Women in the democracies of the West are the most privileged in the world, and sometimes it's easy to be unaware of how those less fortunate suffer in ways both large and small. When women in the Third World say, "Women's work is never done," they're not talking about keeping a neat house. By the reckoning of statistics gathered by International Women's Day 2009, women in undeveloped countries must typically carry home 10 gallons of water every day, often in buckets balanced precariously on their heads, for four miles or more.
International Women's Day began as a communist holiday to liberate women to do the work of a man. A popular 1932 Soviet poster, depicting women escaping the drudgery of the home, declared, "Down with the oppression and the narrow-mindedness of household work!" (Then it was on to cement-mixing and road-building.)
When the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989, the holiday was transformed in many countries into a kind of Valentine's Day, where gents were expected to bring gifts and flowers to the ladies. Barbie, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, inspired a doll-revolution movement. When a Teen Talk Barbie was programmed electronically to say, "Math class is tough," she was regarded as a bad stereotype. Guerrillas of the Barbie Liberation Organization (B.L.O.) stole microchips from G.I. Joe, a popular toy for boys, and gave Barbie a chip transplant. The liberated Barbies across toyland soon cried, "Vengeance is mine."
That would have frosted the beards of every mullah in Riyadh. The Saudi Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, something of an Islamic Nice Squad always on the lookout for moral offenses, decreed that Barbie is a symbol of decadence and perversion. She was also said to be Jewish, naturally, and now Barbie is big on black markets across the Middle East.
President Obama saluted International Women's Day this week, saying that "women are vital to the solutions" for global warming, poverty and conflict. That's a tall order, assuring that women's work will truly never be done. We've come a long way, baby, with a long way to go.