Detaching from one Gender Pedestal to Allow for Balance: The World Needs the Unity

Detaching from one Gender Pedestal to Allow for Balance:

The World Needs the Unity

By: Chikumbutso Chapusa

Sometimes, what hurts the most is the repetition of cycles and continuously finding oneself in a pattern. It can feel like a plague. I observed the news of Bill and Melinda Gates’ divorce with keen interest, the reaction to Melinda leaving Bill caught my attention. Social media was awake with both men and women that believed Melinda should have stayed where the money was. I have grown up seeing women stuck in toxic marriages. They fail to move on because of the notion that leaving means an end the life style their husband afforded them.

While a breather can be necessary, most of the women cannot even afford themselves a week away from their master. Seeing people want Melinda to stay for the money scratched an unhealed scar whose wound runs deep in my being. We are still functioning with mindsets that say women cannot make money. Besides Melinda having a lot of accolades attached to her name; society chose to focus the light on Bill. What a way to inspire our daughters to stay curved in a box. While most women do not carry Melinda’s achievements, it’s high time we started recognizing their commendable job by nurturing the lives of their husbands.

“Women are leaders everywhere you look—from the CEO who runs a Fortune 500 company to the housewife who raises her children and heads her household. Our country was built by strong women, and we will continue to break down walls and defy stereotypes.” – Nancy Pelosi For one to excel, surely the ground must be well leveled and allowing for growth, there is not a ground more essential than the home ground. May stay at home wives and moms be equally celebrated for their sweat, energy, emotional support, wisdom and knowledge. I pray that we get the grace to coexist without demeaning each other based on our biological make ups and our generation after generation hailing of patriarchy. We seek equality between men and women that is not based on toxic competition but on human worth. The idolization of one counterpart in society creates structures of oppression for the seemingly less powerful, the woman. Without embracing balance, society then fails to make room for unified existence.

“The woman leads a twofold existence indeed, the depth of her social ostracism being equally only by her stoic endurance. To live in harmony with the society of man, to conform with men’s demands, she resigns herself to a self-effacement that is demeaning, she sacrifices herself,” Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle. Finding out that we are still wedged in a society that overlooks the great intelligence that women possess felt like the cycle has still not come to an end. Perhaps it is high time we acknowledged without reservation the fact that women have throughout history played such great roles and that they have only gotten better with the years. As the saying “If you want to go faster, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” suggests, maybe it is time the emancipation of women was no longer left to women themselves and the few other men that dare to tip the scales of justice to balance.

“I’m very conscious of the fact that you can’t do it alone. It’s teamwork. When you do it alone you run the risk that when you are no longer there nobody else will do it.” –Wangari Mathai