In less than four months, the Sports Edition of another Women of Valour conference will be held in Philadelphia, USA, following the successful London Hilton event, which was reportedly well patronized.
Previous editions of Women of Valour have been held in France and Ghana, which hosted the maiden event.
The petite and articulate media personality behind the audacious innovation, Nana Aba Anamoah, appears unstoppable in her quest to project women as bold, ambitious, and competitive.
Valour, after all, stands for courage and heroism in the face of danger.
Common denominator
What are the dangers women face in the world today?
I have some answers, but nobody can tell the story of abuse and rape, especially by your own father, better than Deborah Shanley, one of the speakers at the London Conference.
I worked in the women empowerment space for nearly a decade.
I didn’t only examine gender policy matters from the plush and lush offices at East Legon; I went down to the desolate fields of Tumu, Bugubele andyh Degedege, to sit with women on their farms and watched them put into practice agroecological farming methods.
I was in the midst of women groups in Kpobiman, Adaklu and Binduri, to see how hardworking women in female headed-households lead campaigns to demand their right to land to feed their families.
I hosted hundreds of young girls from village schools in rural Ghana who visited Accra for the first time.
They had never slept on a mattress before and had never eaten sardine in their lives.
I saw one enter politics. I saw another become a single mum who worked hard to go to university.
I saw her graduate to work as a programme officer for my organisation.
In the corporate worlds of Accra and London, and through the boardrooms of America and Canada, I have seen high-flying corporate female executives in expensive suits lead blue-chip companies.
I saw them chair boards and deliver innovation.
I benefited from their scholarship and wondered why their lips didn’t move when they ate.
I married a lawyer in my former life, and dated a journalist in my other life.
I know a thing or two about women–the common denominator Oprah Winfrey identifies, that all women desire to be validated and understood.
Beautypreneurs
So, when I say women do not need valour, I have a lived experience.
Women–from the village girl who never slept on a mattress–to the posh lawyer sipping champagne on Wall Street, have some ideas about what they want today, perhaps better than men.
But unlike men, women do not appear to recognise it when they are asking for too much without weighing it against what men have grabbed. Women make better leaders.
We know. But men are stronger leaders.
Women do not want to accept that they can’t have it all. Nobody ever gets it all.
When they want a rich man, they say they are hypergamists.
When they want a henpecked man, they say they are looking for an understanding partner who helps in the kitchen.
When they want a husband just to satisfy a social requirement for marriage, they do so only because there is no such thing as a third sex.
Strangely, some women worry that childbirth delays their careers–only because career men do not have those interruptions.
They hate the acronym: Wonderful Instrument For Enjoyment (wife).
In protest, the more angry ones have become misogamists, making use of dildos, instead of cleaning up after somebody’s adult baby.
These are not the reasons why Nana Aba Anamoah put together Women of Valour.
Not that we know the lofty reasons–beyond a periodic assemblage of mostly good-looking women who seem to have set their eyes on something undefinable and indescribable, yet apparently ambitious.
The ladies, mostly single, divorced or single mothers, share their stories of progress in their various undertakings–as actresses, entrepreneurs, broadcasters and beautypreneurs.
The theme for the London conference, ‘The Pursuit of Fearlessness’ betrays a certain confusion we have always suspected. What are women afraid of? Who is standing in their way?
Feminism and pepperdem
I asked Sonnet, my daughter, these questions when she asked me to buy her a ticket for the Women of Valour conference in London.
What do you seek to achieve by attending a conference to meet women showing beautiful dresses, I asked? Daddy, I didn’t expect somebody like you to say that. What about your freemasons?
Isn’t it just like men of valour meeting for beer, Sonnet quizzed?
We settled the argument with the lessons from a brilliant article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning for the US State Department, CEO of New America, and best-selling author.
In that article titled ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All’, Anne-Marie admonished women to make compromises and let men be men.
Still, something seems a bit off about Nana Aba’s Women of Valour.
What exactly do women need valour for?
When women gather for reasons nobler than just standing up because men have been upstanding, we expect to see Mrs Rita Korankye Ankrah, who is fighting recidivism by helping people rebuild their lives after prison.
We expect to see Oheneyere Gifty Anti, who is happy to subordinate her celebrated profile as a women’s rights defender to the royal protection and respect marriage has afforded her.
We expect to see American activist Candace Owens, who slammed feminism as a sham and confessed to feeling good when a man opens the door.
Are women of valour also feminists? If they need valour to ‘pepper’ men, they needn’t bother.
Men will be just fine, except that our fragile masculinity may not be able to contend with your valour, especially if it is too sexy. You know us better.
By KWESI TAWIAH-BENJAMIN, Canada
Tissues Of The Issues
bigfrontiers@gmail.com
Ottawa, Canada
