Women conferences; women programs; women literature, women advertisements; women cars!

And the list goes on and on…..

Are they doing us a favor by slicing up a space for us to have a dialogue with “ourselves”? Or are they just dividing the audience, and by labeling the activities in advance, they are giving a chance for those who aren’t interested to bail out?

How does this go in alignment with gender equality? When we educate students, we don’t have two policies or curricular!  And according to some rationales co-education is a testimony of such educational equality. New laws are implemented to ensure equal opportunities in the job market and working places; however a salary discrepancy between both sexes is still an issue.

Assigning certain activities for women was a milestone for women development at certain stages of history. From a modernist perspective, it was crucial to indentify and allocate a space of freedom that didn’t exist previously and a place in which this freedom is exercised. To establish such space/place for women had been a stride in verifying their public identities, imposing their existence, marking their histories and planning their futures.

The dichotomies between men and women existed long before feminist movements, and these movements used such framework of identification to mark their own. Thus, women have been identified as the “other”, the “marginal” compared to the dominant men population. However, we should have surpassed such framework, as the world and its components cannot be seen anymore within the light of dichotomies and binary oppositions. Women and their activities should not be seen as those of the “other”. Not to claim that the intention is to unify the fragmented scenes of opposition and diversity, still women should not be viewed as a zone in which all activities are marked for their distinctive differences.

Women are an integral part of any society. When talking about a national identity, or a national struggle, women are integrated in the overall formation. And if someone thinks that this is an optimistic view, well let it be so! I don’t need to watch a women program to build a feminist consciousness, because a general program will be more effective in generating either agreeable sentiments or resentments towards how I and other women are represented, misrepresented, or totally ignored.

I call for mainstreaming us instead of marking our existence by labeling us as “women”. Because a woman is more than a woman, she is a leader inside and outside the house.