Trudy Wiegand & Scheherzade Junejo ‘Green With Envy’.
Frequently, the phrase “the other half” has a condescending connotation; implying that a woman is not an independent individual, but part of a composite entity.
Throughout history, there have been no women military dictators, or leading figures of a religious community (popes, chief rabbis, grand muftis, ayatollahs). Power and religion have been used to dominate, exploit and subjugate women in patriarchal cultures. Over centuries, societies were built in such a way that women’s absence from literature, arts, science, politics, law, sports and business was regarded not as exclusion, but a ‘natural’ state. Linda Nochlin in her ground breaking text Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? reflects on this: “Like any revolution, however, the feminist one ultimately must come to grips with the intellectual and ideological basis of the various intellectual or scholarly disciplines – history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc – in the same way that it questions the ideologies of present social institutions”. Nochlin wrote her essay in 1970, but till this day, there is a disparity between sexes in terms of opportunities, exposures and income from creative expression.