By Jennifer Schechter Executive Director, Hope Through Health
Last night I attended a Gloria: In Her Own Words, about Gloria Steinem and the feminist movement in America, hosted by the New York Women’s Foundation. It was fascinating, both from my perspective as an American woman who has sadly learned little about this historic time before I was born, and as an activist engaged in the global movement for greater equity and social justice. Gloria had one line that particularly resonated with me. “We are living out the unlived lives of our mothers.” It made me think about my own mother, who travelled to Africa for the first time at the age of 49 to visit me while I was living abroad. It also made me think about my mother’s mother, whom I never met. According to my mother, my grandmother kept a large poster of Australia on the wall and talked to her children about how she would travel there one day. My mother, who like her mother didn’t have the opportunity to attend college, enthusiastically encouraged me to explore the world (and later to join the Peace Corps). She has now been to Togo four times! If only her mother could have come as well. Standing on their shoulders, I am able to live out my own dreams. But what about my Togolese female counterparts? Does this theory apply? Are they living out the dreams and the unlived lives of their mothers? Take Hope Through Health’s incredible finance director, Elise Warga, for example. Elise was able to attend formal education in Togo, West Africa, only through grade four. What would her mother think of her daughter working full time, on a computer, managing the complex financial systems of an international organization? Elise’s son now attends university in Togo, on a path to becoming a doctor. He is surely living out his dream.
But what about young women in Togo? Hope Through Health’s Community Health Worker program director, Marie Sahaletou, could easily be Elise’s daughter. A university graduate, proficient in English, and working to build better healthcare systems in her local community, Marie embodies Elise’s dreams and likely her own mother’s dreams as well. Feminism is not often explicitly discussed within the movement for global health equity. It is often lumped into broader goals of human rights, social justice, and equitable access to healthcare. These are valid and important goals, but the struggle for women’s rights, as it is far from over in the US, has barely just begun on a global scale. Progress can be made but not without explicitly calling attention to the enormous challenges being faced by women worldwide. Women, like Elise and Marie, are fighting for women’s equality and are at the forefront of a movement. They do not yet have hundreds of thousands of women marching behind them, but they should at least have the explicit commitment of organizations like Hope Through Health, to empower and support them in their work as community leaders. As Gloria illustrates, they, like me, are living out the unlived lives of their mothers and realizing their own dreams.
