2021 May - June Immaculate Heart Community News Notes

Commission on Justice for Women Reflection #2#2 Sixty years after the Civil Rights Movement, with the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many more, in American culture at large we now speak about, and some of us attempt to address, the profound injustice of racism and of white supremacy. The same is not true, however, of male supremacy, which daily, hourly, stunts and destroys the lives of women and girls in every country of the world. More women are the victims of hate crimes and are harmed by and die at the hands of men

by Femicide every day than there are racially motivated killings. In every country of the world there is a largely silent and unacknowledged war against women and it is epidemic.

This is not to say that one oppression, however pervasive, takes precedence over another. It is simply to recognize that there is a matrix, a system of multiple interlocking oppressions, forms of hatred and injustice, that rise from a similar source and feed upon one another. We cannot address one without addressing them all. However, given our history as a women’s community and our charism of educating young women, from Spain to the Americas, members of the Community of the Immaculate Heart of Mary should feel a special calling to uphold the rights of women and girls.

If, after the 2016 ascension of a proud misogynist to the presidency of the United States and the massive, immediate and spontaneous response of the women’s marches, which were by far the largest global protests in human history, and nonviolent, what will it take for us to begin to seriously address the deeply entrenched hatred and oppression of women?

It will take, at the very least, conscious awareness. Male supremacy has permeated every aspect of human culture for so long and so pervasively that we don’t recognize it and so it goes on, unacknowledged, for centuries.

A case in point. As the United States prepares to withdraw from a twenty-year war in Afghanistan, Raihana Azad, a female member of Afghanistan’s Parliament, fears that as a means of reasserting Taliban rule and identity, the country will once again impose lethal means of subjugating women and what little rights women have made over the last two decades will be overturned. As she puts it, “All the time, women are the victims of men’s wars, but [we] will be the victims of their peace too.”

What this means in practice for Afghan women, who already suffer numerous grave injustices, is that education for women and girls will no longer be permitted. It means that numerous professions will be closed to women and those now serving in them will be prohibited. It means that women will be confined to their homes and forcibly restricted from going out in public without male approval. It means that women will have to observe strict purdah and cover themselves or be beaten. And it will mean that once again women will be killed with impunity for so called crimes of “impurity,” such being raped. This is the condition facing all of the 17 million women of Afghanistan in the coming months and they are not alone. Women all over the world continue to be victims of intolerable oppression.

It is the work of this Commission to raise awareness. Injustices against women are everywhere and most of us feel powerless to change a system so entrenched. We scarcely know what to do, what concrete actions to take. But, as we are seeing with the injustice of racism, learning to recognize, identify and understand the problem is the sine qua non of change. So, awareness and education, raising our own and the consciousness of others, is a crucial first step in changing not only racist but sexist cultural practices and institutions.

Michelle de Beixedon, IHM Page 9