Cedric Mayson spirit level Apart from sex, are women different from men? Is WomenOs Day on August 9 to celebrate a struggle for equal rights or the female contribution to humanity? Is there a OwomenOs point of viewO? Deputy President Jacob Zuma flew to a rally in Mpumalanga last Sunday in an aircraft piloted by two women. There is no OwomenOs angleO on flying. Grilling a steak, nuclear physics, scriptural scholarship, or playing the cello are simply things that humans do, despite paternalist disapproval. Before the days of jeans DH Lawrence wrote: OMan is willing to accept a woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal, or an obscenity; the one thing he wonOt accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.O This need of half the human race to be recognised and affirmed has given them a crucial identification with all oppressed people. Girl children have had to face centuries of stigma from those who thought their place was in the kitchen, the bedroom or the nursery. The struggle to get behind the driving seat, the gavel, the lathe, the microphone and the altar gives women an understanding of oppressed people everywhere.
Some women opt out. Some become oppressors themselves and make their colleagues cringe. The majority develop deeper skills in being human and coping with the world. The sex difference is important not for having sex but for having babies. Men plant the crucial seed in the crucial seedbed, and can be with the woman from conception to delivery, but they cannot be female. There is a tenacity in giving birth, a life-making in giving suck, the promise of growth in giving nurture, and all of them shot through with joy, hope and faith in the future that transform human nature. It gives women an insight into being human, a creative spirit that is both intensely personal and intensely communal, even if they have no children. But these are qualities for all humans. Women can empower men with a deeper understanding of the purpose, creativity, vision, faith, hope, compassion and joy of human-ness. They are components of the human experience that many men have to rediscover.
The driving forces of the colonial and apartheid era had a male Western concept of society, enforced by male Western arms, to benefit male Western economies. They imposed an oppressive, destructive, individualistic view of human nature and a demanding, aggressive, war-loving, male God. Just read their hymns! Jesus wasted his time as far as those heretics were concerned.
The liberation struggle was quite different. It emerged from women and men together. It revealed a human nature passionately concerned for a just, peaceful, and caring society, and testified to a God of compassion, love, mercy and justice in community. It was a tenacious faith.
Men need liberating. OWhat is it that makes us into male chauvinists, corporate patriarchs, rapists, sexual harassers, molesters, warlords and warmongers?O asks Professor Tinyiko Maluleke. Many men are trapped and restricted by their theology, politics, economics and centuries of conditioning by male-centred cultures, which have bloodied the pages of history. We need liberating from the notion that God is male and up in the sky. Denise Ackerman has shown how alienating is the churchOs constant emphasis on the Fatherhood of God to the exclusion of all other godly characteristics.
OAs a woman it is hard to have all the current images of God in my church so dominantly male. It offends my humanity and my nature which, after all, is also created in GodOs image.O It is equally misleading for men. We have to relearn that humanity male and female is made Oin the image of GodO. Human nature male and female is a reflection of divine nature, down here on the ground. How would todayOs religious bodies cope with a female Martin Luther? OWomen keep the church afloat,O said Charity Majiza, when secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Oyet very few women are involved in decision-making processes. We have to learn from our colleagues in government and begin to take women seriously.O Pewfulls of people are so petrified of their religious superiors that they refuse to stand up against those who make holy orders dependent on sexual organs. Professor Christina Landman looks for Othe wonderful day when women decide to stand together and pull out of church, not attending services or doing any work in the congregation until the church brings out a plan to affirm women as ministers!O Some have and find that justice benefits everyone.
WomenOs Day needs to celebrate both the struggle for womenOs emancipation and the insights on human nature that women can share. Men, in fact, are no different from women. Apart from sex.