And Then It Rained: Women Rising from Deserts of Oppression
“The resilience of those who are no longer afraid.”
From the dawn of recorded history, women have often been cast as perpetual outsiders, deemed “too emotional”, “too weak” or simply “not made for this world”, generations were told “the earth itself isn’t made for you”, yet amid this assault, countless women survived and resisted, they persevered through witch‑hunts, dowry‑killings, slavery and legalized misogyny.
Today, one in three women worldwide still faces physical or sexual violence in her lifetime, and roughly 51,000 women are murdered each year by intimate partners or family members, these grim statistics, paired with tragedies like India’s “witch-hunt” killings (over 2,500 people, mostly women, burned or strangled on suspicions of witchcraft from 2000–2016) or the 8,000+ Indian brides who died in dowry-related murders in 2010, underscore how deep the drought of justice has been.
As author Audre Lorde warned, “I am not free while any woman is unfree”, no matter how different the oppressions, our fates are bound together.
History’s Drought: Persecution and Pain
Centuries ago, 20th‑century laws would have been unimaginable: women denied the right to own property or vote, punished for refusing a husband, even buried alive as Vestal Virgins if accused of impiety, medieval Europe’s witch trials alone claimed tens of thousands of lives (mostly women accused as “witches”), today’s world still bears echoes of that brutality, modern “witch-hunts” continue across Africa and Asia, where some 1,000 people—often women or children—are abducted and forced to drink poison on orders of self‑declared witch‑finders, in patriarchal cultures around the globe, victims—widows, outspoken women, or those who defy male authority—are scapegoated, in India’s hinterlands, traditional “healers” label independent women as sorceresses to extort payments, driving many to torture or death.
Yet persecution only tells half the story, even under colonial rule or military dictatorships, women found ways to resist, in the 1970s and 80s, thousands of Argentine mothers marched weekly in Buenos Aires (the Madres de Plaza de Mayo), demanding answers about their “disappeared” children, during the Holocaust, some Jewish women organized secret schools or couriers’ networks, teaching the next generation in hidden bunkers, in the American Civil Rights Movement and India’s independence struggle, countless Black and Dalit women held roadside protests and taught literacy to the oppressed, these footnotes rarely grace textbooks, but they show a pattern: every crucible has fueled women’s courage.
Storms of Resistance: Rage Becomes River
Despite the hate and fear raining down on them, women have turned anger into action, from a lone candle lit in defiance to global movements, they have learned not just to survive storms but to build storms of their own, in 1995 the Beijing Declaration mobilized thousands of activists worldwide to insist: “Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world”, since then, women and girls have steadily chipped away at legal barriers.
Today 29 countries—mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean—recognize femicide as a distinct crime, and Mexico’s 2019 cabinet became Latin America’s first with equal numbers of women and men, even these gains have a long way to go, only about 11% of women globally live under laws that explicitly penalize gender‑motivated killings.
Grassroots insurgencies have been just as powerful, in 2016 Argentina and Mexico erupted in “Ni Una Menos” mass protests after brutal murders made international headlines, millions of women across South America donned black in strikes and rallies against femicide, the anger was volcanic: in Argentina alone, at least one woman is killed every 30 hours, yet that rage sparked change, Argentina even created a Ministry for Women, Gender and Diversity and forced legislators to enact victim-sensitivity laws, in Chile, Chilean women’s collectives powered massive street demonstrations and helped drive efforts to write gender parity into the new constitution, Nigeria’s “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign made international headlines, India’s #MeToo movement—sparked in 2017 by revelations about film mogul Harvey Weinstein—saw a million tweets in 48 hours, shattering silence and holding powerful abusers to account worldwide, each such uprising proves Audre Lorde’s insight: “we have learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of animals… we have survived and grown.”
- Scale of Struggle: Globally, about 30% of women report lifetime physical or sexual violence.
- Legal gains: Only 29 of 190 countries have femicide laws (mostly in Latin America), and many legal reforms (e.g. property and voting rights) have come only in the last century (Switzerland granted women the vote in 1971).
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Activism upsurge: Mass protests—from Women’s Marches (5+ million worldwide in 2017) to grassroots coalitions—show that when one woman cries out, we all do, as Lorde said, “there is no freedom until we’re all equal.”
