Stitched-up
Book
Review
Women – empower yourselves
[The Citizen newspaper
3 December 2004]
STITCHED-UP is a book every woman should read. And if you’re a
man who wants to understand women, then I’d recommend you give it a chance.
Author Stephanie Vermeulen says women have progressed in society
to the point that we now live in a “woman’s world” but that real equality
between men and women will only be possible when women substitute the scam of
self-sacrifice for self-development.
I love the foreword by Cheryl Carolus where she says traditional
stereotypes of the strong man and the passive woman are not only impossible to
maintain but they also create monsters like violent bullies, murderers and
rapists.
She says myths that extend to conservative ideas about the “happy family” can no
longer be believed – it is too naive to think that a good man is one who
maintains a traditional lifestyle and a good woman is the person who stays at
home.
Women have a hard time deciding whether to stay at home or to go out and bring
home the bacon.
No matter what choice we make, we’ll always be perceived as wrong.
If we decide to become hot-shot lawyers, and forget about having babies, we’re
thought of as lesbians.
When we stay at home and have babies, we’re ridiculed by career types.
And if we try and combine the two, we usually end up with exhaustion. And this
is where Vermeulen’s book comes in.
“Ideas about liberation are easy to ignore if you believe that you’ve never
really been abused. But if you have ever been exhausted for any length of time;
accepted lower pay or a position that’s inferior; been ashamed of your body;
felt guilty about the effect of your career on your children; or had to fight
for child maintenance, then the system is abusing you,” says Vermeulen.
The most urgent challenge women face today is to empower themselves sufficiently
to negotiate full control over their lives, their bodies and their sexual
activities.
Vermeulen says the habit of self-sacrifice is so entrenched that women are
almost totally unconscious of it, to the point that many will defend it as
intrinsic to the female gender.
We have to address our own conditioned faith in self-sacrifice so this obstacle
to our freedom can come tumbling down. –
JULIA PATERSON’S column appears in The Citizen every Friday.
Stitched Up by Stephanie Vermeulen is published by Jacana.
