Women's History is Every Month: 15 books about women leading the way on climate change; U.N. Chief: Growing Gender Inequality 'Should Shame Us All'; Shirley Chisholm Speech: 'America has gone to sleep'Yes, America needs a National Women’s History Mus
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"U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Thursday that inequality for women is growing and it “should shame us all in the 21st century because it is not only unacceptable, it is stupid.”
The U.N. chief said in a speech at the New School in New York that gender inequality and discrimination against women is the “one overwhelming injustice across the globe — an abuse that is crying out for attention.”
“Everywhere, women are worse off than men, simply because they are women,” he said, and minority, migrant, refugee and disabled women “face even greater barriers.”
Guterres said gender inequality is “a stain,” just like slavery and colonialism were in previous centuries.
He said young women like Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who campaigned for girls’ right to education after surviving being shot by Taliban militants, and Nadia Murad, the Nobel peace laureate who survived enslavement and sexual abuse by Islamic State extremists in Iraq, “are breaking barriers and creating new models of leadership.”
But despite these advances, Guterres said, “the state of women’s rights remains dire.”
“Progress has slowed to a standstill — and in some cases, been reversed,” he said. “There is a strong and relentless push back against women’s rights.”
Guterres pointed to violence against women “at epidemic levels,” with more than one in three women experiencing violence in their lifetimes, and legal protections against rape and domestic violence “being diluted or rolled back.”
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"We must remember that when the Constitution was written, that women were regarded as property and that blacks were only regarded as 3/5 of a person. So one could understand how it is that blacks and women are still struggling to gain equitability of opportunity across the board in jobs, in education, and in training. There is no particular test as yet that indicates that men has a superiority of gray cranial matter over women. There are stupid men and there are stupid women. There are brilliant men and there are brilliant women. And our country needs the collective talents of the genus Homo sapiens who have talent, of whom some are men and some are women, in order to be able to better the conditions for all of us.
We blacks and we women, we did, over time, bring some important concessions from the males in power. Through the years we have risen from the horizontal closer to the vertical, but we women and we blacks did it separately. We did it as blacks or we did it as women. We each fought our own battles because we did not see or we could not see or we would not see that it was all the same battle for freedom and equality of opportunities. We have been marching down different sides of the same street that are not to recognize it, but maybe finally we are coming together and we are marching down, hopefully, the middle of the street.
On Saturday August 27, we walked together down an important street. That street was Constitution Avenue in Washington D.C. We marched together as a new coalition of conscience not only to remember the historic gatherings of 20 years ago but also, and more importantly, to unite behind the causes key to our future as a nation and our future as a planet peopled in peace by a diversity of human beings.
The United States of America is a multifaceted, variegated nation. People, your ancestors, came to these shores from other countries across the Atlantic years ago fleeing from economic, political, and/or religious persecution because they heard of a place called America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. So they came because the words at the foot of the Statue of Liberty beckoned to them and gave them the feeling and idea that you have come to a haven.
But black people also came, but black people came for predestined roles in America. The words at the foot of the Statue of Liberty did not have the same meanings for black people because they came to perform certain backbreaking slave labor on the cotton fields, on the tobacco fields of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Arkansas in order to help develop this country in such a way that their labor, their sweat, their blood helped to make this country the great mercantile and financial center that it is today.
So the blood and the sweat and the tears of black citizens also lie rooted deeply in the stream of America, but because of our high visibility, the amount of melanin in our skin, even though we are all alike beneath. You remove that outer covering, my friends, and do you know that we really have the same kind of blood coursing through our veins? The same pair of lungs. The same circulatory system. That if I could help you to live, my blood or something that belongs to me might help you to live, it would not be a question of race.
It is important for us to recognize in this country that we must move away from the phrase of, "What do you people want now?" Black people, my friends, want no more nor no less than every other group that has come to the shores of America hardly able to speak the English language but came in order to hopefully realize the fruition and the aspirations that they dreamt about as they were persecuted in Europe. The blood, sweat, and the tears of black Americans also lie rooted deeply in the soil of America."
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A reading list on women and climate change
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