Rising Waters: Solidarity and Sisterhood
Solidarity is the rain cloud that turns into a downpour of change, in every corner of the world, one woman’s struggle floods into another’s, consider refugees in conflict zones: women-run community health clinics in Sudan and Syrian refugee camps in Jordan provide nutrition and safety to thousands, even under bombardment, in India and Pakistan, widows banned from rites are forming self-help cooperatives to rebuild their lives, in Malawi and Uganda, female farmers share microloans and new drought-resistant seeds through cooperatives— “we share the rain,” as one Malawian woman put it—rather than compete.
Even in hostile environments, women build networks: female bloggers in Iran gave each other safe spaces to post under threat of censorship, and environmental activists like Wangari Maathai in Kenya gathered thousands to plant trees—against government hostility—,reminding the world that women create life where there was barrenness.
International bodies have also echoed this truth, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals include Gender Equality as Goal 5, underscoring that lifting women ends droughts of poverty, hunger and disease, nobel laureates like Malala Yousafzai, and Nadia Murad, became global rainmakers, forcing geopolitical storms to acknowledge girls’ basic rights, World Bank analysts point out that including women fully in the economy could “boost GDP by up to 34% in Egypt or 12% in South Africa”, each fact is a beam of sunlight: every year a girl stays in school raises her future income by about 10–20%, and if all girls had 12 years of education, global female earnings could jump by $15 trillion, those figures translate drought into fertile ground: educated, empowered women lift entire societies.
After the Deluge: Rebuilding and Rising Again
Yet we do not pretend the skies are clear, UNICEF warns that at current rates, it would take 300 more years to end child marriage, worldwide, female labor force participation and political representation remain low, sexual harassment is still rampant, in the U.S., 81% of women say they’ve experienced it, and many countries lack basic protections, each new crisis—pandemics, wars or climate disasters—has been a flash flood of backlash on women, the COVID-19 lockdowns saw domestic abuse rates soar, in conflict zones like Afghanistan and Sudan, women’s rights are being rolled back under new regimes.
Still, “the rain doesn’t stop for anyone”: it teaches us even in sorrow there is movement.
Women continue to rebuild from each storm, in the face of Taliban rule, Afghan women’s underground schools and media outlets operate defiantly from secret locations, Nigerian women abducted by Boko Haram started advocacy groups to rescue captives, the Italians protesting in squares daily after feminicides of young girls every two to three days, were seen as normal occurrence, United Kingdom, where suffragettes fought to extend the right to vote to women’s rights to vote, United States, Activist Rosa Parks sparked the civil rights movement against segregation laws with her 1955 protest, the Polish “Black Protests” of 2020 against abortion bans filled churches with banners, and so many others throughout the decades, by 2021 abortion remained illegal, but the movement forced major reform discussions and sustained a new generation of feminist leaders.
And then it rained, literally and metaphorically, the heavens have opened, each drop that falls is a sister lifting another: every protester in the rain, every girl who returns to school, every law that finally recognizes her humanity, these are rain that breaks the drought of centuries, today’s world is not one where “earth isn’t made for us”, but one where women have made the earth with their hands and voices, as Audre Lorde said, we use our anger as fire to build “stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference.”
After the storm of repression, there is life, history’s deserts of injustice are giving way to fields where women can blossom, yet the work is unfinished, the clouds gather again and again, they're angry, full and never stopping but we know how to stand, We have learned how to face the wind, to link arms when thunder roars, because as Lorde reminded us, and as generations of women have proven: “We use whatever strengths we have… including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow.”
Sources:
Femicide laws worldwide: 50 years of evolution and ongoing gaps
UNICEF on Ending Child Marriage | UNICEF USA
For witch hunts to end, India must break cycles of misogyny, poverty | The Indian Express
Femicide laws worldwide: 50 years of evolution and ongoing gaps
(1981) Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" | BlackPast.org
The Polish “Black Protests” of 2020
Afghan women’s underground schools
Nigerian women abducted by Boko Haram started advocacy groups to rescue captives
The #MeToo Movement: History, SA Statistics
Empowering Women at the Grassroots
Malawi and Uganda, female farmers share microloans and new drought-resistant seeds
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