Guest Author - Kristin Bradfield

As I begin to feel a bit overwhelmed by the challenge ahead of me to provide content on such a broad topic area such as “Women’s Issues” I prompted to ask myself, “What are ‘Women’s Issues’ anyway?”

I think the term there that bothers me the most is “issue”. Closest synonym to issue----problem. But women’s issues really aren’t JUST women’s problems.

When you go down the list of usual suspects for women’s issues, I can’t find one that is an issue that only affects women. Even if you look at something as specific as breast cancer, it will only take participating in a Race for the Cure walk to recognize how many people breast cancer affects as you are surrounded by men with shirts saying things like, “In memory of my wife”, “For my sister,” or pass a small child with a shirt- “Here’s to you mom!” Not to mention, men get breast cancer as well.

However, as women, we have allowed the media, and society in general to define women’s issues for us. We have allowed them to make it isolated, a ’point over there, that’s where the problem is so let’s make some bracelets and have a charity event for it’ type of response. These are community based problems that are embedded into our culture, workplace, communities and families. While they impact us more specifically AS women, they also impact society as a whole and I don't think we as women are doing enough to voice that.

None of the women’s issues concerns are isolated from the community, but this is what our culture would lead us to believe and we allow them to placate serious issues such as domestic violence by airing a 10 o’clock news special.

But where is the real support ? The type of support we need in order to make the systematic changes to eliminate some of these women’s problems? I recently met with a state legislator here in AZ who told me that they actually had difficulty passing a spousal rape bill- and to make matters worse- a woman was one of the state legislators whose vote caused the bill to fail!!

We live in a society where women control almost 90 cents of every dollar that is spent, but only have 84 women in the house and senate, where we have the right to vote yet, 20 million women did not exercise that right in our last election.

If this is how we choose to express our voice, our power within our communities, then I have to ask us, as women, what is OUR problem other than OUR selves? And if we spend so much time discussing, volunteering, and fundraising for women’s issues- then why don’t we exercise our right to express our equality through expressing OUR voice and say, “These aren’t just OUR problems!”