Make her praises heard afar

Make her praises heard afar.

One of my favourite authors, Arandhuti Roy, wrote:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

In recent weeks there have been a lot of memes circulating about our heroic sacrifice in 2020 - to wash our hands and stay at home.  This weekend, reflecting on the sacrifices from another era, Anzac Day also reminds us that we have the opportunity to reimagine our world.  

The world wars provided women the opportunity to do more than sit down and sew things.  They were able to give their time and labour freely in many previously unimagined ways.  When we emerged from the hardships of this time, women held on to these freedoms and our society was changed for the better.

In the spotlight these past weeks has been a new awareness that it is women who carry the burden of running the household and caring for the sick, the young and elderly.   As women have stepped forward in the workforce, they have still been left with the bulk of household chores.   A recent Guardian article sites a Gallup poll from January of this year that found women were more than seven times as likely to care for their children on a daily basis as men in couples.  

We know this is true, and we know it is unfair.  Women are relied upon to enable adventure, commerce, and war; to tend and restore what is broken and to provide a safe and warm hearth to return to. This incredible mahi of nurturing and tending must be valued by our society and recognised in our measures of prosperity such as GDP.   Let’s take this opportunity to finally right this enduring wrong.  

Hear our voices, we entreat.