The vast majority of women in the world are afraid, make impossible sacrifices and, in the best of cases, struggle with the schizophrenia of participating in the labor market as if they did not have a family and caring for their children as if they did not have a job. of work
It was late at night when the mother went down to the stables to feed Cachorro, the family ox; He went by the chicken coop to check on the birds in case there were any eggs in the nest. Meanwhile, upstairs in the kitchen, Benita was turning off the iron stove, but not before taking advantage of the last ember to light the lamp. A nickel soup spoon became a candlestick thanks to a piece of canvas soaked in pork fat that lit wonderfully, feeding a weak flame of light.
The young woman sat on the bench in front of the heat that the kitchen still gave off and ruffled her hair. She was the firstborn of a family of farmers, in a remote part of northern Spain, and had been favored with a shock of blonde hair that combined well with her light complexion and blue eyes; a clear descendant of the barbarian peoples who, coming from northern Europe, populated the region in the 5th century AD.
Benita’s seven brothers – all men – revered the young woman, who led the family tribe due to the authority that her character gave her and the unquestionable support of the paterfamilias with whom he shared principles and personality. But all this baggage would have been of no use if the woman had not responded to the many parental demands if she had not made an effort to work harder, demand a lot and always comply “like a man.” So much so, that the boys did not go out to work in the fields or the mountains if Benita was not first and led the march.
It would seem that she was the leader of the pack, as the people of the village thought. However, in order to exercise the symbolic authority granted to her by her father, she had to deny her feminine nature, hide or resolve as if the traits of her condition as a woman did not exist. In the fields, orchards and vineyards, he was like them in everything and worked like anyone else. At home, she worked like her mother in the kitchen, cleaning, caring for the animals, doing laundry, carrying water from the fountain… Tasks typical of women.
At night, when her father and brothers retired to rest from the arduous efforts of the day, Benita let her mother comb her hair in the light of the domestic candlestick and with the help of a bone comb. With skill and dedication, the woman wove her daughter’s golden braid, night and night in a learned and inherited ritual. The next day, Benita opened her eyes at five in the morning, woke up her brothers and woke up the house to start a new day of work. Like them, he drained the liquor from the heap in one gulp and left before everyone else, with the hoe on his shoulder. She didn’t have to comb her hair or shave. It was one more.
More or less this was the life of many women in rural Spain, at the beginning of the 20th century. Meanwhile, in France, the bourgeois and intellectual elites were enjoying a promising time for women, who cherished the first signs of liberation and emancipation that advanced women such as Simone de Beauvoir spoke of. Likewise, in European capitals we began to see girls without corsets, with skirts and short hair, and even some daughters of the most advanced elites dared to smoke or drive motor vehicles.
But, fundamentally, they continued to be subaltern elements in a world of masculine layouts and schemes (or patriarchal, as we would say today). Even Beauvoir – who taught us that women are complete people and can be autonomous and independent without depending on an “other” to give us meaning or complement – also accepted a secondary role in her existence, the history of philosophy, literature and the society of his time before the prominence he gave to his friend Jean Paul Sartre.
With the memory of Benita in my memory, I recently found a film that is very revealing of this common reality of women, wherever we live and whatever era we belong to. Curiously, the work is titled “The Braid” (Laetitia Colombani, 2023) and mixes stories of girls and women from different parts of the planet who live in tremendously distant places and very different environments. An Indian girl – outlawed due to her “untouchable” status – who is snatched away from her family by her mother so she can study; a successful Canadian manager, who makes impossible balances to avoid being professionally relegated due to the serious illness she suffers from; and a young Italian woman who, with the help of a women’s cooperative, manages to recover the family business of traditional crafts that her father left in ruin. Three stories of struggle without victimhood.
Feminist theorists say that the 21st century will be that of women, and I agree with summarizing the female presence – never before known – in a global public sphere that is more recognized because our voices resonate today on the social, work, and political level. , etc. It is true that our rights are being proclaimed, vindicated and, sometimes, respected in an almost general way. But we cannot forget that those of us who enjoy a privileged situation – like the majority of Spanish women – are only a European minority who live according to Western standards without having completely banished the sexist system in which we have been educated and of which very few vestiges remain. powerful even in our own subconscious.
However, common difficulties that are as painful here as in the antipodes are mixed in the braid of the women of the planet. Because women are killed in their homes, beaten by their loved ones, despised by their co-workers, humiliated by their parents, gang-raped, silenced and persecuted even on the busiest streets. The vast majority of women in the world are afraid, make impossible sacrifices and, in the best of cases, struggle with the schizophrenia of participating in the labor market as if they did not have a family and caring for their children as if they did not have a job. of work. Guilt punishes them if they dare to be mothers and failure follows them if they cannot give their all in their professional career. And these are the privileged ones. Not to mention Congo, Iran, Afghanistan and countries where the history is different and terrifying.
For them, the women who die every day, murdered by sexist violence – one every ten minutes, according to a UN report –, we went out to protest in the streets last 25N, aware that the path is the shared struggle and not the victimhood. And yes, we well-to-do Spanish feminists made a bit of a fool of ourselves last Monday with different and divided marches, with different and disparate flags to mark our own narcissistic profile, when we all know that there is an incontrovertible truth that unites us: “Machismo kills.” .
#braid #sexist #violence
