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 Janne Haaland Matlary
“To
give women equal rights - which entails equal duties -
with men, means an added burden on women, not equality...”
began Dr. Janne Haaland Matlary.
Quoting Sigrid Undset, Dr. Matlary set
the tone for her conference on the new feminism at
the “Women, Work. Family” conference in Dublin this November.
Dr.
Haaland is best known in political circles as a
leading politician from the Norwegian Christian Democratic Party, and a
Professor of International Relations in the Oslo University. Among
Catholics she is known for her work as a representative
of the Holy See in the United Nation’s Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing.
To her younger son Francis,
she is mum, and she travels too much. “Are
you going away again now?” her son inquired a short
while ago. “Yes, but it's only a short trip
to Geneva,” she answered. He protested: “The other children
have mums who stay here. Only the dads travel. I
want you to be like that.” She tried to educate
her son and tell him that mums and dads can
both travel, but he didn’t believe her. “Mums are
different,” he said. “Dads can travel.”
Haaland disagrees with her
son, and her son disagrees with her, but she admits
that he has a point. Mothers are more important
to children at certain stages of their development, and this
isn’t to say that women are more important in the
upbringing of children of men, but that each gender has
their role and function in the process.
Applying this to society,
Haaland argues that just as both women and men are
needed in the home, they are needed in society.
The woman and the man both possess weakness, but they
also possess great strengths, and great strengths that need to
be equally represented.
“To manage children, a household,
and the practical and economic affairs of a family entail
important competences that men usually have to a far lesser
degree than women. These competences are relevant to work life
- just remember that the Greek word ‘oikonome’ - economics
- originally meant the ‘household sphere’” she said.
Throughout history women
have normally held the central position of the family, and
it was understood that this was the domain of the
woman. But don’t women have a role in society
and the world of work as well?
Dr. Matlary
says they do, and that it is urgent and necessary
for women to penetrate society and politics for they have
capacities and talents in these areas that the world desperately
needs.
This entails that we all think about women differently than
we did 20 or 30 years ago. As the
woman expands her sphere of activity, we have to re-identify
and redefine who the woman is.
But this process of rediscovering
the woman is not an abstract project of a few,
but the real life struggle of so many women who
see the importance of the woman’s contribution in the workplace
and politics, but who also see that this takes them
away from their important role in the home.
This implies real life choices, and consequences.
Dr. Matlary
is the first one to relate her struggles and feelings
of guilt for leaving her children so often, but she
is also convinced that women have a mission in the
field of politics and the world of work that can’t
be left aside.
Why do women need to enter politics?
It’s not for power, but “because we want to change
political decisions. We have a program, specific values, not only
a thirst for power,” she said.
The program of the
woman is the promotion of peace and conflict resolution, the
avoidance of war at all costs, and thus the promotion
of values “that are prolife in a profound sense,”
she said.
Also, women by the fact of having what could
be termed “motherly qualities,” have a social or emotional
intelligence “about interpersonal relationships and other human beings that few
men have.”
So how can women get more involved?
It’s a question of re-organizing the way societies do
politics. We have to change the schedules so that
women can both be involved, and be mothers at the
same time—“on our terms.”
“There is for instance no apparent reason
why parliaments should work all night and have very long
vacations. I think few if any women have seriously asked
these questions yet. But they are pressing because political participation
is in my view a service that is sometimes also
an obligation for those with the talents for it.”
“The key
issue here is the agenda. We want to effect changes
to the appreciation of work - motherhood’s work, professional and
paid work. We further want to put human and social
issues on the agenda, such as children’s conditions, child labour,
and women’s conditions in other parts of the world. We
want to create a human face to economic life and
to build peaceful efforts at reconciliation in conflicts. We want
to show the immense importance of the human factor, and
ensure that human dignity is at the core of
all other policies. I am not at all saying that
men are foreign to this agenda - only that women
should have specific talents for advancing it.”
Dr. Jaane Haaland
Matlary is the author of “Time to Blossom” and a
professor of politics at the University of Oslo, Norway.
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