Skimming the newspapers I had opened at random, I saw the smiling face of Saida from the Mediterranean. Not intimidated by threats and insults, she had courageously accepted the electoral mandate in the commune of Kouba, in Algeria. Her fellow townspersons describe her as a mayor who listens to her citizens. And she is proud to have turned her city hall into a model of management. Then there is Leïla, anAlgerian too, and a lawyer. Working constantly for those less fortunate, she is the only woman among her party’s deputies. Leïla is known for the purity of her speeches in a parliament with a big majority of men. She affirms: “Militancy flows in my veins.”

Other images come from Arabic TV and the pages of their daily papers: four triumphant faces – four victorious V symbols. This is a proclamation of victory that can be defined as historical if the term were not so worn-out from overuse. Four different women have been elected to the Parliament of Kuwait, a nation in which women acquired the right to vote only in 2005: Al-Mubarak, first woman Prime Minister; Rola, who works for the rights of women; and Salwa and Aseel, who are both teachers. During the electoral consultation, Kuwaitis admitted they were tired of the continuous arguments among deputies and members of the executive that have led to three elections and five governments in three years. They look with hope at the faces of these women just elected.

Non-violence against rifles

“They are destined for defeat, because to soldiers what counts are weapons:” these words came from Aung San Suu Kyi, a Burmese Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has been valiant in defense of human rights. She’s again in the international limelight for her many house arrests – her face smiling, her slender figure indomitable. She emanates the strength of a Jumbo ready for take-off, “We will prevail, because our cause is right and is well founded. Time and history are on our side.” “Freedom from fear” became her slogan. From newspapers to book author – Shulamith Hareven, the Israeli writer who had disappeared for a few years. A youth in the kibbutzim and an activist in Haganah, she served as a physician in 1948 during the siege in Jerusalem. Then, she became one of the first activists of the movement Peace Now, which concerns itself with a peaceful solution to the entangled conflicts between the two peoples. She is one of a thousand women “who moved the world.”

The famous faces of busy women who have built the future are everywhere: Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to get the Nobel Peace Prize; the Indians’ Sonia Gandhi and Kumari Mayawati, the “queens of the dalits (the outcastes)”; Rania, the queen of Jordan who’s busy working for the peace process and the protection of children from all types of violence; the Kenyan Wangari Maathai, also a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the founder of the Green Belt movement for raising awareness of environmental problems, and Ingrid Betancourt, with her eyes deep as a lake and her brief words after the long imprisonment: “I deeply believe that today we can change the world, because I have changed myself.” It is not a matter of politics or visibility.

The sweet look of Victoria Gillick and her stupendous book “A Mother’s Tale”, speak about a mother of ten children who passes on, particularly to young girls, the beauty of an affective life that fully realizes, if it’s inserted in, human and spiritual projects, and the value of a pleasant maternity. By sharing her tale, she wants to encourage many. Comparing it to an acrobatic stunt, she encouraged the search for a new equilibrium that will allow women to happily and meaningfully carry out their roles as wives and mothers, while busy in public and civil life. Samantha Cristoforetti, a military aeronautics pilot, is the first Italian and European astronaut. “Starting today, I am an astronaut of the ESA, but otherwise a woman in my life”– clear words, an iron wish of hers. Ruth Sophia Padel is the first woman called to occupy the prestigious chair of poetry in the University of Oxford. She announced her program: “I will explore department by department the contribution that poetry can offer to students, both in humanistic studies and in scientific ones.” And how many other women, perhaps less famous, but who deserve and have the right to full pages in history?

We may remember how the Bible recounts Esther, Judith and Deborah saving their people when men no longer knew what to do. These female biblical figures united in themselves three feminine characteristics: courage, faith and beauty. Also, in the tragic moment of Golgotha, almost all the men ran away from Christ, while the women remained.

The women’s millennium?

