I think the evolution
of discussion
of women, of feminism, of
women's rights, of all of that
right now is to diversify
how different cultures
and different countries
and different communities
experience that within
their own lives.
So there's an evolution
of how we handle
the topic of women's rights.
Before we had
defined it together,
mostly as a Western concept.
And then we go to other
parts of the world
and try to apply these
Western concepts into that.
And right now, it's not
backfiring, but it's evolving.
It's evolving into
new meaning.
So for example, if I'm using a
Muslim women as an example,
many Muslim women in
America and overseas
are wearing the headscarf
as an expression
of their freedom of expression
not as an oppression at all
actually.
So they're saying the
same applies to us.
If we've fought so hard to have
women wear whatever she wears
and before it was
revealing part of it,
the same applies to us of
wearing whatever we wore
and that could be covering
ourselves from head to toe.
So but that interpretation may
not be seen as women's rights.
It's actually seen still
as an oppression of women.
But we have to evolve
that discussion
in a cultural application
of women's rights.
Sometimes in the name of
respect of other culture,
we can be patronizing
or even more
conservative than
the culture itself.
So I don't mean that way.
But I do mean that when
the women are defining it
in their own way, we need to
hear how they are defining it.
So what Mount Holyoke can
do and everybody else can do
and I think it is
doing actually is now
the exercise of
not only learning
what women's rights is, but
the exercise and the learning
of how do we hear and define
that from other people's
perspective as an
evolution for that concept.
