International Women’s Day has run its course. Not because the battle is won and women have achieved pay parity and managed to have a conversation about the low level of female representation in Cabinet without anyone saying “the talent is just not there”.
Neither is it because the epidemic of gender-based violence is over, nor because girls in Afghanistan have returned to education, or because reproductive rights are unassailable and universally available, or because women have finally taught the world how to separate the whites from the coloureds before putting a load in the washing machine.
And not because all the fuss is not fair on men when nobody pays much attention to International Men’s Day. (In fact, men have more than one day a year dedicated to furthering their rights. You may know them by other names: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.)
The reason International Women’s Day is no longer useful is that a paltry day a year is not enough. The women I want to see celebrated on these days (once a month should do it for now; if the world continues in its current doom spiral trajectory we may need to increase its frequency to once a week) are not the chief executives, trailblazers in science, politics, business or the arts, worthy though they all are.
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The women I am celebrating on this International Women’s Day are those in a rage
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The women to whom I want to pay tribute are the ones who are absolutely raging.
These are the women who may wish we didn’t know their names but have decided to make the most of it by letting their blistering fury rip. Those declining to take any more of anyone else’s crap. They’re not fearless, they’re something better than that: they are undaunted.
Here are just a few, in no particular order.
Natasha O’Brien was walking home from her job at a Limerick pub one night in 2022 when she heard someone making a homophobic slur and decided she was not taking any more crap. She politely asked the drunken idiot shouting the abuse to stop. We know what happened next. Big man Cathal Crotty punched her in the face and kept attacking her as she lay on the ground. Afterwards, he bragged to his pals on Snapchat, “Two to put her down, two to put her out”. O’Brien’s fury was relentless. She spoke at protests, gave media interviews, and was given a standing ovation in the Dáil. In January, Crotty’s suspended sentence was overturned and he was jailed for two years.
It would have been far easier for Nikita Hand to walk away from her civil action for rape against Conor McGregor. For her, it was never about the money. She took the case only after the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to prosecute McGregor. She turned up in court every day, facing down the cameras, the social media onslaught and the distressing accusations made about her by McGregor. She won, with the jury of four men and eight women finding that McGregor had raped her. Last month, he appealed against the judgment.
Then there are the women taking the fight to US president Donald Trump and his coterie of bullies intent on treating the White House like a frat house. Some names you might know, others you won’t. You may know of Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop who shamed Trump at his inauguration and told him to “have mercy upon” immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals. You might not have heard of Karen Ortiz, an administrative judge at the equal employment opportunity commission.
After a supervisor sent an email ordering judges to compile a list of all cases involving LGBTQ discrimination, she responded to everyone in the office with an email that read: “THIS IS NOT NORMAL. Please RESIST. DO NOT COMPLY WITH THEIR ILLEGAL MANDATES.” She has since said that she can live on “cornflakes and community” as long as her soul is intact. (Honorary mention, too, to the women and men who have taken a raft of federal lawsuits against Trump – so many that he is being sued three times for every business day he has been in office.)
Another beacon of unrelenting fury is Yulia Navalnaya, who has taken up the mantle of resistance from her adored husband, Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, who dropped dead a year ago at the age of 47 in a brutal penal colony in the Arctic Circle. She faces arrest and possibly worse if she returns home to Russia, but she is not about to let fear or distance stop her being a thorn in Putin’s side. “My political opponent is Vladimir Putin. And I will do everything to make his regime fall as soon as possible,” she said recently.
There is no respite from the relentless, almost daily, toll of sexual violence against women. But there is some small consolation to be gleaned from the fact that more and more survivors take their place on the steps of the court and, in words engraved on the public consciousness by Gisèle Pelicot, hand the shame back where it belongs, by waiving their anonymity and naming their abuser.
Unfortunately, there are far too many to name here but this year they have included Marie Murphy, who last month told her 82-year-old father and rapist, Edward Molyneaux, “I’m not keeping your secret any more, it’s your shame, your blame”. And Susan Lynch, who told her former partner and rapist Paul Anthony in January, “you were a monster and you are a monster in my dreams”.
So this International Women’s Day give a big hand to the astronauts, artists and athletes. But then stand in awe of the women who have had enough, the resistors and warriors, the women taking the power back and rejecting the shame, the ones who never needed an MMA belt to show the world what it means to be a fighter.
