. When I logged on to my twitter account, it was full with several top notch people congratulated Women all over the world as well. One of the most active account in Twitter with Happy International Women Day (IWD) tweets was Helen Clark's, the Head of United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Once, Mrs. Clark tweeted "Education is life changing - Women need equal opportunity to access it."

Equal opportunity.

Even though my boyfriend made a joke about how unfair this special day is (because he defended his opinion based on there is no such thing as "International Men's Day"), I spent around 1 hour this morning, thinking about how special I am as a woman. It is more than just the celebration (it's all just words for me), the feeling that I have today is different. I look back at how hard it was for woman on my age, before 20th century, to achieved gender equality in many aspects from health care, education, right to vote, right to be voted, and many others.

Now, in these past remarkable years, we have seen a lot of  issues raised in journals, press, cyber media, about how important woman as a subject not an object. We partially seen woman as a "Man's Supporter", where there is a great woman behind every great man. I always remember how people in my country (Indonesia) perceive marriage as a condition where man will be the leader while the woman is the follower of the man's words. This typical perception of how life is gonna be after the marriage, made me think again about the conception of gender equality (in a terms of life after marriage). Everytime I try to talk about this with some friends of mine (when we were still in college), 90% of them always give me the same answer, it was all related to how religion taught as about woman position in marriage.

For me, there is a thin line between religion and law. I will never accept any kind of domestic violation, even though the reason is because "the wife does not obey the husband, so she deserve this as an impact of her bad behaviour." For me, that kind of thought is stupid. It is not about modernization or globalization's mind, but it's more into how woman needs to be respected. 

Equal opportunity for women, are we already on it? More opportunities in politics, world debate, education, and more importantly.. equal opportunity for women from developing and least developed countries. 

For the women around the globe...

Happy International Women's Day 2011 :)