Deputy President Jacob Zuma flew to a rally in Mpumalanga last Sunday in an aircraft piloted by two women. Grilling a steak, nuclear physics, scriptural scholarship, or playing the cello are simply things that humans do, despite paternalist disapproval. This need of half the human race to be recognised and affirmed has given them a crucial identification with all oppressed people. Girl children have had to face centuries of stigma from those who thought their place was in the kitchen, the bedroom or the nursery. The struggle to get behind the driving seat, the gavel, the lathe, the microphone and the altar gives women an understanding of oppressed people everywhere.
Some women opt out.
Some become oppressors themselves and make their colleagues cringe. The majority develop deeper skills in being human and coping with the world. The sex difference is important not for having sex but for having babies. Men plant the crucial seed in the crucial seedbed, and can be with the woman from conception to delivery, but they cannot be female. There is a tenacity in giving birth, a life-making in giving suck, the promise of growth in giving nurture, and all of them shot through with joy, hope and faith in the future that transform human nature.