International Women’s day

I’m never quite comfortable with the way this day is so often framed — as if it were simply a celebration, flowers and polite applause for women.

Because there are still people who deny the gender pay gap. Still men who insist equality was settled sometime in the 1970s, as though those battles closed the matter. They didn’t.

Epstein. The way women are treated in rooms of power. The way the so-called “women’s issue” is still approached with a certain unease — like the great elephant in the room everyone politely avoids naming.

And I can’t help feeling there is also an economic world quietly sustaining the most retrograde version of the West — a vision that, with the rise of the MAGA movement, seems to be returning to the stage. A vision in which a woman’s place is neatly folded back into the home, where “family” is reduced to bloodlines alone.

Yet that idea misunderstands — profoundly — what family can be. Family can also be made of relationships, chosen bonds, love, trust, and the everyday acts of support that turn individuals into a community. A wider, more generous community, able to meet difference without fear and to respect it simply because it exists.

Perhaps then we would be more patient with democracy too — with its slowness, its messiness, its difficulty. And perhaps, in the end, we would become far more open, and far more inclusive.

So perhaps this day might be less a celebration and more a moment of reflection — about where our world is heading, and about the simple truth that without social justice, peace will remain an illusion, even in places where no wars are being fought.

An inclusive embrace,
Paola