According to Psychologist and relationship expert Terrence Real, when a couple is dealing with depression in their relationship, the first order of business is to empower the woman. If the man is the one who's depressed, empower the woman. If the woman is the depressed participant, empower the woman. No mater who has the issue, the first step is to empower the woman.
Why is this?
Because like it or not, women are the cornerstone of any relationship. Women call the emotional shots, and if we're good at it, we'll do so in a way that makes our man feel like he's in charge.
Women are the mothers, and mothers are responsible for giving sons an emotional vocabulary. Our job is teach our sons how to articulate feelings. But most important, Mom, who also happens to be a boy's first love,
is his HOME.
Women are the backbone of the families and communities.
We run the house..
And so too, the world.
So the question begs, how can this be done effectively if women are made to feel inferior? Weakened?
Secondary?
Made from HIS rib?
It can't.
Take a look around folks. For the most part, the politics of the world are in shambles.
Studies have shown that if more women were heads of state, wars probably would never happen. No woman would willingly send off the sons and daughters she carried to DIE in the name of patriotism. Women produce food for their offspring. They wouldn't be so inclined to poison it in the name of profit. Women communicate feelings. They would not encourage the numbing of emotions the way Patriarchy does. By empowering women, society provides the strength, confidence and faculties to be a competent member of the world.
If all societies did this, the world would change.
And quickly too!
Empowering women means empowering everyone.
Perhaps to the male powers-that-be, that's precisely the problem.
Men need to stop being afraid of a woman's power, and the freedom it would lead to for all.
Now for the article ladies and gents.
How Empowering Women Benefits Men
Here are at least five ways that women's empowerment could change things.
1. Women are much better at dealing with certain problems
There are some social problems that only women can really solve. The clearest example is
overpopulation. For years governments tried all kinds of programs to reduce excessive birth rates that were undermining the economic well-being of their countries. But none of these top-down programs worked. The only thing that has worked has been the empowerment of women. In countries where women have gained in education, economic opportunity, and legal rights, the birth-rate has gone down to a manageable level. Male-run governments could not solve this alone - in fact, men were quite literally propagating the problem. It wasn't until women were empowered enough to control their own bodies that we could see any progress.
On questions of family health, child development, family income, and a whole range of issues the ability of women to act on their own with a full-range of social rights at their disposal makes it easier for them to use their ingenuity to solve the problem. In these situations the whole family benefits - as well as the rest of society.
2. There are some situations that could be improved just by the presence of women
Sometimes the mere presence of women can change things for the better. The first time this hit me was several years ago during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. That incident involved a band of white male cops using excessive violence against a black man, and it led to massive violence and destruction in the L.A. area. But as I watched the news reports, I wondered if that violent outburst against King would have happened if some of the members of that police squad had been women. I think there's a good chance that it wouldn't.
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The presence of women would make a difference in many potentially violent situations. Women are usually less likely to resort to impulsive violence, and men are more likely to restrain their instinct to violence when women are active in the group.
When we hear there's an angry mob attacking another ethnic group or storming a building or fomenting terrorism, we know without hearing the rest of the news report that it was very likely to be a male-only group. Once you start asking yourself the question, "Could this situation have turned out better if women had been there," you start seeing that kind of opportunity everywhere.
3. Protecting women's rights is the key to protecting everyone's rights
Protecting women's rights around the world is essential, because it is one of the keys to dismantling repressive regimes and institutions. All totalitarian ideologies, all repressive governments, and all fundamentalist religions - no matter what their creed or belief - share one characteristic:
they all try to keep women in their place. This has been true of fascists, communists, and hereditary regimes, and it's been true as well of the more fundamentalist versions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions. These are almost always male-dominated institutions in which women have little or no voice. They become echo-chambers in which the viewpoint and needs of women are never heard.
If reform is going to come to these types of institutions, it probably needs to start with a focus on women's empowerment. Unless women's rights are addressed head-on, it's too easy for authoritarian and traditionalist institutions just to give lip-service to reform and then slip back into their old ways. There will always be cultural-relativists who will argue that we should back off from supporting women's empowerment in such instances, because the second-class treatment of women "is the way they do things in their society." The only way to counter that argument is to point out that any system built on the suppression of half of its members is simply not entitled to much deference.
The suppression of women is what keeps many fundamentalist regimes going, and it's the empowerment of women that will ultimately make the difference in changing them. (*applauds*) So whenever I hear of a group of women fighting somewhere to get their rights - whether it's teenagers trying to go to school in Pakistan, Saudi women fighting for the right to drive a car in Saudi Arabia, or Nuns on the Bus in America trying to have their voices heard - I have to think they are ultimately fighting a fight for me and everyone else.
4. Women's empowerment is good for the economy and the environment
Women's empowerment benefits us all, because it's important for the economy. Countries that have opened up education to women and brought them into the work force do much better economically than countries that keep women suppressed, and many of those women work in environmentally-friendly occupations. It's no surprise that countries that suppress women and deprive them of an education are more economically backwards than others, because leaving one-half of your population uneducated means that you created have a drastically inferior work force.
And the higher women go in the echelons of the economy, the better it is for everyone.
Christine LaGarde , the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, remarked, somewhat facetiously, that the financial collapse of a few years back might not have happened if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters. She observed:
"I do believe women have different ways of taking risks, of addressing issues ... of ruminating a bit more before they jump to conclusions. And I think that as a result, particularly on the trading floor, in the financial markets in general, the approach would be different."
There's plenty of evidence to show that diversity in management of major businesses leads to benefits for everyone. A
major study recently compared the financial performance of businesses with large numbers of women on their boards to those with few women. The companies with women well-represented on their boards out-performed the others in every respect.
5. Women can provide critical insight at important moments
There are many important, pivotal events in human history where the addition of an empowered group of women might have made a difference - and possibly avoided tragedy.
The best example is World War I - the biggest disaster in human history by almost any measurement. We're about two months away from the 100th year anniversary of the event that supposedly started that war. I say "supposedly," because historians don't really look upon the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand as the cause of that war. In the years prior to that, other world leaders had been assassinated - including the King of Italy and the President of the United States - and those events didn't lead to war. During that month a bunch of guys sitting around in the capitals of the major countries in Europe somehow let things slide to the point where millions of young men in their countries were sent out to fight and die.
Where were the women, we have to ask, who might have awakened these rigid, macho characters and kept them from sleepwalking into tragedy?
Probably silenced by oppression, sitting at home because they weren't allowed to work.
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