History of Feminism

from Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Laureate, "The only way to have peace and growth and a healthy community is to give women the power to make the decisions that effect their lives."

He was giving a speech at my university and I had the chance to go to it and that is what he said. He backed it up with a story...

This story is about a village in his country that was located on the banks of a river were very poor and had not safe way to cross the river to get to the next village for trade and other beneficial interactions unless they walked two miles downriver to cross which was time consuming among other drawbacks. Most of the villagers who went to the other village were the women who went to get food and trade fabrics and other goods. So a group of engineers went to see if they could help. They looked at the site and determined that a bridge could be built to assist in these two villages in connecting at a location nearer to both villages.

So a costly bridge was erected near the village on the river's edge, but nobody used it. The villagers still went to the crossing two miles downriver. The engineers were perplexed and annoyed at this after all they had done to "help" these people. What was the issue here? Why didn't they use this wonderful new bridge that was built for them?

Finally someone asked the villagers about this. The answer was that nobody asked the women if they wanted the bridge nor whether the location was satisfactory to them... it wasn't because a bad thing had happened there where the bridge was built. They considered it a sort of sacrilege to go there and felt that the spirits of the people who were involved at that site would harm them if they used the bridge because its construction disturbed their resting place. A bad juju kind of thing. They wouldn't go through that part of the forest because of this even if the bridge hadn't been built. Aside from that, the bridge also messed up the river bank so they couldn't access the water near the village because the erosion and killed many of their medicinal plants that grew along the bank at that location.

The point being, nobody bothered to give these women the power to make the decision about where the bridge should be built and whether it would be an improvement for them because they were women. The women ended up deciding to move the village a few miles further away from the bridge because it had that bad juju and they felt it affected life in the village in a negative way so they moved away from the bridge that disturbed the spirits of the victims of the event on the river's edge that they guarded but never approached. And now they had nearly twice as far to travel to get to the other village where they traded their goods.

The reason the RWNJ faction wants to disempower women is because they fear women and their general sanity and wisdom. Women will change the world in a good way if they only had the power to get it done instead of being subservient to men who manage to abuse most of everything they touch.

I have had so much respect for Mr. Arias since then and will never forget what he said that evening back in 1999.