International Women's Day should always be of supreme importance, whether it is because we are commending the brilliance women have thus far achieved or demanding the equality we are still lacking. Either way, International Women's Day is a day in which we all must respect and honor the women in our lives, and the work we still have to do.
We recently celebrated International Women's Day on March 8th and in the wake of the #MeToo and TimesUp movements we all must leave this day with a new importance. This year we need to recognize the extreme disadvantage and challenge women have always been faced with. We have recently been able to witness first hand how severe the epidemic of sexual harassment and assault is.
We have seen how many women have been plagued by this radical evil, how it has inhibited women's growth in their employment, in their schooling, in their ability to walk down the street. We now have this knowledge and we therefore must look at International Women's Day with this in mind.
We must commend all women for more than we did before. We must commend them for enduring years of harassment and abuse. We must commend them for having to live in fear but still succeeding. We must commend them for continuing their education and employment even while they have had to deal with this major block in their path. Therefore, as we leave International Women's Day 2018 we must acknowledge that women have had another obstacle and we must respect them even more than we already did for overcoming it.
We also must leave this International Women's Day with the knowledge that we have more work to do than we previously thought. We know have to work to fix this epidemic which falls primarily on women, and that women deserve us to fix this soon.
We are now shown another way in which women have not gained the full equalities they clearly deserve, and that means we now have a new battle we must fight.
Instead of leaving International Women's Day with gratitude and admiration in 2018 we must leave it demanding to end the massive problem of sexual violence. We must work to see the institutions that kept this system in place for so long, and once we find those institutions we must dismantle them.
We must work to protect and represent the women in other industries who don't have the funds to truly be represented. We must work to include all women as we try and fix the problem, because all women have been plagued by this issue.
Therefore, as we delve further into the fight for female equality on this year specefically we must acknowledge the #MeToo movement. We must have a new respect for women as we see what they have had to battle, and we must realize that we have new work cut out for us.
