"The real revolution will be when women are armed"

Where are females heading?

Evidence is supporting feminist movements and all its enthralling and capitulating results encompassing equality, rights, standards of living and the like.

Thorough inquests with explanations or elaborations on the essence of the woman, even with the last card of the major arcana, Le Monde, (The World) picturing a woman, as divine and enriching to attain sensitivity, understanding, reasoning and of course, tolerance to those in retrograde societies or circles to whom view it still as the minority gender, surely should invoke the concept in the living thoughts, processes and ultimately the actions of a woman.

Intellectual, philosophical, theoretical discourse and action have contributed immensely. Rosa Markmann, Mary Gilmore, Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, Alice Walker,Betty Frieden, Alice Echols, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Sarojini Sahoo, Taslima Nasrin and Marilyn Frye cross through arts, activism and rights, welfare, literature.

Would any of these names not only ring a bell in popular cultures, to youths unless they get introduced in college, university and all other tertiary level studies? The Mass of their legacies, and iconic names do head into another spectrum, another wave of understanding, tolerance and coexistence. 

Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Octavia Butler, through music with Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, folkloric emblem Violeta Parra, Madonna and Indie arts personality and artist, Björk plus so many others of yesterday and today whom all have been, are and will hopefully spur on a faith to continue an such an iconic path.

In the Spanish-speaking world, commendable attention goes to Dolores Ibárruri, though crossing Communist and Socialist ideologies, stuck through thick and thin with feminist values supporting equal rights for women, at an extremely complicated, fear-ridden period of history and time.

There are martyrs of course, crossing the tricky roads of understanding, the tricky multi-disciplinary facets where politics with militarism boil to upstanding withdrawals and to limitless symptoms. Freedom definitely being the altruist label of achievement. Ask Ingrid Betancourt. the Colombian and also French citizen getting to lengths in both mocking and accompanying political agendas, militia groups and the media.

Elena Poniatowska in Mexico with her fiction, winning the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize and Rosa Markmann in Chile whom passed away recently and as First Lady under Gabriel González Videla's conjugal arm and government exemplified fashion and elegance yet pushed for the female vote. Influential ladies in their peaks, in their prime age. Michelle Bachelet, current President is also a phenomenal and respected, historical individual, representing a nation and a landmark in a region as Latin America. A prolific and much respected political scientist, acknowledged across the world, far from her agnosticism nevertheless, in some ways viewed as a powerful, strong woman treading in deep waters or playing with fire, with experience, maturity and competence.

When will it be time for Australia to step in with a female Prime Minister? Governor-General Ms Quentin Bryce without a doubt is a honourable milestone, clearly limited to the public eye. Only those thoroughly interest are aware of her commendable presence and the official Australian visit to South Africa in testimony to Nelson Mandela.

The debaters, many more famed than others in their huge upstarted and conditionally intellect minds, like Carol Gilligan, Germaine Greer, Susan Bordo, Frida Kahlo, Judith Plaskow, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Kristin Luker, Cathy Young, Janet Biehl, Donna Haraway, Judith Walker, what influential figures, such contributions to the field.

Ítalo Calvino, one of the most praised fictional writers, born in Cuba yet lively Italian did include in one of his most successful novels; "The real revolution will be when women are armed."

Hats off to the legacies, the brandings and references to Gloria Alzandúa, Rigoberta Menchú, Chela Sandoval, Cherrie Moraga, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and the role of women in the Nicaraguan Revolution. To Caribbean and Afro-American instigators, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, all subliminal example of their uprising and gradual presence for the realization of equality.

A feminine existence does make a completion, a society, the world, masses, people, organisations, nations, entities and the various numerous, infinitive structural surroundings go round.

To everything, in completion, femininity must go down to what is unseen, not hidden as that in more ways than one can go under the subjective bracket. The unseen, in the female being an utmost role from converting movements based on thoughts, presence, charm, elegance, sympathy and charisma.

An ability to retain.

Is it truth women are retaining? A fragment of it? Exactitude? Perhaps not exactitude, and a more total approach is definite. Unity as totality.