A woman’s place…

Today is International Women’s Day.  As with International Workers’ Day (May first), it began as a commemoration of a labor tragedy in the United States, picked up initially by international socialists as a means to raise consciousness for organized labor groups, and eventually broadened to include society outside those working for wages.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. which led to changes in U.S. labor codes, and fire safety codes, as well as strengthening the then still suspect organized labor movement, was 25 March 1911, but the commemoration began being held the first Monday in March.  Somehow March 8 became the standard day as International Womens Day became less and less about industrial worker safety, was de-radicalized and co-opted by governments around the world.  Still, since wage workers are not the only women in the workforce, it’s worth a holiday.

A recent Reuters/IPSOS poll found that about a quarter of adults world-wide (and surprisingly a highter number than that among younger adults) believe that women should not work outside the home.

In Mexico, however, the attitude is certainly not held, with only nine percent of Mexicans believing this.  Women have always worked outside the home in Mexico,  and there are a few indigenous cultures (like the Zapotec) where it is women, not men, who dominate economic and political life.  In some of these traditionalist communities, it is still not uncommon to see working men in drag…  it’s not that they’re transvestites (although the Zapotec recognize a third gender) so much as that it’s that the assumption is that if you’re doing certain jobs, you dress a certain way… and that way means you wear a dress.

Women hold down important jobs throughout the country — as  party chiefs, government secretaries (Rosaria Green was Foreign Secretary long before Madeline Albright became the first U.S. Secretary of State), Party bosses, large and small business owners, governors, union leaders, municipal presidents, doctors, lawyers, police chiefs and gangland bosses.

Probably the only sector of society where one still does not find working women is among combat soldiers — although women were soldiers during the Revolution, and among “informal” military groups like the Zapatistas (whose uprising was led by a woman) and the gangster hit squads are not open to women — and in los Pinos.  Women have become president throughout Latin America (with Dilma Rousseff Linhares of Brazil likely to join the list next year) and it’s hardly unthinkable.