(I may not always agree with Germaine Greer  – but I do here. And I love her feistiness! Rowland Croucher, March 5, 2012).

International Women’s Day will be upon us again next Thursday.  A whole day out of the 365 that has been set aside for women.

Disabled people, mountains, diabetics, the ozone layer, victims of the Holocaust – the United Nations has dedicated days to all of them. Most indigenous people around the world have no way of knowing that the UN has named August 9 for them. Do the boat people on Christmas Island break out the bubbly on International Refugee Day (June 20) joining the other 35 million or so people on this earth who are celebrating because they will never be allowed to settle anywhere?

Having a day set aside by the UN gives the impression that being born a woman must be particularly bad luck. There are lots of reasons for thinking so, especially in countries where women get beheaded for adultery or killed by their families because they’ve been raped. In some countries it’s tough for a woman to get born at all. There are something like 50 million missing girls in India, probably more in China. There are 111 men for every 100 women in Pakistan. The reasons are many- foeticide, infanticide, less food and worse food for female children, and no medical care at all. Women are not valued, hence the effort is not made. Not made by anyone, not even their mothers.

All over the world, women are beasts of burden. They carry just about anything that needs to be carried – water, firewood, babies, bricks, mortar, road-base, anything. As a beast of burden a woman is worth less and is often even treated worse than a donkey.

As long as work is manual, women do it. They grow food, gather it, clean it, cook it, feed it to their families, clean dwellings, sweep surroundings, all with rudimentary utensils. As soon as a machine can be found to do the work, men commandeer the machine. Women hoe and weed; men drive tractors. The wife rows the boat, the husband fishes. Men ride; women walk.

Some of us can remember the inspired project that gave village women mobile phones, so they could offer services to their neighbours, building prestige and acquiring a little income. Another scheme provided women with bicycles, so they didn’t have to walk everywhere. It was understood early on that poor women were more reliable than poor men when it came to servicing and repaying loans and so microcredit was made more easily available to them.

The bad news started coming in long before 2006 when Mohammed Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, got his Nobel peace prize. Imams were telling the Bangladeshi faithful that the Grameen Bank was encouraging its 98 per cent female borrowers to reject their husbands’ authority and take the welfare of their families into their own hands. What we cannot know is whether more wives were beaten because they accepted microcredit and, as a condition of accepting the loan, promised to send their children, including their daughters, to school. We cannot know either how many women defaulted on their repayments (up to 20 per cent according to some sources) because their menfolk took their money. And their phones. And their bicycles.

The UN weighed in with an International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. We are told to “Say No: Unite to End Violence against Women” – as if any of us were likely to say, “Yes”. We are saying “no”; we have been screaming “no” for generations, protesting not just against violence meted out to grown women, but at violence meted out to our children. And not just by men, but by women too.

The singling out of one form of domestic violence for universal condemnation is soft-headed. The Say No website tells me 15 per cent to 76 per cent of women may be abused in their lifetime – a meaningless statement. Its very fogginess tells us we have no idea how violent and coercive families can be. The thousands of Asian brides who will die this year when their saris are set alight could have been protected by their mothers-in-law but were not. Old people of both sexes are at risk of abuse by younger people of both sexes, including their own family members.

As I write this, 70 people, sportsmen and women, youth activists, human rights lawyers, journalists, entertainers, and staff from UN offices and other worthy organisations across Africa are climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, by way of calling attention to the “critical issue of violence against women and girls”.

In our time, war is made by machines against civilian populations. The violence to which people of both sexes are subjected every day, at school, at home, in hospitals, in care homes, is nothing compared with the massive violence that is unleashed by the 21^st century war machine. The UN has the answer, an International Day of Peace (September 21).

Meanwhile the developed world indulges in a fantasy that its women have achieved equality. Women in Europe, North America, and even Australia can have it all. Why, look at the Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard. British media used to ask me if I became a feminist because Australian men were so misogynistic. The truth was I learnt my feminism in England, where the cold dislike that most men feel for most women is obvious. Australian men generally avoid women; Englishmen actively torment and belittle them.

Through the days leading up to the ballot for the leadership of the ALP, Australian public opinion was canvassed relentlessly, and each time the result was the same. The Labor caucus liked Gillard, the public did not. The public had utterly forgotten how much they dislike Kevin Rudd, and all one could conclude was that they had grown to dislike Gillard more. She was still the same woman we fell in love with in December 2007 when she stood in for Rudd while he was attending the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali. What we liked about her then was how unlike Rudd she was. She wasn’t in love with the sound of her own voice, didn’t use 10 words when one would do, didn’t take herself anywhere near as seriously as he did. She’s as dry and matter-of-fact now as she was then. What’s not to like?

That she’s a woman, that’s what.  An unmarried, middle-aged woman in power – any man’s and many women’s nightmare.

The Saturday Age, March 3, 2012, p. 22