Much More on International Women’s Day

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

An Introduction by H. Steven Moffic, MD

Following our column on Friday about International Women’s Day, which occurred on Saturday, much more needed to be said. One of our readers has said it in this follow-up guest column. Please read it and learn from it, and you very well may want to write your own letters for the rest of Women’s History Month and any day thereafter.

For many in the US, International Women’s Day may have come and gone without much recognition. The first International Women’s Day was held in New York in 1909. Another was held in Germany in 1914, and the poster for it was banned.

Between those years, in 1911, a fire ripped through a garment factory in Greenwich Village, New York in what is still one of the worst industrial accidents in US history. Children as young as 14 died, and in all, 123 women and children lost their lives. If we think back to where our clothes come from and who made them, there is a good chance that they were made by women and girls. This fight for safety is not over—it is intensifying.

Thirty-five years ago, Amartya Sen found that while boys and girls are born in roughly equal numbers, if you look at actual population registries, there are 100 million missing women.¹ Recently recalculated, this is still the case. Wars, famine, and the bombing of critical infrastructure are some of the factors. In 2022, when a maternity hospital was bombed in Ukraine the day after International Women’s Day, you can see why this is so.

In 2023, António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, the head of the UN, opened the session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women by saying that on our current path, gender equality will not be achieved for another 300 years.

In this context, what should we do on March 8th? I decided to write to women. In all countries, there are girls and women who need lifting up. They need to see that someone knows women’s history and sees their life in the context of it. Regardless of the country they live in, all of them move me because I can see them swimming against an ancient current, and one that is getting fiercer. This is because all of us are also contending with climate destabilization and its disasters. What people do not often realize is that when a disaster strikes, women are 14 times more likely to die.² This is in part because women will often be slower to escape because they are doing so with their babies, children, and sometimes elders. When they do make it out, resources may not be equitably distributed, not then, nor in the long aftermath.

Some of my letters were short, some were longer, and they went to a variety of individuals. What I got back were letters far longer than I had written, telling me about their lives, loneliness, struggles and their gratitude. One person wrote back, “You don't know how much your words mean to me.” I think I do.

Dr Diamond teaches at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. She is a researcher and the Director of The Health Inequality Studies Group and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. She has written on various topics, including castes, ethics, and climate destabilization.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

References

1. Sen A. More than 100 million women are missing. The New York Review of Books. December 20, 1990. Accessed March 10, 2025. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/12/20/more-than-100-million-women-are-missing/

2. Okai A. Women are hit hardest in disasters, so why are responses too often gender-blind? United Nations Development Programme. March 24, 2022. Accessed March 10, 2025. https://www.undp.org/blog/women-are-hit-hardest-disasters-so-why-are-responses-too-often-gender-blind