John Paul II spoke much of the “feminine genius.” Philosopher Julia Kristeva affirms that this genius “is born from an individuality that continuously overcomes herself, but remains to share her own experience with others.” Perhaps this can be the key to the future: the ability to overcome oneself and share it with others, an essential ingredient for building tomorrow’s society; thanks to new technologies, which have placed the whole world online and made it easier for the world to become one human family on a global scale. And who more than women have an experience of over 100 thousand years in building a “family”? Does this mean that women have become perfect and they can live without men, inaugurating a matriarchal world? No. What we need today are certain abilities more commonly found among women, just like that of overcoming oneself for others, a trait quite essential today on a large scale, and this does not exempt men, for all of us to be one human family in harmony and peace.

“Conscious of their identity,” Chiara Lubich underlined, “today, women not only intend to give their original and irreplaceable selves, in solidarity among them, but also together with men, they want to work for that whole network of new relationships among individuals and among people for the future of the world.” She continued, “I have the impression that today in the world, there is the blossoming of a new type of woman. Like pure water in a world, which has been desiccated by secularism and by materialism, they can quench this thirst, offering peace, serenity, solutions to problems and anguish, overflowing love and light on to many.” In short, as the awesome dawn is seen in early morning, the third millennium will have the imprint of women. d women are ready to collaborate.”

Michele Genisio

WOMEN TODAY

Lucy Fronza Crepaz, an Italian former member of Parliament who is co- responsible for the New Humanity Movement and the Cityfest project answers two questions.

What does a woman today mean for you?
“It means not losing any aspect of this jagged life. From her diverse jobs in the house like choosing the jobs together, to prioritizing relationships, to the light ones like reading books but also communicating through Facebook. The woman, perhaps because she is now entering public life, tries to manage all aspects of her life well. Once, women were forced to choose, following the masculine model, a role inside or outside the family. Today, women try to combine all elements together: family, affections, job, etc. If she succeeds, it is because she has a great ability to live the present moment. An ordinary day for her goes like this: all the time devoted to her children, then to her job, and to the streets too, the new situation which she finds herself in immediately. Lately, among the thousand things I have to do, I have started to embroider and I realized that we have been so concerned with many things that it’s just opportune to take up this art again.”

In the future, what role is there for man?
“We want collaboration. Great grandmothers, grandmothers and mothers have all told us, that it was insufficient, when that masculine model was the only held up for women to emulate and they have asked us to tell it to young boys too. At times man is frightened by novelty, so as fathers and partners they disappear, or react badly; but woe to a society that is too feminine! We have to avoid the extreme swings of the pendulum, that is, another period where the female sex prevails for example, and then we revert to a consequent period of male domination. Together, what awaits us is a world with more collaboration, because modern man has also changed a lot and both men and women are ready to collaborate.”

WOMEN AS JOURNALIST

Ann Politkovskaja, a Russian journalist, was murdered inside the elevator of her apartment in October 2006. She had been recounting the horrors of the war in Chechnya, even if aware she had become an uncomfortable thorn in the side for people in power. Ann had pursued the truth and tried to expose it.

“It is so stupid that they don’t even know the value of money,” she wrote as she wanted to stop corruption. She said: “I am an outcast. It is the major result of my job as a journalist in Chechnya. What crime have I committed for being labeled as ‘one against us’? I have dedicated myself to reporting the facts I witnessed. I have written but I have spoken infrequently; my life is certainly difficult and above all, it is humiliating. At age 47, I no longer have the strength to face hostility and the printed mark of an outcast on the forehead—such a horrible way of life. I would like to be a little more understood. But the most important thing is that I keep on doing my job, telling others what I see, and every day I receive people who don’t know where else to go.”

She believed in the inherent strength of change by communicating with those who could not see it. It was her very existence in those situations which became the first antidote to the evil that her words described.

Also who can forget Shiela Coronel and Eugenia Apostol , both Ramon Magsaysay Awardees, for their courageous journalistic services in an era of “living dangerously” in the Philippine political setting these past three decades?

Maria Rosa Logozzo with Jay Amdi