A hundred years of progress,
years of fighting shifting sands;
when everything we wanted
was controlled by other hands.
A hundred years of asking,
begging, pleading every wall;
a hundred voices silenced
by the deafness of them all.
And now, we've nearly got there,
see, we've won our right to vote.
We can stand on the committees
and be citizens of note.
We've ruled the lands and cities,
educated women lead --
Our voices aren't silenced
by their power-thirst and greed.
But those who say we've made it,
I say all those people lie.
For though we're now accepted
still we've lost ourselves thereby.
See, those who built our countries
built our rules of life as well:
those rules say who succeeds here
and can form a woman's Hell.
Author notes
Sometimes it seems to me that a woman can only succeed if the men allow her to. Men's strengths are still the only strengths that matter, women's strengths are often weaknesses. There is certainly room for further progress for women!
Written November 26th, 2005
A contest entry
- This is who I am. by Hadji Murad.
528 points, ended January 2, 2006, 14 entries
Gold trophy winner
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest
What did you think
Comments
1 - 8 of 8
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Interesting piece which I liked a lot
Feminism is still active, and although we have a lot to do we have made great progress. Keep writing, this poem is very powerful Quite a dark tone to it, although there is a little hope Good use of sibilance and rhyme
All the best
Pozo
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by the deafness of them all.
by their power-thirst and greed.
and can form a woman's Hell.
All three endlines read with the same meter, and with equal facility, to me. No awkwardness.
(From an American viewpoint, simply having 'M' played by a woman was suprising enough, and I certainly wasn't going to do anything as typically American as bring James Bond into the discussion of British Feminism! I thought Judi Dench played the roll well, and I rather think her hard-bitten performance could be taken as that required of the head of MI-6, not the model of 'just any' successful woman.
If you want my opinion, the Bond stereotype still holding down British womanhood is Moneypenny.)
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Thanks for your fantastic comment, Eric. With regards to the poem, I think the rhyme and rhythm work well, but I'm not sure about the line "by the deafness of them all": I think it's a little awkward.
With regards to feminism in the UK, I very much doubt that it's much different from the US. It's not that women can't succeed: we definitely can. It's just we always have to work on the men's terms. Pregnancy, for example, is frowned upon. And a woman who is to me a leader must be a bit like Judi Dench as "M": strict and distant and decisive -- and these traits are all very masculine. I firmly believe that feminine traits are also desirable in a leader (empathy, effective delegation, multitasking...), but somehow it's still the masculine traits that we look for.
My point is less that women are held back by the glass ceiling, and more that we can never really be equal until we can succeed as the people we are rather than some facsimile thereof. Does that make sense?
Margaret Thatcher was a case in point...
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I could scarcely remember that this poem was written outside America, Jo...it fits so well the facts of Feminine Equality here, right down to the accuracy of that Hundred Years. We are finally, barely approaching the point that a woman can succeed in "a man's world" without sacrificing her femininity. (As I write this, a couple of contestants in the upcoming Miss America Pageant are speaking on television about their own feelings about what it means today, as opposed to even a decade ago, to be the representative of American Womanhood, so the timing was great.)
I'd actually forgotten for a moment, you see, that Suffrage as a cause began in the UK and was carried over into the US. Perhaps we drew a bit ahead? I don't know...but the day will come that a woman can do what she can and will, and remain a woman in every way.
I believe that/
And I also forgot that I'm supposed to be talking about the poem, here...but you carry the message well, and you achieve the main goal I always set myself when writing in rhyme and meter...you make them an accident. This poem could be stripped of line-breaks and stanzas and written as paragraphs, and not have to have a single word changed; it reads as natural speech, and THAT is how you write truly successful structured poetry...in natural speech, as if the rhyme and meter occurred by sheer coincidence.
This is well done and speaks to the goal of the contest well. Glad I didn't have to compete against it...I don't imagine I could convince an international audience that 'cowboy' is actually a persecuted minority.
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I am Woman, hear me roar
Feminism is still alive and kicking!!!
This is a great poem, just because women have won 'equal' rights does not mean we are no longer oppressed, some of us are oppressed in less obvious ways....being a feminist does not make you a 'man-hater', I LOVE men, I think they are fabulous, but that does not mean I think we get treated as true equals in society as a whole...if you look at it from a societal rather than a personal perspective.
Thank you for writing this I want to post it on billboards! :-) Good luck in the contest. -
Thumbs up
Good Stuff. I must agree with the lines reading "But those who say we've made it,
I say all those people lie". Well thought -
Love men love women we're all people
JoBob - I can almost wholly agree with you on this but I have a deep reservation in that, many men I know are honest, kind and well intentioned (albeit a different species of same). I really don't think (and I get from this poem that you might agree??) that we have done ourselves any favours, us women, by trying to beat the men at their own game. Men and women have different strengths - but to streamline our qualities into a gender thing is to trip and fall. I feel sad that men cannot experience pregnancy - because that just gives us girls a communication headstart. I'm sad they can't sit at 4 in the morning, having been woken for the umpteenth time and feed their baby and know that physical closeness which is utterly right. I know some effing fab dads - mine was one - and they get regularly dissed. In short, (Ha Ha Ha...?!) These days, we women have the quality end of the deal. I say we could go back a few steps and not lose. -
Very profound. Although I know that I agree with your conclusion, I'm not sure that I'm with you all the way. Modern architecture in the fifties and sixties was a dangerous experiment because we threw out what had evolved over centuries and, naively, replaced it with an invention. We didn't see the impact or the ramifications. Shaping a new world order has to be equally risky. All the best. vic
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