Advocating

ON MARCH 8, 1956, my paternal grandfather died. I don't remember him, having been only ten months old at his passing. I have always known that I missed a great deal, because from all accounts, he was a kind, gracious gentleman who constantly expressed sincere concern for the welfare of others, even to the point of offering to readjust the thermostat in his home for the comfort of visitors. Would you like something to eat? To drink? Please, take your coat off and relax, that sort of thing. ironically, he, like his son my father, was a tort lawyer, endlessly haggling in court over whether this insurance company or that was liable for damages. Not much fun. I am told he held me in his loving arms, and that's enough for me, because its all I have. Sixty four years later March 8 took on a significance of s different sort; International Women's Day, when the female gender, all across America's fruited plain and around the world, got up and out of the kitchen, out into the streets, and paraded, their message being: we demand the opportunity to develop our full potential as human beings, we are tired of being confined to gender base roles, we want, in short, equality, of the comprehensive, unqualified kind. Well, they have a point. They've have the same point for decades, centuries. From the eighteen forties on, women marched into the streets of America and Europe, suffragettes, demanding the basic right to vote. It took a long time to get there, in 1920, on the day of my mother's birth. In Europe and America women have had advantages that Asian and African women have not; so go cultural differences. History is uneven. I never knew my grandfather, but I knew my grandmother well. She lived until I was a teenager. She was a stern, severe, domineering, haughty woman, deeply devoted to her Southern Baptist faith, deeply scornful of anyone who was not. In my grandparent's household, it was my grandfather who needed liberating. He never achieved it, and, his relatively death, at age sixty eight, my father, who detested his mother, attributed to her incessant, harridan haranguing. Abraham suffered a similar fate. he married a woman party for her social statue and money, then spent the rest of his life trapped in a dominated state called "committed marriage". It is not always the woman who needs liberating, but usually, it is, and across the world, women, over the decades and centuries, have come to fully realize it. now, they are finally starting to really do something about it, and the world will be better off, at long last, with all that human potential finally liberated, free to express itself and to produce, at long last.