The mother is brave between the epics of war and poverty

The images and faces broadcast by world televisions from Ukraine crowd together and even resemble reincarnation. However, two features caught my attention. The first is the prevalence of the situation that transcends ages and civilizations: that the only concern of men is to ensure that their women and children leave the country. A man cannot divert his concern to resistance and fighting when he is not reassured after his family has reached their safety in one of the neighboring countries. That is why you see men in train and bus stations torn between the pain of excruciating separation and the peace of mind resulting from the certainty that they no longer have anything to fear after the prospect of death in battle has become exclusively for them, excluding their families and loved ones. The second feature is the significance worthy of extracting from the story of two parents who took risks and walked with their daughter dozens of miles in the midst of the advancing tanks and the bombing of artillery and mortars, without finding a place to hide or shelter along the way, as they hardly reached the Moldavian border. The BBC's lofty Irish correspondent, Orla Guerin, addressed them in her distinctive, focused style that is incomparable in the balance of tone and the reliability of the testimony. Her concern for our little daughter. Her courage was extraordinary. It encourages me.

The coincidences of the war of aggression, which Putin decided to wage against a nation that allegedly did not exist (!) made Urla Guerin to tell this story to the world on March 8. What a throw without a ram: It is as if the message is that Women's Day is a day of courage. Not female courage, but absolutely human courage. For “mother is brave” (the same can be said as “mother” Brecht or “mother” Gorky) is but one of the manifestations of a woman’s courage. women in general. Women are the source of true human strength. Not the apparent strength, that is, the strength of the rock against which the waves break. Rather, the intrinsic force: the force of the waves voluntarily swaying the rock, overpowering it, and transforming it into whatever aspects of its destiny. Waves that, if given the weapon of time, whether it is an individual age or a social history, will never cease to carve the rock into an eternal sculpture.

In order to address an unconscious personal shortcoming, I began a while ago to try to read more women writers, so I turned to the late American researchers Edith Hamilton and the British Mary Bird because of their specialization in Greek and Latin classics. I also read the biography of Ada Lovelaus, this amazing girl whose genius in mathematics enabled her to lay the building blocks that would later lead to Alan Turing's discoveries leading to the invention of the computer. One of the charms of Ada Lavlos’ biography or its misfortunes is that she inherited from her father, the great poet Byron, the talent for poetry and the romance of nature, so she combined the two loves, the love of equations and the love of words, in what she called “poetic science.” As for the surprise, it happened to me thanks to two books. The first is “Heroines of the Medieval World,” in which Sharon Bennett Connolly shows that medieval history is replete with exceptional female figures who played an active role in all fields: religion, war, politics, and literature. But most of them are obscure, because European history neglected to mention them or only mentioned them in the margins, despite the centrality of their roles. However, it was the second book, “The Wives of Fame” that impressed and delighted me. Firstly, because it was written by Edna Healy, wife of the giant Labor politician Dennis Healy, who was famous as “the best prime minister that Britain had ever had” and in whom I was so interested that I read his autobiography with interest and returned to excerpts from it more than once. But I confess that it was only recently that I discovered that his wife is a researcher writer. The second reason is that her book deals with the biographies of the wives of Marx, Livingston and Darwin, with historical comprehensiveness, which was brightened by the narrative mastery. The result is that without the dedication of Jenny Marx, Mary Livingston and Emma Darwin in supporting their husbands, humanity would not have now in its repertoire, even the small amount of what it was enriched with from their writings and their conquests. First, because it was written by Edna Healy, wife of the giant Labor politician Dennis Healy, who was famous as “the best prime minister that Britain has ever had” and in whom I was so interested that I read his autobiography with interest and returned to excerpts from it more than once. But I confess that it was only recently that I discovered that his wife is a researcher writer. The second reason is that her book deals with the biographies of the wives of Marx, Livingston and Darwin, with a comprehensive historical approach, which was brightened by the narrative mastery. The result is that without the dedication of Jenny Marx, Mary Livingston and Emma Darwin in supporting their husbands, humanity would not have now in its repertoire, even the small amount of what it was enriched with from their writings and their conquests. First, because it was written by Edna Healy, wife of the giant Labor politician Dennis Healy, who was famous as “the best prime minister that Britain has ever had” and in whom I was so interested that I read his autobiography with interest and returned to excerpts from it more than once. But I confess that it was only recently that I discovered that his wife is a researcher writer. The second reason is that her book deals with the biographies of the wives of Marx, Livingston and Darwin, with a comprehensive historical approach, which was brightened by the narrative mastery. The result is that without the dedication of Jenny Marx, Mary Livingston and Emma Darwin in supporting their husbands, humanity would not have now in its repertoire, even the small amount of what it was enriched with from their writings and their conquests.

What is the common between the three women? It is the force. Soft power, according to Joseph Nye, or perhaps quiet power, according to Mitterrand. But when we broaden the angle of view of the general human condition that women suffer in the world, it becomes clear that this benevolent force is a sentimental quality that is rarely recognized by the prevailing laws, especially in poor countries, and even the girls who possess it rarely have opportunities for education and even food rations. This is because there is abundant evidence that the result of food scarcity in countries affected by bi-drought and population growth is that males eat first. Females do not eat anything that remains... if it remains.