Women are the strength of a nation

THE real strength of the nation is in our women. They are much maligned and maltreated, yet our women carry our nation.
They do so in the mind-numbing rigours of child labour and birth, in the nurture of each growing child, and in the unquestioning toil provided for each home.
Child or adult, disabled by violence or malformed at birth, educated or illiterate, women perform tasks beyond their calling and often beyond their strength and tragically for far too many, beyond their endurance.
Modern men ought to know the difference but often times the hardships inflicted upon wives and daughters today are no different to the physical and mental torment and anguish of our mothers, grandmothers and aunts.
Men of today show they merely stepped across the cultural divide but never grew up or out of the claustrophobic constraints of male chauvinism.
The inequalities stacked against women is enormous. Women constitute roughly half the population of the country, yet their vote is negligible on behalf of their sex as evidenced by the fact that the highest number they have provided in any one parliament is three.
They are beaten senseless on numerous occasions. Yet they are far stronger than these facts convey, or perhaps, because of these facts, they have emerged resilient, courageous and triumphant.
One needs only be in the delivery room of a hospital labour ward or a makeshift shelter which constitute a delivery room in most rural settings, to understand the physical pain and stress to her being that a woman is able to withstand – again and again at each child birth.
She hardly ever says no and often she has no choice in the creative process, giving as her nature provides and as often being taken against her will.
Writing A Treatise on Domestic Economy author Catherine E Beecher wrote that the success of democratic institutions, as is conceded by all, depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the mass of the people and that the formation of such character development is committed mainly to the female hand.
Beecher said: “The mother forms the character of the future man; the sister bends the fibres that are hereafter to be the forest tree; the wife sways the heart whose energies may turn for good or for evil the destinies of a nation. Let the women of a country be made virtuous and intelligent, and the men will certainly be the same.
“The proper education of a man decides the welfare of an individual; but educate a woman, and the interest of a whole family are secured.”
Yet these formers of the destinies of nations are, in this nation, maltreated beyond reason.
A woman is generally worked as a slave at home, maltreated and bullied at school and taken advantage of and harassed at work.
She is warned by the police force of the nation to take care every day in her dress, her manners and her conversations lest she invites unwanted attention.
But the sword is made keen by the fire and the maltreatment of women is producing amazing results in PNG.
Everywhere, in every industry and profession women are advancing. Their meek, submissive and obedient character, which might have seemed weak in a past era, is absolutely correct for a corporate organisation where such characteristics contribute greatly to productivity.
Other parts of her nature help her in the modern economy. She is adept at multi-tasking because that is what she does at home. She is consistent and committed to finishing a task. She is caring and loving but territorial.
The day is fast approaching, if it has not already, when the women of this country will bask in the glory of public recognition and of guiding the nation out of the miseries most assuredly laid out by their menfolk’s vicissitudes and short comings.
That would be a well-deserved and overdue accolade but more especially, it would rescue this nation.