Cleaning drawers I have come across a campaign by Doctors of the World;
It was released in 2018, but today it is sinisterly current.
It was called
Virus Eva
and it argued that this virus, which affects women just because it is, puts the health of 3.7 billion people at risk.
They gave tremendous data, such as that more than 800 pregnant women die every day from preventable causes related to their condition.
Sexism is a sort of selective pandemic.
I would add that sexism is also a conspiracy, another buzzword.
A millenary conspiracy that has consisted in erasing all traces of women's achievements and disdaining their contributions to culture and history.
But you know what?
That ignorance caused by prejudice is about to receive a final blow at the hands of a Spanish woman.
Ana López Navajas is a professor and researcher and Equality Advisor at the Valencian Department of Education.
Ten years ago, he did a study on female references in ESO textbooks: only 7.6% of women were cited.
"We live in an absolute cultural fraud, because they teach us as universal a partial culture that has dispensed with the enormous contribution of women."
True;
Until very recently, we all believed that there were almost no references for women in the past because they had so many difficulties that they had been canceled.
But the truth is much worse: despite all these obstacles, many did wonderful things that sexism took care to suppress from the annals.
For example, who is the first literary author in the history of mankind?
Well, an Akkadian princess of 4,300 years ago, Enheduanna, author of the work
Exaltation to Inanna
.
Amazing that we haven't heard from her.
Now there are many motivated people who are trying to break this skewed account.
Numerous catalogs of women scientists, painters and other disciplines are appearing, but this, says López Navajas, even though it is very valid, is not enough.
“There is good will, but little system.
The equality thing and March 8 is very good, but what I'm talking about is scientific and cultural rigor.
It's like someone who teaches science class and says, 'Today, we're done, we're going to talk about Lise Meitner.'
Well no, talk about Meitner when he plays, when you explain nuclear fission.
Or the Prado exhibition last year about female painters.
Well, great, but, for example, Fede Galizia was the initiator of the still life, and Clara Peeters, a renovator of the genre.
Do you think they are studied when we talk about still lifes?
I gave a talk in Catarroja, a Valencian municipality, and I told them that a formidable musician had been born there, Ethelvina Ofelia Raga, composer and band director, and they said: 'Oh, how good, well, on March 8 we can…'.
Nerd;
you take the patron saint festivities and you do the main concert with her music ”.
So that teachers can speak “when they play”, Ana has been developing a project of a unique size in the world for 10 years.
It is a bank not only of women's data, but also of their works, which also offers teachers and publishers a series of activities that they can use in class and in texts, following the contents of the education law.
It covers from first to fourth of ESO and is freely accessible.
But the great news is that, after a decade crossing the desert, López Navajas just got money from the EU to make it happen.
The
Women's Legacy
project
has three years of European funding that will pay a team of more than 100 people.
Very soon there may be a first generation of Spaniards who have grown up knowing a more real world.
"They tell me: 'Now we have to do a feminist story.'
No, sorry.
What you have to do is a story, period.
Because what there is now is a story with an adjective, biased, androcentric and poorly done.
Feminism is what has led us to be able to write a normal and true story ”.
This change in the story of the world is not trivial;
the millennial ignorance of women has led us to
the Eva virus
, to devaluation and abuse.
I mean that the fact that only 7.6% of women are cited in ESO ends up killing.
And knowledge is the best vaccine against this virus.